Town of Huntersville demolishes historic home to make room for greenway

HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. — The town of Huntersville lost a little bit of its history Wednesday.

It took just four hours for demolition crews to reduce more than a century of history to a pile of debris.

In March, the town agreed to purchase the 102-year-old house that sat near the corner of Old Statesville and Gilead as part of its greenway expansion project.

Kathy Jones, of the Olde Huntersville Historic Society, said the house was first owned by beloved town doctor Thomas Craven from the early 1900s until he passed in the 1950s. Craven also served as Huntersville’s mayor from 1927-1940.

The “Doc Craven” house, as it became known, had been a fixture for Huntersville natives until it recently fell into poor condition.

Although one of the options for the greenway project included the house in the plans, ultimately the town board voted 4-2 to have it razed.

The greenway that will come through the property will eventually run all the way under Interstate 77, connecting downtown Huntersville to its suburban neighborhoods.

Assistant town manager Bobby Williams told Channel 9′s Mark Becker that the board tried to find a buyer who would agree to move the house, but they didn’t have any takers.

“It’s tough to see history go for things to move forward sometimes, so it’s probably bittersweet for a lot of folks,” he said.

For residents Amber Kovacs and Amy Hallman, seeing the house come down was like watching an old friend fade away.

“We just felt like we needed to be here, to kind of be with it to the end,” Hallman said.

“It’s really sad to see. It’s emotional, and it’s almost like you can feel it as it’s getting ripped down,” Kovacs said.

“When the window and the attic came down it seemed to struggle – it kind of encompassed everything I was feeling, and I just started to cry then because it just felt like it was finally giving in to something it and we had tried really hard to hang onto for years for our town,” Hallman added.

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Cox Media Group