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The houses of Lincoln Park, like the majority of houses in America, are vernacular buildings. Vernacular architecture refers to structures designed by a builder, contractor, or homeowner rather than by a professional architect. They may follow an architectural style or share features of a number of different styles. Lincoln Park houses represent most major late 19th and 20th century styles of residential design. Lincoln Park has a distinctive land use pattern with large lots that are narrow and deep.
From its beginnings, Lincoln Park has been a community of great self-sufficiency. Many people were jacks-of-all-trades. People built their own houses and, with the help of family or friends, performed carpentry and all household repairs.
The homes and land of Lincoln Park were typically arranged as homesteads. Land was intensively cultivated and provided families with much of their food. Typical outbuildings included henhouses, hog pens, smokehouses and outhouses. Large vegetable gardens and sometimes small orchards were located near the house. Lincoln Park has many springs. Families drilled wells for water and also used springs for refrigeration. Families used wood- or coal-burning stoves for heating and cooking.
The first lot in Lincoln Park was sold to Ella Martin on June 30, 1891. Hulda Martin purchased a lot at approximately the same time. Ella Martin's house still stands at 327 Lincoln Avenue, inhabited by her descendants. Many of the original Lincoln Park houses still remain.
Four log houses still stood in the 1890's. Such houses were typical for the 19th century and usually had two rooms on each of two stories with wood floors and a foundation of stone piers and log walls joined at the corner by V-notches.
Of the original four log houses, three are notable: the present house at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and North Horner's Lane incorporates a log house. Reuben Hill's was of logs and the Powell family's log house was across Lincoln Avenue from the barbershop.
Beginning in the 1880's and especially after 1900, two-story frame houses became more attractive to build than log houses. Although floor plans were similar, with two rooms on the first and second floors, the frame houses also had a central hall. Older frame houses in Lincoln Park generally are sheathed with German siding, which provided a weathertight seal and an attractive surface pattern.
Reuben Hill House, 305 Lincoln Avenue
Reuben Hill (1832-1916) was born a slave of the Stonestreet family. In 1874, he and his free-born wife Rachel Martin bought land to the east of what would become Lincoln Park, where they first lived. They later built a home on what is now Lincoln Avenue. Their son, Reuben Thomas Hill (1856-1936), a skilled carpenter, built the present house in 1881. Now enlarged, it incorporates the original cottage, which was one room wide by two deep. The cross-gabled roof suggests Gothic Revival. Synthetic siding covers the original, probably German siding. It has a full-width front porch with a stickwork, ladder-shaped frieze. Various additions were made circa 1917.
Click here to see further documentation of the Hill house, which was presented to the City of Rockville Historic District Commission in 2002.
Ella Martin House, 327 Lincoln Avenue
The house of Ella Martin, 327 Lincoln Avenue, was built in 1891. One of the first houses built in Lincoln Park, it is owned by the fourth generation of the family. The original house probably had two rooms on both the first and second floors. Each room had a potbellied stove. The house has its original siding, shutters, and shutter hardware.
The frieze of the front porch is similar to that of the Reuben Hill house. The front gable contains an attic vent with a cutout design made by a jigsaw. Such wood features reflect the new machines of the 19th century. Sidelights flank the front door, a feature of Colonial Revival architecture and probably a later addition.
Hicks House, 605 Douglass Avenue
Joseph Hicks, the great-grandfather of Ardell Shirley Hilliard, who currently lives in this house, swam with Martin Broadneck across the James River in Virginia in 1860 to escape slavery. Both men built houses in the area that was to become Lincoln Park.
The Hicks house, a one-story frame structure dating from 1927, was built by Ardell Shirley Hilliard's maternal grandfather, Louis Hicks, as an investment for his daughter. The original house had four main rooms arranged in a square: front bedroom, living room, dining room, and kitchen. The house shows simple Colonial Revival features. Its symmetrical massing suggests a Cape Cod cottage. The projecting front porch is a vernacular version of a classical portico, a porch made of columns supporting a triangular pediment, or gable, found on ancient Greek and Roman temples.
Harrison England developed much of the land that now comprises Lincoln Park and Croydon Park, the subdivision adjoining Lincoln Park to the south. Lincoln Park was probably his first building venture. England took pride in building simple but substantial homes. His Lincoln Park houses are mostly stuccoed frame structures. England had no architectural training. He hired contractors and built following standard patterns, probably obtained from magazines and books. Before Rockville incorporated Lincoln Park, Harrison England provided the first water lines.
Palmer House, 216 Frederick Avenue
The house has been the Palmer family home since the early 1930s. The Palmers kept chickens and hogs in the backyard. The large chicken shed still stands, but the slaughterhouse and large fenced hogpen no longer exist. Family members still occupy it as well as other homes on Douglass and Elizabeth Avenues.
The stuccoed house, built by Harrison England, has some bungalow features, notably the large front porch with short piers with splayed sides and the clipped, or jerkinhead, front gable. Behind the kitchen is a utility room, called the “pump room,” which once contained the pump and well. Each room downstairs had its own coal-burning stove, while upstairs rooms were heated by the stove pipes running through the walls. The Palmer house resembles the 1920's "Salem" model from the Sears catalog.
