From the archives: Preservation NC director gives CPR to state’s historic buildings

Editor’s Note: J. Myrick Howard previously was honored as a News & Observer Tar Heel of the Week. This story was originally published Aug. 10, 1997. He was named The N&O’s Tar Heel of the Year in 2023.

J. Myrick Howard produces a key to the door of the old Briggs Hardware building on the Fayetteville Street Mall and promptly confronts a circumstance that, at one level or another, defines his life’s work: The door is stuck shut.

Given that this is frustratingly common — Howard, who last week began his 20th year as executive director of Preservation North Carolina, has grown accustomed to facing obstacles, doors included — he’d be forgiven an outburst. A hearty shove, at least.

Yet despite the jam, Howard is tenaciously patient. Even though there’s a meeting demanding his attention in 15 minutes, and the building he is supposed to be showing is sealed tight, he remains perfectly at ease, willing instead to discuss the exterior renovation that soon will transform the four-story structure from its current state of neglect to the glory of its past.

And why get all flustered, really? A couple of workmen soon appear and solve the problem. Within minutes, the door is flung open and Howard, as usual, is in.

“His ego never gets in the way — never, never,” says Carol Wyant, director of statewide partnerships for the Washington-based National Trust of Historic Preservations. “He focuses on the mission and, if one way won’t work, he finds what will.”

Howard’s steady leadership has made Preservation North Carolina one of the nation’s premier historic conservation groups, Wyant says, comparable in scope and achievement to groups in Georgia, Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania and Utah.

His group has risen in stature along with his reputation — a 20-year evolution inextricably linked. When Howard joined Preservation North Carolina in 1978, he was 25 years old and fresh out of college. He became the assistant director of the nonprofit foundation, which is dedicated to saving the state’s historic buildings and places.

It was a part-time post — one that he chose over a full-time position offered by the National Trust in Washington. But Howard says he was never torn between the two offers; he wanted to stay in North Carolina.

Such a commitment to place, he says, is deeply rooted. He grew up in a house that his grandfather built 80 years ago in Lakewood, a working-class neighborhood in Durham. His mother moved there when she was 3 and still lives there. His father, a machinist at American Tobacco, never worked anywhere else.

“I grew up with stability and continuity,” Howard says. “I had a real sense of place.”

He remembers how, when he was a kid, such Durham landmarks as the Benjamin Duke mansion were torn down — “to make way for motels and in some cases to make way for nothing,” he says.

So by the time he went to college, his career track was set. First he studied at Brown University, then at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he collected three degrees. He says he remembers telling the dean of the law school that he was pursuing his law degree to go into historic preservation.

“He laughed,” Howard says. “Now they ask me back to talk about alternative degrees in law.”

Little did Howard know that when he took the job at Preservation North Carolina, the executive director was looking to step down. Within three months, Howard was the full-time executive director, and his predecessor was the part-time assistant.

“I was pretty terrified and pretty excited,” he says. “I knew it was going to be a big challenge. I had no choice but to give it a try, ready or not.”

When he took charge, he had a budget of $34,000, which enabled the group to salvage maybe four houses a year. Today he has 14 employees and a budget of $900,000 and works with about 40 properties a year.

“What’s kind of funny is that we are doing the same things in 1997 that we were doing in 1978 in terms of the fundamental program,” Howard says. “But the scale of it is enormously different.”

Strategy to preserve old properties

Howard’s trademark for saving endangered properties is a revolving fund that uses a strategy right out of a TV infomercial: investing in real estate with little or no money down.

Howard does it with options. Rather than buying something outright, he negotiates a deal that specifies only the intent of a sale. What this option does is buy time and shield the property from being destroyed.

In the meantime, Howard works to recruit someone else to actually buy the property and renovate it according to his agency’s standards.

The strategy has been used to preserve more than 300 properties — with a combined market value of $70 million — across the state and Triangle, including the old Durham Public Library building, the Maddry Homeplace in Chapel Hill, and the Dodd-Hinsdale House in Raleigh, where a restaurant will open this fall.

“A lot of preservationists have beaten a path to Myrick’s door to study his strategy,” Wyant says. “I don’t know how many have actually done it, though. While it sounds easy, you’re still assuming a degree of responsibility for that property. Even though there may not be financial risk at the front end, it takes a lot of work to make the strategy successful.”

