Work underway to restore 100-year old home to former splendor
Published 12:10 am Saturday, December 16, 2023
C.J. Peters sits inside the turret on the corner of the Bradshaw House. Peters is working on restoring the turret for the Historic Salisbury Foundation.
The turret located at the corner of the Bradshaw is one of only three octagonal turrets in the city of Salisbury, according to C.J. Peters. One of the more unique features of the home is the glass pushed into the stucco above and below the turret's windows.
An exterior side wall of the Bradshaw House. Historic Salisbury Foundation plans to replace the plywood walls with pebbledash walls that will resemble the original exterior built around 1905.
The original pebbledash wall is still present on the exterior of the first floor.
C.J. Peters shows off the glass he is using to replace the stucco features on the exterior of the turret. Peters put out a request online for donations of unused shards of glass to use in the restoration.
SALISBURY — Work to restore the Bradshaw House at the corner of Park Avenue and North Shaver Street to its original splendor is underway, led by the Historic Salisbury Foundation.
The first stop of the restoration will be for local contractor C.J. Peters to restore the turret on the southeast corner of the home. The main work Peters is doing is restoring the original wood on the turret as well as replacing the glass and stucco work that had been removed from the turret. Peters said that in order to find replacement glass, he put out a request for shards of colored glass online. By the time the start of the project rolled around, he had enough glass to perform the restoration work and still have some left over.
“Historic Salisbury Foundation is restoring it, and that’s really special that they’re doing new glass work. We’re putting on a slate roof. We’re going to restore the turret perfectly the way it’s supposed to be,” said Peters.
Peters said that he expected to have the work done by Friday, at which point the HSF can move on to replacing the exterior, second-floor pebbledash walls. At some point in the past few decades, the pebbledash walls had been removed from the home and replaced with a painted plywood exterior. The first-floor walls were left on the home. Edward Norvell, president of the HSF board of trustees, said that the organization already has a Salisbury-based contractor lined up and they hope to begin the work in early January.
The house had been on the group’s radar for years before it finally became available in 2022, Norvell said. HSF took the opportunity and bought the home as part of their revolving fund project. The revolving fund project allows the HSF to buy a home with the funding, pay to stabilize it and then sell the home, returning the profits into the revolving fund to work on another historic building.
Norvell pointed to the many features the house boasts that made the HSF interested in buying it, including the original woodwork remaining in the mantles and stairway, the stained glass windows, the pebbledash exterior and the turret. Peters said that the octagonal turret was one of only a couple that still remain in the city.
In 1984, the North Long Street-Park Avenue Historic District, the area the Bradshaw House sits in, was nominated for placement on the National Register of Historic Places. That nomination included the basic history of the home until the 1980s. The home was built in 1907 by local contractor David Clarence Bradshaw, who envisioned it as the dream home for him and his wife. Bradshaw died shortly after building the home and it was owned and inhabited by his wife, listed as E.J. Bradshaw, until 1935. That year, it was sold to accountant Ray Sloop, who lived in it with his family until selling it in the late 1940s.
“Although it does not possess the rich eclectic exterior decoration of its neighbors, the Victorian character of this two-and-one-half story stuccoed dwelling is emphasized by its asymmetrical composition featuring a high hipped roof interrupted with projecting front and side pedimented gables, dormers and a three-stage corner tower with a conical roof,” the nomination says about the Bradshaw house.
Norvell could not say when the HSF would have the stabilization of the home completed. Once the project is finished, the organization will list the home for sale with added protective covenants. Those covenants will require the new homeowner to maintain the historical exterior and any parts of the interior which are deemed historically relevant.
