Alexander Dickson House

The Alexander Dickson House, an ideal example of an 18th-century Quaker-plan farmhouse, was built around 1790. Alexander Dickson, his wife Elizabeth, and their nine children moved into the house in 1845. Along with farming, Dickson owned a gristmill, store, blacksmith shop, and wagon repair shop, and although he was a successful farmer, mechanic, and craftsman, he was a poor investor. The family gained lasting historical significance in April 1865, when Confederate generals Wade Hampton and Joseph Johnston and their troops camped on the grounds of the house's original site because it stood in sight of the railroad between Raleigh and Greensboro and near the road to Durham Station. According to Dickson family tradition, an outbuilding called the office was where the general slept, and Dickson's daughter Nancy remembered that the nearby Confederate troops were very hungry and foraged across the property for food, even digging up wild onions. Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis had urged Johnston, commanding a large Confederate army of 90,000 men, to continue fighting, but Davis finally conceded after hearing of Gen. Robert E. Lee's capitulation of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9. On April 17 and 18, Johnston traveled from the Dickson House to the Bennett Place in what is now Durham County, where he learned of President Lincoln's assassination and negotiated a surrender with Union Gen. William T. Sherman, effectively ending the Civil War in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. In 1983, the house and office were moved from the original farm site, located 1¼ miles southeast of town, to their current location. The restored house now serves as the Hillsborough Visitor Center and as office space for the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, and its preserved interior woodwork and brickwork include original oak timbers, pine woodwork and floorboards, hand-beaded ceiling joists, and even an original window pane or two. The landscape where the Visitor Center stands was donated by Dr. Charles Blake and Helen Blake Watkins, designers of nearby Chatwood Gardens, and a garden there honors them.

Hillsborough, North Carolina · United States