Howard explains: “We refer to our organization as the animal shelter for buildings. We deal with the poor dogs that nobody else will love.”

And while sheltering so-called dogs has kept Howard increasingly busy year by year, little prepared him or his board of directors for the scope of a project that unexpectedly came their way in 1995.

Some time earlier, Unifi, a textile company based in Greensboro, had closed a mill it bought in Edenton, leaving behind one of the last intact mill villages that once defined North Carolina’s industrial identity. Unifi then donated the 57 clapboard homes and the former brick mill to Preservation North Carolina — marking the agency’s largest gift.

“It’s probably been the most exciting single project we’ve been involved in,” Howard says. The project followed PNC’s traditional strategy of brokering the properties to individual buyers and controlling the renovation through covenants designed to maintain the essential character of the village.

But there were huge risks, given the scope of the project and the logistical issues involving such services as utilities and street maintenance.

Howard, with an unfaltering enthusiasm that is described as both infectious and calming, pressed to take it on.

“There was a lot of monetary concern about committing to a project like that,” says Ginny Stevens, who was PNC’s president when the project came along. “We were very much concerned that we were biting off more than we could chew. However, the board of directors is a risk-taking board because of the trust we have in Myrick.”

The risk paid off. Within four months of listing the properties, 28 were under contract. Currently, 31 homes have sold, four more are under contract and eight more have been put up for sale. Not only has PNC recouped its investment, it has reaped $300,000 in profits that have boosted the group’s endowment to $900,000.

“We have been absolutely blown away with how successful it’s been,” Howard says. “And it’s preserving the essence of the mill village, which is certainly an important part of North Carolina history.”

A new era of projects

Saving the mill community in Edenton has marshaled in a new era for the preservation group — and for Howard’s leadership. Two more large-scale projects are planned.

One is the 120-year-old Glencoe textile mill village outside Burlington, with 95 acres, 35 houses and 100,000 square feet of mill building. The other is a 500,000-square-foot brick textile plant in Gastonia that PNC optioned this summer with tentative plans to recruit multiple uses and tenants.

“We are now looking at some of these bigger real estate efforts where we can both achieve our mission to preserve history and end up with endowment money,” Howard says. “That’s been a change of thinking in the last two years.”

Still, he says, the preservation group will continue to invest in smaller properties and renovate some of them. The Briggs Hardware building, for example, is being refurbished by PNC as its new office building — something it has done four times before at properties in Raleigh.

The group’s current office, at the old Bishop’s House on the campus of St. Mary’s school, was saved from destruction eight years ago by PNC’s renovation.

Howard says the tax credit recently passed by the General Assembly, which grants a 30 percent credit on state taxes for historic preservation work on homes, will be a boon to future projects.

“That’s still the staple of our diet,” Howard says. “These bigger projects have certainly added some spice, if not bulk.

“We’re not going to take on every old mill or mill village in North Carolina,” he adds. “Our hope is that by demonstrating how it can be done, the private sector will take it on.”

Howard says that as he enters his 20th year with Preservation North Carolina — his first and only job — the challenge to preserve the state’s past will prove more formidable in the face of future growth.

“It really concerns me how North Carolina is growing — not that it is growing; I have no problem with the fact that it is growing — but the sprawl and short-term thinking that’s going behind it is really an issue that bothers me.”

Stevens, the former PNC president, is confident Howard will prevail.

“What we rely on him most for is his vision. Because of his phenomenal ability to retain what has happened and what is happening, he has become a wonderful resource both locally and nationally.”

J. Myrick Howard bio

Born: April 22, 1953, in Durham.

Education: Earned three degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: bachelor of arts in American history, master’s in regional planning and a law degree.

Hobbies: Sings in a Renaissance a cappella group named Fortuna; travels to Europe and elsewhere to give presentations as a preservation expert; tinkers with his renovated 86-year-old Cameron Park house.

Career milestones: His first and only job has been with Preservation North Carolina, where he was the only employee in 1978 and managed a budget of $34,000. He now oversees 14 people and a budget of $940,000.

Quote: “Preservation is not just about one building here and one building there; it is really about the fabric of our lives. It really is disturbing to me that we are building a future that in many cases will be very hard to use — the sprawl. We are building cities that are completely dependent on the car, and that means you can’t do anything without getting in a car, shutting the door on the rest of the world and driving. That separates communities. That’s the opposite of community.”