Now, 172 years later, the house is at a new location with a new future role, probably as a museum.

The stately Greek Revival structure last week was moved a few hundred feet north from its perch along Manchester Road to a spot on the north end of the same property, at the northeastern corner of Manchester and McKnight roads.

U-Gas Inc. of Fenton is paying for the move. It bought the property where the Fairfax House had been situated for a gas station, car wash and convenience store. The city of Rock Hill, which owns the Fairfax House, had made its preservation a condition of its approving the deal..

Construction of the gas station is expected start next month, with completion in September.

Brinkmann Constructors, working with Wolfe House Movers, last week picked up the house and moved it north along McKnight. Today the house stands elevated on a platform.

“Those old houses aren’t square or plumb, so we can build the foundation to the shape of the house,” said Kendrick Lathum, project manager for Brinkmann. The structure is likely to be lowered onto the foundation later this month or early next month.

Not everyone is pleased about the move. A group of residents has worked hard for years to restore it.

“I have done everything I could to try and preserve this house,” said Donia Hunter, chair of the volunteer Fairfax Restoration Group. “It isn’t just that they want to move it. They are shoving it in the back of the lot to stand up against apartments and a sidewalk.”

Rock Hill assumed ownership of the building in 1997. It was vacant for a few years and since then has been used for special events.

Fairfax is among the oldest and most historically significant structures in the St. Louis area, Hunter said.
She said its next use will probably be as a museum for local history.

The house’s fate is bittersweet for some historic preservationists. While it at least is remaining in Rock Hill, the old Rock Hill Church that had adjoined it was not saved intact and will not stay in Rock Hill.

A winery owner, however, has taken it on himself to spare the church from going into a landfill.

Carl Bolm, owner of Cedar Lake Cellars near Foristell, said he intends to rebuild the church as closely as possible to the way it had stood. It will be used for weddings and other events.

Once all the pieces arrive at the winery, Bolm expects the rebuilding will take about a year.

“The mortar has to be knocked off of every stone,” he noted.

In the early 1840s, slaves and immigrants carried stones one by one to build the Rock Church. It opened in 1845.

“At 7 o’clock the church was there, and by 10 a.m. it was gone,” said Lathum, who said the work was completed carefully and with attention to preserving the pieces and artifacts.

Lathum said that 12 truckloads of fieldstone were taken to the winery.

DELICATE CARGO
A large semi-trailer is taking more delicate cargo: the oak pews, stained-glass windows, light fixtures and decorative metal pieces, as well as numbered stones that will be reinstalled by the windows and front entrance.

The red front door is in the truck.

The church played an important role in African-American and pioneer history in St. Louis County. Preservation groups and local residents had sought to find a buyer who would move the church to another site in Rock Hill. They held vigils and sales, raising about $8,000 — not nearly enough for a project that could cost around $800,000.

Bolm said he’s committed to the project. If he were not, he said, “I wouldn’t be going to this much trouble, expense and effort.”

He added: “I’ll do the best I can to preserve it the way it was in Rock Hill.”

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/rock-hill-s-fairfax-house-is-moving-on-with-a/article_efb4f1dd-eba6-5af7-81d3-0ec57dcc8879.html#ixzz1upmL7tom

Again, my hat is off to Tim and Company who went over and beyond what was required of them. I would recommend them to anyone in need of a great house mover!

Thank you.

Sincerely,
J. Nelson Link

The Red Bank resident and owner of township-based Stasi Landscaping, and his wife, Deborah, had a late-1890s Victorian farmhouse moved to a new location, where it will be preserved for future generations.

“The farm property is being developed, and one of the conditions for approval on the project was that we had to preserve the home,” Stasi said. “It’s historic to Old Bridge. It’s been in our family and the Walton family for years, so there’s history here. It wasn’t a difficult decision to say, ‘We’ll save it.’ It’s a beautiful piece of architecture for the town.”

The property, on Englishtown Road near the intersection of Texas Road, was purchased by the Stasi family in the 1970s and used as a nursery for the family business — Stasi Landscaping Co. Located at the former site of the McBride/Walton Farmstead, the house was renovated in the late 1970s and an addition was built in the 1980s.

Stasi and his wife bought the farm from his parents in 2005, and in order to proceed with their plans to develop the property, last year they also purchased the farm property next door.

The property, where the farmhouse was located, is the future site of a 21-lot single-family home development and neighborhood retail center, Stasi said. The builder for the residential portion is Ryan Homes, a national builder based in Reston, Va.

Stasi said he will retain ownership of the retail commercial portion, develop the project and ultimately manage it.

But for the development plans to move forward, three buildings had to be moved to the adjacent farm.

