By Lee Barnes
lbarnes@salisburypost.com
A statewide preservation organization has honored two Rowan County sisters for their decision to preserve their 200-year-old family farm.
Joyce Ann Barber and Rebecca Barber Floyd are among this year’s Preservation North Carolina’s winners of the Gertrude S. Carraway Award of Merit. The award is named for a New Bern activist who led the push to rebuild Tryon Palace in the 1950s.
The organization calls the sisters “heroes” for preserving their father’s 241-acre farm instead of selling it for development.
The sisters worked with Preservation North Carolina and the LandTrust for Central North Carolina to get protective covenants for the property, which includes houses built in 1854 and 1870. The property is along U.S. 70 and has railroad access, which would have made it a prime site for redevelopment.
The covenants mean the sisters have essentially donated and sold development rights on the property to LandTrust, a Salisbury-based conservation agency that works to preserve farmland in 10 counties. Work on restoring the property began in earnest in 1989, after Hurricane Hugo made a mess of part of the farm. The Floyds, living in Athens, Ga., at the time, began splitting their between Georgia and the farm. For the past five years, they’ve lived in the restored 1854 house.
Elias Barber from Maryland started the farm in 1794. In 1939, Richard Wainwright Barber bought the land from other members of the family and introduced modern farming techniques. In 1947, his farm won awards for both its corn and cotton crops.
He died in 1977.
Floyd and her husband Charles now live in the restored 1854 Franklin Barber House. Joyce Ann Barber is in a nursing home. Handicapped since birth, she worked for 20 years in the N.C. Orthopedic Hospital in Gastonia.