Author: RoAnn Bishop
The Mauney House stood at 139 Catawba Avenue in Old Fort, NC, for 120-plus years. Its pine floors were wavy, and its roof was prone to leak. But having survived the Flood of 1916, it was a local landmark.
About 1982, the state acquired the house for the Mountain Gateway Museum’s offices. For ten years, it held my office, where history books filled the bookshelves, past exhibit panels hung on the walls, and files full of “works in progress” lay stacked on my desk.
All that changed on Friday, September 27, 2025, when Hurricane Helene hit the mountain region. Floodwaters from nearby Mill Creek swept the Mauney House off its foundation and slammed it to the ground. Deemed unsalvageable, it was demolished on February 17-18, 2025. The site is now a vacant field.
But before the Mauney House became offices, it was a home. Sidney Franklin Mauney, Sr., built the two-story, seven-room bungalow back in 1903, when the farmland south of the railroad tracks was just beginning to be developed and was called “New Fort.”
Here, Mauney and his wife, Nancy, raised their four sons-—Sidney Jr., Clarence, Leslie, and Francis (known as “Bebe”). Their home, with its wrap-around front porch and yard full of shade trees, was the scene of many church and social functions.
A Rowan County native, Mauney had played football and baseball while studying at North Carolina State University. He married Nancy
Bradley of Gaston County in 1900 and soon moved his growing family to Old Fort, where he worked several jobs, including rural mail carrier and carpenter. He later served as McDowell County’s superintendent of public welfare.
Always community-minded, Mauney donated land for the Old Fort United Methodist Church and the Old Fort High School (now the site of a new elementary school) on Mauney Avenue, which was named after him. Nancy was a homemaker, active in her church and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1950 at age 69. Mauney died five years later at age 77. Both are buried in Old Fort City Cemetery, along with three of their children, two of whom were infants.
Now their house, too, is gone. Often, when a historic building is torn down, its history also disappears. May is National Historic Preservation Month. Let’s make it a point to remember Old Fort’s Mauney House – and all the others like it.
