ncmoore

Our work with the service station in Bassett is coming to a close. We are hard at work applying mud to the outside of the building, creating an even surface on which we may apply stucco. The “mud” that we are smoothing onto the walls is a mixture of mortar, sand and water. I was surprised that it was not more complicated than that, which lead to an interesting conversation on the history of masonry with James, our lead brick mason. These building techniques have changed little since they were first developed in ancient Rome based on Greek, Egyptian and north African Phoenician building techniques. It is very satisfying for myself that I can work in a trade that has such a vast history and heritage. It really feels like I am taking part in an eons-old trade.
As we are finishing up the roughing-in of the finished masonry, we just have to finish the stucco well enough for the painters to be able to get to work. The finished building is going to be finished white with green trim and a green roof, according to the last conversation the client had with my boss. This is the first in a long list of potential sites in Bassett that can be worked on. The grant money that is coming in from the state applies to the entire main street, which includes at least another dozen buildings including an old train station. One local was especially enthusiastic about the renovations coming to the downtown area. An older gentleman and presumably his grandson, pulled up to our job site the other day in a red pick up. I talked with him for a while about what we were doing, and he told me about the memories that he had of the service shop going back to his childhood sixty years earlier. He expressed his excitement for the restoration that we were doing, especially because we are restoring it to the original appearance that the station had in its height, some sixty years earlier.
A few lessons that I have learned working with Southwest Restoration beyond how to lay mortar or tap masonry nails or set up scaffolding have been helpful and in retrospect, common sense. First, anticipate, anticipate, anticipate. If there is a guy fifteen feet above you that is laying mortar on brick as fast as possible, stand by with towels, more mortar and a bucket of water. If those things are needed, they are needed right then. If you are walking around with scaffolding bucks and braces, watch where you are going and carry it from place to place in order. There is nothing more aggravating than having the wrong pieces of scaffolding in odd places around the job site. The second lesson is, if you work slower, you go faster. This seems counter-intuitive but when it came to spreading mortar on the inside of a garage door fifteen feet above the ground on a ladder, this was unbearably true. You will spend more time fixing mistakes you make from rushing than you will ever save by working quickly. If its done right the first time, you can get done before 3:30 and maybe leave early. Lastly, clean up as you go. There is nothing worse than having piles of refuse and construction scraps laying around the job site at the end of the day when you may have a cut on your thumb, a pulled back muscle and maybe a little sore from hauling mortar. These lessons were integral to making peace with the more difficult aspects of my internship, and fortunately they were fairly easy and straight-forward lessons to grasp.

My internship really took off over spring break. I was able to spend a lot more hours delving into the construction and restoration side of the internship with Southwest Restoration. Our project has been to restore an old car service station down in Bassett, VA. Bassett is an old railroad town about an hour and a half south of Salem that is known for its furniture factories. The town itself is rather small, and it is apparent that it has seen better days. This particular service station was built in the 1940’s and is an excellent example of what the main street of Bassett could have looked like in its height.
The old service station has been repurposed into a white water rafting and river tubing business for the Smith River. My main project was to assist our carpenter with window repair around the building. This involved cutting aluminum sheet metal to size, applying it to the sides of the cinder block walls with a gun powder nail gun, and sealing the area with caulking. Afterwards, every metal surface needed to be thoroughly scuffed to ensure that the stucco would adhere to the wall. This metal repair was essential to waterproofing the structure.
In addition, I assisted our stone mason and the rest of the crew with raising a 400 pound steel beam infused concrete beam twelve feet in the air with a forklift. After it was in place, new cinder blocks had to the mortared into the gap above the beam. I spent several hours running up and down a ladder applying mortar to the gaps in the blocks and scraping away the excess.
Our carpenter is working on repairing the roof above the parking lot that once housed the fuel pumps. Once those boards have been replaced and the stucco applied to the walls, the painters can begin work on making it look like new.
It is a very rewarding experience to see the results of my labor right in front of me. It has been great working with our work crew so far and I really look forward to finishing up this project and moving onto the next one.

I am back at the internet marketing and social media work. My goal has been to finalize adjustments to the company website to make it more aesthetically appealing and easy to use for users. My main focus has been to rewrite the captions and blurbs on the site to make them both easily read and conducive to Google search algorithms. The photos and graphics on the site have been troublesome as well. I am now going through the pictures on the website and others at our disposal to properly illustrate the wide-range of historical renovation that is not only possible but has been accomplished time and again. One of the greatest appeals of historic architecture is its sheer aesthetic quality. Many times people preserve buildings just for the beauty it adds to an area. I’m working on changes to the website to really showcase the range of American architecture that still exists all around the state of Virginia, and the skills of the tradesmen that make it happen.

The physical part of my internship began with a 5AM wake-up and a three hour drive to Tazewell to deliver a truckload of cut metal to the historical jail that we are restoring. The Tazewell jail was built in 1832 and expanded some thirty years later. The structural damage to the structure is immense, and it is taking the combined efforts of skilled carpenters and stone masons to restore it. The most interesting aspect of my brief tour of the job site was the wooden, possibly Chestnut, beams that ran the width of the jail. The beams made up the floor of the upper-level of the jail and supported the four iron jail cells that housed the prisoners of this small mountain town. The beams were roughly two feet thick, square, and about fourteen feet long. In total, about a dozen original timbers made up the floor of the second story.

I discovered within my first two weeks at Southwest Restoration the immense complexity that is the intersection of private, business and government interests in historical sites and their preservation. Many contracting companies “bid” for contracts, meaning essentially that they cold-call customers, hoping for business. Southwest Restoration, on the other hand, receives much of their business because they are known for pioneering the industry of historic restoration through revolutionary techniques of building material analysis and simple, proven building techniques. Few contracting companies in the United States specialize in historical renovations, and fewer are skilled at it.
The primary concern of the business that I am interning for is of course to make money from the contracts that they negotiate with individuals, public and private institutions and government entities. Funding has been a consistent theme in public history discourse, and I am learning about it from a unique angle. Southwest Restoration is on the receiving end of funds dedicated to repairing and restoring many historic buildings around Virginia and beyond. For example, a project that the company is working on is renovating the oldest barracks on the Virginia Military Institute campus. The funding from the project is coming from two different non-profit foundations and the Virginia state government, and dispersed through a committee appointed by the college. My first task with Southwest Restoration has been to make sense of the major forces at work in the community and beyond regarding buildings of historic value.