The History

Born August 15, 1855, in the Wake County settlement that became Cary, North Carolina, the first of eight children of lumberman Allison Francis Page, who later founded Aberdeen, and Catherine Raboteau Page. By the time he came home to Moore County in February 1913, Page was already one of the most consequential men in American publishing: co-founder of Doubleday, Page & Company, editor of The Forum and The Atlantic Monthly, founder of The World’s Work.

He came home looking for land, and found a thousand-acre farm two miles southwest of Pinehurst, timberland his own father had logged a generation before. The Pinehurst Outlook announced the purchase that February: “Dr. Walter Page, editor of ‘World’s Work,’ has purchased a thousand acre farm . . . upon which he will build a winter home.” Page planned a winter house, a peach orchard, a return to the landscape that had shaped his family. He named it Garran Hill.

Six weeks later, history intervened. Woodrow Wilson appointed him Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s on March 26, 1913. Page sailed for London on the Baltic that May, and served through the whole of the First World War. He never came home to build the farm himself.

He built it anyway, by letter. His son Ralph supervised the work in Pinehurst while Walter directed it from an ocean away, writing home about the farm constantly: “The farm, the farm, the farm.” From Tregenna Castle Hotel in Cornwall in March 1918 he laid out a full working-farm program: vegetables, dairy, eggs, figs, pecans, scuppernongs, and told Ralph to “get a bang-up gardener no matter what he costs.” A month later he was still asking after frost damage to the peach crop. “Build the farm, therefore,” he had written Frank Page back in December 1914, “and let me hear at every stage of that happy game.”

He returned to North Carolina on December 11, 1918, arriving by private railroad car at Aberdeen station, gravely ill; his son carried him from the train. “Well, Frank, I did get here after all, didn’t I?” His last recorded words. Ralph had already made the farm his own residence, so Walter and Alice rented Currituck Cottage in Pinehurst, two miles from the finished house. Page died there ten days later, on December 21, 1918, and was buried at Old Bethesda Cemetery, Aberdeen.

His memorial tablet at Westminster Abbey, placed in 1921, reads: “The friend of Britain in her sorest need.” A portrait by Philip de László hangs in the North Carolina Museum of History, and in London.

The farm he’d imagined was already becoming real. By April 1919 the Pinehurst Outlook reported 50,000 trees in bloom and preparations underway at Garran Hill Siding, a railroad stop a mile west of the Carolina Hotel, to ship 15,000 crates of Elberta and Georgia Belle peaches. By January 1920 the orchard had been folded into the neighboring Nat Hurd orchard and sold to a $100,000 development corporation. The farm and the house were already living separate lives.

His diaries and correspondence, 1905-1918, are held at Houghton Library, Harvard.

After his father’s death, Ralph Page moved his family into Garran Hill and made it a home, editing the Pinehurst Outlook and remaining in Moore County for the rest of his life. The house stayed in the Page family for more than four decades, at least through the Second World War. Ralph Page died in October 1963, still in Moore County.

By then the land and the house had long since parted ways. The orchard was sold off in 1920; the thousand-acre farm kept shrinking around the residence that remained, until the house was nearly all that was left of it.

Page gave the estate its name. Betty Dumaine gave it a new one.

In 1959 she bought the estate and renamed it Hollycrest, for the native hollies at the front of the house, though the threshold, cut in 1916, kept its first name. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, in January 1900, the daughter of industrialist Frederic C. Dumaine Sr., she arrived in Pinehurst a horsewoman and a foxhunter.

She’d made the friendship that would define much of her later life decades earlier, as a nineteen-year-old at the Edith Johnson School in Cambridge in 1919, when her roommate was a young Thai woman named Sangwan Chukramol. Sangwan married Prince Mahidol of Songkla and became Srinagarindra, the Princess Mother of Thailand, mother of two kings. The friendship lasted the rest of both women’s lives: the Princess Mother visited Betty at Concord and at Pinehurst, sometimes with her husband and young sons; Betty ran the U.S. fundraising arm of the Princess Mother’s charities from her Pinehurst estate, traveled with her to border-patrol-police communities in northern Thailand in 1964, and co-authored The Princess Mother with Dora H. Layton in 1972. The Thai royal family gave her the title Thanpuying, roughly, “Lady.” In 1980 she founded The Princess Mother’s Charities Fund of Thailand, which still operates.

At Hollycrest she left a garden as much as a house: stables east of the property, kennels, peacocks on the lawn, a camellia garden by the entry circle, Grandiflora magnolias, dogwoods, three American plane trees that still stand. She fought to save the trees in the median of Midland Road, and was known for throwing birthday parties for her horses, to which the neighborhood’s children were always invited.

She died in 1984, at eighty-four, after twenty-five years of stewardship, and left the property to Duke University. Duke advertised it in Atlanta and New York and found no buyer. The house waited.

Betty Dumaine’s favorite horse was Blue Fox, an Irish Hunter. When he died, she buried him at the back of the property in a ten-by-sixteen-foot grave, covered in slate, with a four-foot statue of a fox once standing beside it, lost sometime after her own death.

The brass marker survives and reads: MY IRISH HUNTER / BLUE FOX / 1946-1965. Printed accounts give a later death year; the marker is the physical primary source, cut closest to the day, and it is what this house quotes.

