Demolition of historic mansion nearly complete after a week

A week after demolition of a historic Winston-Salem mansion began, just a small first-floor section remained Friday afternoon.

An orange Mitsubishi excavator, after dismantling the 6,653-square-foot Reynolda Park home room-by-room, sat idle while a chain, with a black "NO TRESPASSING" sign attached, stretched across the driveway behind three orange cones.

The mansion was designed by Charles Barton Keen, architect of the historic Reynolda House and R.J. Reynolds High School. The home was built for Wachovia executive Richard Stockton.

Roughly half the house had remained as of Wednesday, but the work was nearly complete two days later.

A Winston-Salem couple offered to buy the century-old home for $1.9 million but the owners, local builders Marc Nevin and Geoff Mitchell, moved forward with the demolition on May 8.

Mitchell, who confirmed that both sides had settled on that price, criticized the Journal's coverage of the situation, calling its reporting "misleading trash."

He expressed displeasure with comments from Jim Gray, who spoke for the potential buyers hoping to save the Reynolda Park home.

Gray, a former associate dean at both Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the UNC Chapel Hill Keenan Flagler Business School, now lives in Raleigh. But he took special interest in the situation because his father, James Gray Jr., a leader in the restoration of Old Salem, spent more than a decade refurbishing the mansion beginning in the 1950s.

The elder Gray also served for many years on the National Trust for Historic Preservation and was an early leader of the non-profit NC Preservation.

‘Hellbent on tearing it down'

Through Jim Gray, now a marketing communications and fundraising consultant, the couple said they weren't given enough time to come up with the earnest money being demanded by the owners.

Mitchell, meanwhile, complained in a text message that "Jim Grey (last name misspelled) was not involved in the negotiations and doesn't know what he's talking about."

He added that he felt the Journal's reporting "is defamatory and could cause me to lose potential business."

Gray, however, said the couple were "asking for a reasonable time to get a downpayment but Nevin was hellbent on tearing it down to get out from under what he complained was the neighborhood and preservationists' 'pressure.'"

Mitchell insisted that the couple missed multiple deadlines for signing a contract and making a payment, and that the demolition commenced when "shortly before noon on Friday (May 8) we were told they were no longer interested in buying the home."

But Gray countered that the couple gave up when it became clear that Mitchell and Nevin had become impatient and were ready to move forward with the demolition.

The owners, he said, "could not wait on the ($100,000) cash downpayment for more than two hours."

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