Rogers-Whitaker-Haywood House

The Rogers-Whitaker-Haywood House is a historic house near Wake Crossroads (formerly Rogers Crossroads), North Carolina, an unincorporated community northeast of the state capital Raleigh. The original story-and-a-half house, now the west end, was built in 1771. It has a stone exterior chimney on the west end. Now one large room, it may originally have been arranged as a hall-parlor plan; it formerly had a door between the two south windows and a straight stair with winders in the NE corner.

Circa 1812 the house was enlarged by the addition of a free-standing second room to the east of the first building. Either soon or immediately, the space between the two buildings was enclosed to form a central passage, with two shed rooms on the north side, and the stair was rebuilt approximately in its original location, but opening into the passage. There is no visible interior woodwork from the 1771 period; the entire interior is finished with vernacular Federal woodwork. Although both main chimneys are built of stone, doubled shouldered, and with later brick stacks, the stonework of the E chimney consists of larger and finer cut stone, suggesting a later construction date than the W chimney.

The NE shed room is heated by a fireplace with an exterior chimney. To the east, between the two chimneys, is a pair of lighted pent closets with early shelving. The SE room has a door to the exterior sheltered by a shed porch with thick turned early 19C columns. The side door, typical of North Carolina vernacular design, suggests that the exterior kitchen was to the east of the main house. Between the unheated NW shed room, which opens only into the SW room, and the passage is a lighted closet with a built-in beaufat consisting of glazed doors over drawers over a lower cupboard section. There is a similar beaufat, with arch-top lights, in the large SW room. The closet opens only into the passage. The three principal rooms have flat paneled wainscot; the passage wainscot is a double range of panels with the stiles "breaking joint" like brickwork. All doors in the house are raised paneled on the "good" side and flat paneled on the back and are hung on their original butt hinges.

In the garret, the stair rises into an unheated central space the width of the passage below. To the east and west are heated chambers with simple transitional Georgian/Federal chimneypieces. The central space is lighted by one dormer window on the N wall. This gabled dormer was reconstructed in the 1970s within the original framed opening. The reconstruction is probably inaccurate; the original probably had a shed roof. The chambers are lighted only by pairs of casement windows with their original hinges on either side of the chimneys.

In the 1970s the house retained all of its Federal period interior paint colors. The passage and SE room had dark olive green trim with doors grain-painted as yellow pine; the SW room had white trim, light blue plaster, and grain-painted pine doors; the pent closets had blue trim and shelves with white-painted wood sheathed walls; the passage closet beaufat was blue with the glazed doors painted red; the NE room had white trim; the garret chambers had green trim; the center room in the garret had blue trim, with white-painted wood sheathing above the wainscot and a balustrade with a red newel and yellow square pickets.

In the yard in the 1970s, a late 19C kitchen survived NW of the house. It had been moved in the 20C from a position SE of the house and its chimney demolished. NW of the house, an early unlined well was embellished in the 1970s by an early-19C combination well shelter and storage building which formerly stood on the original site of the 1775 Lane-Bennett house near Macedonia in Wake County.

In the early 1970s, other interesting features on the place included, W of the house, the original roadbed of the Oxford-Smithfield Stage Road; the "cook's house" (now collapsed/demolished), a late-19C replacement of an earlier stone chimneyed structure which burned; a 19C packhouse; a late-19C outhouse; and a crude 20C shelter for an automobile.

In September 1985, the Rogers-Whitaker-Haywood House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.