45 Richmond Hill Rd
Asheville, NC, USA

National Register of Historic Places - Richmond Hill House

Statement of Significance:

Richmond Hill, one of the chief nineteenth century landmarks of present-day Asheville, is a large, impressive, and little-altered frame house of restrained, classicizing Queen Anne style. It was built during the years 1889-1890 for the distinguished congressman and diplomat Richmond Pearson, who entered foreign service during the administration of his friend Theodore Roosevelt. The house, part of a handsomely sited hilltop estate, was designed for Pearson by James G. Hill of Washington, D.C., who had served as supervising architect of the U. S. Treasury in the 1870s and 1880s. Original plans for the house survive.

On February 2, 1867, Richmond Mumford Pearson, chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, obtained a deed of trust from N. W. Woodfin for three tracts of land along the Frence Broad River in Buncombe County. Woodfin was indebted to Pearson for $3,864.92. To secure payment of the debt, Woodfin mortgaged one large tract of 620 acres and two smaller adjoining tracts of 100 acres each. Payment was due on March 4, 1872. Woodfin defaulted on the debt and Pearson foreclosed on the mortgage, taking possession of the property early in 1873.

At the time of acquisition of the Buncombe County property (the only land Pearson owned there), the chief justice resided at his Yadkin County home known as Richmond Hill where he continued to live until his death on January 5, 1878. The lands along the French Broad River were leased to tenants and were used largely for grazing cattle." No Pearsons occupied the property until the end of the next decade.
Richmond M. Pearson's will be probated on February 6, 1878. His widow, Mary Bynum Pearson (second wife and not the mother of his children), received a life estate, but there was no provision for disposition of the property after her death. A clause in the will, however, gave Mary Pearson the right to sell the estate upon agreement with Richmond Pearson, her stepson and the executor of Richmond M. Pearson's will.
In April, 1879, Richmond Pearson placed the Buncombe County property for public sale. No adequate bids were entered and the land was withdrawn from the market. A contemporary description of the land called it "unproductive... not susceptible of an advantageous partition among the residuary legatees." Ownership passed to the five surviving children of the deceased chief justice: Richmond, Eliza, Mary, Sallie, and Ellen Brent. Each held an undivided one-fifth interest.

Richmond Pearson began purchasing the interests of his relatives in October, 1879, and by the end of the month, he held full title to the property. He spent nearly $3,000 to acquire the remaining 677 acres of the original 820-acre estate."

Richmond Pearson was born January 26, 1852, at his father's home in Yadkin County, but not at Richmond Hill as popularly believed. That famous Yadkin County home was not built until the end of the decade, about 1859-1860. Attendance at Horner's School in Oxford prepared young Pearson for a college education. He received A. B. (1872) and A. M. (1873) degrees from Princeton and followed his father into the legal profession. Although he was admitted to the North Carolina Bar in 1874, Pearson's fame came from his political and diplomatic service.
After serving as a U. S. consul in Belgium during President Grant's second term, Richmond Pearson spent eight years in his private law practice. In 1885 he was elected to the North Carolina legislature where he served two terms, after which he again returned to private practice. He was persuaded to run for Congress in 1895 and thus began nearly fifteen years of uninterrupted public service.

While in Congress (1895-1901), Pearson developed a personal friendship with Theodore Roosevelt. When the latter became president in 1901, he enticed Pearson to enter the diplomatic service. Pearson began his second tour of foreign service as a U. S. consul in Genoa, Italy (1901-1902). From there he became envoy extra- ordinaire to Persia (1902-1907), and concluded his diplomatic career as minister plenipotentiary to Greece and Montenegro (1907-1909). When his friend left the White House, Pearson retired from public service to concentrate on his law practice.

Richmond Pearson married Gabrielle Thomas on March 30, 1882. A few years later he moved to Buncombe County and decided to build a home on his property out- side Asheville. He selected a site on a high knoll overlooking the French Broad River and named the 50-acre tract Richmond Hill after his father's estate in Yadkin County (and incidentally after his grandfather's estate in Rowan County)." A family friend who visited the site in 1889 wrote to Pearson a year later commenting that ". . . the view from the hill chosen for your house, is one never to be forgotten. I hope you are in your house, enjoying it to the full."2 Clearly the house had not been completed at the time of this visit. Yet Marjorie Noel Pearson, oldest child of Richmond and Gabrielle, was born in the house in 1890. Thus, the structure known as Richmond Hill was completed in late 1889 or early 1890.

When Richmond Pearson decided to make his home near Asheville, he first consulted a Boston firm and received plans for a granite structure. For reasons not clear even to the family, that design was scrapped in favor of a frame structure designed by James G. Hill of Washington, D.C.

Hill was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1841. At age thirty-five, he was appointed supervising architect of the U. S. Treasury. Government buildings constructed under his supervision and planning included the old Bureau of Printing and Engraving and the Printing Office in Washington; a courthouse and post office in Albany, New York; a post office in Baltimore; and a courthouse and post office in Minneapolis. During construction of the Chicago Customs House, charges of fraud were levied against Hill and his staff. A congressional investigation began in July, 1883, and two months later Hill resigned his post as supervising architect in a swirl of controversy.

James G. Hill returned to private practice and established a Washington firm under the name of Hill & Kendall in 1884." While in Congress as a representative of the Ninth North Carolina District, Richmond Pearson apparently met Hill and hired him to design a house for his Richmond Hill estate. The original plans for the house prepared by Hill are now contained in the Richmond Pearson Papers in the Southern Historical Collection in the University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill. The actual cost of construction is unknown, but the fifty-acre tract and new house, with outbuildings, were valued at $50,000 in 1890.

Hill's subsequent architectural career remains unsearched. He died suddenly at his residence in Washington on December 20, 1913, at the age of seventy-two."
Pearson retired to his Richmond Hill estate in 1909 and there he lived until his death on September 12, 1923. His will was concise and clear: "I will and devise all my estate personal and real to my wife Gabrielle absolutely and in fee simple." A rather unusual feature of this will was its long unchanged duration before probate, a span of forty years (1883-1923).1 Gabrielle Pearson survived her husband by only a year. In accordance with the terms of her will, probated December 26, 1924, the Richmond Hill tract passed to her two children, Marjorie Noel and James Thomas Pearson.

Thomas (he never used James) was equally successful as his father and grand- father but never attained the same recognition. Born at Richmond Hill near Asheville on June 24, 1893, Thomas received his basic education at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire." Like his father he attended Princeton from which he was graduated in 1915. A career with American International Corporation was interrupted by the entry of the United States in World War I. Pearson attained the rank of captain and distinguished himself by winning the Legion of Honor (France), the Order of the Crown and the Croix de Guerre (Belgium), the Order of Prince Danilo I (Montenegro) and Officer Honneur et Merite (Haiti). Following the war, he served briefly as foreign trade editor of the New York Evening Post before embarking on a long career that included the reorganization and administration of financial institutions in foreign countries. In 1951 he retired from service and returned to Richmond Hill."