Driving a house down Spring Creek Parkway takes patience and a lot more shimmying than you’d think. “Nudge over to the left a foot,” Billy Lemons yells out over the radio. “I don’t want to jump that curb if I don’t have to.”
Lemons moves houses for a living. His company, Lemons House Moving of Whitesboro, Texas, has been moving large structures like these since 1963, when his father first founded the business.
On this day, Billy is moving the Collinwood House, Plano’s oldest home built in 1862, about a mile down the road. For years, the city has tried to figure out what to do with the Gothic revival home that belonged to one of Plano’s founding families. The Civil War-era home was almost torn down because the city and voting taxpayers didn’t want to foot the bill for restoring it. But Collinwood got its happy ending when Clint Haggard and the Haggard family stepped forward to move the home onto their nearby farmland.
“I got 20 inches over here. How much you got over there?,” Billy says, hopping off the bed of a pickup truck that’s leading this caravan traveling down Windhaven Parkway, west on Spring Creek Parkway and then south on Parkwood Blvd. “You gotta line right up with it,” he tells a crewman, motioning his hand out in front of his eye line. “Then show me how much space you got.”
Billy puts two hands up, palms turned inward to demonstrate how close the house is to the obstacle ahead.
And there are plenty of obstacles. Traffic lights, lamp posts, and power lines are the ones Billy and his Lemons House Moving crew worry about most. As I’m walking alongside the house on wheels, Billy tells me to stay back when the house is crossing under the power lines.
Just as soon as the house clears the power lines, there’s a problem with a street lamp that the house won’t clear.
Shimmying to the other side isn’t an option because of a fire hydrant, so a crew member dons a ladder and climbs to the top of the roof to see whether the light pole has any give. It doesn’t, and the trailer carrying the home must reverse and use the other lane of traffic.
But there’s obstacles you don’t realize until you’re trying to maneuver an extra wide load down the street, like curbs, tree limbs, street signs, and fire hydrants. Today, about half a dozen sign poles came down temporarily, like this “Left Lane Must Turn” sign that the house bowled down.
Meanwhile, passersby on Spring Creek and Parkwood drove by with windows down and phones out to film the strange sight of a house in the middle of a busy intersection. Moves like this typically happen at night and occur in several stages, where disassembled parts of the house are moved individually. But the Collinwood House is unusual in that it moved all in one piece and during the late morning hour.
The house moved one mile and took three hours. Billy Lemons does the math for me. “Nevermind what I said earlier about the house moving two or three miles an hour while on the road,” Billy says. “That house went one-third mile per hour.”
Billy’s work is just about done as the Collinwood House moves onto its final destination. The Collinwood House will now be the Haggard House, and it’s finally found its home.
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