2016 Preservation Trades Network Workshops, September 9-11, Clermont Farm, Berryville, Virginia

The annual gathering will be at Clermont  Farm now owned by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Here is the link to the farm: http://www.clermontfarm.org/ Their facebook page has good pictures.
The National Barn Alliance will be there too.  On Friday there will be a barn tour - http://ptn.org/iptw-2016/barn-tour

There will be blacksmiths, lime mortar makers, timber framers, window repair people, masonry specialists, painters, roofers...


 Last year at Shelburne Farm I watched dimensional lumber come out of a log with bark, all by hand. I saw a Georgian cabinet built, and windows become like new.  The pictures are from that gathering.













I will be there to teach 2 sessions on
                Practical Geometry
 which, to quote Owen Biddle in 1805 "every Carpenter ought to be acquainted with".

Or more formally: "Geometry is the foundation on which practical Carpentry is based." Minard Lefever, 1833,

The sessions will be hands-on.
I will have compasses, pencils, erasers and straight edges. And drawings.
I will be helping whoever shows up see the geometry which governed framing and design for churches, mansions, houses, barns. As we uncover the geometry participants will see how design and structure come from the compass.

We will decipher brick houses in Virginia, wood frame churches in New England, houses built from 1680 to 1840. For people who want to see how much they already know I will have the plates from the first pages of the pattern books which present  "such problems in Geometry, as are absolutely necessary to the well understanding of the subject." (Asher Benjamin, 1827) Will they master the problems with a compass and a straight edge?

The pattern books of Asher Benjamin, Owen Biddle, Peter Nicholson, Minard Lefever,  will be available along with posters and handouts on Robert Adam and William Buckland.
And paper for experimenting

I demonstrate twice. There will be  plenty of opportuity for me to watch and learn from the other presenters, to explore the farm and its buildings, and talk with people. I know I will have a great time.

You can come too.

Jackson, NY, House - a Dutch vernacular frame, 4 of 6 posts

 

written January, 2016

The house has been stripped to its frame. The sheathing removed, each board numbered as it came down. The stair and moldings (inside and out) carefully moved into storage.

Now the frame is visible -
no ridge beam,
12 bents: each is a post on either end mortised to a 2nd floor joist.
The plate across the top holds them all together; The 14 rafters sit on the plate and are not spaced to match the bents.

The joists on each end are mortised into posts.
Plates, mortised into the sides of the  posts, space the bents and carry the intermediate 2nd floor joists.

Here is a post with its joist and the pegs that hold the tenons of the plates seen from the outside.

Here seen from the inside, are: 2 posts, an intermediate stud; 2nd floor joists, plates and intermediate joists.
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.
We think it was assembled bent by bent, the intermediate plates added one at a time as each bent was set into the sill.







I have measured the first floor - twice The first time it was just too cold. I hurried. I wasn't careful.

The framer used Hudson Valley Dutch framing. The house was clothed in the latest Federal style with possible Shaker influences. Inside it retains the traditional system.  

I need to add more, especially about the Dutch way of framing.
An orthographic perspective would make the frame easier to read.
The frame details deserve a post of their own.
So does the careful cleaning and repair of the frame by Green Mountain Timber Frames.
I want to redraw the front elevation to reflect the frame we saw and measured compared to the plaster and clapboard surfaces I saw and measured in the beginning.

However, it is July, months later.  Time to share!


The link to  the men who took down and repaired this house, Green Mountain Timber Frames:  https://www.greenmountaintimberframes.com .

The Old First Church Geometry - the Floor Plan - Part 4

 I first wrote about the geometry of the Old First Church in Bennington, Vermont, in September, 2012, focusing on the 2nd floor windows with their round tops.
http://www.jgrarchitect.com/2012/09/geometry-of-old-first-church-bennington.htm

I will not repeat that post and the ones that followed -  just expand upon it here.

As I studied how the church was designed I saw that the window design was the logical extension of the basic design.

This spring the full window design and then the geometry of the floor plan - which had eluded me - became obvious.

The circle geometry which determined the curves in the half round top also determined the size of the window itself and muntin pattern  in the lower section.
The completed circle of the top half intersects with the circle which begins in the lower sash. The circles divided in 4 determine the size
of the window panes.




The panes themselves are not quite square because of the thickness of the frame.

The pattern in the rounded top is made by 7 intersecting circles. The window itself is 2 intersecting circles.

I have called these 'rolling circles' because visually they seem able to roll one way or the other. Perhaps in a church the circles roll toward each other and meet..
It would be fitting symbolism for Old First Church whose covenant says the members hope to " ... become a people whom the Lord hath bound up together... "









Here is this geometry:
looking at the windows in the balcony in the church,

Here is the floor plan, measured and drawn in the 1930's by Denison Bingham Hull, the architect who supervised the church's restoration.

