Video: How do you move an 800,000-pound, 255-year-old home? Sail it up the Chesapeake

The Galloway Mansion was completed in 1764, a wedding gift to William Nicols and Henrietta Maria Chamberlaine Nicols that sat on 200 acres near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.

But now, with suburban sprawl encroaching in the growing area across the bay from Washington D.C., the new owners said they decided it was time for a move.

So they hatched a plan to pick up the Georgian-style mansion from its home of 255 years in Easton, Maryland, drive it down to the water and load it on a barge for a 50-mile trip up the Chesapeake to Queenstown.

“Facing years of unoccupied neglect and the endless march of suburban sprawl, the historic Galloway mansion ... had a bleak future,” the owners said on a website dedicated to the move.

In order to keep this amazing piece of American history and architecture from succumbing to these forces, we decided to do the seemingly unthinkable - pick the whole house up, brick chimneys and all,” they said.

Christian Neeley, who works in cybersecurity, told The Baltimore Sun that he split the cost with his parents to move the 800,000-pound house to its new home.

The move cost the family almost $1 million, he told the newspaper, and he plans to add two additions to the house in the new location to create a family home for generations to come.

“The new intended use for this property is to give 4 generations of a very mobile and dispersed family someplace to call home,” the family said on the website about the move.

Expert House Movers, the company that moved the house, has some experience relocating historic structures, according to The Star Democrat in Easton. That’s “the same company that moved the Block Island Lighthouse in 1993 and the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in 1999,” the newspaper reported.

The house made it to the new property on the Chesapeake Bay on Sept. 25, according to the newspaper.

This story was originally published October 1, 2019 at 12:06 PM.