The manor house

Set behind a grove of large magnolias and deciduous trees on a 12-acre lawn, you’ll find Coolmore Plantation and its matching outbuildings. The manor house was built from 1857-1860 by Dr. Joseph John Willis Powell and his wife, Martha Branch Whitaker Powell, both of Halifax County. Dr. Powell moved to Edgecombe County to run what was to become Coolmore Plantation for his Uncle Richard Harrison, one of antebellum North Carolina's wealthiest planters and businessmen. Dr. Powell subsequently inherited 2800 acres in 1856 and proceeded almost immediately to build one of the grandest plantation houses in the entire South.

Coolmore Plantation manor house was designed by Baltimore architect, E. G. Lind. It is an Italianate style house with a central-passage plan, divided into a vestibule, stair hall and back hall. The surviving outbuildings, also done in the Italianate style, include a smokehouse, a carriage house, servants' quarters, a gas house, and a kitchen.

The Powell family papers (privately held) document thoroughly Lind's role in planning the house, orders of furnishings and other items from Baltimore, and other accounts. The house was completed on the eve of the Civil War and is regarded as one of the most completely preserved of Lind's residences. The home also features the remarkably intact work of the Baltimore decorative painter Ernst Dreyer. Dreyer's art is not actually fresco (painted in wet plaster) but paint on plaster.

Upon entering the massive double front doors of Coolmore, one immediately steps into one of the grandest spaces that could ever be imagined. The entrance hall is by far the most elaborate room in the mansion and has all of its original faux marbelized wall, trompe l'oeil ceiling and hand-painted, canvas cloth floor covering. Statuary niches are found here, as well as the Grand Spiral Stairhall. It is said that the marble statues, imported from Europe, arrived in Baltimore, but due to the beginning of the Civil War were never shipped south to Coolmore. They supposedly remain somewhere up north today.

Watson Brown's Backroad Photography