1384 Charlotte Hwy
Fairview, NC, USA

National Register of Historic Places - Dr. Cicero McAfee McCracken House

Statement of Significance:

The Dr. Cicero McAfee McCracken House, a well-preserved Foursquare-style frame dwelling erected in 1924, is important in the history of Fairview and Buncombe County as the residence of a long-time country doctor whose rural practice spanned a period of four-and-a-half decades in his adopted community of Fairview and the surrounding region. Dr. McCracken (1868-1942), a native of Haywood County and a member of the large McCracken family who resided in and around the Crabtree community, received his medical education in the then-typical combination of reading and work with a local physician, Dr. C. B. Roberts of Clyde, North Carolina, and study at Vanderbilt University Dental School and the North Carolina Medical College where he graduated in 1896. In the summer of 1896, he located in the small village of Fairview on the Asheville-Charlotte Highway where he opened his medical office and, in 1897, was married to Helen Lura Clayton (1878-1920). From at least the turn of the century until 1924, Dr. McCracken and his large family lived in houses in the village. For much of this period he occupied a house immediately south of the Fairview Baptist Church: it was pulled down in the mid-1980s. In 1924, a widower with seven children, Dr. McCracken built and occupied a new house, office, and garage on the north side of the Charlotte Highway, opposite the Fairview School campus. Those buildings, surviving to the present, were his home and office until his death on 8 December 1942. A member of the Fairview School Board (1913-1929) and the Buncombe County Board of Health (1918-1924), he was accorded the tribute of a biographical sketch in the Bulletin of the Buncombe County Medical Society in 1939 and the honor of a large public funeral in the auditorium of the Fairview School from whence his body was carried to Cane Creek Cemetery. The Dr. Cicero McAfee McCracken House is eligible for listing in the National Register under Criterion B for its association with the productive life of Dr. McCracken and as the major surviving building associated with his career: his practice embraced a territory from Asheville to Rutherfordton and from Black Mountain into Henderson County. The house is eligible for listing in the area of Health and Medicine for its association with the practice of a well-known and well-respected doctor whose career spanned four-and-a-half decades in Fairview and where he exercised parallel positions of leadership in his church, community, and profession.