Three area homesteads - in Apex, Fuquay-Varina, and Morrisville  were recently recognized for their historic landmark status by Wake County.

During the annual Wake County Preservation Celebration May 6, historic plaques were awarded to the Williamson Page house in Morrisville owned by Mary Jo Ferrell and DH Lumley; Seagroves Farm in Apex owned by Bill Cotton; and the Zeb and Lorena Atkinson House in Fuquay-Varina owned by Richard and Jeanne Robinson.

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"The metal numbers “627” are posted just beside the home’s red front door.

For 70 years, the Peyton McSwain house sat at 627 South Washington St.

On Sunday, movers transported the two-story duplex one-tenth of a mile in about two hours – an average speed of roughly four and a half feet every minute. Someone bought the lot where the historic house once stood, and the Historic Shelby Foundation decided to save the structure from demolition by moving it to a new location.

The Peyton McSwain house is part of the Central Shelby Historic District. Moving the 1940s structure down the block keeps the house in the same historic district and maintains the neighborhood’s character, said Ted Alexander, who works for Preservation North Carolina and also serves on the Historic Shelby Foundation Board of Directors."

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Shelby Star (5/1/2012)

Anyone driving by the forsaken Gaston Memorial Hospital building on North Highland Street in recent years has likely found it uninspiring.

"This building has looked really bad for a long time," said Lucy Penegar of the Gaston County Historic Preservation Commission.

Tearing it down seemed the only option for a time, and the 67-year-old eyesore was perilously close to meeting that fate. But Penegar was one of a handful of officials on hand Tuesday afternoon to celebrate the hospital's eventual reuse. The hope now is that it will become a success story in salvaging structural history.

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(from The Gaston Gazette, 4/27/12)

"Wilmington is home of many exemplary examples of historic architecture – Georgian, Federal, Greek and Gothic Revival, Queen Anne, Neo-classical Revival – large and small.

Before World War II, many of the original families still owned homes built by their ancestors.

In 1941, Wilmington experienced a gigantic population surge, tripling the number of residents. The surge resulted from people employed at the shipyard and military installations like nearby Camp Davis Army Base.

All those people required housing, which Wilmington was unprepared to provide. Some federal housing was built, but most of the housing was supplied by converting large downtown houses into apartments.

Following the war, the downtown residents sought new houses in the suburbs, leaving many of the old houses unoccupied and neglected. Downtown became an undesirable place to live and many owners sought to demolish the structures, removing them from the tax rolls. In 1962, the N.C. Department of Conservation and Development, Division of Community Planning conducted two planning and development studies of the city.One, The Wilmington Historic Area Study, identified the city's historic resources and made recommendations for legislation needed to preserve them."

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Star News (4/17/2012)

"The operators of the TROSA Grocery, the store that opened almost two years ago in North-East Central Durham to provide healthy grocery options for the area’s residents, are planning to close the store because of a lack of steady business.

The store is meant to generate revenue for the nonprofit Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers Inc., or TROSA, a long-term residential substance abuse recovery program based in Durham. The nonprofit is supported by other businesses including a moving company, Christmas tree lots, and a frame shop.

The nonprofit’s chief executive and founder Kevin McDonald said the store opened on Angier Avenue near its intersection with Driver Street after he got a pitch for the idea from business and education leaders who are advocates for the economic revitalization of North-East Central Durham.

While McDonald said the support from the community for the concept has been “mindboggling,” the store has not been able to meet its costs. The store operated rent-free in their 3,000-square-foot space, but the business lost more than $100,000 in about two years of operations, McDonald said."

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The Herald Sun (4/6/2012)

"The recently unveiled Wake Forest Biotech Place in Winston-Salem is a tremendous success. It has transformed a vacant tobacco complex into a state-of-the-art life sciences center that will employ 450 workers. Its construction created more than 600 jobs and generated $51 million in state and local taxes. Best of all, this development enhances Winston-Salem's rich history and architectural heritage.

What might not be so obvious is the important role that federal and state historic tax credits played in shaping this project - and others in downtown Winston-Salem. The Biotech Place developer, Wexford Science and Technology, called the combination of federal and state tax credits absolutely essential in making the entire $100 million project possible.

Much of the credit for North Carolina's historic rehabilitation tax credits must go to the late Sen. Hamilton Horton of Winston-Salem. In 1997, Ham was the principal sponsor of a bill in the North Carolina General Assembly to refine and expand a state tax credit that builds on the federal tax credits for historic renovation. He worked tirelessly to get the bill passed, often remarking that he hoped that the credits would someday receive widespread use in his own downtown.The bill also created a state tax credit for homeowners who live in buildings listed in the National Register - individually or in historic districts, such as the West End neighborhood, Ardmore or South Main Street in Kernersville. These credits have had a tremendous impact in such neighborhoods statewide.

As a result of Ham's legislation, Winston-Salem actively sought National Register designation for its downtown. The Arts District blossomed. One historic downtown building after another was renovated. It was particularly gratifying to see the owners of the Modernist Wachovia Bank building (completed in 1966) obtain National Register status in order to adapt it into Winston Tower.

The legislative alliances for the tax credits were the epitome of effective bipartisanship. Ham, a conservative Republican, joined forces with Rep. Marie Colton of Asheville and, later, Rep. Deborah Ross of Raleigh, both progressive Democrats, to create and sustain incentives for renovating the state's historic buildings.