A 1,200-square-foot metal equipment garage was disassembled, piece by piece, by a Pennsylvania company and driven to the adjoining property, where it was reassembled, Stasi said.

The other two buildings — the farmhouse with its wraparound porch and a 1,000-square-foot metal building, which is home to a paint-ball recreation tenant — were moved intact because the buildings were finished inside, Stasi said.

On Monday, workers with Wolfe House and Building Movers of Bernville, Pa., began the tedious task of moving the 3,000-square-foot farmhouse to its new location at the adjacent farm property about 1,500 feet away.

Workers spent about four days preparing for the move, which included supporting the farmhouse with wooden cribbing and filling in the foundation with dirt, Stasi said. Steel beams were strategically placed under the home and three motorized hydraulic dollies, all controlled from a central diesel power unit that sat on the porch, were placed under the steel beams, he said.

Using a remote control, Nevin Buckingham carefully guided the home away from nearby trees and limbs and rotated the home 180 degrees before embarking on the slow journey across the field. Buckingham, an experienced mover, said he expected the home would travel at most about one-half mile an hour.

The farmhouse inched its way through the woods as it was strategically navigated around trees and shrubs and over a ditch. About seven hours later, the farmhouse was safely placed on an excavated foundation hole.

“I am relieved,” Stasi said. “It wasn’t terribly nerve-racking. Actually, they made it look relatively easy. You just want to make sure it got into the hole without tipping or cracking.”

On Tuesday, workers returned to the site to set the house at the final and proper elevation. On Wednesday, a mason contractor began building the footing and foundation under the home, Stasi said.

Stasi estimated that it would cost at least $300,000 to build this size home today.

“The cost of moving the farmhouse is $35,000, plus a new foundation underneath,” he said. “People think it’s too complicated a process, but I’m not moving it. Someone who knows what they are doing is moving it. Forty years ago, we chose to renovate it and not knock it down. It’s definitely worth keeping. You can’t re-create that. In the end, it was a positive business move and a positive effort to preserve part of the history of Old Bridge.”

The farmhouse will be used as commercial office space, he said.

Stasi said he is grateful to the town and township historian Ann Miller, who have been supportive of his efforts.

Groundbreaking on the new development is expected within a month, he said.

For Stasi, the farmhouse was not the first house move in which he was involved. In 2003, as president of the Red Bank Charter School’s board of trustees, Stasi was a key player in arranging the move of the 138-year-old Century House from one Red Bank location to the charter school’s new home, also in Red Bank.

Old Bridge Mayor Owen Henry, a member of the township’s Historical Society, also stopped by the property to see Monday’s move.

“It’s a landmark and it’s well-maintained,” he said. “It’s an important part of the history of Old Bridge and you can’t replace history. You can’t put a dollar value on it. Old Bridge at one time was all farms, and it’s important for the future generations to see what Old Bridge looked like.

“The town thanks the Stasi family for undertaking this adventure here to move the house. We know it’s not easy, especially in these economic times. The Historical Society also is extremely grateful that it’s happening. We have lost a number of homes in town to developers, so we’re pleased that this home will be saved.”

“There were houses here, a butcher shop at the end of the road, this warehouse wasn’t here,” she said as she studied a portion of the brewery. “This used to be a lot different.”

Before yesterday, only one piece of that neighborhood remained: a small, yellow church that sat along 33rd Street, looking out of place surrounded by concrete buildings and warehouses.

The church, St. Stephen’s AME, has been in that spot since 1906, when it was used as a German benevolent society. Now, that piece of the forgotten neighborhood is gone. To Tolbert’s delight, however, it was not demolished — it was moved about 1,000 feet away to a new home along Oak Street to make way for the brewery’s new $7.5 million wastewater treatment facility.

Bernville-based Wolfe House and Building Movers started the process Wednesday by inserting two long beams into the church’s foundation and then moving them — and the 40-by-20-foot church — about three feet in the air. The movers then inserted several small beams underneath the building before resting it on three hydraulic transport dollies.

Wolfe foreman Nevin Buckingham then controlled the transport dollies with a remote, guiding it across the parking lot and to its new home.

“It’s really a simple process,” said Buckingham, who has moved buildings as big as 840 tons — which called for 21 transport dollies. “This one hasn’t given us any trouble.”

Dozens of brewery workers watched as Buckingham guided the 37-ton structure atop 12 wheels. The move took less than an hour, and Tolbert was the only member of the church’s congregation able to witness the event, but she was more than happy to record the entire move on her cell phone.

“I’m so excited I can hardly contain myself,” she said as the wheels started turning.

Tolbert’s grandmother was a founding member of the church in 1928. Over the years, the congregation has become smaller and older, and now has just six active members, she said, adding that at age 62 she is the youngest of them all. Tolbert said the congregation is hopeful that the new location will help bring more people to the church.