I superimposed a circle with its rectangle marked in red which  matches the circles that define the east interior elevation and the exterior front elevation.










This is what I had not seen before -  how the geometry of the floor layout uses the same forms as the windows. Both are 2 intersecting circles.


The rectangles laid out by the circles determine the size of the sanctuary. The diamond shape where the 2 circles cross, the center of the church,  is the  location of the dome -an acoustic device - a technological tour-de-force in 1805. The narthex fills and over flows the lower quarter of the circle. The depth and width of the front bay is determined by the arc of the circle's perimeter.









Expanding the circles in the way that the window design    'roll'  I saw that Lavius Fillmore, the master builder, did not need divide his circles into daisy wheels to locate columns and determine proportions.


This relationship of one circle to another in a linear (up and down, side to side) pattern rather than relating one circle to the next by moving around the perimeter is seen in all the elevations and plans for the Old First Church.










In the drawing to the left I have added small circles at the intersections of the arcs which mark the lines of the columns, the corners of the front bay and intersect with the perimeters of the circles at the 4 major columns - the black squares - which run from  piers in the basement through the sanctuary into the attic to anchor the trusses which carry the roof and the trusses from which the dome is suspended.

Fillmore need not have drawn a daisy wheel with its 6 petals to refine his design.
He might just have rolled his circles.


In many ways these different approaches to 'basic geometry' - as Asher Benjamin calls it - cross-reference each other. The daisy wheel and the rolling circles are variations of the same proportions.
My 'aha' moment is when I find for one way of working that is clean, simple and 'obvious'.

Here are the earlier posts about the church geometry. Each one was posted when I learned (taught myself) more about how circle geometry can be used for design. Part 1, therefore. is a preliminary understanding.  

Part 3     http://www.jgrarchitect.com/2014/11/old-first-church-and-daisy-wheel-part-3.html
Part 2     http://www.jgrarchitect.com/2014/01/old-first-church-and-daisy-wheel-part-2.html
Part 1     http://www.jgrarchitect.com/2013/01/old-first-church-and-daisy-wheel.html

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The Persistence of the Salt Box Plan, Part 2

The original owners of these houses in Bennington County, Vermont, have ancestors who lived on the New England seacoast. 

Why is that useful information? 

Settlers built what they knew. 
We have seen this in the houses the Dutch built in New Amsterdam, in the Victorian era houses in Oregon which look like the 1840's houses on the East Coast their owners had left behind, in the houses in Ohio's Western Reserve which copy those their owners knew in their home towns on the Connecticut River. 

House-wrights in new settlements built what they had been taught 'back home'.  They might have seen a pattern book; but those guides showed the Classic Orders, complex roof details, stairs and railing, mantles and entrances: decoration - not basic post and beam framing systems. A house-wright learned his craft by apprenticing to a master-builder: hands-on. He built what he had been taught and had seen.

Bennington County house-wrights copied the saltbox plans they knew.

Here are two examples.

Samuel Safford came with his family to Bennington, VT, in 1761. The next year he built the town's first corn mill and a saw mill. In 1769, he built this house for his family, 2 stories with a tight front stair against the center chimney, a large room on either side, a long narrow kitchen behind with small service rooms on either end - the salt box plan. The Safford family had lived in Hardwick. MA. Their parents had lived in Ipswich, MA. Houses with this floor plan, pre-dating this one in Bennington, can easily be found in both towns.

The Safford Mills Inn is now a B&B and a restaurant, open to the public.


The house where Robert Frost wrote 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is also open to the public. It is a museum in Shaftsbury, VT.

Built by Amaziah Martin in 1769 it uses the salt box floor plan with a variation, a center hall. The chimneys were located on the end walls which are stone.
Martin was part of a group of Baptists who came to Shaftsbury about the same time that Bennington was being settled.
The Baptist families came from Dover Plains, NY. Their parents had come to Dover Plains from the area around Smithfield, RI, where there are many salt box houses. 

Both of these houses were dramatically updated several times in the last 240 years. For an architectural historian - me - they are fascinating to visit.

I have researched the family lines for the Saffords and the Martins. I think it adds little to my thesis to include those genealogies here. 


https://www.jgrarchitect.com/2016/06/the-persistence-of-saltbox-floor-plan.html

Geometry as Design

At the PTN Workshops last summer I tried to teach geometry in construction. I assumed most people had an understanding of geometry and facility with a compass. 
I was wrong.

This year I have been 'practice teaching' with students as my guides.



