Neighborhood History

By the early 1900s, the city of Durham had expanded during its short post-Civil War existence to a bustling industrial tobacco and textile town and sprawled on both sides of the North Carolina Railroad that ran southeast to northwest through town. Gridded blocks of new houses were appearing along Duke and Gregson streets and cross-streets north of the new Trinity College Campus, established in 1891-92. The new hospital, Watts Hospital, endowed by industrialist George W. Watts in downtown Durham in 1895, was outgrown by 1908. Watts donated twenty-seven acres of wooded rural land at the north end of Broad Street, the west boundary of Trinity College. A new and architecturally distinguished Watts Hospital campus of six buildings designed in the “modified Spanish Mission style,” by Boston architects Kendall and Taylor, was built on the site between 1908 and 1910.

Two other institutions - a country club and the waterworks park - and a new trolley line gave the Watts-Hillandale area the amenities necessary to draw residents. West Club Boulevard was laid out between the hospital and Hillandale Road six blocks west. The Main Street trolley line ran all the way down Broad Street to Club Boulevard by 1907. The ten-acre waterworks lake, a popular recreation spot, became a destination when a trolley line was extended down Club Boulevard to the waterworks by 1912. In 1912, George Watts’s son-in-law, wealthy businessman John Sprunt Hill, and his friends organized and built Durham’s first country club on the north side of the 2500 block of Club Boulevard. The clubhouse was a large, cozy shingled bungalow with a big welcoming veranda. The Hillandale Golf Course, adjacent to the waterworks, was built by Hill as well, who retained it as a separate entity.

With such amenities in place, developers wasted no time in creating a new suburban neighborhood. In 1913, two separate development companies, the West End Land Company and Durham Loan and Trust Company, purchased tracts of the Hester Property and created the lots along Club Boulevard, Englewood Avenue, and the intersecting streets. The West End Land Company subdivided “Club Acres” along Club Boulevard between the hospital and Hillandale Road. In the center, the low-lying creek bed is set off as a park, with a meandering street called “Park Way” bordering the park. The intersecting streets of Ninth Street, Carolina Avenue, Park Way (now Oval Drive and Oakland Avenue), Virginia Avenue, Alabama Avenue, and Hester Avenue (now Georgia Avenue) are included in the subdivision, but only a few lots face these streets, because the lots fronting on Club Boulevard are so deep. A dotted line down the center of Club Boulevard indicates the trolley line, and almost all lots have sewer connections. The only structure indicated on the plat is the Durham Country Clubhouse in the westernmost block of Club Boulevard.

Beginning in 1916, a large advertisement in the Durham Morning Herald announced, “There Is Every Reason Why You Should Own a Home On CLUB BOULEVARD, the Beautiful Residence Section Between Watts Hospital and the Country Club.” Listing such neighborhood assets as city water and sewer and the macadamized boulevard with curbs and gutters and cement sidewalks, the Durham Realty & Insurance Company boasted that four homes had recently been completed and four more were under construction.

The first lot sales in the new subdivision were in 1913. Sales were slow until 1919, hitting their peak during 1921 when twenty-seven lots were sold.

In 1913, John Sprunt Hill’s bank, the Durham Loan and Trust Company, subdivided a tract known as “Englewood” to the south of Club Acres, extending from Ninth Street to Alabama Avenue. The lots are smaller and the intersecting streets of Edith, Virgie, Hale, Rosehill, and Oakland break up the south side of Englewood Avenue into smaller blocks than those on Club Boulevard.

The western anchor of WHH, the Durham Waterworks, was completed in 1917 – one of the first modern municipal water plants in North Carolina. The city purchased acreage on the west side of Hillandale Road at the west end of Club Boulevard and built a ten-acre reservoir and facilities. W. M. Piatt & Company, which specialized in waterworks engineering, constructed the plant. The original filtration plant is a three-story brick Romanesque Revival style building. Together with a diminutive matching pumping station and a whimsical valve house in the center of the lake, the waterworks has historical and architectural significance. The plant expanded in 1927 with a two-story brick wing built to receive the underground aqueducts coming from the new city reservoir at Lake Michie. The building was doubled in size with a stuccoed Art Moderne addition in 1949-50.

The majestic willow oaks that now form a leafy cathedral along Club Boulevard were planted by the City of Durham in the late 1920s. These trees have reached their lifespan and, in recent years, several have fallen.

During the years of the Great Depression, growth in the Watts-Hillandale District slowed considerably. Hill’s City Directory for the early 1930s reveal that many district homeowners took in boarders, often nurses who worked at the hospital. Durham’s trolley system shut down in the early 1930s. Watts Hospital continued to thrive, but the Country Club did not. The depression and competition from the thriving Hope Valley Club doomed the Hillandale Country Club. In 1939, John Sprunt Hill donated the Hillandale facility and golf course. The clubhouse was torn down around 1950, its land subdivided and new houses built on the site in the 1960s.

The Watts-Hillandale Neighborhood reached its current appearance by the mid-1940s. In the late 1940s and 1950s, brick and frame Minimal Traditional-style houses and Ranch houses, as well as duplexes, appeared on infill lots. Residency was quite stable, with many of the original homeowners remaining in the neighborhood throughout their lives, into the 1960s and 1970s. Watts Hospital abandoned its campus in 1976 for the new Durham County General Hospital in the north section of the rapidly growing town. In September 1980, the deserted Watts Hospital buildings began a new life as the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, a boarding school for academically talented students from all over North Carolina. In one of the city’s best examples of adaptive reuse, old Watts Hospital now thrives as NCSSM.

The neighborhood remains a popular choice for current Durham residents and newcomers. Many of the houses have been rehabilitated, expanded, and maintained. New houses continue to be built on available lots and as replacements for teardowns.