Hancock's Resolution
Pasadena, MD: 1997
The Miles Brewton House in Charleston, SC is one of the finest Georgian townhouses in America. Except for some Federal, Neoclassical, and Greek Revival remodeling, the Miles Brewton House maintains most of its original over-the-top Georgian elements. A portion of the restoration project included repair of forty-five double-hung sash windows and one large 6 foot wide Neoclassical oval window located in the front pediment. We were unable to find local contractors with adequate preservation skills, so the client allowed us to train people from the community. We created an on-site window repair school in the carriage house, focused on training and introducing a core of dedicated locals to the unique needs of historic buildings. This school not only created a labor force that was lacking in Charleston, but it also freed up the conservation team so that we could focus our attention on the careful restoration of the delicate and intricate oval window.
When the house was constructed in the 1760s the front portico was most likely adorned with a carved cartouche window that was replaced just before the turn of the nineteenth century by a more modern Neoclassical design. These windows are each unique, created by a craftsman with a particular set of skills at a particular place in time when certain trade practices were in vogue. While there are many oval windows like this on buildings throughout the country, they are all different in construction. They tell us about the capabilities and the understanding of the craftsmen, from the types of tools they worked with to the ways they solved problems. The materials, joinery, and details of the millwork on this 18th century building, although tattered and weathered, were as sophisticated in design and execution as the elaborate period furniture in the house. With that in mind, we strove to save as much of the original material as possible.
In the mid-19th century millwork standards became more standardized, but up until then these windows were each unique in their construction. As we dismantled, inspected and recorded the window, it was important to determine if failures were the result of original construction choices or stemmed from neglect that could not have been anticipated by the builder. Building elements located high up on buildings suffer from neglect because they are so hard to access. Often the only attention they receive is from painters on the end of a 40-foot ladder who lack the specific tool skills needed to make appropriate repairs and thus they are more likely to apply caulk or drive nails indiscriminately, creating other kinds of damage.
The repairs to this oval window incorporated a variety of solutions: wooden "dutchmen" patches and splines to bridge shrunken joints, moldable epoxy fillers to infill missing detailed areas, and targeted consolidation of weakened wood fibers. Each solution was custom fit to address a precise problem.
This project was designed to use local labor for repair of the forty-plus double-hung sash windows, as well as stripping and repair of most of the exterior woodwork, but we found no local contractors equipped with the skills required to conduct comprehensive repairs. The client was forward-thinking enough to agree that it would be best to train local people so the skills would exist in the local market. A sort of "crafts collective" was organized by choosing people with an expressed interest in learning new skills working under the direction of the conservation team. These individuals included both jack-of-all-trades craftsmen and women with no experience in working with their hands. (Patience and a willingness to learn is often more important for training someone in preservation skills than any prior construction experience.)
By starting with window repair in an on-site workspace, the team was sensitized to historic preservation and the tools of the trade that would prepare them for work on other parts of the building, while allowing us to assess each individual's suitability for particular tasks. Once the core group was trained, we paired them up with new team members to pass on what they had learned, thereby reducing the cost of the training budget. We designed a semi-mass production workflow within the carriage house that allowed work to proceed in discreet batches with a variety of workstations dedicated to specific stages in the repair process.
The first double-hung sash repaired as part of the windows school at Miles Brewton cost $6,000, including trainer time, but after the first ten, the windows were being turned around for $700. Of the many successes on this phase of the Miles Brewton, probably the biggest achievement was the development a uniquely trained workforce for Charleston, as well as increased pay rates for this type of skilled work, and the opportunity for several on the women on the crew to gain skills that allowed them to set up their own businesses after completion of this project.