Cooleemee: The Greek Cross House and the Three Hundred
Near Winston Salem, North Carolina
The house at Cooleemee Plantation on the Yadkin River is unlike almost anything else in North Carolina. Built between eighteen fifty-three and eighteen fifty-five, it was designed by New York architect W. H. Ranlett and shaped in the form of a Greek cross, each arm of the structure projecting from a central core fifty feet high. Godey's Lady's Book, the most widely read magazine in antebellum America, called it an Anglo-Grecian Villa. It required more than three hundred thousand bricks.
The name Cooleemee reportedly derives from a Creek village in Alabama, said to mean "place where the white oaks grow." Peter Hairston established the plantation in eighteen seventeen, and his descendant Peter Wilson Hairston eventually inherited it. By eighteen sixty, Hairston had expanded the estate to four thousand two hundred acres and was working it with three hundred enslaved people who raised tobacco, corn, cotton, and hogs. It was one of the largest plantations in the Piedmont.
During the Civil War, Hairston served as an aide to his brother-in-law Jeb Stuart in the Virginia cavalry and later under Jubal Early in the Army of Northern Virginia. When the war ended and the enslaved workers were freed, many chose to remain on the land as hired laborers, a complex transaction shaped by economics, geography, and the limited options Reconstruction offered.
A different chapter followed in the eighteen nineties when a cotton mill was built nearby, turning Cooleemee into a mill village with company-owned homes, a church, and a school alongside the old plantation house. The mill ran until nineteen sixty-seven.
The great Greek cross house still stands, privately held but on the National Register of Historic Places, an architectural curiosity on a landscape layered with the history of enslaved labor, planter wealth, and industrial transformation.
