708 Gimghoul Road
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RALPH RANKIN HOUSE
1954, 1989
One-and-a-half-story, frame gable-end house with front-gabled wing, plain siding, and eight-over-eight window sash. The Colonial Revival entrance porch was added in 1989. Built for Ralph Rankin, head of the UNC public relations bureau.
The house has been significantly altered since the 1992 survey with the installation of a gabled dormer on the façade, a shed-roofed porch across the right three bays of the façade, and the installation of paired French doors in place of original windows on the façade. The house has fiber-cement siding, an interior brick chimney, aluminum-clad windows, including a paired window on the front-gabled wing at the left (east) end of the façade, which originally had a single window. The original six-panel front door has been replaced with a six-panel door with three-light sidelights. The original hip-roofed, one-bay-wide porch has been replaced with a three-bay-wide, engaged, shed-roofed porch supported by square posts. A one-story, hip-roofed wing projects from the right rear (southwest) corner and there is a gabled ell at the left rear (southeast) with a basement-level garage. County tax records date the building to 1952 and the house does not appear on the 1949 Sanborn map.
In the 2013 survey, this was deemed a Noncontributing Building.
The non-contributing status reflected in the database was assigned to the building as part of the 1993 National Register nomination. Were the NR nomination to be formally updated, the period of significance would likely be extended to include the construction of this property, however, changes to the property would likely render it noncontributing.
SOURCE: M. Ruth Little, National Register of Historic Places Nomination: Gimghoul Neighborhood Historic District, Orange County, OR0709 (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, 2013, via HPOWEB, accessed 8 Jan. 2020), courtesy of the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office; Heather Wagner Slane, 2013 Survey Update (NCSHPO HPOWEB 2.0, accessed 10 Jan. 2020); courtesy of the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office.
