Wineka column: Links to medical community part of Stokes-Snider House's allure

Susan Sides stands in the far end of the large sun room, which looks toward the corner of North Fulton and Kerr streets. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

Susan Sides looks over some drawings left behind in the garden shed, which was once Dr. Ernest Stokes' medical office. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

Gwen Matthews, left, and Susan Sides talk in the back family room. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

The second floor has an expansive upstairs foyer. Poto by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

The front entrance features some of leaded-glass designs in several of the windows and doors of the Stokes-Snider House. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

Susan Sides looks from a sitting area off the dining room toward the back yard, where Dr. Stokes' office used to be. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

The Stokes-Snider House, dating back to 1922, has a history directly linked to Salisbury hospitals and the medical profession. Photo by Mark Wineka, Salisbury Post

It's easy to picture Dr. J. Ernest Stokes' patients strolling up the sidewalk, opening the gate and moving through the garden to the small cottage in back that served as his office.

On the way, they must have paused to look up toward the handsome main house, which had rooms both for entertaining and relaxing.

Except for a few pieces of furniture, books left behind on built-in shelves and appliances in the kitchen, much of the 1922 Stokes-Snider House at the corner of North Fulton and West Kerr streets is empty.

Prospective buyers go through the home these days, marveling at the space, the floors and vaulted ceilings, the stairwells, foyers and — for lack of a better description — special places.

There's a width-of-the-house attic, easy for any man to walk in straight up. There's an alcove off the dining room that must have been a sitting area or place for a bar, overlooking the garden.

There's the glassed-in porch on the opposite north side, where light pours in during the day and traffic-light colors blink against the walls at night.

The inside of the cottage in back is still encased — floors, walls and ceilings — in its original wood.

Gwen Matthews, director of historic properties for Historic Salisbury Foundation, always shows the house behind her best real estate sales demeanor.

But it's hard for Matthews and foundation trustee Susan Sides to hide their deeper appreciation for the home's history.

"To say it's a classic doesn't give it enough oomph," Matthews says.

Sides agrees. Just its connection to the city's medical history is impressive enough.

"If only the walls could talk," Sides says.

Stokes, who died in 1937, was one of the South's eminent surgeons and a man closely connected to the history of hospitals in Salisbury, including the founding of Rowan Memorial Hospital.

But most of today's Salisburians remember the Colonial Revival house as home for Arnold and Kate Mills Snider.

Among many other civic ventures, Arnold Snider served as a trustee for Rowan Memorial Hospital for 25 years. Kate Mills Snider had a strong kinship to Historic Salisbury Foundation.

She was a charter member of the nonprofit preservation group, co-chaired its first OctoberTour and served as a foundation trustee for 10 years.

"Every time women came together doing something for the foundation," Matthews says, having looked back through the foundation's history, "she was there."

When Kate Mills Snider died in 2006, she left the 4,700-square-foot home to Historic Salisbury Foundation.

"When you get this type of home left to the foundation, it tells you how much you meant to them and how much they meant to you," Matthews says.

Kate Mills Snider's good friend Holtie Woodson, who lived across the street, also left her impressive home to the foundation at her death.

For the Stokes-Snider House, the foundation's asking price is $390,000.

Matthews and Sides walk through the house, pointing out its three working fireplaces, three full bathrooms upstairs, a downstairs family room that's the size of an efficiency apartment and little details, such as leaded-glass windows and doors.

But they keep coming back to the history of the people who lived here.

Dr. John Whitehead invited Stokes to Salisbury in 1899, and together they championed the Whitehead-Stokes Sanitorium, which grew over the years to a 60-bed hospital at the corner of North Fulton and Liberty streets, a block away from this house.

Stokes, who was 26 when he came to Salisbury, had studied medicine at the University of Maryland and later graduated from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. He spent two years in Germany at the University of Freiburg.

The Whitehead-Stokes Sanitorium became one of North Carolina's finest medical centers, according to a history from the Rowan-Davie Counties Medical Society.

The Post also wrote once, "The fame of the hospital spread throughout the entire South, and persons from many sections and from all walks of life came here to be restored to health, to undergo treatments or operations as necessary."

A nurses' training school started at the sanitorium in 1903, with the first class graduating in 1907. Many of the nurses went to leading hospitals across the country.

It became the Salisbury Hospital in 1921.

Whitehead, a beloved physician in Salisbury, died in 1926, leaving Stokes to run the hospital and try to guide it through the Depression. Because of all the charity patients it was treating, the hospital came close to closing in 1932, bailed out by a group of citizens who formed the nonprofit Rowan General Hospital Inc.

With Stokes as a guiding force and the Duke Foundation's help, the community built the original 80-bed Rowan Memorial Hospital in 1936.

A year later, Stokes died.

He and his wife, Rebekah Marsh Stokes, had built their corner house around 1922, and Rebekah lived there until 1940. The house had given Stokes easy access to the old Salisbury Hospital, while he also conducted his private practice from the cottage.

Arnold and Kate Mills Snider became the house's owners in 1948.

Kate Mills Snider was granddaughter of U.S. Congressman Claude Kitchin of Scotland Neck.

A Salisbury native, Snider eventually became president of Eastern Rowan Telephone Co., Denton Telephone and Mid Carolina Telephone. For a time, he also was a principal in the Krider, Snider, Mattox Insurance Agency.

Snider served on Salisbury City Council, as a Catawba College trustee and on the boards of the Rowan Cancer Society, Salisbury-Rowan YMCA and American Red Cross. He died in 2001.

Sides remembers Snider telling her once that his home was a "Lazenby House."

That in itself makes the house historic. Before he died in 1943, Alfred Lazenby built some of the finer residences in Salisbury.

He also built the Empire Hotel, First Methodist and First Baptist churches, Central Methodist Church in Spencer, Catawba College's administration building, some of the original buildings at Pfeiffer University, the Rouzer and Washington buildings in downtown Salisbury and, interestingly enough, buildings connected to the Whitehead-Stokes Sanitorium.

Sides and Matthews end their tour of the Stokes-Snider house at the cottage, which the Sniders had converted to hold tools, plants and potting soil.

"This is not your average garden shed," Matthews says.

When visitors tour the house with an eye toward buying, they usually envision the cottage's conversion to some kind of getaway — maybe a retreat for writing or reading, a playhouse for the kids or an office with modern day conveniences such as laptop computers and wireless Internet.

An office? Dr. Stokes could identify with that.