For decades, the historic Crabtree Jones House has been nearly invisible, hidden by trees from speeding traffic along Wake Forest Road. Only its longtime caretaker ventured up the steep gravel driveway.

That will change this weekend as the home nears its date with the movers. Preservation North Carolina is working to move the house to make way for an apartment development, but first the nonprofit is opening the doors for two days of tours Saturday and Sunday.

The house was built around 1795, making it one of Raleigh's oldest. But while the other homes of that vintage - the Mordecai House and Joel Lane House closer to downtown - welcome visitors daily as museums, the Jones House has stayed in private hands.

The house is named for its builder, early Raleigh settler Nathaniel "Crabtree" Jones, who ran a plantation that neighbored Isaac Hunter's Tavern, where plans for the state capital were first made. The property stayed in the Jones family until the 1960s, when real-estate investor Charles William Gaddy bought up tracts of land around the Beltline. Gaddy didn't have much use for the old home, but he wanted to preserve it. After Gaddy's death in 2005, his family sold thelot - one of his last undeveloped properties - to an apartment developer, who agreed to finance the house's move to nearby Hilmer Drive. "The house is unbelievably intact, with astounding architectural details," said Lauren Werner, director of education outreach for Preservation NC.

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RALEIGH - Almost 100 near and not-so-near relatives who can trace their roots to 18th-century Raleigh landowner Nathaniel "Crabtree" Jones Jr. had what likely was their last chance to walk in and around their ancestor's hilltop home off Wake Forest Road on Sunday.

By late summer, if all goes as planned, the 3,448-square-foot house will be 500 feet away on a new foundation on Hilmer Drive and will become someone's home.

Sunday, however, the two-story house with its three brick chimneys still sat amid large oaks and rambling hedges at the end of an unpaved drive off Wake Forest Road just inside the I-440 Beltline.

On the lawn, Kimbrough Jones of Raleigh said he had lived in the house briefly after getting out of the military in the early 1970s. His parents had moved into the house several years before, taking it over from another Jones relative.

"I was never interested in genealogy," Jones said, and he chuckled as he recalled how as a boy, visiting the house with his parents, he would flee family discussions to sit in the car and listen to rock music on the radio.

Jones and his wife, Evelyn, said their son, Bryan Jones, is the last to bear the family name.

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 (The Raleigh News & Observer, 5/20/13)

Hurricane Isabel ravaged the East Coast nearly a decade ago, and in Edenton, N.C., its effects are still seen at the Kadesh African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

Spanning an entire block on East Gale Street, the church complex sustained such significant damage from the 2003 storm that it was deemed unsafe for parishioners to continue worshiping there.

"Now it's just kind of sitting there, an empty shell," says Sam Dixon, a local attorney and an adviser to the National Trust who has long been rallying for the restoration of the church.

Congregants moved to another venue across town, but as Dixon says, "They're ready to go home."

The Gothic Revival church has a long history in Edenton (pop. 5,000). It was built in 1897 by Hannibal Badham Sr., who himself was a member of the church. For generations, the Gothic Revival church complex was the center of religious and social life in Edenton's African-American community.

(From PreservationNation Blog, 5/13/13)

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After a complicated 20-year effort to save a redbrick mill in North Carolina that was once considered the largest in the world for textiles and that played a significant role in the South's textile history, the plant is finally moving toward a new life as a multiuse complex.

The Loray Mill, which for decades produced fabric for car tires, last month began a $40 million conversion project that will create 190 apartments in its six stories, as well as several floors of shops and restaurants. The mill, which was the site of an famous labor strike in the 1920s, is in the city of Gastonia, a former industrial hub outside of Charlotte.

To the delight of preservationists, the development team of JBS Ventures, of Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., and Camden Management Partners, of Atlanta, will retain much of the original 600,000-square-feet structure of the complex. This first phase of the redevelopment will reinvent about 450,000 square feet of the mill, including the main section, which dates to 1902.

Gastonia officials, too, say there's a lot to like about a project that continues decades of effort to remake a longtime industrial center as a bedroom community of Charlotte, which is just 30 minutes away. At the very least, they say that a redeveloped Loray (pronounced LOW-ray) could revitalize its immediate neighborhood, whose sidewalk-lined blocks once bustled with mill workers but have long since grown quiet. The mill is on the west side of town in a primarily residential area where boarded-up buildings dot the main commercial drag.

"When you put this many apartments and businesses in an area where there's been so much disinvestment, it's enough to create its own weather," said Jack Kiser, Gastonia's senior executive for special projects. "It will have a catalytic effect."

In many ways, the project, which is to be completed in 2014, is lucky even to be under way. Dozens of other mills, which went up in the central part of the state around the turn of the last century, as textile businesses relocated to North Carolina from New England, have fallen into ruin or been razed.

Loray Mill has seen several development proposals come and go since 1994, when Firestone, which had owned it since the Great Depression, shut the mill down and left for a more modern plant in a nearby community. Firestone has, however, continued some operations in a smaller building toward the rear of the property.

An early condo plan for the mill failed, and in the late 1990s, Firestone was poised to demolish the building, which features a 140-foot tower that is the tallest in Gastonia. But the company ultimately donated it to Preservation North Carolina, a nonprofit group, which paid its power bills and hired security guards while marketing the property, according to Myrick Howard, president of the preservation group.

"This was by far the most time-consuming project I have ever worked on," added Mr. Howard, who estimated his group had helped save 700 buildings across the state since the 1970s.

In 2003, the current developers approached Preservation North Carolina about buying the property, with its arched windows and open floors lined with columns, but the team struggled to line up financing. Then, the recession hit, sapping public financing for the project and derailing efforts once again.

Today, Berkadia, a lender, is providing a $22 million loan backed by the Federal Housing Administration. Most of the balance is coming from two investors: Chevron, through federal preservation tax credits, and the health care provider Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which is taking advantage of state tax credits that encourage mill conversions.

The developers are also supplying equity, said Billy Hughes, a JBS principal, though he declined to specify the amount. The sale price of the mill was $660,000.

While the building's industrial legacy may be part of its draw, it has also stoked some local opposition. In 1929, Loray was the site of a violent labor strike that lasted for months and resulted in two deaths, including that of Orville Aderholt, Gastonia's police chief, and Ella Mae Wiggins, a union organizer and protest singer.

(The New York Times, 5/3/13)

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