Craftsmen Leading Repair of Hall House's Chimneys

BY MARK WINEKA
SALISBURY POST

In a material world, John Greenwalt Lee is a materials guy.

Like a cat with nine lives, Annapolis resident Lee has been a master cabinetmaker, patternmaker and conserver of rare musical instruments. He has restored everything from antique furniture to window sash. Over the years, his expertise has taken him to projects at historic Williamsburg, Yale University, Monticello, the University of Virginia, Charleston, Philadelphia and England.

This week, Lee settled in Salisbury, bringing with him his most recent life as an "above-ground archaeologist." These days, Lee is as much detective as artisan. He spends his days tripping across the country researching and developing conservation techniques for materials that are essentially deteriorating from age and the elements.

He might deal with wood, plaster, paint - or, in Salisbury's case, bricks and mortar.

"A lot of what I do is understanding the chemistry of building materials," says Lee. "What happened to them, and why."

The Historic Salisbury Foundation brought in Lee, of Annapolis, Md., and noted Winston-Salem architect Charles Phillips to consult on the repair of four of five large chimneys at the foundation's historic Hall House on South Jackson Street.

The fifth chimney collapsed more than a year ago and was rebuilt from the ground up. Foundation officials didn't want that to happen again, nor did they want to chance losing many original bricks in a typical restoration.

Tearing down the Hall House chimneys and building them back up would cost at least half of the original bricks, Lee estimates. Instead, Phillips and Lee worked with local stone masons Joe Leazer Jr. and Joe Leazer III in devising methods to save the chimneys in place.

Foundation president Nancy Clement says the specialized work will save money, too. The rebuilding of the collapsed chimney cost $20,000. The repair of the remaining chimneys can be done for roughly the same price.

Phillips says the best owners of historic properties don't want their buildings to appear as though they have just been restored. They would rather have their buildings seem as if they've been continually maintained over the years.

The highest compliment a conservationist can ever receive, Phillips says, is being asked, "Now what was it you did?"

CHIMNEY CHALLENGE

A back chimney at the Hall House kitchen proved particularly challenging this week. It had bowed in the middle. With Phillips and Lee's help, the Leazers built scaffolding and affixed wood bracing, using an angle iron as a fulcrum to take the upper chimney's weight off the bulge.

The workers then used saws to cut out various loose mortar joints and replace them temporarily with wooden shims. The remaining mortar in this part of the chimney is essentially dead - sand is left but no lime.

The setup allows the men to ease the bulge back into a straight alignment. As Phillips works with the Leazers on the scaffolding, Lee frequently goes to the ground and mixes a special mortar, designed to be no harder than the original and just as porous.

In discussing the mortar, Lee becomes a chemist, talking about the adding of ingredients that causes atoms to repel each other by creating a negative charge - or something like that. The fluid mortar, relying on ceramic spheres as a substitute for normal sand, has the consistency of pea soup or toothpaste.

The workers inject this mortar into the key joints, and its non-shrink characteristics are important as the men eliminate the bulge. On this back chimney, which probably dates to the 1890s, the men had to rebuild about a third of the bulge where bricks gave way and dropped out.

Phillips chastises himself for not putting in more wedges and going slower.

HUNTING NEW IDEAS

Lee always pushes to find new ways to save materials. He and Phillips consider the repair of each element in a building like fixing a leg on a table and view it as a practical, economic and honest way of conservation.

Lee makes a point to work with local contractors when he can. When the process really works, he says, he teaches them techniques they can use later in their own learning process.

"So far this project's been a real pleasure," Lee says.

Joe Leazer III remembers getting out of his truck on the first day and being told to put away his ham

mer and chisel. The men told him those tools wouldn't be needed.

"I felt lost," Leazer says, smiling now. Leazer acknowledges that if he and his father had been hired to restore the Hall House's back chimney in a conventional way, they would have torn it down and started over.

Lee also stresses the importance of his and Phillips' getting on the scaffolding and working on the building with the Leazers. The kind of conservation he's involved with is not merely an academic exercise, based on pre-drawn specifications. They have to do the work and build into the process an ability to adjust - what works on a bench or in a lab doesn't always work on a building, Lee says.

THREE TYPES OF WORK

Lee divides his work into three parts: part detective, part inventor, part craftsman. And he talks about historic structures as "invisible buildings." To him, a new house that exists only on a blueprint is a more visible building than an older structure from which you never know what to expect.

Lee almost got out of the preservation business completely many years ago when he became disenchanted. He said until he met Phillips in 1982, he couldn't find architects actually interested in real preservation. In Phillips, he found someone dedicated to preserving buildings as artifacts and the conservation of materials in those buildings.

Their paths have crossed continually ever since. Some time ago, Lee saw that masonry conservation was being neglected, more so than woodworking. He then made himself into a national expert on mortar mixes.

Lee says it's a pleasure to work for an owner such as Historic Salisbury Foundation, which appreciates the conservator's work and process.

"It's usually not a question of whether you can do it but whether you're willing to go the extra mile to do it," adds Phillips, who joined Lee earlier this week in giving a public slide presentation on some of the projects and problems they have faced together elsewhere.

It shows, Phillips says, "some of the things that can be done that people sometimes think can't be done."