605 Cascade Avenue, John L. and Emma J. Gilmer House, 1929 (LHL 2017, https://www.cityofws.org/DocumentCenter/View/3923/137---John-L-and-Emma-J-Gilmer-House-PDF?bidId=)

A large side-gable brick-veneered Colonial Revival house that sits atop a hill overlooking Park Boulevard and Washington Park with a view of Winston-Salem's downtown. The symmetrical five bay structure includes two one-story side wings; one a sunroom, the other a screened porch with a two-car garage beneath it. The central entrance is in a slightly projecting central bay with an oval window on each side of the door and three windows above, and includes a broken pedimented surround with no porch.

Windows have jack arches with cast stone keystones, and a modillion cornice sits beneath the green Ludowici-Celadon tile roof. There is a rear two-story gable projection and one-story gable ell. Changes have included the introduction of a row of glazed French doors leading out the back to a new swimming pool, and the addition of a large frame gable dormer in the rear reflecting interior changes to the attic. The property today retains 3.32 acres that includes a stone retaining wall running along Cascade Avenue.

After their 1903 Queen Anne style home was destroyed by fire in 1928, Gilmer and his wife Emma commissioned this house from Northup and O'Brien Architects. It was completed by Fogle Brothers in 1929 with landscaping believed to have been designed by a New York landscape architect. Gilmer was vice-president of Inverness Mills and of Bon Air Realty Company, and had been an owner of Gilmer Brothers Company, a wholesale notions firm.

In 1926 Gilmer formed the Camel City Coach Company by buying up a number of small bus companies operating in Winston-Salem, a company eventually absorbed by Atlantic Greyhound. His large acreage, including a substantial flower garden on the SW corner of Leonard Street and Cascade Avenue, was subdivided and developed in the 1940s.

Colonial Revival style – architecture that reuses aspects of earlier colonial prototypes; found from about 1870 through today.

Willard C. Northup, who with Leet O'Brien formed the noted local firm of Northup & O'Brien, has been identified as the architect of five houses in Washington Park: the 1914 Horace Vance House at 100 Banner; the 1916 Charles Siewers House at 20 Cascade; the 1918 A. H. Eller House at 129 Cascade, built to replace the Victorian house moved to 14 Park Boulevard (attributed to the firm); the 1929 John L. Gilmer House at 605 Cascade, built to replace an earlier house destroyed by fire; and the 1914 Henry E. and Rosa Mickey Fries House at 104 Cascade Avenue. (Cicero Lowe's 1911 Neoclassical Revival house at 204 Cascade has been attributed to Northup as well.)

Northup was born in Michigan, moved to Asheville as a child, then completed his architectural degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Around 1906 he moved to Winston-Salem, later partnered with Leet O'Brien, and was active in the state's professional organizations. He was president of the North Carolina State Board of Architectural Examiners as well as a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He designed both commercial and residential buildings in Winston-Salem and throughout the state, and is most well known for his many Georgian Revival houses designed in the 1920s and 1930s. (https://ncarchitects.lib.ncsu.edu/people/P000213)