National Register of Historic Places
Carolina and Northwestern Railway Freight Station
Lenoir, Caldwell County, North Carolina
The record
- Listed
- August 30, 2019
- Type
- Building
- Address
- 1407 College Ave. SW, Lenoir
- County
- Caldwell
- State
- North Carolina
- Contributing resources
- 1 building
- Coordinates
- 35.90800, -81.54780
- Reference number
- 100004319
Slide toward Today to fade the historical sheet and see the modern map underneath.
David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesUSGS Historical Topographic Map CollectionDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesBarry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesBarry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection, Stanford Libraries
The story
Written by AI from this property's National Register nomination and the record above; every sentence is checked against its sources before it appears here. Corrections: privacy@treealive.com
The Carolina and Northwestern Railway Freight Station is a Modernist freight depot at 1407 College Ave. SW in Lenoir, Caldwell County, built around 1950 and listed in the National Register in 2019.
Why it's listed
It was listed under criteria A and C, with local-level significance in architecture and transportation. Its period of significance runs from 1950 to 1969, anchored by the depot's construction around 1950.
Physical character
The depot's walls are common-bond red brick with cast-stone trim on a foundation of cast stone and concrete, under tar-and-gravel and concrete roofs. It retains its original freight scale and weighbeam, steel-sash windows, and separate waiting rooms once used for white and African American passengers, plus a 1952 flat-roofed Modernist office addition.
Historical context
Engineers with Southern Railway designed the depot, which the Elliot Building Company built around 1950 on land the Carolina and Northwestern Railway bought from Lenoir Furniture Corporation in 1949. The Carolina and Northwestern Railway discontinued passenger, mail, express, and baggage service in 1947, and the building was leased for storage from 1994 to 2018. Norfolk Southern conveyed the property to Lenoir Depot LLC in 2018, and it was vacant at the time of its listing.