The Daily Southerner, Tarboro, NC

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August 20, 2009

MOVING DAY

Moving day here for Norfleet House

W. TERRY SMITH

The Edgecombe Community College’s Historic Preservation program is taking a big step Tuesday when the 199-year-old Norfleet Plantation House is moved on campus.

“I’m so excited,” said Monika Fleming, director of the historic preservation program at ECC. “I have been waiting six months for this.”

Fleming’s office will be inside the 19th century structure. She was there over the weekend when a historic carpentry repair class built a mantle for a fireplace.

"We used an photo," Fleming said.

The house will contain a heritage center, which will have books and records for research, lab where students can work and a classroom.

In fact, historic preservation students may get some hands-on training when the house is set on its concrete footing that was poured the other day. House mover H.S. Bunn of Bunn is cutting it in half to facilitate moving. It will have to be re-attached.

The house was on a 1,700-acre plantation. The cotton press that was moved to the Town Common in the 1930s came from Isaac and Christina Norfleet’s farm.

The house was moved from its original site across from ECC in 1998 when Carolina Systems Technology moved into the Tarboro-Edgecombe Industrial Park, now the Tarboro Commerce Center. An old family cemetery remains, but the historic status of the house demanded it be preserved and that meant moving it the old town farm, off U.S. 258, north of town near Batts Chapel Road.

There was talk at the time of it becoming a visitors center, Fleming recalled, or maybe a tourist attraction, but it did not happen. After it received some damage in the 1999 flood, the town restored it.

“It was not a total historic restoration,” Fleming said, “but they re-did the wiring, the walls, chimneys, porches, bathrooms and added a handicapped ramp. They brought it up to code.”

The house has its original flooring in two rooms, 22-foot long heart pine lumber. It is 22 feet wide, 57 feet long and 26 feet tall. There are three rooms upstairs.

Norfleet had 10 children, several of whom made their homes in Tarboro. In 1858, Robert Norfleet built the “suburban villa” at 1100 Main St. that Councilman John Jenkins and his wife Sandy live in now. Thomas Norfleet bought the house that is now Jimmie Keel’s law office at 511 Saint Andrew St.

The house is expected to take the following route Tuesday, according to Bunn:

From U.S. 258 to the Scotland Neck Road toward Princeville, Shiloh Road to N.C. 33 to Scott’s Crossroad across the Tar River at the Old Sparta Bridge, up Colonial Road to Sara Lee Road to the west corner of campus.

Bunn will be paid $27,000.

Fleming is leaving the end of the month for a four-day international historic preservation trade school in Colorado.

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