George and Fanny Cooke House, 302 Lincoln Avenue
The Cookes built this handsome Queen Anne house in about 1895, copying rowhouses familiar to them from living in Pittsburgh. The house was bought by the Waters family in the 1930's and is still owned by a member of the family. The house may originally have had a 'twin' next door, though now it stands alone, a rowhouse without a row, like a slice from a pie.
American architects adopted the late 19th century English Queen Anne style. Favored for city rowhouses and large suburban dwellings, Queen Anne buildings freely use historical details, seen in elaborate shapes and surface patterns. The Cooke house is a two-story stuccoed brick building with a corbelled brick cornice. The windows have molded brick arches.
The drawing mistakenly shows the house number as 303.
Hagar Cooke House, 808 Stonestreet Avenue
The shotgun house is a vernacular house type, consisting of two or more rooms placed one behind another, front to back. Common in many historical black communities, the shotgun house is believed to be an indigenous African house plan brought to the United States by way of the West Indies. It therefore represents an important link to African cultures.
Hager Cooke built the green shotgun house with the metal roof at 808 Stonestreet Avenue. Several prefabricated homes on Stonestreet Avenue and other houses in Lincoln Park are shotgun derivatives.
The 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement resulted from a romantic interest on the part of designers and social reformers in the medieval past. They believed that using medieval architectural features such as asymmetrical massing, steeply pitched roofs, and a variety of materials would help maintain traditional values in a time of rapid change by recalling simpler days. Arts and Crafts houses use details from many styles. Some are similar to the Gothic Revival in the use of steep roofs and gables, though Arts and Crafts domestic architecture was modeled on vernacular houses rather than Gothic churches. The steep roofs and broad roof overhangs imply the shelter and security offered by home and family.
Isreal House, 200 Frederick Avenue
The Isreal house may have been the first built in Harrison England's Second Addition to Lincoln Park, though it is not an England house. Dewey Isreal's grandfather, Willis Isreal, commissioned it from another local builder. Willis and his wife Violet moved to Rockville from Georgia in the 1920s. He worked as a tenant farmer and handyman, and they had lived several places before buying their first house in Lincoln Park at 704 Stonestreet Avenue.
The stuccoed frame house at 200 Frederick Avenue has a pitched roof that extends over a full-width front porch. The decorative sawn-wood porch balusters show the influence of the Arts and Crafts style. The roof extends almost a foot at the sides of the house, exposing thin rafters. Except for minor changes, the Isreal house has not been altered since it was built.
Willis Isreal also had several houses built on Stonestreet for his daughters, including the white house built for Ida Summerour that still stands at the corner of Stonestreet and Ashley. Dewey's brother, Clarence, “Pint” Isreal, was the famous baseball player who played with the Newark Eagles in the Negro National League.
Davis House, 222 Frederick Avenue
The Davis house, at the corner of Frederick and Westmore Avenues, is a remarkable stuccoed structure with many unusual Arts and Crafts details. These include blue pressed-tin shingles and two parapeted porches. This latter porch is an arcade of Moorish ogee, or double-curved arches. The glass block window above the front door suggests the influence of Art Deco.
James N. Davis, Jr. designed and built this house over a period of about four years, beginning in the mid-1930's. Reverend James Davis, Jr. was the minister at Mt. Calvary Baptist Church for almost 20 years and built the present church. He also ran a trucking company, transporting building supplies to local construction sites. The buildings he saw while travelling gave him ideas for his own projects.
Honeymoon Cottage
Behind the main Davis house is a smaller building, also of stucco with a pressed-tin roof known as the Honeymoon Cottage. The Davises lived there while building the main house. Newly married couples lived there while saving money for their own houses.
Auto Shop
This business had a long and varied history. Reverend Davis ran the garage, later installing Esso gas pumps, opening a mom-and-pop store and delicatessen at the front of the garage where the office is now. It became a gathering place for local kids in the 1940's and 1950's and had a snack shop and a juke box. For many years, Reverend Davis made the garage available for high school basketball games.
The walls of the shop are made of terra-cotta block, and the floor of river rocks and broken bricks. The side walls have large glass block windows.
Howard Homeplace, 604 North Horner's Lane
Lucille Howard Davis's father, Fred Howard, the head painter at Chestnut Lodge, had this house built for his family. It stands next to the Mt. Calvary Baptist Church, built on the site of the Shelton family homeplace. Lucille Davis, the mother of Reverend Rodney T. Davis, was born around 1916 in this house.
Warren House, 202 Frederick Avenue
This is a blue stuccoed house with Arts and Crafts influence visible in the steep front gable and the rambling, asymmetrical floor plane. The house looks deceptively small from the street. It was built in the 1950's by Charles Warren, son of the Douglass Avenue landowner who ran a plastering and stucco business in Rockville. Warren built the house with separate apartments on each floor, intended for his adult children. Over forty windows of different shapes were obtained from other buildings.
