RESTORATION TALES 6-14-11
I have been restoring old buildings across America since 1985, and have many more tales than can be printed from my past columns. When I lived in Little Rock Arkansas from 2005 until 2013, I was lucky enough to have a forum at a painfully short-lived paper known as The Emerald City of the South, a sometimes-bi-monthly (or bi-yearly) city paper put out by Glen Schwartz, an editor/owner/publisher/ad seller that let me do just about anything, as long as it read well. Like most of my editors, he didn't really have to do anything, including formatting the text.
Though HE might have a differing opinion.
Hey, Glen!
You old stoner, you.
GHOSTS AND TREASURES
Anyone dealing with old buildings
automatically becomes a bit of historian, whether they own it or dig a ditch in
the front yard. It goes with the territory. And anyone not interested in
history is automatically expelled from owning an old building, or they’re just
plain misguided.
It’s when history comes calling in
the form of the physical and ethereal that my hackles rise in anticipation.
I personally believe in ghosts, but
professionally do not. I’ve never seen or gotten a picture of one, and trust
me, I’ve tried. I three times recorded a nonexistent string quartet in the
Married Officers’ Quarters at MacArthur
Park, now the Military Museum.
Jim Eison, the past curator, would let me set up high-bias recording equipment
in different areas of the building back in the eighties, when it was the Museum of Discovery. And that string quartet was
there each time, no matter where we set up, with the same volume and clarity
(neither which amounted to much). The music was the same piece each time as
well. I got the same results recording just outside, on the porch. No radio was
left on, and the building was quiet as a tomb. Go figure.
And in case anyone wonders, I do know
where one of the tunnels is, though if it’s the fabled “tunnel to the river”
that may or may not exist, I’ll never know. Park officials made the backhoe
driver fill it in as soon as they got wind of it, but I saw it just after he
broke through. Triangulated its location, as well, after dropping into it. Made
of hard brick, it measured ten by ten feet high, with an arched top. Stretched
twenty feet to the south before a collapse and disappeared into darkness to the
north. The park officials scolded me and the backhoe operator, but I was the
archaeological monitor on the park at the time, so I had business there. They
told me not to talk about it. Statute of limitations are up, gentlemen. The
State Archaeologist at the time was not interested in its existence. Go figure
again.
But I’ve not seen any floating
vapors. There is an apartment complex we restored a few years ago, and the
manager swore it was haunted. He still does. I went so far as to do a nighttime
photographic survey during demolition, but no images of Casper. But I felt something weird about number
fifteen. Nobody liked to work in
there. It felt creepy to all the guys, regardless of belief. We had been told
about number fourteen as well, and when a stranger showed up six months into
the project and asked whether fourteen was still haunted, we laughed and told
him we didn’t know. We all kept up our guard after that.
But, while standing outside of
number fifteen near the start of the project, I felt something cold and clammy
move right past me. I spun around, thinking I was in someone’s way, but nothing
was there.
“Did you see that?” one of my
carpenters, to whom I had been talking, asked.
“No! Did you?!!”
“No, but I saw you see it!” We
laughed nervously and changed the subject.
I personally think these things are
extensions of our selves, but I still like the movie “Poltergeist.”
Treasure is where you find it. And
have I found it.
While cleaning out the leftover
junk from a tiny apartment in a carriage house in the Quarter before restoring
it, I discovered two French Foreign Legion bayonets with numbered scabbards.
While scanning a wall for metal
pipes in a home in Connecticut, I got WAY too big a signal; opening the wall, I
found an ancient apple peeler with so many gears and hinges that it must have
been designed by Rube Goldberg. The owner let me keep it, and it sits proudly
on a bookshelf at home today. But why was it in the wall?
Sometimes the treasure can’t be
taken away, as it belongs to the house.
I cut my restoration teeth
restoring an 1835 farmhouse in upstate South Carolina (it had some sort of
presence in it, I assure you; tell you about it next time), and on one of my
yearly updates to the property, I removed some deteriorated siding on the rear
parlor wall, discovering a previously covered-up window opening. No casement or
sash, just the framed opening.
“I always thought there should have
been a window there,” Peggy, the owner told me when I called her with the news.
“How hard would it be to put in a new window with the same dimensions as the
old one?”
“About twelve hundred dollars should
do it,” I said. There were matching sashes in the barn, possibly the same ones
that had been removed. I milled the casements, sill and facings to match the
original, and that room now has windows on three sides like it did in 1835.
While digging a garden in the front
yard of the same farm early in the project, I hit brick. Thinking it was an
errant remnant of past chimney building, I tossed it aside. Then I found
another right next to the first. I tossed my shovel aside and went for my
mason’s pointing trowel. This, to you whom have not been archaeologists, is the
primary tool of that profession. I carefully cut the soil away from this
structure until I had uncovered three feet by eighteen inches. The bricks were
aligned end to end, with a depression in the middle.
