Mebane & Sharpe of Greensboro, North Carolina, began developing Hope Valley in Durham, North Carolina, in 1927. "In a thoroughly rural, picturesque setting, Hope Valley," according to historic preservation consultant Claudia Roberts Brown, "is considered by many to be Durham's first neighborhood to epitomize our traditional image of the suburb." Mebane & Sharpe established Hope Valley Country Club with a circuitous eighteen-hold golf course designed by nationally known golf course architect J. Donald Ross of New York City so that an optimum number of lots front it. The developers commissioned the architectural firm Milburn & Hiester Company to design the clubhouse. They hired George Watts Carr to design eleven speculative or "seed" houses. (Claudia Roberts Brown, Durham's Early Twentieth-Century Suburban Nieghborhoods, in Catherine W. Bishir and Lawrence S. Early, ed., Early Twentieth-Century Suburbs in North Carolina: Eassays on History, Architecture and Planning, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1985, p. 45.)
From the guide to the Hope Valley Development budget and cost estimates, September, November 1928, (Special Collections Research Center)