Bungalows are small houses, often just one story, dominated by large front porches and broad roofs with deep overhangs. They usually have exaggerated wood framing. Bungalows show the influence of many other styles, including the Arts and Crafts, Japanese, and Indian architecture, indicating the early twentieth-century interest in exotic cultures.
Shelton House, 651 North Horner's Lane
Kenneth Shelton's father, Henry Shelton, Sr., bought an acre on the east side of North Horner's Lane. He divided it in half for his two sons, each of whom built a bungalow on his property. Only this house remains. Kenneth Shelton, a plumber, and his cousin Colston Howard, a carpenter, built 651 Horner's Lane in 1931 for about $3,000.
The bungalow features porch columns taken from a house in the area that was being demolished. Other houses once stood nearby. North Horner's Lane formed a separate and distinct community from Lincoln Park.
Click here to read further documentation of the Shelton house, which was presented to the City of Rockville Historic District Commission in 2001.
Ella Jackson Martin, sister of Kenneth Shelton's wife Ethel, also owned a small bungalow which still stands at 204 Frederick Avenue.
For most of the 20th century, architects and builders have been interested in the features of early American houses. Colonial Revival houses have a simple symmetrical massing, walls of clapboard or brick, and window and door openings framed by classical moldings.
Yates House, 901 Stonestreet Avenue
Raymond Yates designed this house and built it over four years in the late 1940's, working in the evenings and on weekends. He also built the house at 212 Elizabeth Avenue. Yates was a carpenter, cabinetmaker, and licensed electrician by trade, as well as a plumber, upholsterer, and artist. The Yates house has a Dutch Colonial gambrel roof, which is a roof that has two pitches on either side of the ridge as opposed to a simple pitched or a hipped roof. It is a frame structure covered with stucco. The projecting entry shows Arts and Crafts influence in its curved asymmetrical roofline and the use of windows of varied shapes and sizes.
Davis Homeplace, 807 Westmore
Reverend Davis bought the Westmore property from "Button" Griffith, and worked on the house with friends and family, starting in 1929. They cut down chestnut and oak trees on the property for lumber. The older sons helped their father build, and later they built or bought houses nearby. Jim, Joe, Frank, Henry, Ed, and Phillip all built their own houses in the immediate area. Joe Davis lives across Frederick Avenue from the Davis garage. Ed Davis built 805 Westmore, a similar house with a two-columned or piered portico. Henry Davis built 809 Westmore in the 1930's. Phillip lives at 806 Westmore, an England house. Richard lived at 804 Westmore. Frank Davis built 220 Elizabeth Avenue.
The homeplace at 807 Westmore has German siding, now covered with synthetic siding. The roof is a standing seam metal one. The family kept over 100 hogs in a large fenced area with a meathouse. They also had chickens and a large vegetable garden.
208 Lincoln Avenue
This Cape Cod cottage has a central chimney rising from the sloping face of the front roof. This placement can be seen on a number of houses in Lincoln Park and may indicate the presence originally of a stove rather than a fireplace. Lewis Monk, former principal of Lincoln High School, once lived here.
Prather House, 203 Elizabeth Avenue
The Prather home is a rambler or ranch house of stuccoed concrete block. Its strong horizontal lines and deep roof overhang suggest the Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright. The emphasis on horizontality was meant to suggest the seemingly endless space of the American continent. The dominant roof is a holdover from the Arts and Crafts movement, carrying a similar connotation of shelter and security.
Watson Prather, a retired inspector for the Naval Medical Hospital, designed and built this house with friends in the 1940's. The kitchen and carport were added around 1959. There is an unfinished basement under the kitchen.
Watson Prather's father, Henry Prather, lived in Lincoln Park in the small white house at 300 Frederick Avenue. Watson's grandfather owned 315 Lincoln Avenue, one of the first houses on the street. Mabel Prather's family came from the Quince Orchard area. Her parents moved to 907 Stonestreet Avenue, a home still occupied by family members. A sister lives next to the Prather home at the corner of Stonestreet and Elizabeth.
The Rocklin Apartments, originally named the Carver Apartments, were built in 1954. The Lincoln Terrace Apartments on Moore Drive are owned by the Rockville Housing Authority. Built in 1960, Lincoln Terrace was Rockville's first public housing. Several blocks to the west are the David Scull Apartments, which are not in Lincoln Park proper but are inhabited by many former Lincoln Park residents.
These apartment blocks reflect the utopian social ideals of the International Style, an architectural movement that sought to apply the benefits of industry and modern materials to housing. Apartments were arranged to provide ample light and air to each rooms. Windows and other features were designed to a standard size for economy in production and to provide a harmonious rhythm to facades.
In addition to the buildings described by the exhibit, we have pictures of the following buildings. To view enlarged images, click on the pictures below.
Shelton House at 606 N. Horner's Lane. The lot was part of W.W. Welsh's original 1890 subdivision of Lincoln Park. It was sold to Christopher Columbus R. Patterson in 1893. Henry and Maggie Shelton built this house in 1914 and lived here for many years. |
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The Louis Hicks House at 308 Lincoln Avenue. In later years, barber and musician Clinton Hicks lived here. |
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