Press Release: Heilig Meyers Building wins 2024 Gertrude S. Carraway Award of Merit
On Wednesday, October 16th the Heilig-Meyers Building in Tabor City received the 2024 Gertrude S. Carraway Award of Merit from Preservation North Carolina. The Preservation North Carolina 2024 Conference was held in Rocky Mount, NC. Benjamin Briggs of Preservation North Carolina notified the Town of Tabor City back in July of this year that they had been chosen to receive the Award of Merit from Preservation NC.
In an award letter Mr. Briggs said: “It is my great honor to inform you that the Heilig-Meyers Building Project has been selected to be recognized with a 2024 Gertrude S. Carraway Award of Merit from Preservation North Carolina. The Carraway Awards are presented each year to people and organizations that demonstrate genuine commitment through extraordinary leadership, research, philanthropy, promotion, and/or personal participation in historic preservation. Please know that a committee reviewed a list of candidates for recognition, but yours rose to the top! Congratulations!”
This is quite an honor for the Heilig-Meyers building to receive this award. Only (12) awards of this stature are given each year. The building was competing with renovations throughout the state of North Carolina and was chosen for the thoughtful renovation in Tabor City’s Downtown Historic District. To accept the award, was Mayor Royce Harper, and First Lady Lora Harper, along with David Stogner and Sarah Stogner of Stogner Architecture. This project was paid for completely out of grant funds and Tabor City’s own Apex Construction was the General Contractor for the project.
This is the second award that the Town of Tabor City has received for renovations of buildings located in their Commercial Historic District recognized by the National Register of Historic Places. The Ritz Center, in 2019, was recognized by the Historic Wilmington Foundation for outstanding achievement in historic preservation and received the Preservation Award for Adaptive Reuse.