John E. And Mary Frances Beaman House
Prosperous white Raleigh businessmen often lived in stately Georgian Revival houses in the early twentieth century. The Beaman House reflects this trend beautifully. Identifying features of the style include side-gabled roofs, symmetrical facades, columned porches, and an elliptical fanlight over the front door. The look came to be associated with professional success and the Hayes Barton neighborhood has modest to monumental examples.
The J. E. Beaman Construction Company erected many landmark office buildings in the 1920s: the Odd Fellows Building, the Professional Building, the State Agriculture Building, and the Lawyers Building. It put up structures at the State Hospital (later Dorothea Dix Hospital) and did the new campus for Meredith College, which relocated from downtown in 1924. As the Raleigh Times reported in 1925, “Raleigh’s sky-line bears the imprint very distinctly of his operations.” Beaman built his White Oak Road house in the flush years of his contracting business, and it shows.
Date: 1929
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