Shown here is the Grocery store after the roof, trusses some interior and some wood sash windows have been removed. The store was not structurally sound as could be seen by anyone walking by the exterior shown here that looks like the siding the store interior was doing the "wave". We were told by a neighbor that during hurricane Florence the tin roof had peeled up in many spot like a sardine can being opened. Then it was left exposed to the elements from almost three years. The wood was old growth pine that is extremely rot resistant but not impervious. The side wall shown here which is the East facing wall was open to the rain and suffered. The support beams that are supposed to hold up the second floor of the store had in many places let go from the frame in the wall. They were resting on the beard board of the first floor wall. This made the structure not impossible to save but simply uneconomical as it would have to be completely disassembled by hand (which we are doing anyway) but then put back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Our inspectors, builder and structural engineer declared the store to be not worth saving and in fact dangerous.
As of July 1 2021 the store is completely gone. The last thing done was to take apart the back ice room that was cinder block and concrete. We pulled a bunch of the bricks from the store foundation out of the dumpsters. The foundation piers were made of brick and Oyster Tabby. Our architect was there yesterday and had a colleague that was very knowledgable on historic structures. She pointed out the Oyster Tabby cement which according to Wikipedia was brought to America by the spanish and used from Florida to NC. It does come off most of the bricks pretty easily. Shown in the last shots above are the stack of bricks most all from the foundation, a close up of an oyster shell in the Tabby and a bunch of oyster shells and loose Tabby.
Shown here is the structure of the store foundation(s). The brick with Oyster Tabby concrete was used to create piers (small columns of bricks interleaved) that were supports for the base timbers. The timbers are the wood shown here and you can see the dark wood in the first picture (with a piece of horizontal bead board nailed to it) that is part of the framing (balloon frame). The brick piers or columns were not terribly well supported under the ground which led to problems with the store structure.
Shown here on our window sill over on Orange St. are a few of the bottles, an insulator from the knob and tube wiring of the Grocery store and a hanging scale. There are many more bottles and at least one scale not shown. A special bottle is from the Pep-Tono soda company of New Bern, apparently a competitor of Pepsi. We keep coming across more bottles just poking out of the ground. Laudanum bottles, half pint and pint whiskey bottles (not labeled) and more.