BETHANIA -- Two weeks before Rosalie Horton had to move out of her house in Winston-Salem after selling it, she looked at the Solomon Transou House off Main Street in Bethania.
Her friends had encouraged her to check out the house. Once she saw it, she thought it was the one for her. She would just buy it, put in a new heating and air-conditioning system and then move in.
That was 10 months ago. Although the project has proven much more involved than she expected, now that it is nearly finished, she has been impressed with the transformation.
Horton is the daughter of the late Ham Horton Jr., a former North Carolina state senator from Forsyth County. She has renovated five houses in cities from Durham to Richmond, Va., but the Solomon Transou is her first attempt at restoration, she said.
"I wasn't exactly looking for an old house to restore," Horton said. "I had no idea what we would find…. I'm just lucky to be able to do it."
With the help of builder Kevin Thomas, she is restoring the outside of the house to the way it would have looked in the late 1700s, but the chimney will be a style from the 1840s. The inside of the house mixes Moravian architectural details, with modern-day conveniences.
Thomas has a reputation for working wonders with old houses and is known by many as the "log whisperer," Horton said.
"People show up in the driveway to watch his new project," Horton said. "He knows what he's doing and I just don't question him, except when I have to give my opinion."
They've done a lot so far. They have removed a central chimney and put in two interior chimneys. The third floor has been opened up, a room added to the back of the house, and a porch on the front.
The back porch has been replaced, and the fireplace has been restored, as have the ceilings and siding. The plumbing and electrical systems have been upgraded, and the heating and cooling system is new.
"We really had to take down the bad old house inside of the historic house, gut it and fix it," Horton said.
Thomas has been restoring houses for 28 years and said he learned the craft from his father.
"I've just always felt like you're someplace sacred," Thomas said of being on site at the houses he's restored. "You've got to have a lot of respect for these old houses.
"When you look at the restored foundation, it just makes you know that it's going to be here another 200 years."
Thomas said he hopes that the house will be finished within a month.
Michael Terry, the manager of Bethania's visitor's center, said that the restoration has been good for Bethania. He said that since work began on Horton's house, two or three other restoration projects have started and some newer homes that had been on the market have sold.
"It's like a breath of fresh air coming through Bethania," Terry said. "It helps us to remember that Bethania was the first planned Moravian settlement in North Carolina. We're approaching our 250th anniversary, so the timing is just perfect."
Exactly when the Transou House was built wasn't known until recently, Terry said.
Both written records and various artifacts found during the restoration underneath the floorboards indicate that the original log house was built in 1782 by Solomon Transou's father, Abraham Transou, he said.
"The neatest thing is that people are driving down Main Street in Bethania, stopping and looking at the house and then coming to the visitor's center to see the artifacts," Terry said. "We're literally putting them in touch with the past."
■ Lisa Boone-Wood can be reached at 727-7232 or at
lboone-wood@wsjournal.com.
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