5455 Chamblee Dunwoody Rd
Dunwoody, GA, USA

National Register of Historic Places - Cheek-Spruill House

Statement of Significant:

The Cheek-Spruill House is significant in architecture because it is a good example of a gabled-ell type farmhouse. There is strong family and local tradition that the house had one floor built around 1907 and then raised up, possibly as early as 1909 or as late as 1921, and the second floor built underneath the first. Due to the house's expansion so close to its construction, it gives a unified appearance today, especially in the exterior walls, the interior stair, and other features. The house retains much of its original materials including doors, moldings, stairway, and porches. The gabled- ell house type is an important house type in Georgia identified in the statewide historic context "Georgia's Living Places: Historic Houses in their Landscaped Settings (1991)." Its character- defining features include a "L" or "T" shaped plan with a prominent projecting front-gabled ell and with three principal rooms on each floor. One interior chimney usually is located between the two rooms in the ell; a second exterior chimney is usually located at the end of the main gabled section of the house. A front porch usually extends from the intersection of the main house and gabled ell across the front of the house. A central stair hall is commonly found. The Cheek-Spruill House retains all of these important plan-form characteristics of the gabled-ell house type. Most of the gabled-ell houses in Georgia were built between 1875 and 1915, and most were built in cities and towns. The Cheek-Spruill House is somewhat unusual in having been built in a small rural hamlet. Gabled-ell houses are relatively rare in Georgia, constituting only one-half of one percent of all surveyed houses (unlike their much more common one-story counterpart, the gable-ell cottage, which accounts for 7% if all surveyed houses.) The Cheek-Spruill House is thus representative of a relatively rare form of vernacular house in Georgia. It should be noted that two-story house of any type is relatively rare in Georgia, constituting only about 10% of all surveyed historic houses. In this context, the Cheek-Spruill House, standing two stories high at the center of the small Dunwoody settlement, would have been an impressive local landmark when built in the early 20th century, just as it remains a local landmark today.

The house is significant in community planning and development because it was built at a very prominent location, the very heart of where the town of Dunwoody began in the early 1880s, at a railroad and roadway intersection, and then grew into the suburb it is today. When the house was built, it faced the railroad leading from Chamblee to Roswell, with the depot being just northwest of and in front of the house. Most of the businesses were on the west side of the railroad, and to the south (across what is now Mt. Vernon Highway, then Lawrenceville Road) was the Joberry Cheek Gin and other enterprises as well as the Joberry Cheek homeplace. Joberry Cheek had long been one of the early settlers and land owners in Dunwoody. It was Mr. Joberry Cheek who bought this lot in 1907 and later in 1912 officially sold it to his daughter, Myra Cheek Crook and her husband John W. Crook, an international milling engineer. Immediately prior to Cheek's purchase, the lot and some 50 other acres in the intersection were owned by Perry L. Moss who ran a general store and was postmaster. Moss had owned this corner lot since 1891 and presumably rented out a small house that is indicated as being there in the 1900 Census. The Cheek-Spruill House is the only surviving historic house at the center of the formerly rural Dunwoody community. Standing as it does at the very center of the community, at the former intersection of the railroad and major county roads, it alone represents the early development of the Dunwoody community.