THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 5, 1994 TAG: 9407050071
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY ANNE SAITA, CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: BETHEL LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
You could call Benjamin Hobbs' enclave of antebellum buildings a community for the condemned. A safe haven for the neglected and battered. An orphanage for outhouses.
For Hobbs and his wife, Jacqueline, you can call it home.
Since the 1970s, the Hobbses have rescued 13 pre-Civil War homes, jails, smokehouses, dairy buildings and more throughout rural northeastern North Carolina and brought them to their Bethel homestead for safekeeping. Some were gladly donated by landowners; some Hobbs paid to own.
``These buildings have very little value to people, that's why they give them to me,'' Hobbs said while conducting a brief tour of the wooden structures nestled among a grove of beech and pine trees.
Under the former math teacher's skillful instruction, the long neglected buildings are getting a new lease on life. The couple is turning their Williamsburg-like compound into the Albemarle area's newest historic attraction.
``I thought these buildings were worth something,'' Hobbs said. ``Many times the grand houses are saved. It's the small ones that don't get saved.''
Some of the buildings are slowly being restored to provide rooms for the couple's Beechtree Inn, a bed & breakfast that opened last winter and has housed 28 guests, mostly from Hampton Roads.
Currently, overnight visitors can stay in either a detached wing off the main home, known as the Richard Pratt House, or at the adjacent Bear Swamp House. Families with small children are easily accommodated.
Named after the area where it was recovered, the Bear Swamp House is believed to be one of the last survivors of a specific construction method used in the early 1800s.
The rooms' black, blue and olive trim work are original colors. Weatherboards still bear the Roman numerals used for placement when the house was built.
Inside, authentic touches include a nine-peg closet rack that probably held early owners' entire wardrobes. The brick fireplace in the sitting room provides added warmth in the winter.
A full bathroom was added for guests and features a marbleized vanity and floor accented by a newly tiled steel tub and shower.
Like the Bear Swamp House, the Pratt Wing is filled with antiques and 18th century reproductions done by Hobbs, a professional cabinetmaker who left teaching more than a decade ago to make furniture full time.
Despite the rustic feel, rooms come equipped with modern heating and cooling systems, cable television and telephone service.
``We tried to not scrimp or get by a cheaper way. We did the best we could,'' Jackie Hobbs said.
The Bear Swamp House originally served as the showcase room for Hobbs' post beds, chests, tables, bookcases and desks constructed and stained in his nearby woodworking shop.
The large work shed, like every other building on the family's wooded lot - including the main dwelling house, bought for about $1,000 - was moved from someplace else.
Hobbs' pre-Civil War collection began in the early 1970s, when a friend in Murfreesboro restored an ancestral home.
Hobbs got the ``old house fever'' and began scouting for abandoned buildings destined to be razed or ruined by nature.
His first acquisition was a tiny jail plucked from a Perquimans County plantation home and now located at the Hobbs place on Pender Road, about two miles off U.S. 17 between Hertford and Edenton.
A smokehouse from Hertford, used for storage, is one of the few buildings Hobbs purchased, for about $100 and mainly for aesthetics. ``We bought it for symmetry, sort of. There was a spot that needed something,'' he said.
All these outbuildings needed something too: a purpose.
``Small buildings ceased to have a use,'' Hobbs said. ``Plus, so many people moved away and they were abandoned - and an abandoned building becomes a liability.''
To Hobbs, however, these sagging structures are a draw.
``I think the window of opportunity to save them is getting smaller now. There's so little left,'' he said.
Three recent arrivals from Gates County are now in various stages of reconstruction. Two more buildings, a privy and a barn, will soon join the fold.
The pace of the restorations and inn expansions will depend on income from the family's new bed and breakfast business, promoted almost entirely by word-of-mouth.
Rooms rent for $45 to $75 daily and include a full breakfast served on china and hand-blown glassware in the Pratt House dining room. ``It makes it, I think, a little more fun,'' Jackie said.
With 30 acres of farmland surrounding them, the Hobbs family, which includes three grown sons, still has plenty of room to add to the menagerie.
``I like the idea of grouping old houses,'' Hobbs said. ``There certainly will not be enough for a village, but we'll save what we can.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
DREW C. WILSON/Staff
Jacqueline Hobbs stands in the doorways of an 1840 Perquimans County
jailhouse. Since the 1970s, the Hobbses have rescued 13 pre-Civil
War homes, jails, smoke houses, dairy buildings and more throughout
rural northeastern North Carolina.
Benjamin Hobbs, who runs the Beechtree Inn with his wife,
Jacqueline, works to reproduce a set of 12 1760 Chowan County arm
chairs. The original is at right.
by CNB