W. S. Andrews (fl.1850s), architect, from Columbus, Ohio, appeared briefly during the antebellum railroad growth era in the North Carolina Piedmont. He advertised in the Greensboro Patriot of September 17, 1858, that he was “prepared to furnish plans and drawings for Public Buildings, Villas, Cottages, etc.” In his advertisement, he cited as references such prominent Piedmont men as D. P. Weir, Charles Shober, Robert P. Dick, and Cyrus P. Mendenhall of Greensboro,and C. W. Covington of Rockingham, North Carolina. Several unusually fashionable and picturesque style “cottages” and “villas” were built for these men, suggesting that Andrews might have been working under the influence of published designs by Andrew Jackson Downing, Samuel Sloan, and others. The David P. Weir House (1850s?) was built several years after architect Alexander Jackson Davis gave Weir a plan for a much more elaborate English style house. Dunleith (1856) was the towered villa style residence of Judge Robert Dick. Cyrus Mendenhall, an officer of the North Carolina Railroad, was associated with numerous building projects, including the cottage-style Francis A. Stagg House built in Burlington in the late 1850s.

Although there is no C. W. Covington known in antebellum Rockingham, the John Wall Covington House near Rockingham (1850s) is a cruciform plan house akin to a Davis design for a “small classical villa” in Downing’s Architecture of Country Houses (1850). Although none of these projects is documented as Andrews’s, the coincidence of his references with these houses suggests that he was one of the men who translated national villa and cottage concepts into Piedmont communities.

• Marvin A. Brown, Greensboro: An Architectural Record (1995).
• Edward T. Davis and John L. Sanders, A Romantic Architect in Antebellum North Carolina: The Works of Alexander Jackson Davis (2000).
• Greensboro Patriot, Aug. 6, 1858; Sept. 17, 1858.
• J. Daniel Pezzoni, The Architectural History of Richmond County, North Carolina (2007).
• J. Daniel Pezzoni to Catherine W. Bishir, Feb. 7, 2005.