The Nissen House

(Originally Published Friday, December 30, 2011 – Blogger: One Daughter’s Point of View)

Today I took a walk back in time in Lewisville, NC.

Our DAR Chapter has been working with the Lewisville Historical Society regarding their grant application from NSDAR. The grant will be used to help restore the Nissen House and I wanted to take a closer look at this project that has generated so much interest among some of our members.

The Nissen House was saved from demolition when it was moved to a new site by the Lewisville Historical Society in 2009. The home once stood on the main street in Lewisville, and was home to the Nissen Family who owned and operated businesses such as a grist mill and the Nissen Wagon Works.

The three-story structure features Italianate and Greek Revival architecture and is one of the few surviving examples of these 19th century architectural styles in Forsyth County and North Carolina according to the Lewisville Historical Society. The house has eight large rooms and eight fireplaces, with many original materials still intact.

The Lewisville Historical Society plans to restore the home to it’s original design and make it a functional space for meetings and the sharing of local history. The story of its owners is in many ways a story of growth and advancement in our area of North Carolina.

Following is information provided about the Nissen Family by the Lewisville Historical Society.

The house was built by George Elias Nissen (1839-1913) who was the owner of large tracts of land, a saw mill and grist mill in the Lewisville Township in the 1870s-1880s. George Elias Nissen was the son of John Philip Nissen who founded the Nissen Wagon Works in 1834.

Nissen Wagon Works was one of the most important early industries in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. The Nissen family set innovative standards in the early business community, dating back to the late 1770s in the Moravian settlement of Salem, where Tycho Nissen (George Nissen’s great-grandfather) was the town wagon maker.

In the 1870 and 1880 census, George Nissen was living in the Lewisville Township with his family where he was the largest land owner with 1,700 acres. The Laugenour-Nissen Sawmill was located on the property which is today’s Lewisville Town Square, owned and operated by Nissen and his brother-in-law, Lewis Laugenour. Nissen’s grist mill in Lewisville was the 4th largest industry in Forsyth County in 1870, with J.P. Nissen Wagon Works ranked as the 3rd largest industry. In 1880, George Nissen was the census enumerator in the Lewisville Township.

Nissen Wagons were known for their superior quality and sound workmanship, and were instrumental in the development of the textile and tobacco industries in Piedmont North Carolina, transporting raw materials and manufactured products.

George Nissen operated the family wagon business from 1874-1910 as the George E. Nissen Wagon Works. The business was located on a 600 acre tract of land in the Waughtown area of Forsyth County, producing thousands of hand built wagons during his leadership of the company. Nissen Wagon Works manufactured wagons for 91 years (1834-1925), selling wagons throughout the United States and abroad.

In 1925, brother William M. Nissen sold the Nissen Wagon Works business for one million dollars and built the eighteen-story Nissen Building on 4th Street in Winston-Salem, the first air conditioned office building in North Carolina. Today, the Nissen Building is restored as a residential structure and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

As I walked though the house today, I thought of the family that once occupied this home. Their industry in a different day and age; the oil lamps that may have set on a desk while they wrote a letter or did their school studies; the rocker that may have set on the second floor balcony as someone fanned themselves to cool off in the hot humid Carolina summer at dusk.

Never did they imagine someone would roam their home to learn about local history, old architecture, or industrialization in a prior century – and then go home and sit in front of some contraption called a laptop, sipping on a mocha, and write about their home and way of life.

Wonder what someone will make of my history one day.