Services
Our Heritage Preserved's reclaimed antique plank flooring is salvaged from old and unused factories, warehouses, smoke houses, tobacco barns and other agricultural buildings across rural Eastern North Carolina.
The heart of pine, oak and chestnut wood, once reclaimed, is milled into planks, slow dried in our kiln and cut to "tongue-and-groove" or customer specification. The finished heart pine is offered for sale to home owners, designers, builders, architects, and select flooring distributors. Our Heritage Preserved also provides moldings to accentuate our flooring as well as wall paneling, wainscoting, ceiling and stair treads. We also offer a wide variety of architectural elements salvaged from condemned aged homes. All styles and periods are offered in our collection.
When the first colonists arrived on the shores of America, they found virgin forests of Long Leaf Pines growing to over 150 feet. This wood was later nicknamed heart pine because, at full maturity, the trees had a unique attribute: they consisted almost entirely of heartwood, the wood of the center of the tree, with very little sapwood surrounding the outsized heart.
The heartwood was claret-colored, bug-proof, rot-resistant, incredibly strong and very durable. The heart pine lumber was used for virtually every building purpose. The wood’s strength made it suitable for constructing bridges, warehouses, homes, and even railroad trestles. Large quantities of heart pine wood were exported to Europe.
Most of the buildings of out country’s own industrial revolution were constructed of heart pine. By 1900, this seemingly endless supply of wood vanished. With encroaching civilization, the conditions necessary for these trees to reseed and flourish no longer existed. No one realized it at the time, but the magnificent forests of heart pine were gone forever.