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Down N.C. 150 in Rockingham County is a 200-year-old house with gold buried in the backyard.

“That’s 'supposedly,’ ” Brianne McAlister, the sales and marketing director of High Rock Farm homestead, says with a twinkle in her eye.

If so, it hasn’t been found on the grounds of the Federal-styled house — built circa 1808 by Joseph McCain, the great-great-great grandfather of U.S. Sen. John McCain.

The McCain house, which doubled as a tavern, sat along a major stagecoach trail between Washington, D.C., and Georgia and a stone’s throw from skirmishes leading up to the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.

The Greensboro area is full of houses connected to American history, although years later, they sit without much fanfare in neighborhoods or along quiet country roads.

“If the walls could talk we’d know this wonderful history that’s mostly been lost,” said Rockingham County historian Bob Carter.

Magnolia House Motel, 442 Gorrell St.

Cameron Falkener saw how a taste of liquor caused an up-and-coming musician to smack around his much younger female companion.

Falkener’s family was good friends with the owners of the 14-room Magnolia House on Gorrell Street, which bustled with business from the black professionals, musicians and athletes who could not stay in segregated hotels.

“There was no place, actually, between Richmond and Atlanta,” the late Arthur “Buddy” Gist recalled in a documentary about his parent’s boarding house, which opened in a converted home in 1949.

Arthur and Louise Gist, whose son Herman served colorful terms in the state legislature, drew baseball great Jackie Robinson and “Godfather of Soul” James Brown, who kept Falkener’s attention with his processed hair and shiny silk-mohair suits.

Ike and Tina Turner often passed through the area.

“That was before they were super famous, but I can remember ... Ike would start beating on Tina and acting ugly to Tina ... and Doc — Mr. Gist — was a little guy, but he was the only guy who could talk some sense into Ike,” said Falkener, who was always hanging around. “Mrs. Gist would pull Tina to the side and try to console her.”

Ezzard Charles also made a stop in Greensboro.

“They said, 'Cam, this is the heavyweight champion of the world,’” Falkener recalled of the 6-foot-tall boxer, whom ESPN ranks as the 27th-greatest boxer of all time, ahead of Mike Tyson and Oscar De La Hoya. “I think I was between 5 and 8 years old.”

Gurney Simpson Boren Jr. house, 802 Northridge St.

Legend is Gurney Simpson Boren Jr. concocted his Samson’s Sauce in 1925 in a barrel in the attic of his Northridge Street home — letting it age for months while stirring the meat seasoning daily with a canoe paddle.

He would fill empty soda and whiskey bottles with sauce and gave it away to friends, creating a cult following that over the years spread throughout the country.

“That would explain the vinegar bottle we found up there,” said owner Marian Burnett.

In the 1940s, Boren designed a label boasting that the sauce had powers beyond enhancing steaks, stews, seafoods and other foods. He inserted a French word meaning “the rest is just foolishness” and listed that the sauce could be used for baldness, hangovers, amnesia and as an aphrodisiac.

“Twenty drops will cure insanity or else drive you crazy,” the label read. “Not recommended for prickly heat, poison ivy, shortness of breath or hemorrhoids.”

Years later, the bottles would appear on the shelves of Harris Teeter, The Fresh Market and restaurants.

After Boren’s death in 1954, family members — including son Gurney Boren III — continued producing the sauce.

Later, Boren III leased a warehouse to expand production from 200 cases per year to 1,000.

Government inspectors visited and didn’t find the label amusing.

“Uncle Sam just doesn’t have a sense of humor,” Boren III said in a 1988 interview. “They’re just trying to protect one incompetent idiot out of a million who might pour a bottle over his head.”

Richard Mendenhall house, 603 W. Main St., Jamestown

Shirley Haworth can’t validate rampant folklore that the home built by Quaker Richard Mendenhall was a stop on the Underground Railroad — despite the ladder leading from the basement to a trap door.

“We can’t find the evidence,” said Haworth, president of the Historic Jamestown Society, which has kept the 1811 home intact and offers tours.

Historians continue to wonder about the possible goings-on there.

The house’s parlor doubled as a gathering place especially for Quakers, who opposed slavery. Mendenhall, who did not own slaves, was president of the Guilford chapter of the Manumission Society, which worked for the legal emancipation of slaves.

“I can see Richard stating his views that you needed to work within the law and others taking the more extreme position that you must act humanely,” Haworth said. “That kind of lively discussion would have gone on in this room.”

The plantation, which has welcomed visitors from around the world, is home to a donated false-bottom wagon that helped carry slaves northward.

People also come to catch a glimpse of Mendenhall’s daughter Minerva, the eldest of his seven children. Minerva taught school and served as one of Jamestown’s early postmasters. She lived on the Mendenhall homestead until her death, and possibly after.

During a tour by school children years ago, a girl at the back of the group asked if there were ghosts in the house.

“The (tour guide) said not as we know of,” Haworth said.

“The girl said, 'Well who was that lady back there?’ ... and described Minerva perfectly with a shawl and apron.”

There were no pictures of Minerva in the house at that time, which gave rise to the story of the ghost of Minerva.

Julius Cone house, 1030 E. Wendover Ave.

Eleanor Roosevelt slept in a room just off the top of the grand stairway, and it isn’t hard to imagine the first lady descending to the first-floor foyer to greet guests.

“I’m sure it’s memorabilia to some, a piece of history,” said Tom Wilson, the owner of the old Julius Cone house, which was built in 1923 and is a reminder of an era when mansions lined Summit Avenue.

Roosevelt was a guest of Laura Cone — sister-in-law of Ceasar and Moses Cone, primary builders of the Cone Mills empire — when she came here in 1945 to speak at Bennett College.

The front yard of the once 200-acre homestead, which has an East Wendover address, included the land where the Northeast Shopping Center sits. The house itself is primarily concrete.

“You’d have to bring in a D.H. Griffin (demolition company) to tear it down,” Wilson said.

In the shadow of an administrative building owned by N.C. A&T, the nine-bathroom house was long ago converted into office space.

In 1960, it housed the architectural firm of Ed Loewenstein, Laura Cone’s son-in-law. His firm had 32 members working out of the space, including Wilson, who later became a partner and whose Wilson and Lysiak Inc. engineering consulting firm remains on the property.

The bedroom where Roosevelt slept is used as an office. All the drawings ever made by the Loewenstein-Wilson firm dating to 1948 are somewhere in the house, including Beth David Synagogue, Central YMCA, private homes, Cone Hospital additions and Bluford, Archer and Jones schools.

High Rock Farm, 960 High Rock Road, Gibsonville

Much of what is known about the 4,500 square-foot-house house on High Rock Road has been gleaned from oral histories and paperwork.

“This might have been one of the first integrated cemeteries,” Rockingham County historian Bob Carter said of the burial ground for members of Joseph McCain’s family as well as dozens of slaves in close proximity.

After falling in disrepair, the house went through two restorations — the final one began in 1990 by Rolfe Teague and her husband, Richard, who bought the house from the Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina.

Richard Teague operates a farm there with fruit and nuts and sells blackberry jam, among other things. He hired Brianne McAlister, the sales and marketing director, and recently opened the home to weddings and plans to offer tours.

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy. mclaughlin@news-record.com