418 Arcadia Avenue, Charles A. Crews House, c.1900

A large frame Queen Anne style house with a projecting semi-octagonal bay and modified turret roof that includes interior chimneys with corbelling and caps. The home now features replacement metal shingle roofs and includes a one-story hipped-roof wrap porch supported by faux classical columns. (This home was saved by Preservation Forsyth, then sold with an attached preservation easement. The young owners have done an amazing job of restoration and/or rehabilitation.)

City directories show Charles Crews, a tile manufacturer and farmer, and his wife Emma L. on this site by 1921, possibly as early as 1915. Crews was in the concrete pipe business (concrete pipe for storm sewers), and had a pipe plant on his land which extended to Freeman Street near W. Sprague. Behind his house was a large barn constructed of cement bricks that housed draft horses used to deliver the pipes when the city was laying and paving streets, but the barn burned in the 1940s or 1950s. In 1929, he went bankrupt.

The Crews' son, Hall Crews, lived here from 1920 to at least 1923 while he was a draftsman for the noted local architect Willard C. Northup. Hall graduated from Salem Boys School, studied architecture at Columbia University, then apprenticed with a New York firm. Upon returning to Winston-Salem, he was first hired by Northup, then in 1923, became the first architect to pass NC’s newly instituted licensing exam.

He later practiced from this house, quickly becoming a respected local architect. HIs commissions included: Salem College’s Clewell Dormitory, 1923 Baptist Hospital, 1926 Augsburg Lutheran Church, 1928 Brown-Rogers-Dixon Company Building, the award winning 1929 Ardmore Elementary School, and the 1947 Streamline Moderne Modern Chevrolet dealership (demolished). He is said to have designed the 1920 Schlatter Memorial Church, a Gothic Revival style brick building at 236 Banner Avenue, however, this would have been before he became a registered architect.