By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost
Some people would say George Culver is in the demolition business. He prefers to call it reclamation.
When it comes to tearing down old mill buildings in North Carolina ó he has done 11 ó Culver tries to recycle 90 to 95 percent of the materials.
Now Culver’s company, Applied Abatement Demolition & Trucking, has the salvage rights on the historic Kesler Manufacturing plant, known to most Salisburians as the former Cannon Mills Plant No. 7.
“I’ve been chasing this building for five years,” Culver said this week while giving the Post a tour of the abandoned site.
Culver said he already has more than $100,000 sunk into the project through asbestos removal, opening up windows that were bricked in and gutting seven different buildings. In a back parking lot, he has stacked 1,000 pallets, which will be used for sorting and carrying off all the bricks.
He has a full-time security person living on the site and a junkyard dog who’s mean even to him.
Culver’s payday will come, he hopes, when he can tear down the buildings piece by piece and salvage what he can of the wood, brick and concrete. He plans to have 25 to 30 men on the site, who’ll be able to remove most of the complex in 90 days.
The trouble is, the city of Salisbury has halted the demolition work to give preservation interests time to see whether they can save any of the mill, which dates back to 1896.
City Manager David Treme rescinded the demolition permit Culver obtained in October after Historic Salisbury Foundation noted that the city code allows a 90-day waiting period before a demolition could proceed.
The waiting period, if approved by the Salisbury Historic Preservation Commission, applies to properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Kesler Manufacturing Historic District, which has the mill property as its focus, was added to the National Register in 1985.
Earlier this month, the Historic Preservation Commission started the clock ticking on a full 90-day waiting period, which will extend into March.
The city’s move blindsided Culver.
“I’ve never had this problem,” he said. “This is hurting me.”
Meanwhile, Historic Salisbury Foundation Managing Director Jack Thomson is optimistic that part of the mill complex can and should be saved.
Just days after the Historic Preservation Commission instituted the waiting period, the foundation brought in a Greenville, S.C., developer to tour the plant. That developer, whose team has experience in these kinds of projects, has started a conversation with the property’s owner in Atlanta, Thomson said.
In 2007, FCS Urban Ministries of Atlanta became the owner when it received the mill site as a gift. The nonprofit group later contracted with Culver to clear the site in hopes it could eventually sell the vacant property to someone else.
Thomson said Friday state and federal historic preservation tax credits, plus a N.C. mill rehabilitation tax credit, could be layered together to make preservation and rehabilitation of some of the mill buildings economically viable.
A developer can package those tax credits together in a plan and sell them to a bank, thereby receiving cash up front to get a project off the ground, Thomson explained.
“There’s a lot of chewing on this before you know whether it’s a good project,” Thomson said.
The foundation also is pursuing other possible developers.
Thomson said preservationists see a vacant lot as much less marketable within a historic town where historic buildings are expected to be part of the fabric.
“Look at all the real estate sitting there fallow, and this is going to be exactly like that,” Thomson warned.
He challenged the notion that Culver’s recycling of the materials is a kind of historic preservation. It fails to respect the true history of the building when the bricks end up as part of a new house in suburbia, Thomson suggested.
Saving some of the buildings would be true preservation, he said.
Culver said he doesn’t want to come across as a bad guy, and he stressed he would do whatever he could to help the foundation during the 90-day waiting period.
“I hope they can save it,” he said.
But he expressed doubt that a serious developer will step forward.
First, the developer would have to buy the 12-acre property and all of its buildings. Then, he would face settling up and paying Culver, which would not be cheap.
The mill buildings themselves show signs that they would require significant rehabilitation ó something which may not be economically feasible, Culver said.
On his tour, he pointed out a lot of concerns. In the oldest manufacturing building, where many of the bricked up windows had to be knocked out during the asbestos removal, some of the wood floors were buckling and ceilings were sagging.
Grass and weeds growing on the rooftops suggest that it’s been holding a lot of water, meaning the beams underneath could be rotting from the inside out, Culver said.
Because of the way an addition was constructed, a whole wall of the original building would come down if that expansion were removed, he predicted.
Culver noted the places where previous fires caused damage. Puddles of water existed throughout the buildings.
“You let the buildings sit here another six months, and it’s going to get real bad,” Culver said.
But the structures, which cover some 280,000 square feet, also would be a treasure to Culver if he can reclaim many of the materials. He spoke of the huge wooden beams throughout the plant, some weighing more than a ton each.
Almost every brick could be cleaned and salvaged, every nail would go into a bucket as scrap metal to sell. Culver is impressed with the plant’s square smokestack, the four air washers on top of the manufacturing buildings, huge water and fuel storage tanks and the tall water tower along Park Avenue.
The metal-sided air washers, each as big as a house, were part of the ventilation system that tried to deal with the plant’s cotton dust.
Everything would be processed in the back parking lot where the 1,000 pallets are waiting.
“The whole business is a gamble,” Culver said, explaining how he really doesn’t know what he has until the materials reach the parking lot.
Culver pointed out places that were too dangerous for his men to traverse and how he would use machinery to pull down those parts of buildings.
He plans to sell a couple cotton warehouses on the site to another salvager.
Overall, the buildings are a fire hazard and safety liability for the owner, Culver said. He also has expressed concerns about environmental issues on the site, saying the grounds are possibly contaminated with PCBs, mercury and fuel oil.
It’s just one more expense any buyer would face, Culver noted.
Meanwhile, he waits.