Free guided tours of Winston-Salem City Hall run at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16, for the building's 100th anniversary. No registration is needed.

Winston-Salem City Hall turns 100 next week, and the city is opening the building for free guided tours on Monday, Nov. 16.

City staff, led by Historic Resources Officer Michelle McCullough, will walk visitors through the building’s history, its architecture and its role in local government. The city announced the celebration in a news release on Tuesday.

The schedule

All events are on Monday, Nov. 16, at City Hall, 101 N. Main St.:

  • 2 p.m.: first guided tour
  • 3 p.m.: remarks from city officials and a video of Mayor Allen Joines walking through the building and talking about its history, followed by refreshments in the hallway outside Council Chambers
  • 4 p.m.: second guided tour

The event is free and no registration is required. Free parking is available in the North Lot next to City Hall, the city said.

A century at Main and First

The Board of Aldermen held its first regular meeting in the new building’s Council Chambers at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 19, 1926, with Mayor Thomas Barker presiding. That detail comes from the aldermen’s own minutes, quoted in the building’s National Register of Historic Places nomination. The building was added to the National Register in 2001.

The nomination records how the building came about:

  • June 13, 1924: the aldermen told the mayor to appoint a special committee on a new City Hall.
  • November 1924: local architects Northup and O’Brien had partly finished the plans.
  • December 1924: Earle Sumner Draper of Charlotte was hired as landscape architect.
  • February 1925: the city issued $550,000 in bonds to build “a City Hall and Municipal Building,” to be of fireproof construction.
  • 1926: the building was completed.

At that first meeting, the aldermen also asked for an ordinance “to prohibit expectorating on the floors,” the nomination notes.

The site had a long history before that. Judge D.H. Starbuck bought the lot at one of Winston’s first land auctions, around 1849, and built a brick house there. The city bought the house in 1920, when it was a boarding house, and the City Health Department used it until the lot was cleared for construction.

The nomination calls City Hall the city’s only example of Renaissance Revival civic architecture. It is three stories of brick over a ground floor of rusticated limestone, with a 17-bay front and two-story limestone pilasters across the center. Northup and O’Brien was the leading architecture firm in Winston-Salem in the 1920s and 1930s, according to the same document.

The building replaced Winston’s first Town Hall, built in 1892 at Fourth and Main streets. That building was torn down in 1927 to make way for the R.J. Reynolds headquarters. The nomination reads the move as a sign of the tobacco company’s influence over local government at the time.

What it means for you

  • Anyone can go. There is no charge, no ticket and no sign-up.
  • Pick the 2 p.m. or 4 p.m. tour, or come at 3 p.m. for the remarks and refreshments.
  • Park free in the North Lot beside City Hall.

City Hall is also where the City Council meets and where many city services are handled. Our guide to who to call at City Hall lists the main offices. For more of the city’s past, see Winston-Salem history and landmarks, and for other events this month, things to do in Winston-Salem.