Qualla: Crabtree Jones House

Crabtree Jones House: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jdh77, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the developers came in 2012, the Crabtree Jones House had been sitting on its hill for two hundred years. Built between 1808 and 1811 by Nathaniel "Crabtree" Jones, planter and politician, the Federal-style frame house had outlasted three British monarchs, Sherman's army, and the city that grew up around it. What it could not outlast was the apartment plan the new owners wanted to build on its acre. So Preservation North Carolina did something usually reserved for lighthouses and covered bridges. They lifted the house, drove it half a mile down the road, and set it back down in a 1960s subdivision next to the Jones family cemetery.

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Image: Jdh77 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Crabtree Jones House: Two Hundred Years on Crabtree Hill

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jdh77, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Jones land traced back to a 1740s grant from the Earl of Granville to Francis Jones. The family wanted high ground away from Crabtree Creek, and Nathaniel Jones built his new house on one of the steepest hills around, forty feet above the surrounding fields and a hundred feet...

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Image: Jdh77 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Crabtree Jones House: Tobacco, Confederate Camps, and Sherman

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jdh77, CC BY-SA 3.0. The estate's main antebellum crop was tobacco. The enslaved people who grew it left almost no documented voices, but their labor built the prosperity that paid for the porches and the silver. Camp Crabtree, a Confederate training facility, stood on the Jones land during the Civil...

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Image: Jdh77 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Crabtree Jones House: Federal Bones, Italianate Porches, Termite Floors

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jdh77, CC BY-SA 3.0. The main block is classic early Federal: a two-story central section, five bays across, flanked by single-bay one-story wings. The front door opens directly into the dining room, which would have served as both eating space and the formal hall. A six-paneled wooden door, hand-cut...

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Image: Jdh77 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Crabtree Jones House: Saving the Bones, Losing the Hill

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Glenn Abbey, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the 1990s, developers had bought up most of the surrounding land. By the early 2000s, only the house and a single acre remained. Charles Gaddy, the 1973 owner who had promised preservation, died in 2005. The land transferred to a development group in 2009, and apartments were ...

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Image: Glenn Abbey | CC BY-SA 3.0