In a back bedroom, he showed a visitor the family tree, which filled a 10-foot-tall wall.

"The planks all came from trees grown here, the nails were made here, the bricks were made here and the stone was quarried here," said Silver of the two-story Midway Plantation house that has been in his family for seven generations.

Now, he's getting ready to move all 4,000 square feet of the house and everything in it, plus the four outbuildings -- a kitchen, schoolhouse, dollhouse and carriage house -- to a new site two miles up the road.

LAND GRANTS When Charles II was returned to the English throne in 1660, he rewarded eight supporters by making them Lords Proprietors of a new colony, Carolina, which stretched from southern Virginia to the Spanish colony of Florida. But the men had difficulty managing the colony, which was troubled by piracy, wars with the Tuscarora Indians and border fights with Virginia. Seven sold their stake back to the crown. The one who didn't was an ancestor of John Carteret, Earl of Granville, who controlled 26,000 square miles from the Atlantic Ocean westward and set up his own land office to issue grants and collect rents independent of the royal government. Granville County is named for him. Lord Granville died in Bath, England, in 1763.

"The land you walked in on, there's no deed for it," Silver said. "It's never been sold."

Until now.

Silver is selling his land to developers for eastern Wake's first regional shopping center, the $48 million Shoppes at Midway Plantation. A Target and Home Depot are among the stores planned for the fields where his family once grew tobacco.

"That property will be the front door of Knightdale," Silver said of the 50-acre center being developed by a partnership of Wakefield Associates and Kimco Realty, the nation's largest owner and operator of shopping centers. The center will have 476,000 square feet of stores and will double the town's retail space when it opens in July 2006.

Silver, 59, wasn't eager to sell the property, which was a land grant to his family in 1739 by Lord Granville of England. But with six-lane Interstate 540 scheduled to begin carrying traffic beside his property in spring 2006, the choice was sell now or be surrounded by concrete.

"The big thing is, it will be the next big interchange in the county -- like Crossroads" in Cary, said Silver, whose land also has a half-mile of frontage on busy U.S. 64. "It will be the same kind of development as Triangle Town Center."

Knightdale, which is east of the Neuse River from Raleigh, has seen its population increase almost 23 percent to 7,325 since 2000, according to town manager Gary McConkey. Last year, a record 300 homes were built. But with the I-540 connector and the six-lane Knightdale bypass slated to open this spring, the boom is just beginning, said town officials and developers.

An additional1,500 homes are being planned, and developers are talking about putting 300,000 square feet of retail space on the west side of town on Hodge Road near the new bypass, said Mike Chalk, the mayor pro tem. Developers Mike Hunter and Kyle Ward, who are building the 450-home Princeton Manor subdivision on Hodge Road, recently contracted to buy a 25-acre former driving range on U.S. 64 near the Neuse River for another shopping center.

"When you see a major thoroughfare like I-540 coming into a small but populated area, it's positioned perfectly for a huge amount of growth," Hunter said. "I-540 and the 64 bypass ... will dramatically change the whole region over the next decade."

A sewer line being extended to The Shoppes at Midway Plantation will open up an additional 500 surrounding acres for development, Silver said. In the past three years, land prices jumped from $10,000 to $12,00 an acre to $30,000 to $40,000 as speculators and developers readied for the boom.

"When they [the Department of Transportation] got funding for this section of I-540 the phone started ringing," Silver said, "probably once a week."

He expects other landowners to sell, too. "It's what all these farmers will do to retire."

Silver's land is part of what was once an immense estate that stretched from the Neuse River to Rolesville in the north and Clayton in the south. Over the decades most of the land was sold off, leaving Silver with about 100 acres and the house, which was built in 1848. He is hanging onto about 50 acres at the rear of the shopping center site.

Silver, who owns a national contracting consulting firm, won't say what he is being paid for the land, but saving his family's ancestral home, which is listed on local and national historic registers, won't be cheap. A 46-acre tract nearby where he plans to move the house took two years to find and cost $1 million. The moving cost for the house and outbuildings is $500,000, he said.

There are other costs, too.

On Monday, a survey team was busy marking off the exact position of the house and outbuildings so they will be identically positioned after the move. He is still waiting for the expert who's going to restore the antique French wallpaper, which must be removed from the walls around the chimneys before the house is moved, very slowly, by trailer, to its new site.

But Silver, who lives in the house with his wife, Dena, has reconciled himself to the move and says it is worth the cost, although almost every day brings a reminder of his family's past. Someone poking around underneath the house recently retrieved a hand-blown wine bottle. A few days ago, part of a plowshare turned up.

"Farming is a business. The reason they [my family] came here was to grow tobacco. The reason Lord Granville came here to grow tobacco was because there wasn't enough in England," Silver said. "Now, the best business decision is to move the house.

"I grew up swinging from the trees, shooting my BB gun and fishing, and I'll miss all that. But if I want my family to have the same memories, it ain't gonna happen right here.

"Nobody is going to have a picnic with 18-wheelers rolling by."

Staff writer Dudley Price can be reached at 829-4525 or mailto:dprice@newsobserver.com

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