114 Saint Marys Street
Raleigh, NC, USA

National Register of Historic Places - Tucker Carriage House

Statement of Significance:

The Tucker Carriage House is a large, picturesque frame building, located near the heart of downtown Raleigh. Its ambitious scale, irregular form, and rich surface treatments of patterned shingled walls, polychromed slate roof, and essentially unaltered condition make it an impressive and rare example of a Queen Anne style outbuilding, representative of the nineteenth century suburban estates that wealthy citizens once occupied on the edges of Raleigh. It served the grand Italianate house (now gone) and perhaps the business of Rufus S. Tucker, one of Raleigh's leading merchants and most influential citizens.

The Tucker Carriage House is the only building known to survive that was connected with Rufus Sylvester Tucker, one of Raleigh's post-Civil War wealthiest merchants. Tucker began his mansion house in 1858, probably designed by William Percival, an outstanding architect then working in Raleigh. It was completed the next year, with the firm of Thomas Briggs and James Dodd as the builders. (Percival also designed in the 1850s the First Baptist Church and Montfort Hall in Raleigh, New East and New West at Chapel Hill, plus several buildings in Tarboro.) This large, brick, Italianate mansion was razed in 1964. It had a number of outbuildings of varying uses, including carriage house, servants' houses, and wagon and wood sheds. As early as 1909 a Raleigh map shows the estate had a bowling green or alley, in front of the house. Today, only the great carriage house remains.

Rufus Sylvester Tucker (1829-1894) was one of the most influential men in Raleigh. He rose to the rank of major in the Confederate army, became a director of the North Carolina Railroad Company, the Seaboard Airline System, and the largest private stockholder in the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad Company. He was a director of banks in Raleigh and New Bern, was for over thirty-one years a director of the institution for the deaf, dumb and blind in Raleigh, and was for many years its president. Major Tucker was one of the largest owners of city property in Raleigh, and he had extensive farming and cattle operations in Wake County. With his brothers he was a partner in the mercantile firm of W. H. and R. S. Tucker, which had been established by his father, Ruffin Tucker, in 1818.

The exact date of construction of the carriage house is uncertain. A map, entitled "Birds Eye View of the City of Raleigh," dated 1872, shows the Tucker estate, but the carriage house is not shown. O. W. Gray and Son, of Philadelphia, mapped the Raleigh area in 1882, but no carriage house is shown at the Tucker mansion. The first time the Sanborn Insurance map showed the Tucker property is 1909, the year the widow Tucker died. In that year the great carriage house is shown. As early as 1883 the account books of Thomas Briggs show the firm of W. H. and R. S. Tucker buying materials for a "waggon shed." This was probably the waggon shed shown on the 1909 Sanborn map. It is likely that the firm of Thomas Briggs also built the carriage house.

The building may have served also as stables and storage for the large Tucker mercantile operations. The carriage house has a large amount of storage space, and there were numerous stalls for mules or horses.

Dr. James M. Rogers, a prominent Raleigh physician, and large owner of city real estate, purchased the estate from the Tucker heirs. Several parts of the horse stalls were removed by Dr. Rogers's daughter, Mrs. Norman Edward Edgerton, about 1940, and installed at the stables at her house, Tatton Hall on Oberlin Road in Raleigh. The carriage house is now owned by the heirs of Dr. Rogers, and is currently for sale. An option has been purchased by the Raleigh Housing Authority.