I stood up and eyeballed the
direction it seemed to lead away from the front porch, and walking away from
the house towards the railroad cut in the front yard, I smiled when I reached
that fifteen-foot drop. Because there, having been cut through many decades
before, was the same brick structure. Five bricks wide, with the same
depression in the center. I scraped this one, too, and after uncovering three
feet of it, I stood up and looked towards the house.
Then I got it.
“Of course!” I laughed. “Of course!
Why didn’t I see it before?”
I hadn’t seen it before because I
didn’t have the house as a center point. And to get the best view of my find, I
had to climb down into the railroad cut and up the other side.
I turned around, and there,
perfectly profiled by the railroad cut, was the cross-section of the original
driveway of the house, complete with its brick gutter on the left side. The
gray sandy loam of the farm was interrupted by a foot-deep, twelve-foot wide
berm of hard clay and gravel, compacted into this hidden driveway only revealed
by mischance and cross-section. Further research showed that this driveway had
been built in the 1840s and abandoned around 1900 when the tracks were built.
I photographed the excavations and
reported my finds to Peggy, who couldn’t wait to see the exposed brick.
Cordoned off like a museum exhibit, it can still be seen on the Cason Farm in Hodges, South
Carolina.
But by far, my favorite offchance
find during a restoration was what dropped into my hands while demolishing a
plaster ceiling in an 1873 row house in Washington
D.C. in 1988.
What dropped into my hands was a
rat’s nest, complete with the rat.
Before you go running to the
bathroom to wash out your eyes from having read such a thing, let me assure you
that Brother Rat had been dead for long enough to mummify it. Or, with a nod to
the Egyptians, long enough to desiccate it and allow it to be preserved in the
exact form it had in life.
Now, people, I can assure you that
I have iron testicles. I chase tornadoes, explore virgin caves, and have no
problem singing in front of strangers. I can carry a musical show for four
hours if my voice holds out. I spent years hitchhiking across this country.
I’ve had a black widow for a pet for three years. I let her go when she got too
big.
I was not freaked at this
experience. I felt the plaster and lath give way, and knew I’d got a mouthful
of black dust and spider eggs and splinters and godknowswhatelse.
And guess what? I did. In two
seconds, I was covered with the hidden dirt of a century.
My exclamations (a little too
colorful to print here, I assure you) were heard throughout the third and
second floors, and my fellow craftsmen came running to see what was wrong, if
they could help, or if there was a funny story to be gleaned from my
discomfiture. And they all laffed and laffed and laffed upon seeing my face and
hair and shoulders completely draped in black dust, spider webs, and tattered
paper.
But when the dust began to clear
and they saw that I held something remarkable in my hands, they gasped.
“Get me a piece of plywood or
drywall!” I sputtered, spitting centuries of dirt from my face. I stood there
on the stepladder, shaking the dirt from my hair, trying to make it possible to
open my eyes without going blind. I held something airy and ancient and
colorful in my hands, and it was so light that I thought it’d blow away with my
next breath.
“What IS that?” more than one
worker asked.
“Its history, boys,” I smiled, my
mouth crusted with black dust. “And you’re the first to see it in decades.”
It was true; I had so much dust in
my eyes that I could hardly see a thing. But I knew what I had from feel and
from the first glimpse of what had dropped before the dark dust cloud took
over.
One of the carpenters held out a
scrap of drywall with shaking hands, and I placed my find onto it carefully.
“Take it into the front room and
put it on the table with the plans,” I said, wiping blackness from my eyes.
“Somebody bring me another scrap! There’s more!”
I had soon emptied the two-foot
space above the third floor of its rat nest, and alighting from the ladder,
walked to the front room with the second half of the treasure. Word had spread
of the find, and within a minute, fifteen guys stood agape at the table.
“How old is it?”
“Is that a rat?”
“What’s all that stuff?”
The rat was ten inches from tip to butt,
excluding the tail, and its tail measured that again; this appendage was
wrapped tightly around its side, and its face was turned up slightly. It
appeared to be looking at me, and its grin revealed more of its teeth than I
wanted to see. Tan skin stretched tautly across a long skeleton, and by its
size, I surmised that this particular rat lived rather well.
But the real treasure was its nest;
a hundred years of history filled the sticks and straw that made up its bulk.
Apparently this home had a sewing room on the third floor, because the third
most prominent ingredient was thread. Thread of all colors, thread of all
sheens. It looked as if it had just been taken from the spool, nevermind the
black dirt. Then there was a plethora of fabric cuttings, some merely rag edges
and some as fine as crinoline. The rat was apparently egalitarian in its
tastes.
And buttons! Oh, my! I had heard
that rats are attracted to shiny baubles, but this was the first proof I’d
seen. It had a thing for silver buttons, and the gaudier or more embossed, the
better it liked them.
