Dr. Avant House & Office

Front view of Dr. Avant Home & Office.

The Dr. Avant House and Office is a two story, three-ranked building with a red-brick exterior located on the north side of downtown Wilmington. The prominent entryway clearly identifies the house as Colonial Revival style. The portico is the most detailed feature of the symmetrically balanced front façade. It is centered with two single-story columns and a triangular pediment. The hipped roof, moderate roof overhang, and grouped windows are also consist with the Colonial Revival style. On one side of the house there is a side entryway with a gabled overhang and brackets. A chimney is located on the opposite side. The brick veneer dates the home to the 1920s, as earlier examples were generally made of wood. Overall, the house is a simple variation of Colonial Revival with few elaborative details, but essentially all the hallmarks of the architectural style during the 1920s.[1]

According to oral history, John A. Moore, a native of the Wilmington area, was the architect of the Dr. Avant House and Office. John A. Moore was born in 1888 to Joshua and Sylvia Moore in Rock Hill, a small African American community of mostly farmers on a former plantation of the same name. Little is known about his early life, but local historian Beverly Tetterton’s brief biography of Moore states that he attended Hampton University, a notable HBCU in Virginia, and got his start in architecture in the Washington D.C. area. By 1922, he moved back to Wilmington, where he worked as an architect and builder until shortly before his death. Moore’s descendants have stated that in addition to Dr. Frank Avant’s home and office, Moore and his brothers, Joshua and Stephen, “were responsible for the construction of many houses in Wilmington’s Forest Hills neighborhood.”[2]

John A. Moore.

The Moore brothers built the Dr. Avant House and Office at 813 Red Cross Street sometime between 1928 and 1930. When he moved into the home around 1930, Dr. Frank W. Avant (1876-1873) was already a leading physician in Wilmington, NC. He was born in Southport, NC, just south of Wilmington in Brunswick County, and was a descendant of a notable line of African-American builders from the region. Avant worked a variety of jobs while he pursued his medical degree. After graduating from Shaw University’s medical school in 1908, he started his own practice in Wilmington. He continued serving the Wilmington community as a doctor and civil rights activist for the next 50 years.[3]

Avant was involved with the founding of Community Hospital, the first black-founded hospital in the city. Before Community Hospital, there were only a total of 25 beds for the city’s black patients. The main city hospital, James Walker Memorial Hospital, had a colored annex, but the space was only one floor, and black doctors could not practice there. Wilmington’s seven practicing black doctors, which included Frank Avant, formed a medical society to help organize for the establishment of a black hospital. Avant stepped away from the project before it opened but joined the staff in 1922. He helped the hospital survive until it expanded in the late 1930s and continued working there until the 1950s. [4]  According to one of his obituaries, he also taught courses there in gynecology an urology.[5]

Governor Hoey, Dr. Avant, Dr. Foster Burnett at the Dedication of Community Hospital.

Dr. Frank W. Avant was an active community member and served in many other leadership roles throughout his life in Wilmington. He was president of the New Hanover County Negro Medical Society for thirty-one years, but was also associated with the establishment of Shell Island, a beach resort for African Americans at Wrightsville Beach.[6] Like all public spaces and institutions, even the city’s beaches were subject to Jim Crow segregation, and Avant already had a history of pushing for racial equality beyond healthcare. In 1920, he penned a letter, on behalf of Wilmington’s black citizens, appealing to the Board of Education for “more adequate school facilities” and interracial cooperation to better serve the needs of black children.[7] In 1924, he was elected first president of the Colored Chamber of Commerce. He served about four years in the role and continued to represent the organization at meetings with the city until at least the late 1930s on issues like establishing a library and recreational facilities for black citizens.[8] In 1925, the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare created a Negro Advisory Committee and appointed Dr. Avant and other prominent African Americans in North Carolina. Avant served on the committee for at least two years.[9]  He also represented the state’s African Americans at the North Carolina Interracial Commission’s annual meeting in 1929.[10]

For over 30 years of his long and illustrious life, Dr. Frank W. Avant lived and worked in his home at 813 Red Cross Street, which his only child inherited upon his death.  Avant married Florence Louise Nichols around the beginning of the 20^th century. Florence, born around 1887, had her first and only child with Avant in 1912. The doctor delivered his own daughter on December 15, 1912, in Wilmington, N.C.[11] Sarah Ellen Avant, named after her paternal grandmother, lived at the family home until about 1940 when she married. According to the city directory, she was a teacher at Peabody School in 1934 but became a teacher at Williston Industrial School by 1938.[12] Williston was a pillar of Wilmington’s black community and the state's first accredited high school for African Americans. Dozens of oral histories have been collected in which alumni, former staff, and other community members powerfully describe how countless teachers, librarians, administration, and students cultivated a positive learning environment for black children during Jim Crow at Williston Industrial High School.[13]

On December 24, 1940, Sarah Avant married H. Carl Moultrie in Wilmington. Sarah moved out of the family home and lived at 906 S. 9th Street with her husband by 1943.[14] According to his obituary, Moultrie attended Lincoln University and moved to Wilmington in 1936 after graduating. Throughout the 1940s, Moultrie led a boy’s club for African Americans and “headed the Hillcrest Housing Project in Wilmington.” He moved to Washington D.C. around 1950 and began working for the national office of Omega Psi Phi, a prominent black fraternity. After receiving his law degree from Georgetown University in 1956, Sarah and H. Carl Moultrie remained in Washington, D.C., where the latter became a D.C. Superior Court judge in 1972.[15]  

Dr. Avant in His Flower Garden.

Shortly before his death, Dr. Frank W. Avant transferred the deed of his long-time home and office to his daughter. Avant moved to Washington, D.C. to live with his daughter and son-in-law after his wife, Florence, died in 1962 to live with his daughter and son-in-law. Although they inherited Dr. Avant’s home, there is no evidence that Sarah and Carl Moultrie ever moved back to Wilmington. In 1979, they sold the home on Red Cross Street to Lewis A. Hines, Jr. and his wife, Portia Mills Hines. Portia Hines was a notable political activist and civic leader who worked as a substance abuse counselor and opened the state’s first Therapeutic Drug Facility in Wilmington. In 2011, a city-owned park near the Dr. Avant Home and Office at Rankin and 10^th Street was renamed in her honor. The park has become an important community source for the city’s predominantly African American Northside of downtown.[16] Although she only briefly lived in the Dr. Avant house, her residence there is notable. She died at the young age of 36 in 1985, and the house was subsequently deeded over to her husband, Lewis A. Hines Jr. It remains in his possession to this day.

The Dr. Avant House and Office remains an important part of Wilmington’s cultural landscape. As the historical resources of downtown’s north side continue to face erasure, preserving buildings like this one is crucial. The building was not only home to one of the first and most established physicians in the city but was also Dr. Avant’s private practice. He provided healthcare to the city’s black population both in and out of the home for decades, so the home was surely well-known in the community. Avant’s legacy of civil rights activism also lives on through the preservation of his home. After the home was sold in 1979, it continued to be associated with community activism and healthcare through Portia Mills Hines.

- Researched and written by Karla Emperatriz Berrios, UNCW Public History MA student.