“People will have a straight shot to us now. We’ll be very visible,” Tolbert said.
“This will make us more accessible. People would drive from Pittsburgh and couldn’t find us because they didn’t know to go through the (brewery’s) gate.”

When it was a part of the old neighborhood, Tolbert said the church used to host picnics and invite anyone who would like to come. Denny Holzer, who has been at the brewery since 1975, said he remembers attending a couple picnics when he first started.

“I was on my break, sitting outside here on a step, and I saw some tables set up”
at the church, he said as he watched the church come to rest beside its new foundation. “Nosey me, I decided to see what’s going on. I walked over and a woman told me for a couple bucks I can eat, so of course I did.”

Tolbert and church Pastor Prudence Harris said now that the church is back in a neighborhood, they hope to be able to get more involved in the community.

“That’s where the first churches were — in communities where people could come worship and learn and not talk about religion, but about connection and unity in your area,” Harris said as she was on her way to see the church at its new location. “Ministry isn’t just about the word. It’s about teaching and helping out each other.”

In addition to paying for the move, the brewery has agreed to build a 32- by 20-foot addition to the church that will be used for banquets and meetings, said City Brewing controller Zack Mazzoni. The addition should be completed within two months, Mazzoni said, which is when congregants hope to resume worship at the
church. In the meantime, services will be held at Greater Parkview Church in Greensburg.

Mazzoni said construction of the wastewater treatment facility should start the second or third week in July and should be complete by August next year.

Tolbert, meanwhile, said she was ecstatic that her place of worship is once again part of a community.

“I feel like a little kid,” she said. This is incredible. It’s truly a blessing.”

By Cody Francis
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, June 24, 2011

Cody Francis can be reached at cfrancis@tribweb.com or 724-853-5062.

The Weber County Pioneer Museum was built in 1902 as one of the first Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stake Relief Society buildings. It was deeded to the Weber County Daughters of Utah Pioneers in 1926 and up until today it had sat near the Ogden temple’s parking lot. The museum is being moved to make room for the expansion of the LDS temple.

The church offered to move the museum and pay for some of its restoration in exchange for the land it was sitting on. The DUP agreed and the painstaking process of moving the century old building began.

The building weighs 600 tons. It was moved with the use of a remote-controlled dolly which was made up of 136 tires. Museum officials watched as their building inched its way to its new home on the corner of 21st and Lincoln.

Publicist for the Weber County Daughters of Utah Pioneers, Marti Clayton said, “It reminds me of the floats in the rose parade. They’ve backed it out and turned it and made the corner. It’s kind of a crucial corner.”

Once the museum is lowered on its new foundation the restoration process can begin. Rod Mortensen is the architect on the project. He tells ABC4 the old brick building is in good condition despite some water and plaster damage. “What we want to do is keep the building looking as old as it is, but make it look nice,” said Mortensen. “We don’t want it to look like it did in 1903 because it’s an old lady and we want to keep it looking the way it should.”

Clayton said, “We want to get it to be just right so it could easily take a year to a year and a half before we’re back into the building.”

So on Saturday, the two-story, 298-ton wood-frame house will be rolled conspicuously — and slowly — from its cramped site on Convent Avenue to an appropriately verdant new location a block away in St. Nicholas Park, facing West 141st Street. That is as close as it can get these days to the rural setting for which it was originally designed.

Once new foundations are completed, a yearlong, $8.4 million restoration and reconstruction will undo decades of unsympathetic alterations to the house, known formally as the Hamilton Grange National Memorial.

Stephen Spaulding, chief of the architectural preservation division in the National Park Service’s Northeast region, said the 500-foot move on Saturday should take three to six hours.

But in a sense, the journey has taken almost half a century. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy authorized the Interior Department to assume ownership of the house on the condition that it be moved to a suitable location.

As redevelopment sagas go, the story of the Grange ranks among the most protracted. For want of money and almost any concerted political will to get the deed done, at least until recent years, the Grange languished in near-obscurity as other historical landmarks gained a higher profile.

Visitors have found the Grange jammed between a six-story apartment house and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, its formal front facade abutting the church and all but invisible. Nor is this even its original location. Until 1889, when it was moved for the first time, the house was on 143rd Street, west of Convent Avenue.

Lost in the intervening years was any public sense that the founding father on the $10 bill, the nation’s first treasury secretary, had lived in Harlem; that a creator of the federal government passed his last two years in a refined country estate designed by John McComb Jr., an architect of City Hall, from which he departed in 1804 for the duel with Aaron Burr that cost him his life.

Now, in the house he left behind, Hamilton is again coming to life. To their joy, National Park Service officials have discovered that the front stairway, though much modified over time, is essentially the one built for Hamilton, complete with original risers, treads, balusters, ornamental scrollwork and support structure. It will be rebuilt in its original form.

