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any Pamlico County homes sit taller than when they were first built and a lot of them were raised after a flood, when the importance of being higher and drier was driven home. If you wanted a house raised — or moved altogether — it was Jimmy Collins and his crew who did the job.

They were as much a part of the Pamlico County landscape as the homes they worked on. But not any longer.

Jimmy Collins and Michael Duval in late October, as they were raising one last house. It is on Mildred Street in Oriental.

After more than half a century of moving homes from one place to another, or raising them a few feet, Jimmy Collins has decided to retire. “I’m done now,” he says.

In late October, just a few days after turning 70, Jimmy raised his last house. He laughs, “I’m wore out.”

Jimmy Collins says this is the last house he’ll raise.

Jimmy figures that since 1956, he’s raised or moved 150 to 200 homes a year in Pamlico, Craven, Carteret, Beaufort and other nearby counties. That’s roughly ten thousand homes. He can list more than a half dozen churches he’s moved or lifted in that time.

His final job, a few days before Halloween, was a house on Mildred Street in Oriental. With Jimmy was Michael Duval, who has worked with him for more than 40 years.

Why it’s called a crawl space. Michael Duval wedges more wood under the cross beam.

Jimmy Collins and the web of wood stacks, cross beams and lifters that help to raise the house on Mildred Street.

Their mission that day was to lift the weather-shingled house about 3 and a half feet. For hours, they built stacks of wood under the corners of the house and under the metal cross beams, A system of hoses lifts the house a few inches at a time, and then more wood was added to the stack, until eventually, the house was up.

Jimmy Collins checking on how high the house has been raised. In the mid-1960’s he moved the house to this spot from Straight Road. At that time, the oak tree at left was only about a half foot wide, he says.

As it turned out, it wasn’t the first time Jimmy had worked on this particular house. Back in the mid-1960’s, he moved the very same house from Straight Road to Mildred. Back then, he noted, the oak tree in the Mildred Street front yard was only about 6 inches in diameter. It’s now so big a person can’t wrap their arms around it.

Michael Duval and Jimmy Collins under the house on Mildred Street.

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Jimmy Collins says his very first job was to move a home from New Bern to Bridgeton. In 1956, that meant traveling across the old Neuse River Bridge, a narrow two-lane span.

Jimmy Collins hauls hose from his truck to the last worksite, a house that was to be raised on Oriental’s Mildred Street. He says that over the years, he’s gotten phone calls from people looking for him to transport their belongings from one house to another. He had to explain that he didn’t move the contents of houses, he moved the actual house.

He says he sent two men ahead on the bridge in order to halt oncoming traffic, “but no body would stop.” He eventually started to travel across the bridge, house in tow, and was met at the other side by a patrolman who gave him a ticket.

Michael Duval, who has been working with Jimmy Collins for 4 decades.

He says that he’s since scheduled a lot of house movings for Sunday mornings when traffic would be lighter. Even then, though, he sometimes encountered people unhappy to be caught up in the traffic. He laughs at the memory of motorists who cursed him, “‘How in the hell do you expect me to get to church?’”

Jimmy Collins under the house on Mildred Street.

He didn’t have to contend with cursing churchgoers when raising a house, but he and his crew did face other issues working in that tight crawl space. The biggest challenge, he says, was “getting underneath to run the snakes out.”

So how does one do that? Jimmy Collins says they’d burn sulfur balls. Some sites required repeated applications.

Challenges aside, he says he got a sense of satisfaction over the years, especially from “raising a brick house and not cracking it.”

Gembo, Jimmy Collins’ dog, waits in the truck.

On the day of the Mildred Street house raising, Jimmy pauses to have a mid-afternoon snack. Along with the fruit in a Ziploc bag, he pulls out a piece of paper, reads it and smiles. It’s a note from his wife, Eloise. For a decade, each workday, she has tucked a valentine in with his food. Jimmy says he’s “saved every one of them.”

Reading a note from Eloise.

They’ve been married 9 years, but Jimmy is quick to add that they “should’ve been married 55.” He and Eloise first met in high school in Craven County, then got together again about a decade ago.

The actual lifting is done with air hoses, with a few tweaks of the controls.

The house moving and house raising business has been slow the past two years, Jimmy Collins says. The economy may be one factor but he also notes that there’ve not been many hurricanes. In Pamlico and nearby counties where he works, the last hurricane to bring much flooding was Ophelia, in 2005.

All of that led to the decision to call it quits a few days after his 70th birthday. Not that he’s stopped working altogether. He owns a few properties in Craven County that he and Michael Duval are renovating.

Jimmy says that there have been other times when he’s quit the business only to get it started back up again. This time though, he says it’s for real. “I’ve quit before, but I’ve not retired before. I’ve not been 70 before.”

The House That Ruth Visited? Jimmy Collins house-raising on Mildred Street drew spectators. Neighbor Billy Kemp told the house’s owner Laura Turgeon that when the house was back on Straight Road, it was known as a place to go for non-taxed liquor. He spoke of a bootlegger named “Pegleg” and said that Babe Ruth visited there when he came to the area to hunt.

Posted Tuesday November 30, 2010 by Melinda Penkava