This year I taught children, teenagers and adults how to use a compass. 
How it opens, how it twirls, how to keep it steady.




Everyone needed these basic skills before I could begin to help them understand the science and art of geometry, never mind how it was used to frame a building.







I thought people knew this, like the ABC's. I thought it was taught in schools, but I had teachers practicing and asking for help along with the students.





Kids and adults responded in the same way, with awe and amazement, joy and laughter - with lots of  enthusiasm.








When the children realized they could make a star by connecting the 6 points on the perimeter of the circle, they had to show me how! tell me what I should connect next!


They had magnetic tessellation blocks for exploring.

With teenagers and adults real building elevations worked best. Most of my students know the Bennington Old First Church. Since good measured drawings of the church exist, I used those.



I began by asking the students to draw in the floor line, right at the bottom of the doors. This would have been where the framer began his layout, but I didn't tell them. I have found that interesting knowledge is - at this point - extraneous information.



  
I asked them to draw diagonals across the main body of the church - from the floor to the eaves. We noticed that the lines run up the sides of the roof over the main door and cross at its ridge. 


Then with a compass we found the radius and drew the circle.  This could take some time with people who were not familiar with compasses, radii, or circles. The discovery made the effort worthwhile.

I pointed out that if the roof lines extended through the steeple those lines would meet at the top of the circle  - the ridge of the roof.

 If time permitted we found the top and bottom points on the circle with the compass. We divided the circle beginning with a horizontal diameter to find  6 more points along the perimeter and saw how the facade of the church was laid out.
We added circles, as many as we had time for. Everyone kept their diagrams.





I am pleased with the interactions. All the students knew what they had drawn. Some could explore farther on their own. Even those who couldn't be rigorous had fun.

The adults had basic tools for real conversations about the use of geometry in design and construction.

The Persistence of the Saltbox Floor Plan.

This is a ‘saltbox’. 

The name comes from its roof, which reminded Victorians of the slope of kitchen saltboxes.

Variations of this house with this roof line were built on the New England seacoast from the late 1600's to the mid-1700's..

The saltbox plan was a pattern. It did not cease to be when saltbox roofs were not longer built. It evolved, grew and adapted. 

Early NE houses were usually 2 rooms down, 2 rooms up with a chimney in the middle serving the fireplaces. 

 A lean-to off the back was often added for storage.

The storage evolved into a narrow room the length of the house with a fireplace built into the main stack. Usually small rooms on either end served as pantries and bedrooms for birthing or invalids. 

The drawings are by James Garvin - please see citation at the end of this post.

Settlers moving into Maine, western Massachusetts, the upper Connecticut River valley, and across the Green Mountains of Vermont built what they remembered - the layout, the relationship of rooms to function and each other. 

Sometimes they grew the house, using the salt box floor plan for a wider cape. This also simplified the roof frame. 



James Breckenridge built this cape in Bennington, VT, about 1765. 






This c.1800 cape, the house end of an attached farm complex, is near Brunswick, Maine. 

Bennington framers were influenced by their proximity to Dutch framing systems in the 
Hudson River watershed.
They  built story-and-a-half capes with more head room upstairs. The first floor was the saltbox  plan: 2 main front rooms with smaller rooms in the back. So was the second.



Hezekiah and Ira Armstrong built this farmhouse in Bennington  about 1810. Although it has been updated by its 5 subsequent owners, its original floor plan is still clear. 





A  story and a half cape with a post and beam frame, now demolished, about 5 miles from the Armstrong House. 
The original plan had been poorly reworked. The house lost its character.





Hiram Waters, Bennington master carpenter, built this story and a half cape for his family about 1825.
The original house uses the saltbox plan including the center chimney.
From right to left: his workshop including a display room and boarding for apprentices; his original house (the back wing with its roof facing the street); his c.1840 front wing and porch.


These 5 houses all had a steep tight back stair for access to the second floor. Broader stairs with more head room have been attempted with interesting results. 

The salt box floor plan was also used for full 2 story houses– 2 large front rooms, a long back space divided as needed on both floors,  a steep back stair as well as a turning front stair set against the chimney.

Growing up on the NH seacoast, I played in several c.1740 houses with this floor plan.


This c.1800 Westford, MA,  2 story house was measured and photographed  by the WPA in 1933-4 . It burned shortly thereafter. 

Here is its first floor plan: center chimney, 3 fireplaces, large front rooms, long back space divided as needed. 









In Bennington, VT,  the prosperous Norton family built 2 houses between 1807 and 1817 both with Palladian windows. The master-carpenter was Oliver Abel. 









