CANTON – A Kingfield company moved a bit of the past into the future on Wednesday.

It took father and son Jim and Seth Nickerson and their small crew about 90 minutes to make last-minute adjustments and attach a large steel I-beam atop the rear of an idling Kenworth tractor to twin I-beams underneath the jacked up two-story, early-19th-century Cape-style house.

The building was being moved for a second time to avoid flood-plagued Canton village. Wednesday it was headed from 55 Route 108 to its new location at Golden Ridge Estates off Route 108 on Summit Road.

Mounted atop stacked timbers, the garage rocked from side to side as the truck’s tires dropped over the curb, eliciting gasps from owner Cynthia Bissell and an onlooker worried about Nickerson Building Movers and Excavation Inc. crewmen who stood between the garage wall and the rig.

By 9:30 a.m., Nickerson crewmen were adding more wheels to the twin I-beams under the house. Shortly before 10:15 a.m., state troopers closed Route 108 to traffic and Seth Nickerson slowly drove the garage over planking placed beside and over lowered utility lines.

Fifteen minutes later, Jim Nickerson began driving the house toward Route 108. But when CMP crews realized it wouldn’t pass under the three 34,000-volt power lines and another utility line, three of them quickly moved bucket trucks into place and raised the lines.

An excavator had to slowly pull the rig tractor onto Route 108 – and beyond the slipperiness of the yard’s snow and ice. By 11 a.m., house and garage were slowly headed up the highway to new foundations.

Bissell, a SAD 21 director, videotaped the process while former owner Vivian Hanmer snapped photographs with a disposable camera. She and her husband, Doug, had driven four hours down from their home in Sangerville to see their old home of 24 years move to a new location. The Hanmers had moved the house up the knoll where it was located in hopes of keeping it away from the perennial floodwaters.

After devastating flooding in December 2003, Canton was able to get grant money to buy out dozens of homes located in the flood plain.

On Wednesday, Vivian Hanmer shared information about the house with Cynthia Bissell, saying she believed it was built in the 1820s, because she and her husband found newspapers from 1830 in the walls.

The Hanmers renovated and restored the house, which was constructed of hand-hewn beams and wooden pegs.

“I thought that was quite interesting, but I thought it was a little scary with the garage,” a much relieved Cynthia Bissell said, watching the procession.