The most potent variation of the state's historic tax credits, providing a special incentive for the renovation of vacant industrial buildings, passed in 2006. The support was bipartisan, with only one vote against it in the entire legislature. Rep. Julia Howard, a Mocksville Republican, teamed with Rep. Ross to make it happen in the House; similar alliances occurred in the Senate. The mills tax credit, combined with the federal tax credits for historic rehabilitation, helped make Biotech Place a reality.

Ham would be proud - probably even shocked - to know of the success of the tax credits that he helped create. In Forsyth County alone, there have been 147 historic rehabilitation tax credit projects, resulting in the private investment of more than $200 million. Other large projects are in the works.

In 2010 alone, 44 projects across North Carolina used the federal historic tax credits, resulting in the private investment of $200 million, the creation of 3,645 jobs (at the height of the recession), and payment of $45 million in local, state and federal taxes - more than covering the $11 million paid out by the U.S. Treasury.

As a Durham native, I've been thrilled to watch as the renovation of The American Tobacco Campus (where my father worked) and the Liggett & Myers complex has revived derelict buildings, created permanent jobs and injected new pride and energy in my hometown. The American Tobacco complex houses more workers now than it did as a tobacco company. Without the historic tax credits, the buildings would probably still be blighted, and those high-tech, creative jobs would be in other states.

In the coming years, both the federal and the state tax credits will have to be renewed. We urge our members of Congress to support a refinement of the federal historic tax credit by co-sponsoring the Creating American Prosperity through Preservation (CAPP) Act. CAPP (S. 2074 & H.R. 2479) would extend the credit's reach into historic "Main Street" districts, promote energy-efficient building retrofit projects and facilitate nonprofit organizations' use of the credit.

At the state level, we are seeking to extend the tax credit programs, which are slated to expire in 2014. We're finding terrific bipartisan support, in the spirit of Ham Horton, and hope for good results this summer.

These tax credits, if maintained, will stimulate private investment in North Carolina's historic resources and continue to create inspiring places to live, work and play."

Link to the article, with photos

Written by J. Myrick Howard, Executive Director of Preservation North Carolina

The Winston-Salem Journal, 4/8/12

"Landowner Louis Moore Bacon is determined to turn back the clock at Orton Plantation.

Bacon, the direct descendent of the plantation's founding family who purchased the Brunswick County property in 2010, is working to restore Orton's 8,500 acres to the antebellum rice plantation it was in the 1700s, Orton's Property Manager, Dillon Epp, said.

Plans for the property, which borders N.C. 133 and the Cape Fear River, include the restoration of about 7,000 acres of longleaf pine forest, removal of invasive species that have overrun the plantation's 320 acres of rice fields, and preservation of the plantation's historic house and gardens, Epp said.

The goal is to create the landscape that Bacon's ancestors knew hundreds of years ago, Orton's Landscape Property Manager Nick Dawson said.

Bacon is a direct descendent of Roger Moore, who built the original Orton residence and established the property as a rice plantation.

"The owner is doing all this because of his family history," Dawson said. "He would like to look at what his ancestors looked at. But the restoration is also benefitting the community because a piece of North Carolina history is being preserved."

Property managers hope national and state historic preservation agencies will agree."

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Star News Online (3/23/2012)

"It was in the no-so-distant past that residents of Trinity Park were fighting battles for zoning changes and historic status. Those changes helped shape the neighborhood into the tree-lined streets of historic homes in which families reside that it is now.

Council member Eugene Brown, who is a resident of Trinity Park, hearkened back to those battles in discussion Monday night over the Fayetteville Street preservation zoning. He said residents in Trinity Park years ago spoke up to say “we are not just a student slum neighborhood.”

The neighborhood surrounding N.C. Central University merits preservation. The notion of tearing down homes to build a high-rise is an unpalatable one, to say the least.

The Fayetteville Street corridor is part of our city’s history, and one given the destruction of the Hayti business district to which historical significance should be attached. Businessman Larry Hester was right to raise those concerns at Monday’s council meeting, and his inclination to keep the area residential is one that should be heeded.

We’re glad to see zoning approved that will lend protections to this area.

There is a but coming, though, albeit a minor one attached to Brown’s one sentence in the discussion over the zoning proposal.

ZZWhile few of us want to endure all-night parties and the bad behavior that surrounded soirees that Trinity Park residents endured (including urination on lawns, drunken verbal abuse hurled at complainers, litter and noise), the question remains about what to do about off-campus student housing."

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The Herald-Sun (3/21/2012)

"More than 60 years later, school days have returned for Dorothy Coone.

She’s among the former students working to restore the Anderson Rosenwald School she attended here in the 1940s, now a deteriorated shell of a building.

“It has been there so long, so many generations have gone there,” Coone said. “It goes back more than just two or three generations, so just to see it sit there and disintegrate is just sad.”

Nearly five decades after closing, the school is now the target of a restoration project involving community volunteers, architects, historians and Rosenwald alumni.

The Anderson Rosenwald School was one of an estimated 800 Rosenwald schools built by and for African-Americans in North Carolina.

Beginning with a program established by Booker T. Washington in 1912, the schools were funded in part by the Julius Rosenwald Fund, named after the Sears, Roebuck president who bankrolled it. By 1932, the program had built almost 5,000 schools 15 Southern states.

The Anderson school in Mars Hill is one of only a handful of these schools still standing in Western North Carolina."

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Citizen-Times (3/13/2012)