A historic home just the beginning for Washington couple

Published 7:30 pm Thursday, December 12, 2019

This feature has traditionally been dedicated to highlighting the many interesting homes in Beaufort County. Some of them have been on the market; others, generations of one family have called them home. They’ve run the gamut of the historic, new construction, the restored and renovated, the interesting, eclectic and classic.

But sometimes the story of a home is less about the structure itself and more about the people who reside there. That’s certainly the case at 1308 N. Market St. in Washington. The house itself is remarkable — built in 1910, home to generations of the Roebuck family, a sprawling 2,900 square feet set back on a large, landscaped lot near the intersection of 15th Street. As remarkable as the house is, the story of its current owners, Melonie Grooms and Tracy Warren, is even more so.

Their story starts in 2016. Grooms, then living in Hickory, was recently widowed. Originally from Greenville, Warren had retired to Washington, drawn back to the river by childhood summers spent at the family river house in Bayview. They’d crossed paths before — both were educators teaching in Farmville in the 1980s. Grooms taught high school; Warren taught middle school.

“I taught Melonie’s daughter when her daughter was in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades about 30 years ago. It took me 30 years to get that parent-teacher conference,” Warren laughed.

RECOGNIZABLE SITE: Melonie Grooms and Tracy Warren bought the home previously owned by Max and Faye Roebuck in 2017. Since, they’ve embraced what they call their perfect home. (Vail Stewart Rumley/Daily News)

It was Grooms’ daughter Ashley who would mention Warren in 2016; she’d reconnected with him on Facebook.

“Ashley told me he was on Facebook and she said, ‘You should date him,’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t need to date anyone,’” Grooms said. “Ashley loved him to death and thought he walked on water. She was so attached to him. She still is.”

Facebook ultimately would change Grooms’ mind — whenever she logged on to the social media site, Warren would pop as a friend suggestion under “people you may know.” In January 2016, she finally gave in to Facebook’s not-so-subtle suggestion and “friended” Warren. The two began messaging back and forth immediately.

“That was a Tuesday, and by Friday we had met,” Warren said. “We met at my brother’s house in Kernersville, and we went dancing, and we’ve been dancing ever since.”

That night, they stayed up until 5 a.m. talking about students they’d both taught in Farmville all those years ago. A year later, Grooms was ready to make the move to Washington, and the couple enlisted Maria Wilson, co-owner of Coldwell Banker Coastal Rivers Real Estate, to help Grooms find her own home, much closer to her beau than the mountain town of Hickory.

IN THE DETAILS: Ten-foot ceilings, heart-pine floors and wood mantelpieces with dentil and pilasters are just some of the architectural details to be found in the North Market Street home. (Vail Stewart Rumley/Daily News)

“(Wilson) showed me, and she showed us, every house we really wanted to see and some we didn’t want to see,” Warren said. “And every time we rode by this house, she said, ‘I really want to show you this house.’ And every time we said, ‘I don’t know — it’s more than what we want.’”

“I was looking for something much smaller,” Grooms said.

Wilson had her own connection to the house owned by Max and Faye Roebuck for 50 years — she grew up with the Roebuck children; Kenneth Roebuck was a classmate. Faye Roebuck passed away in 2015, and Wilson had been searching for the perfect owners. She knew she’d found them with Warren and Grooms, even if they didn’t know it yet.

“I knew they would bring it back to life,” Wilson said.

When Wilson finally cajoled the couple into taking a look, it was love at first sight, just like  Grooms and Warren’s storybook romance.

“We walked in that back door back there, and as soon as I walked in I said, ‘This is my house,’” Warren said.

“It was the molding, the ceilings, the fireplaces, everything about it — the character of it, the big porch, and then when I walked outside and saw that big sink under the carport? There was so much. I said, ‘This is it.’ And I knew it was,” Grooms said.

Then, an unusual buyer-seller relationship was born. Jane Roebuck Story was just as excited about the potential buyers as they were about the potential buy, Wilson said. Grooms and Story would call one another to chat about the house.

“We got to be such good friends,” Grooms said. “She was afraid that someone was going to come in and make changes, make the kitchen bigger, the dining room bigger, but we did not want to change it at all. We have not changed the structure of the home at all.”

THE KEY: One very unique feature of the home is it still uses skeleton keys in the front and back door locks. (Vail Stewart Rumley/Daily News)

Grooms and Warren loved everything about the house, from the two-acre landscaped yard to the generations-old smilax decorating the wrap-around porch, from the workshop for Warren to the original heart-pine floors and 10-foot ceilings. They set about making a few repairs needed: interior and exterior paint, a new roof, new gutters, some new plumbing and a new air-conditioning system upstairs.

“The air conditioning system upstairs was so old — this is for real now — it was a Lennox Air Handling unit, and the serial number was No. 9,” Warren laughed.

Once they’d gotten the house to where they wanted it to be, they did what comes naturally: they threw a party.

“The very first Christmas we were here, we decided to have an open house for the neighbors and the members of the praise band Tracy plays with at the Methodist Church. Mike, from across the street, came in with a big poinsettia, and I didn’t even know who he was,” Grooms laughed. “So I got to meet a lot of the new neighbors, and we had the minister bless the new house.”

And that’s when Warren got down on one knee and proposed.


DINING EXPERIENCE: A chandelier, refurbished by Tracy Warren, hangs from a plaster medallion in the dining room.

They’ve since settled into life in their new, old house, and it’s a life filled with respect and appreciation for its past owners. Faye Roebuck’s baby grand piano — the piano her daughters Deborah and Jane learned to play on — has prime placement in the living room. On it sits a framed picture of Faye Roebuck.

“I talk to her all the time,” Grooms said. “I say, ‘I don’t know if you’re gonna like this (paint) color, girl. Are you smiling, girl?’ … I know she’s happy we’re here because we love it. I’ve said to my family, I think she was an icon in this town.”

Every day, Grooms and Warren are reminded of the work, and the love, Faye Roebuck put into her, now their, home and yard.

“Outside, when it starts blooming, it blooms until December. Something pops up all the time, and that is due to Faye Roebuck,” Warren said.

The couple has more plans for the house that include work on the two bedrooms and bath upstairs; perhaps turning the bonus room over the workshop into an apartment for Airbnb rentals. But for now, they’ve created a life together in what, unexpectedly, became their perfect home.

“It is,” Grooms said. “It is us.”

ORIGINAL: While current home design calls for large kitchen/combined dining areas, Melonie Grooms and Tracy Warren love their cozy kitchen.