She left him flowers. Someone still does.

The Pinehurst Company built it: “Mr. Tufts’ men under the supervision of Mr. J. R. McQueen”. Mr. Tufts in 1916 being Leonard Tufts. It was the same crew of carpenters and masons raising the village itself that year: the Carolina Hotel, the Holly Inn, the green. The 1995 National Register nomination corroborates the McQueen crew, recording the house, under a typographical slip, as “Garran Hall”; the threshold itself, cut in brick, reads Garran Hill.

The land was still open enough, in those two years, that the Carolina Hotel could be seen from the front porch. The elder Page’s logging a generation before had left the ground clear for his son’s return to it. What rose there was a two-story Neo-Georgian of rare handmade red brick, laid in Flemish bond over a classic water table.

No architect is named in the printed record: “Page hired an architect” is all it preserves. The builder is a matter of public record; the drawing table keeps its secret.

After the 1985 subdivision attempt stalled and developer Robert Kramer died before he could build, the house stood vacant roughly fourteen years. The current stewards bought it in 1998 (recorded September 11, Moore County Deed Book 1422, Page 136) and commissioned architect Thomas O’Shea to document the house as it stood and design the work to come. General contractor Dennis Dunagan broke ground on a three-year restoration in 1999; the family moved back in at the end of 2001.

O’Shea’s drawings, fifteen sheets dated January 2000, still transfer with the property, and they hold the standard of the work that followed: the drawing room’s cornices and coffered ceiling drawn at full size, the portico documented down to its basket-weave brick floor and the GARRAN HILL 1916 plate at the door, a pierced-brick screen for the garage wall, a diamond-lattice rail for the balcony over the kitchen.

The interior was taken to the studs. Plumbing and electrical were replaced, new joists set beneath the floors, custom Marvin windows rebuilt to 1916 proportions; matching the original Flemish-bond brick took three months of sourcing alone. The Georgian millwork (crown moldings, chair rails, wainscoting, paneled doors, the library shelving) was drawn at working scale and built by hand, room by room, under a master carpenter brought in for the work.

What survived the vacancy and the gutting is the house’s real inheritance: all seven carved mantels, the oak flooring, the leaded-glass sidelights, the fanlight over the front door, every solid-wood interior door with its original brass key plate and key, the dining room’s 1916 frontispiece, and the shell cabinets. None of it is new. All of it is still here.

The Village Heritage Foundation later credited the stewards who took the house on as “historians” with “a great appreciation for detail,” who “provided the care that Hollycrest so badly needed.”

The drawing room anchors the main floor, nearly forty feet of it, with a Federal-style carved mantel and dark marble surround, a coffered paneled ceiling, arched built-in bookcases, and French doors to the rear brick terrace. The formal dining room keeps its fireplace, its original 1916 frontispiece, and arched shell cabinets. The sitting room holds a spiral staircase and a Delft-tile fireplace; the library is shelved floor to ceiling, with a rolling ladder to reach the top.

The kitchen was expanded with reclaimed heart-pine floors, white Shaker cabinetry, glass-front display cabinets, black granite counters, a professional stainless range and hood, a butler’s pantry with a farm sink and butcher block, a custom pull-out pantry and built-in desk, opening onto a breakfast room papered in chinoiserie toile.

The primary suite runs the full depth of the first floor: a fireplace with paneled wainscoting and arched niches, two dressing rooms (one behind a glass-front arched wardrobe, the other a walk-in closet with its own bath access) and a bath with a chandelier, an arched mirror, marble counters, a Jacuzzi tub, and a stone walk-in shower with dual rain heads.

Upstairs: three bedrooms, each with its own fireplace, three full baths, two more Jacuzzi tubs, balcony access looking out over the tennis courts and the rear grounds, and a den opening onto the spiral stair. Below, a stone-walled, four-room basement runs beneath roughly half the house, climate-controlled, with a wine rack, a spare refrigerator and freezer, accessible from inside and by its own exterior door.

4.15 gated acres, the original house parcel of the thousand-acre farm Page bought in 1913, all that remains of land whose orchard was sold off by 1920 and whose remaining acreage was platted into subdivision lots in 1985.

The pool and the two tennis courts both date to that 1985 era; the pool was converted to saltwater in 2022, and the courts’ surfaces are due for the same kind of renewal. The grounds still carry Betty Dumaine’s plantings: mature longleaf pines, the three American plane trees she put in in 1959, her camellia garden by the entry circle, Grandiflora magnolias, dogwoods, alongside hollies, azaleas, dwarf nandinas, a signature autumnalis, and irises the current stewards have added since. A well house behind the property shelters the well and storage tank that feed the 28-zone irrigation system and the pool; the house itself runs on county water and sewer.

The rear yard holds one more structure: the Wee Cottage, a child’s playhouse, set beside the well house. Twenty-five years of entertaining have passed through the brick terrace off the dining and living rooms: the English Speaking Union, Pi Beta Phi alumnae, Phi Beta Kappa, the DAR, the Folio Club of Durham, a wedding.

Every claim above traces to one of these. Where accounts disagree, physical artifacts govern: the threshold inscription, the marker at the grave.