I dated the nest to 1893 at the
oldest, mainly because the rat also had a taste for paper. Scraps of personal
notes, bits of newspaper, postcards, and box tops littered the nest. Most of
the dates were in the early 1890’s, but it was the nearly intact playbill that
excited me most. I forget what the play or venue was, but the date was 1893.
The crew debated and declaimed,
discoursed and discussed. Until the foreman came and sent us all back to work.
Then he added his three cent’s worth.
“Damn! It’s a rat’s nest from a
hundred years ago!”
That’s why he was the boss. Sharp
as a spoon, he was.
That night, I presented the nest,
complete with Brother Rat, to Alan, the owner of the house. Being a corporate
lawyer, he was not impressed.
It was his loss.
I kept the rat. Still have it
somewhere, though it may have gone to dust by now.
History stands still only when kept
in a dark, dry place. But it’s nice when it’s discovered.
Then we can learn and talk about
it.
What time capsules are waiting for
YOU?
ADDENDUM
Since this colulumn was writ, I
have found something even more remarkable.
While restoring the 1820 Estevan
Hall in Helena, Arkansas in 2012, one of the demo crew came
running downstairs. Everyone on each crew had been given explicit instructions
to bring me any found objects, no matter how young or old.
"What about this?" he
asked, caked with rock wool dust. He'd been removing old insulation from an
attic behind a four-foot kneewall, and had been crouched for hours. I'm sure
the tiny paper dust mask he wore wasn't helping keep the fiberglass out of his
lungs, either.
He presented me with a strange
looking chain found in the attic. It had a round link on the end, oblong
links in the middle, and an embossed plate in the center. The whole thing was
hand-forged.
"Looks like it'll just fit
around someone's neck," Tim, my demo guy, said with a smile. He was
referring to the local rumors (all apocryphal) of slaves kept in chains in the basement
before the War of Northern Aggression. "Is that a name on the plate in the
middle?"
It was, but I couldn't read it.
"I doubt they made metal
nameplates for slaves," I quipped, examining the thing closely. I still
don't know what it was. Tim, newly energized from this find, went back up to
finish.
"Keep your eyes open!" I
yelled after him.
I hadn't been organizing the plans
on the construction table for two minutes before he came down the stairs again. This
time he was out of breath.
"I found some pictures,"
he panted.
"Well, bring 'em here!"
He shook his head.
"You'd better come up."
I followed him to the crawl door in
the second floor wall. This part of the house had been added in the early 20th
century, and the room had four-foot kneewalls. He pointed to an area about
thirty feet from the door, then disappeared into the hole.
"Damn," I said, following
with my point-and-shoot camera. I HATE crawling. I had hated it since a
disastrous run-in with a deer on my Triumph motorcycle six months before, and
my broken ribs creaked and complained as I got on my knees. I also began to
hack and cough, what with the fiberglass dust in the air.
"This better be good for me to
do all this," I sputtered to Tim. I figured he had found a few desiccated
photographs with water spots and curled edges.
But at the end of the crawl, I was
amply rewarded.
"Holy mother of God," I
said. "Hold that one forward a little. Yeah, like that. Now move
back...that's it."
I took only one picture. I could
hardly breathe in all the dust.
"Stay here," I said.
"I'm going to knock a hole in the wall so we can get them out." I crawled
back to the door and looked around the room to figure where the pictures were;
they were behind the back wall to the closet. Luckily, this room was sheathed
with unsaturated Celotex (????), so knocking a hole in the wall was easy, and
Tim passed the two framed portraits through with none of the bumping and
scratching they would have endured if we used the crawl. There were five more
small pictures in frames as well.
Once the whole collection was
downstairs, the black dust and fiberglass was wiped from them. The two big
portraits looked to be about 1840s vintage, as judged by the clothing, hair
styles, and artistic execution. I immediately called the architect, who called
the owner, and then I got the person in charge of building services for the Delta Cultural
Center. SHE had the
climate-controlled storage where the portraits would be kept safe until they
were carefully cleaned.
It turns out that the portraits
were of the builder's son and daughter-in-law, and I was pretty close in my
rudimentary dating as mid-1840s. The others were framed photographs that were
taken in the first part of the 20th century, and featured a number of familial
scenes, but unfortunately nothing from the outside of the house, which is what
we really needed for architectural verification of facades. They had probably been
put behind the kneewall when the addition was built around 1919, but why they
had been forgotten is a mystery.
The most interesting of the small
pictures was one of the same man in the big portrait. Only in this picture he
was fully white-headed. It was unmistakably the same man.
When the restoration of Estevan
Hall is finished, it will become the Helena Civil War Parks Visitors Center.
The two portraits are slated to hang prominently in the main room, but I hope
they'll include the picture of Tim and his very-evident grin behind that dust
mask. I think the way they were found was as interesting as the pictures
themselves.
