History of Washington Park's Development Companies
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Information from the National Register of Historic Places: Architects | Development Companies | Residents | History of Winston-Salem | Ludlow's Plan | The Park | Streetcars
The first church in the neighborhood was organized in 1914 and a lot purchased at the corner of Banner and Hollyrood for $1,700. The Sunday School was organized a year later on the second floor of C.D. Couch's two-story frame grocery store at the corner of Acadia Avenue and Hollyrood Street, one block south (now demolished; site of Crown Drugs today), and in the fall construction began on Schlatter Memorial Reformed Church; the handsome brick Gothic Revival church was completed in 1920 at a cost of $20,000.
The city's financial success was at its height in the 1920s. The population trebled from 1910 to 1930, making the Twin City the largest in the state by 1920. This translated into a house building boom greater even than that of the decades before. About half of all the houses in the Washington Park Historic District were built in the decade of the 1920s. By 1925 the city had seventy-three real estate companies, formed to take advantage of the need for new housing. Architectural firms had been established in Winston-Salem by 1925 and a number ofarchitects practiced in the city. Several of them lived in Washington Park.
As the neighborhood grew, houses were moved within the district; the Eller-Davis House was among the earliest, moved in 1918 from Cascade to 14 Park Boulevard to become the first house on its block when the owners wanted a more up-to-date building on their Cascade Avenue lot. Along Acadia, as commercial ventures spread and streets were cut, houses were moved around the corner to be saved. For instance, the building at 2113 Hollyrood began life at 232 Acadia until Miles Swaim moved it to make room for his new grocery store in 1929. A block away another building had been moved twenty years earlier to make room for the opening of Konnoak (then Holton Street). Local tradition even reports that the house at 17 Park was once a barn moved from the 200 block of Gloria and adapted into a residence.
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