EC Daniel House
Zebulon gains its first private home to become a Wake County Landmark.
By MaryBeth Carpenter
ZEBULON – The E.C. and Elvah Daniel house at 205 E. Sycamore Street was designated a local landmark by the Wake County Historic Preservation Commission (WCHPC) and Zebulon Commissioners voted to accept this designation at their March meeting after a brief public hearing.
The house was “an intact and excellent example of a Craftsman Foursquare” so popular in Wake County during this time, according to the Wake County landmark report. Built in 1918, “The frame, two-story, square-plan house has a hipped roof with a gabled dormer at the façade and a single story gabled wing at the rear. A full width front porch wraps to the east side and is balanced by a port cochere set back from the façade at the west elevation,” the report states.
“Interior architectural features include two substantial brick Craftsman fireplaces with thick, bracketed mantel shelves, four carved-wood Colonial Revival mantels, Craftsman wainscot with plate rail in the dining room, and a transverse front hall with L-shaped stair with squared balusters under a molded handrail,“ it continues.
The house was built by E.C. Daniel, who started a grocery store and drug company in Wakefield in 1905, and moved it into downtown Zebulon in 1907 and re-named it the Zebulon Drug Company. He received his pharmaceutical training at Page’s Pharmacy School in Greensboro. E.C. was a mayor of Zebulon, the first person in town to own a telephone, and later the head of the North Carolina Pharmaceutical Association. E.C. and Elvah raised one son in that house, E. Clifton Daniel.
Clifton Daniel grew up working in his father’s drugstore and wrote for the Zebulon Record, News and Observer, and then later joined the New York Times, eventually becoming its managing editor. He was known for his excellent writing and editing, designer suits and epicurean tastes.
Clifton Daniel met and married Margaret Truman, President Harry Truman’s only child, in 1956. Their engagement news was splashed across newspapers and even made the cover of Life Magazine. Margaret was a writer, and the couple’s common interest in writing fueled their romance, according to newspaper accounts of the time. They became prominent socialites in New York, entertaining the jet set crowd. Margaret went on to write a series of popular murder mysteries set in Washington D.C. She and E. Clifton had four sons.
Clifton occasionally came back to stay at the house on East Sycamore Street. President Truman and his wife Bess made two trips to Zebulon after his presidency to visit his daughter and son- in- law and stayed in the house in 1958 and in 1960. They made addresses to the town and slept in twin beds still in the house.
After E.Clifton Daniel’s father’s death in 1968 and his mother Elva’s death in 1971, E. Clifton sold the house he had inherited and all of its furnishings to Jamaria and Theo Ward. They were diplomats who lived in Saudi Arabia and Japan and their furniture, collected from their travels, mixed with the traditional American furniture of the Daniels. A back porch was enclosed as a sunroom in 1971, to add room to the house, and the kitchen was modernized and enlarged by removing a wall between it and the pantry.
In 1990, Jamaria sold the house to her daughter Jackie Strickland and her husband Curtis Strickland, the current owners. They converted the garage into an apartment for Jamaria in the 1990s, updated a downstairs bathroom, and added a white picket fence but have otherwise left the house intact. Curtis Strickland serves as a Zebulon Commissioner.
Curtis and Jackie Strickland will receive their Wake County Landmark plaque for the house at the WCHPC Preservation Celebration on April 28, 2019 in Holly Springs.
This article appeared was written by Preservation Zebulon Executive Director MaryBeth Carpenter and appeared in the April 2019 edition of the Preservation Zebulon Newsletter.
