news-record.com

GREENSBORO — Motorists have long noticed the house tucked among the commercial clutter along High Point Road. Near Merritt Drive, it stands well back from the road between a Japanese restaurant and a Habitat for Humanity store.

Legend has it that a long-ago silent screen actress built the “Rock House,” as it’s called.

Resembling a miniature castle, the house survives as one of the few structures originally built as a residence on High Point Road between the Coliseum and Hilltop Road.

“It’s solid,’’ says Angela Crawford, who operates a beauty salon called Castle of Styles in the Rock House. She uses every room, including the “Round Room,” formed by the turret that defines the house, and the former living room, which has a rock fireplace.

A framed photo over the mantel shows the house in its original splendor on a snowy evening. The picture looks like a painting by Thomas Kinkade.

That the house still stands brings chuckles from one of its owners, D.H. Griffin Sr. of Greensboro. Griffin is founder of a huge local demolition company.

Demolition men aren’t supposed to get sentimental about buildings. But Griffin can’t tear this one down without feeling the wrath of his wife, Marylene.

The couple bought the house in the late 1980s — not to live in, but partly to allow Marylene to keep something that stands tall in her childhood memories. She grew up two doors from the Rock House, which she estimates was built in the early 1930s.

She says it’s not legend but fact that a former silent screen star lived there. She remembers the woman only by one name, Pagnotta or Pegnotta. An Internet search of those names turned up nothing. Greensboro did have several early movie stars.

Millicent Fisher, daughter of Fisher Park founder Basil Fisher, after making movies married a movie producer. Pauline Moore died at 87 recently in the state of Washington. According to a news story in the early 1930s, Moore is identified as Greensboro’s contribution to Hollywood, although she was born in Pennsylvania. She went to school here when she was named Pauline Love.

Marylene Griffin says the actress she remembers moved here from New York after marrying her chauffeur. High Point Road was a strange choice to build a home because by the 1930s auto congestion was building. The road was part of a major north-south highway.

“The house was beautiful,’’ Marylene Griffin says, explaining that the lawn — now mostly a parking lot — extended to the highway.

The grounds had two big goldfish ponds. Griffin recalls that when she was 4 or 5 years old, she and the actress “used to sit and watch the goldfish.”

She says the woman invited her over for ice cream. She took her to her room and showed her pretty gowns and dresses worn in movies.

“She was a real pretty and nice lady,’’ Griffin says.

She says the couple later sold the house and returned to New York. The house remained a private home through the 1950s. The last resident was Nathan Gottlieb, who moved out in the early ’70s. Griffin remembers him as a New Yorker who is said to have sold a pickle factory in eastern North Carolina.

After Gottlieb, the house was empty for awhile and then changed ownership often and housed various businesses. For the past 15 years it’s been Crawford’s beauty shop.

“It’s a conversation piece,’’ Crawford says.

Marylene Griffin says no other house along the road in Greensboro matched the beauty of the Rock House.

“As a child,” she says, “it was never in my wildest dreams that I would someday own that house.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net