Qualla: Heritage Square (Fayetteville, North Carolina)

Heritage Square (Fayetteville, North Carolina): Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kelliejojo, CC BY 3.0. The Sandford House went up in 1797, when Fayetteville was still a candidate for state capital and the road outside its front door led somewhere important. Two centuries later, after a Confederate artist's son, a Massachusetts naval-stores merchant, an Air Force general's family, and thirty wartime working women had moved in and out, the house was still standing. It is still standing now, mostly because the Woman's Club of Fayetteville saved it - first by leasing it during World War II, then by exercising their purchase option in 1945 and completing the purchase in 1946. Beside it sits the strangest building on the block: a freestanding 1818 Regency-style oval ballroom that once watched a young wife allegedly serve her first husband arsenic-laced syllabub.

Image: Kelliejojo | CC BY 3.0

Heritage Square (Fayetteville, North Carolina): The Sandford House's Tenants

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kelliejojo, CC BY 3.0. Built in 1797, the Sandford House passed through enough owners that its various names overlap in the historical record. In 1873, former Confederate Captain John E.P. Daingerfield bought it. He had served as a clerk at the Harpers Ferry Arsenal in 1859, on duty during John Brown's...

Image: Kelliejojo | CC BY 3.0

Heritage Square (Fayetteville, North Carolina): Elliott Daingerfield's South Parlor

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit photographer, Public domain. Elliott Daingerfield was born in Harpers Ferry in 1859 and raised in Fayetteville. At age twenty-one he moved to New York to study painting, eventually becoming a major American artist of the late Symbolist and Tonalist movements. He spent summers in Blowing Rock, North Carolina,...

Image: photographer | Public domain

Heritage Square (Fayetteville, North Carolina): Thirty Women, One House

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RadioFan at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. From 1941 to 1945, the Woman's Club of Fayetteville leased the house from the Powell family - and they put it to work. World War II had drawn unmarried working women to Fayetteville in large numbers, many of them filling jobs at Fort Bragg and the supporting industries that surge...

Image: RadioFan at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Heritage Square (Fayetteville, North Carolina): The Oval Ballroom and the Arsenic Dessert

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kelliejojo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Next to the Sandford House stands one of the more unusual surviving rooms in the American South: an 1818 freestanding ballroom with an octagonal exterior and a perfect oval interior, twenty by thirty feet, lined with plaster cornices and pilasters - pure Regency style. Originally...

Image: Kelliejojo | CC BY-SA 3.0