“Alexander Hamilton ran up those very treads!” said Steve Laise, chief of cultural resources of Manhattan sites for the National Park Service, which owns and runs the Grange. “It just puts you in such close proximity with the past. For those of us who really wish we were living back then anyway, it’s probably more of a stimulus to our imagination than we really ought to have.”

Lovely exterior details are also evident for the first time in more than a century, including a triple-hung sash window. Smaller windows on either side have an alternating star-and-circle tracery. “That kind of pattern is well rooted in 18th-century Anglo-American design practice,” said Seth Joseph Weine, a fellow of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America.

Last week, the Grange was raised up and over a loggia, or side porch, at St. Luke’s and now sits on steel beams atop nine dollies in the middle of Convent Avenue. On Saturday, it will be rolled down the avenue; turned east onto 141st Street; rolled down a hillside with a 6 percent grade, past Steinman Hall of City College; turned south at Hamilton Terrace; then rolled into the park.

Windows, especially those at the corners, will be among the most vulnerable areas. To reduce any chance that the structure will shift out of shape, it is being bound tightly with wire rope and tied diagonally to the beams on which it is now supported. The chimneys are also to be braced.

Twice during the move, the house will be inspected. Windows will be tested to ensure that they are operable, meaning that no undue pressure is being exerted against the frames. Existing plaster cracks, already documented, will be checked to make certain they are not widening. If problems do arise, Mr. Spaulding said the house can be releveled by adjusting the blocking between the steel beams and the frame of the structure.

For now, he does not anticipate any need to halt the move outright.

As for that 6 percent slope on 141st Street, Mr. Spaulding said the contractor “is very confident that the grade is not going to be a problem.”

“He’s moved houses down grades like that before,” he added. The move itself is being done by Wolfe House and Building Movers of Bernville, Pa. The general contractor is Integrated Construction Enterprises of Belleville, N.J.

Each of the nine dollies has its own propulsion and braking system, Mr. Spaulding said, powered electrically and hydraulically. “If there’s any failure of the systems,” he said, “the brakes lock up.” There are four brakes on each dolly, for a total of 36 brakes.

Mr. Spaulding and his colleagues will breathe easier on Saturday night, but given the reconstruction and restoration ahead, they will not have much chance to relax. “Our goal for reopening the house would be the fall of next year,” he said. “There’s a lot more work to do.”

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The 120-foot trip took about 40 minutes, the culmination of a six-month process in which the location and cost of the Exeter School District-owned building were contested by residents and the Exeter School Board.

“I’ve been trying to document every move,” Fliegel said, taking video of the move on her camera. “When I woke up today I took a picture of it from my house.”

After about three weeks of preparing the schoolhouse for the move and building a new foundation, workers from Wolfe House & Building Movers, Upper Tulpehocken Township, placed hydraulic beams and tires underneath the building.

“It went as smooth as it could have,” said Jamin Buckingham, project foreman.

Buckingham guided the schoolhouse, with desks and bookshelves still inside, to its new foundation using a remote control, like he was steering a model airplane.

He rotated it so the door now faces the intersection, and rolled it carefully down a steep incline to its new home.

About 20 Exeter residents who live nearby turned out to watch. They came with cameras slung around their necks, though it was hard to capture the slow crawl with a still photo.

“Although it’s moving at a snail’s pace, this is the exciting part,” said Ken Pitts, school district facilities director.

Ronald McCoy, 73, attended Jacksonwald Elementary and took wood shop classes in the schoolhouse. He now lives just a few blocks away.

“It used to have all the materials in there for the wood-making projects,” McCoy said. “Its use has changed a lot over the years.”

Dr. Beverly Martin, Exeter superintendent, watched the move from the Jacksonwald playground. She said the schoolhouse would still be used for educational purposes and history lessons as it has in the past.

The $143,000 relocation was necessary to make way for road work at the intersection. The school district had a $100,00 state grant to help finance the move.

The school board debated the move since January and initially chose to relocate the schoolhouse near the new Owatin Creek Elementary School.

That plan was later deemed too expensive because of fire code problems. The Owatin location was not close enough to a road or a fire hydrant, and rectifying those issues would have cost an additional $75,000 to $100,000.

A horn sounded when the schoolhouse was in place over its new location, and Buckingham put down his remote.

His crew worked throughout the afternoon to build a temporary foundation until Landis C. Deck & Sons, Bernville, constructs the permanent one. Pitts said he expected it would take at least 10 more days to get the building set on the permanent foundation.

“It’s amazing they finally did it,” said Fliegel, her camera still trained on the now-still schoolhouse.

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Walnutport, PA