Century-old Mexia home on the move

MEXIA, Texas (KXAN) - Robert Kraft, a want-to-be goat dairy farmer, had only been on his new five-acre Bastrop County farm for a month and a half when he looked up one day and saw a sky filling with smoke and fire.

“They evacuated us and I grabbed a few things out of the house,” Kraft recalled. “I couldn't find my cat, but I figured we'd be back in a couple of hours because how big could it be?"

The buyer

Kraft left his house and barn behind as ordered, but he worried about the cat and he chafed at not knowing what was happening on his land.

“I snuck through the barricade and went back to find my cat and ended up staying there and fighting the fire for 12 hours,” he said.

Kraft waged his battle with a garden hose in one hand and an iPhone in the other, recording the effort with video and commentary .

“That night, I realized it was just way too big; there was nothing I could do,” he said. “It was closing in on three sides. My little water hose and me were not able to stop it. So I grabbed the cat and hiked out of there back to my truck and left and that night the place burned down.”

Ironically, Kraft credits the day-long fight with the fire with helping him avoid the traumatic stress so many other survivors experienced in the wake of the tragedy.

“It's like, well, you fought and you got beat,” he said. “It was a fair fight and now what do you do?”

His first step was to move a borrowed RV onto his place for shelter. Then he got busy trying to figure out his next step. Along the way, he paid a visit to his dentist and when the conversation got around to the fire, the dentist mentioned a friend who salvaged antique wood for a living and who also put owners of old houses in touch with buyers who seek them.

The go-between

That friend turned out to be Mike Draper, who started salvaging rare longleaf pine flooring and other antique woods from vintage houses and buildings as a hobby.

His first job was on an old house in Walburg in Williamson County. The owner was astonished to learn that not only would he not have to pay a demolition crew to take the house down, but Draper would actually pay him for the salvaged wood.

But long before that, Draper had become his own customer, traveling to Columbus, Texas, to dismantle an aging 6,000-square-foot dance hall. He worked by himself, sunup to sundown, for 45 days straight on the job.

Then he spent another six months, again working primarily alone, to build a combination office, warehouse, workshop and residential apartment near Oak Hill in Austin.

Enjoying a huge customer response, Draper went to work under the name “ This Old Wood .” Later, he bought out a similar business called, “ Old Texas Floors .” Now he operates both and the customers keep calling.

When Draper comes across a vintage structure that still boasts of integrity, though, he offers to put the owner in touch with people he knows who are looking for such buildings.

“I have people calling me all the time,” said Draper. “I've got a list of about 20 people that are looking for houses right now.”

The sellers

So, when Draper got a call from a Cedar Park couple seeking advice about what to do with a nearly 100-year-old house they had inherited in Mexia, he agreed to make the drive to the Limestone County community for a look. It didn’t take long to render a verdict.

“It had the beautiful longleaf pine,” Draper remembered. “It had the original bathtub and sink. It basically hadn't been touched for 100 years, almost 100 years, and it needed to be saved.”

When Barry and Suzanne Sharp heard that news, they were delighted. Barry’s mother, Benita Brown Sharp, had grown up in the house with her great-aunt, Mattie Victoria Brown Crouch. The aunt died in 1970, but over the decades that followed, someone in the family had stayed there, off and on, until 2005.

“It started out as the Humble Oil Field offices in Mexia,” Barry Sharp said, “and then found new life as a home for a growing family during the Depression and World War II, up through the '50s. It became a home away from home for my uncles when they came back from the military or from working.”

The last uncle died in 2005 and when the Sharps inherited the property and the home, they began the grindingly slow process of removing decades worth of family mementos, treasures and belongings, including Aunt Mattie’s clothing which still hung in the house, 35 years after her death.

Some things the Sharps left behind on purpose. The “wallpaper” on the inside of a closet was nothing more than newspaper. The date at the top of one page read, “Fri. Morning, August 22, 1947.” The headlines announced, “Sheep sharply lower,” “Butcher hogs higher,” “Corn and oats set new highs.”

There was an ad for the J.J. Riddle Company, which specialized in “Furniture, Hardware, Funeral Home.” There as a phone number for the company: 149.

In the hallway, beside the hole cut in the wall for the family telephone, was a crumbling calendar from the year 1954.

“You could tell by going through the house