Raleigh, North Carolina

Terms of Use

A History of Montfort Hall

(Largely based on the master's thesis of William Brian Bushong, who was a Master of Arts Degree in History candidate at Appalachian State University. The title of the Thesis was "Montfort Hall and Its Architect, William Percival."  Italics are comments added by the author)

Montfort Hall was designed by William Percival in 1858 for William Montfort Boylan the eldest son of William Boylan. 

William Boylan was a publisher originally from Pluchamine, New Jersey.  He started working in the newspaper industry for his uncle, Abraham Hodge, at the Minerva newspaper in Halifax sometime before 1797.  In 1797 they moved their operation to Fayetteville and renamed it the North Carolina Minerva and Fayetteville Gazette.  As a side note, Minerva is the Roman name for the Greek goddess Athena, who was the goddess of wisdom and crafts and the patron of the city of Athens.  In 1799 they moved to Raleigh and renamed their paper the North Carolina Minerva and Raleigh Advertiser.

William Boylan was strongly political and his paper was a staunch supporter of the Federalist Party.  His rival, Joseph Gales, headed the Raleigh Register, which was the mouthpiece of the Republican Party in North Carolina.  This fierce rivalry eventually resulted in a fistfight between the two men over which Joseph Gales sued William Boylan for $100.

Partly due to the knowledge he gained as a result of his work in politics, as a city commissioner and in the state legislature, William Boylan became a shrewd land speculator and purchased two hundred and seventy acres on what were then the outskirts of Raleigh in 1818.  By the time of his death in 1861, he had amassed four plantations in North Carolina, two plantations in Mississippi, and one hundred thousand dollars in cash.

According to the Economic History Services website at http://www.eh.net/hmit/compare/, $100,000.00 in 1861 would be worth between $1.75 and $227 Billion dollars today.  Although the Economic History Services admit that exact comparisons are very difficult, if not impossible, due to the great difficulty in comparing the values of commodities in one era to another.  At any rate, William Boylan was a very wealthy man at the time of his death.

His eldest son, William Montfort Boylan, who had recently built Montfort hall at the time of his father’s death, inherited a relatively small portion of the estate.  He received $10,000.00 cash, the Crabtree Plantation in Wake County, and a tract of land in Mississippi.  This was due to great differences in the characters of the two men.  The elder man, William Boylan, was very political and public-minded.  His son, William Montfort Boylan, was much more of a bon vivant who enjoyed drinking and fox hunting.  One really telling indication of the low esteem that William Boylan held for his son was that he did not bequeath to his son his home and library which were less than a quarter of a mile away from Montfort Hall.

The architect of Montfort hall, William Percival, is a man of about whom very little is known.  It is speculated that he was an ex British Army officer to emigrated to Canada and then later to the United States.  He taught at the Virginia Mechanics Institute in Richmond, Virginia in 1856 and 1857, previously he had worked on plankroad and railroad construction.  By 1857 newspaper ads were touting his skills as an architect rather than as an engineer.  The first building he designed in Raleigh was the First Baptist Church of Raleigh. 

William Percival went on to design other significant buildings such as the Caswell County Courthouse in Yanceyville, the Main Building on the Peace College campus, and the New East and New West dormitories on the UNC campus.  Montfort Hall is considered an Italianate Villa.  Part of William Percival’s sense of aesthetics believed that beauty was derived from truth, and therefore, the home should reflect the character of the owner, in this case the gregarious fun-loving huntsman.

In comparison to his father, William Montfort Boylan was fairly apolitical; he only supported the Confederacy after secession had occurred.  As a result of his ambivalence in the Civil War, he and his home were spared during the Union occupation of Raleigh, although the grounds of his home were used as a camp by Union troops. 

William Montfort Boylan suffered pretty heavy financial losses during the Civil war, but by the 1870’s, a decade later, his fortune had reversed by a large degree.  His then minor children inherited his brother John H. Boylan in 1870 and his sister, Catherine Boylan, gave him ninety-two acres of the Wakefield plantation in 1875.

Ironically, William Boylan did not die at his beloved home, Montfort Hall, but instead died of a stroke at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after having a wart removed from his nose.

At his death in 1899, he left Montfort Hall and the surrounding land to his wife, Mary K. Boylan.  When Mary K. Boylan died in 1902 his property was bequeathed to his four children: Betsy Snow, Mary A. Haywood, William Boylan, and James Boylan.

By this time, Raleigh had begun encroaching on Montfort Hall and it’s lands.  After living there a few years, William Boylan sold Montfort Hall and its lands to the Greater Raleigh Land Company for $48,000.00 in 1904.  (There’s a discrepancy here, the thesis says the sale took place in 1904, but that the company was incorporated in 1908).

The Greater Raleigh Land Company bought large tracts of land and cut them into subdivisions with graded streets and other improvements.  The Greater Raleigh Land Company hired Kelsey and Guild, landscape architects from Boston, to plan the neighborhood that became Boylan Heights from what had originally been the grounds of Montfort Hall.

The land was broken up into lots and streets were built, many named after members of the Boylan family.  For some reason, the spellings were changed in many cases.  For example, Mountford Street is named after William Montfort Boylan, Kinsey Street was named for Mary Kincey Boylan, and McCullock Street (apparently since renamed McCulloch Street) was named for Elisabeth McCulloch, William Montfort Boylan’s mother.  In 1907 there were ten homes in the neighborhood. 

Montfort Hall traded hands several times and was remodeled over the years.  Eventually winding up in the hands of the Coburn family in 1918, who renamed it to Coburnsville.  Eventually Montfort home was sold to Emily Purcell who turned the property into the Boylan Heights Baptist Church for the next twenty-four years. 

Declining membership resulted in the building being sold to the Jadwick family who undid much of the remodeling that had been done over the years.  The Jadwick family still own the house today and the house resembles it’s original appearance much more now than it did during it’s days as the white painted Boylan Heights Baptist Church with loudspeakers attached to the cupola to simulate the sound of church bells.

Copyright 2003-2008, BoylanHeights.org