Tarboro Tradition

Coolmore Plantation, Tarboro

Unfortunately the many pictures in the magazine are not online.

Coolmore Plantation is both a mansion and a museum. But to Joe Spiers, who lives here with his wife, Janet, it is both a connection to his family’s history and a structure that symbolizes his own endurance and strength.

An hour and a half later, the fence was fixed, and Joe was beat. He returned to his mansion, dusted the filth off his jacket and his jeans, and walked through the back door, stepping into the kitchen.

This is Coolmore Plantation, Joe’s home and one of the most significant pieces of property in North Carolina, an Italian Villa built in 1860 for physician and cotton planter J.J.W. Powell and his wife, Martha. Weather and time and even war have passed through, and while other plantations have fallen, Coolmore has withstood it all.

It is a home and a museum, and Joe and his wife of 52 years, Janet, watch over it accordingly. Preservation North Carolina owns Coolmore, but because there’s no endowment for it, the organization has a unique arrangement with the Powell family — it leases the mansion and property back to direct-line descendants who want to live there and tend to it.

Joe Spiers is Powell’s great-great-grandson.

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Tarboro Tradition
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Preservation North Carolina.

Just outside Tarboro sits one of North Carolina's finest antebellum complexes. Coolmore Plantation, built 1858–60, is a splendid Italianate villa designed by Baltimore architect E. G. Lind for J.J.W. and Martha Powell. The main house contains room after room of original furniture and exhibits elaborate plasterwork and a comprehensive scheme of decorative painting. A suite of picturesque outbuildings mirror the Italianate style of the main house. Extensive documentation of the construction and furnishing of the house survives.

Coolmore has been designated as one of North Carolina's 38 National Historic Landmarks and is one of just 20 prestigious Save America's Treasures projects in the state.

Powell was a wealthy physician and cotton planter who looked North to find a fashionable architect to design his plantation home. Lind sent builder N.A. Sherman from Baltimore to supervise construction. He ordered most of the building materials from there as well—not only glass, hardware, and paint, but also lumber, brackets, ornaments, and the spiral stair rail. He also had a lithograph of the residence printed. Steamboats churning up the Tar River delivered most of the goods to the site.

The spacious house has a central-passage plan, with the passage divided into a vestibule, a skylit stair hall, and a back hall. A full array of goods from Baltimore—sets of furniture, carpets, oil floorcloths, wallpaper, curtains, pictures, decorations and a large set of imported dishes—fill the rooms with exuberant pattern and color. The entry vestibule is a small, spectacular chamber painted cream and chalky blue crowned with gilded moldings. The flanking parlors are rich with floral painting and paper, gilding and molding—the ladies’ parlor in pastels, the gentlemen’s in darker hues. The pièce de résistance is the stair hall rising to the cupola: the spiral stair and the curving walls are frescoed in a grandly conceived and subtly rendered program of trompe-l’oeil paneling and niches creating an effect that transports the visitor to thoughts of the Po River rather than the Tar. This work was executed by Ernst Dreyer, originally of St. Petersburg, Russia, who came to Baltimore about 1840. Coolmore is said to be Dreyer’s masterpiece. The house abounds with original surfaces and accessories left very much untouched by three generations of long-lived Powells who chose to leave things as they were.