By Jessie Burchette
jburchette@Salisburypost
Richard W. Barber loved his family and his farm. After his death in 1977, the farm and its collection of 100-year-old structures had some tough times.
A visit by Hurricane Hugo uprooted huge oaks and crashed them into buildings leaving a mess.
Rebecca Barber Floyd decided she wasn’t going to let Hugo or anything else destroy her father’s farm or his legacy.
“I want to honor my father,” she said recently. “He was a wonderful farmer. He took so much pride in his farm. He took so much interest in his community.”
She and her husband, Charles Floyd, set out to restore the Barber farm off Redmon Road. For several years they split time between Athens, Ga., where he was a professor in the college of business at the University of Georgia, and the Barber Junction farm.
For the past five years, they have lived in restored 1854 house, flanked by huge oak trees and buildings nearby that could be pictured on a Hallmark card. They can look out from the hilltop at the 241 acres of terraced fields covered in grass and soybeans.
On one side the house is the small wood school built by her grandfather to home-school his children.
Looking across the hillside through the large oaks, is the 1870s Edward Barber House where her husband has converted to the kitchen to his office including heart pine shelving for his hundreds of books.
It’s both a labor of love and a sort of do-it-yourself preservation effort.
The Floyds have no children, but they are determined the farm will be preserved.
Rebecca’s sister, Joyce Ann, is now in a nursing home. Handicapped since birth, she worked for 20 years in the N.C. Orthopedic Hospital in Gastonia.
To keep the farm intact, the family has crafted conservation and preservation easements and are working to create an endowment to sustain the farm in the future.
The sisters had the option to sell the acreage and spend retirement years traveling or in the lap of luxury.
The 241 acres has frontage on U.S. 70, Redmon Road and N.C. 801. And the railroad runs through it.
“It’s very valuable. We could have had a much nicer place, done lots of travelling,” said Rebecca.
“We gave that up to preserve the farm. That tells you what we thought of our daddy. It was his pride and joy.”
Restoring and preserving Richard Barber’s farm and its collection of buildings is their retirement project ó an admittedly expensive retirement project.
Home Depot and Lowe’s don’t have heart pine doors, windows or lumber or oak shingles for the roof.
They’ve found that the best 150-year-old door still has a draft.
The Floyds have worked with Landtrust for Central N.C. and Preservation North Carolina, donating the easements. In turn the family has received tax credits and some cash that has gone to the endowment.
One day, the farm may be open to the public on a limited basis, but little else will change.
Rebecca and her sister, Joyce Ann, grew up on the farm. Her father, who was involved in Mount Ulla Flour Mills, bought the farm from members of the Barber family and moved there from Mount Ulla in 1939.
He set out to put in the best farming practices possible.
The work paid off.
He repeatedly won awards as the best corn and cotton producer in the county.
A Salisbury Post story in 1947 reported Barber took first prize in the corn contest with a yield of 117.6 bushels per acre and first place in the cotton contest with a yield of 1,123 pounds per acre.
Barber used hybrid corn seed for the first time for the 1947 planting and was convinced hybrid was the way to go. “I’m going to plant it again next year,” Barber was quoted in the Post in a Dec. 30, 1947, story.
He took time for his community and county, running and winning a seat on the Rowan County Board of Education. He served 18 years, retiring in 1963. Among the accomplishments he cited was the bringing of C.C. Erwin to the county as superintendent.
A strong advocate of better schools, he assisted the Rowan County Farm Extension Service for several years in teaching better farming practices.
Rebecca went off to school, including teaching for a few years in Hillsborough while Charles finished school at UNC-Chapel Hill.
And then it was off to the University of Georgia and Athens for 40 years.
She kept her love of the farm. There’s no favorite spot or memory.
“It’s all wonderful memories,” she said.
When people visit the farm for the first time, she enjoys their reaction. “They are a little bit in awe and amazed the condition it’s still in. They don’t know we are here.”
She credits her husband with making the preservation effort possible. They’re pouring their savings into the effort and still have more to do.
Charles cited the assistance from Jason Walser, executive director of the LandTrust for Central North Carolina for help with working through the myriad preservation and conservation efforts. “We’re very high on him,” he said.
“We very definitely appreciate the county commissioners and the Landmark Commission for the designation,” he said, pointing out the procedures and paperwork for historic designations can be time consuming. It took three years to get the farm placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
“We’d tell anybody it’s a lot of work. It can be a lot of frustration, it can be costly, but if we don’t preserve our history, it won’t be done,” Rebecca concluded. “The farm is our charity.”