29 Rice Branch Rd
Asheville, NC, USA

National Register of Historic Places - Rice-Cornell-Brown House

Statement of Significance:

The Rice-Cornell-Brown House is one of two identified surviving houses in the Beaverdam Valley section of Asheville that are known to have evolved from a mid-nineteenth-century log house into a modest farmhouse; and is one of only three surviving mid-nineteenth-century houses in the area. The house possesses local significance in the area of architecture as an intact example of a rapidly- disappearing building type. The original single-pen log cabin which forms one block of the present house is thought to have been erected around 1850. Frame additions to this house were made in 1890 and 1927, and reflect the modest prosperity and traditional lifestyle of mountain farm families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interior and exterior features and fabric of the circa 1850 original log portion of the house and the additions remain virtually intact, exhibiting original construction materials and techniques, original fabric and wall finishes.

The present twenty-seven-acre site on which the house is located is the residual tract of a holding that has been home to generations of the Rice, Cornell, and Brown families since 1836, when William Wolfe purchased a 210-acre tract from Joseph Killian. Wolfe's daughter, Mary Elvira, married James O. Rice about 1838 and thus united two families associated with the early settlement of the Beaverdam area in the late eighteenth century. The Rice family drained and cultivated the rich bottomland of their holding, and pastured livestock on the hillside west of the one-room log house with its detached kitchen. J.O. and Mary Rice raised two sons and six daughters, but during the course of the Civil War, all of the male members of the family perished. Following Mary Rice's death in 1872, the holding was partitioned among her daughters. Mary Matilda Rice Cornell claimed the fifty-one acres that surrounded the log cabin which she and her husband, William Stephen Cornell continued to farm in the traditional manner. The Cornells augmented their farming activities with the construction of a school on the north edge of their property, and with various outside employment. By 1890, the family had prospered enough to add an additional room and indoor kitchen to the forty-year-old cabin.

The Cornells farmed the land until 1923, when they sold it to Hugh and Edwin Brown. In 1927, Hugh Brown added an additional room to the house, and in 1953 the 1890 shed kitchen was incorporated into a wood frame gable-end room. This expansion marked the plumbing and wiring of the house. The Browns engaged Winfield Scarborough, a descendent of J.O. Rice, to farm the land. Scarborough raised corn and vegetables, as well as livestock there from 1923 until his death in the 1950s.

During the Depression, the fifty-one-acre tract was divided, and the present twenty-seven-acre tract surrounding the house remains in the possession of the Brown family. Eleanor Brown Hall, daughter of Hugh Brown and one of the current owners, has maintained the house and the land much as it appeared throughout its period of significance, and, along with her husband, James Hall, relocated three extremely rare mid-nineteenth-century log buildings from the Sandy Mush Nuclear Plant site onto the hillside southwest of the Rice-Cornell-Brown House. Today the twenty-seven-acre site retains its historic traditional agricultural character through maintenance of the bottomland and careful timber management on the hillsides. The house, that is rooted in the land and that has evolved over the course of a century, serves as a summer and special occasion retreat for the Brown family. Together the Rice-Cornell-Brown House and its site serve as an evocative and significant picture of the traditional Mountain farming lifeways that have all but disappeared in Asheville's rapidly developing environs. This property is eligible for listing in the National Register under Criterion A, for its contribution to the social history of the Beaverdam Valley in Buncombe County, and under Criterion C for architecture which exemplifies mid- nineteenth century log cabin construction techniques and later evolutions of the building into the late- nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.