These houses have center halls with graceful staircases, beautiful moldings and 2 chimney stacks. However they do not follow the 4 room, 2 chimney, center hall plan which followed the saltbox plan - seen here as drawn by Jim Garvin. They continue to use the salt box plan - 2 large front rooms, smaller service rooms in the back.




So does this house in Caledonia County, VT. first laid out about  1780, much updated since.

The Vail House in Bennington, c. 1800. While the chimneys were  moved to the end walls, the framer kept the traditional saltbox plan. 

Finally, the Blow Me Down Casino at Saint-Gaudens NHS in Cornish, NH.
I was there last week for a preservation conference. The house was part of the program.
Its record says 'Built in 1788'. At first I thought, "Absolutely NOT! Somebody who wanted to be 'Colonial' added that center chimney."

Then I looked at the paired 2nd floor windows - the placement of those windows in the wall, the geometry, said this house was pre-1800.

The record and physical evidence show that in 1926, the foundation, the first floor joists, the back wing, attic, and roof were replaced. East and west windows were altered. The chimney was removed, rebuilt. Again in the 1950's the first floor interior was changed. Porches, verandas, balustrades were added and deleted. 

I explored the house, basement to attic. I read the drawings and notes. One indicated the 2nd floor layout had been adapted, not changed.
Not until I had left the conference did I realize the 2nd floor was the saltbox layout -  a large front room on either side of a center chimney, (now removed and replaced by a bathroom and modern chimney) perhaps a front stair (now also gone) and the back stair in the back wing with small secondary rooms. 

For more , please read my second post on the saltbox floor plan: https://www.jgrarchitect.com/2016/06/the-persistence-of-salt-box-plan-part-2.

To read about the house first pictured  - the Defoe- Mooar- Wright House in Pownal, VT, - see the column I wrote for the Bennington Banner. http://passingbyjgr.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-defoe-mooar-wright-house.html

Most of the houses shown here I have been in, including their basements and attics. Many I have measured. They all have the saltbox floor plan. I have posted photographs to emphasize that the exterior style of a house was not necessarily reflected in the arrangement of its spaces, and to show the persistence of the saltbox plan.

The 3 floor plans are drawn by James L. Garvin, and can be found in his book, A Building History of Northern New England. Hanover and London, 2001. p.97,98,99. They are reproduced here with his permission.

I am not the only person aware of this persistence of form.
Kenneth Hafertepe, in his article  Asher Benjamin Begins: the Samuel and Dorothy Hinckley House in Old-Time New England, Spring/Summer, 1999, mentions on page 8 that in the Connecticut Valley "center chimneys persisted into the next (19th) century". Benjamin built the Hinckley House in Greenfield, MA, in 1796. 
http://www.historicnewengland.org/preservation/your-older-or-historic-home/articles/pdf523.pdf

Jackson, NY, house: the windows and the frame , 3 of 6 posts

Dismantling a house is always exciting.

Renovation reveals parts of the frame, the foundation, the joinery of an old house. But taking it down carefully shows us all of it.

So even though  it was 10*F with a stiff wind, I have been there - for the past week. My fingers froze, my camera refused to work. The timber framers said their battery operated power tools were likewise not inclined to cooperate.  





The newer windows were shorter than the originals.The hole above was filled in with 2 short lengths of clapboard.   








Last week with the clapboard removed, The original window frames were obvious.









Inside the frame was exposed; the rough window opening visible.
Still the 'window' we saw was not the original.












At the top of the opening we could see a new stud scabbed against the old, wider stud. The wider stud stopped at the top of the original window.
 Note the white smudge marks on the sheathing - they are made by the un-fired brick that was used for insulation - nogging - and fire stopping. 







 Bottom of the same window - more white marks on the side of the frame where the brick was under the original window. One of the timber framers, who saw this first, is measuring as I take notes.

I had not expected to see the bottom -  the sill - of the original window higher than the newer one but the evidence was right there. At some windows the cut stud was newer lumber as well.

The newer windows sat a little lower than the old. The height of the old matched the height of the front door.

The posts on each side of the window have the 2nd floor joists mortised into them. These bents - front to back down the length of the house, one each side of each window - frame the house. 

This is how Dutch houses in the Colonies were framed 2 generations before this house was built.  

The picture of the southwest corner shows the post on the left side of the front corner window running from floor to roof, the beam mortised into the post, brick nogging, and cross bracing.

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Note: in the picture of the window (above) an intermediate joist is visible  - centered above the window. It is not mortised into a post. It sits on the plate. There are regular intermediate joists in the floor frame of the 2nd floor.


The link to  the men who took down and repaired this house, Green Mountain Timber Frames:  https://www.greenmountaintimberframes.com .
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