208 Pritchard Avenue

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Saunders-Pritchard House
208 Pritchard Avenue
c. 1850

The stately two-story frame I-house (two stories and one room deep) is oriented east-west, facing West Rosemary Street. It stands on its original site, when it was at the center of a large farm. Its shallow hip roof and large wooden windows with decorative surrounds with corner blocks indicate a construction date during the Greek Revival era, possibly 1840s to 1850s. According to local historians, the house is associated with William Laurence Saunders, founder of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan, who lived in Chapel Hill in the early 1840s while attending the university and for a period in the mid- to late 1860s. The old farmhouse is squeezed onto a lot surrounded by other standard-sized subdivision lots, with its narrow end fronting Pritchard Avenue. The interior retains its original wide pine floorboards. The east-end chimney still stands, while the west-end chimney was removed when a porch was added to orient the house to Pritchard Avenue after 1922, when the farmland was subdivided into a residential subdivision. The Zebulon Councils lived in the old farmhouse from 1922, when they purchased the farm, until their deaths. Zebulon P. Council, a longtime mayor of Chapel Hill in the mid-twentieth century, died in 1958.

Sources: Vickers, Chapel Hill, 172; Jones, s.v. “Saunders, William Laurence”; Reeb, “The Northside Neighborhood.”

SOURCE: M. Ruth Little. M. Ruth Little, The Town and Gown Architecture of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1795-1975 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2006), 214.