The Remembrance Structure, an outdoor classroom on the grounds of the Menokin Foundation near Warsaw, has won an AIA Virginia 2018 Award for Excellence in Architecture.
AIA Virginia is a member of the Society of the American Institute of Architects. Its Awards for Excellence in Architecture honor Virginia architects’ works that are no older than seven years, contribute to the built environment, and are clear examples of thoughtful, engaging design.
Architect Reid Freeman based what was originally called the Ghost Structure on archaeology, 18th-century timber framing techniques, and examples of similar slave dwellings in the region that still survive. The framework is covered only by a transparent fabric that diffuses shade. At night, solar-powered lighting creates a paper lantern effect.
A crew of professionals, students and volunteers built the simple structure during a five-day workshop last May. It sits directly over its footprint of the late 18th-century slave dwelling that it re-creates.
Besides serving as a classroom, the Remembrance Structure is intended to be a memorial to the enslaved workers who worked on Menokin plantation for Francis Lightfoot Lee, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The Menokin Foundation’s African American Advisory Work Group recently renamed the building the Remembrance Structure in honor of the enslaved people who built the original and lived there.
This year’s Awards for Excellence in Architecture included two Honor Awards, 13 Merit Awards and one Honorable Mention. Award categories include Architecture, Contextual Design, Residential Design, Interior Design and Historic Preservation. Freeman’s design was one of two Contextual Merit Award recipients. The other was Stemann I Pease Architecture’s design for the Historic Farmstead at the American Revolution Museum in Yorktown.
The awards for contextual design are chosen based on outstanding architecture that perceptibly reflects the history, culture, and physical environment of the place in which it stands and that, in turn, contributes to the function, beauty and meaning of its larger context.
Looks what’s new in the Menokin Gift Shop? This gorgeous piece of jewelry – designed and produced by Carol Koch (sister of our very own Alice French) – is fashioned from the iconic keystone that once graced the entrance to Menokin and is now on display in our Visitor’s Center.
The pendant comes in sterling silver and solid brass. All three are available for purchase in our online SHOP and at the Menokin Visitor’s Center.
A perfect gift for all the Menokin enthusiasts on your list!
The Menokin keystone in situ. Photo taken by Richard and Robert McClintock in 1969.
WHAT:
Very hands-on and interactive course work; instruction and techniques will be covered for the following:
• Shingle making
• Chopping mortises
• Making tenons
• Peg making/drawboring
• Planing
• Using molding planes
• Discussion of paneling work, sashes and doors
• And more!
About The Instructors
Matt Webster
Historic Preservation Architect
Garland Wood
Master Carpenter
Ted Boscano
Joiner and Carpenter
By pre-registering, you are expressing an interest in attending the workshop and would like to receive detailed information when it is available. Pre-registration is not binding in any way.
PART I Nothing brings a place alive like the work of many hands. Phase I of the Menokin Glass Project is underway as three interns dived deep into the Menokin stone databases to identify and locate cut and carved stone from the historic building.
Under the supervision of Encore Sustainable Design Architects Nakita Reed and Ward Bucher, the summer interns did a terrific job of updating files, re-tagging stones and finally moving them to giant, life-size print outs of the Menokin HABS drawings.
The students, Bethany Emenhiser, Sarah Rogers and Chris Cortner, came from around the U.S. and were attracted to Menokin’s innovative approach to preservation. But has the job been easy?
Only if you think moving 250 100-500 lb stones in 90 degree heat is light-weight work.
“It was fun to finally be able to move the stones to their proper places on the HABS drawings after spending weeks documenting and tagging them,” said Bethany Emenhiser, “but it was a long, hot day.”
Local contractor, Robert Yeatman, stands by as stones are indentified.
Pallets of stones were driven to the proper location on the HABS elevation, then hoisted into place by the interns
Sarah and Bethany directing traffic.
Nakita and Menokin E.D. Sarah Pope inspect the progress.
Hank Handler from Oak Grove takes his Bobcat driving very seriously.
A bird’s eye view of two of four elevations. You can see the house taking shape on top of the drawings.
Bringing in summer interns to help with preconstruction work was something of a no-brainer.The Menokin Foundation and its project partners were able to save essential funds and the interns gained valuable experience in the field, learned best practices for documentation and assessment of historic materials.
Though the preconstruction work has just begun, the progress is visible. Stop by Menokin and you’ll immediately see sorted stones atop the giant canvas drawings, a visual reminder that soon those same stones will be returned to the house.
Thus wrote Archeologist Eric Schweickhart, who came to Menokin to research our 18th century nails.
Here is the report he sent us to share with you.
On January 14th 1765, a number of men from Prince George’s County, Maryland gathered at Oxon Hill manor to inventory the estate of the recently deceased John Addison. In his cellar they noted finding “5,000 10d Nails” which he was presumably storing for some future construction project.
Figure 1: Illustration of 18th-century nail making process.
In the 1700s, blacksmiths made nails by hand, cutting long iron rods into sections which were each given a head on one side and tapered into a point on the other. The length of each of these sections, and therefore the length of the finished nails, varied according to the needs of the buyer. Thin wooden lathing, which was plastered over to create interior walls and ceilings, could be secured with nails about an inch long but thicker clapboards, rafters, and roofing shingles required longer nails. Therefore, a system had been developed in England to sell nails in sets of 1000 according to their weight. Since a thousand three-inch-long nails would weigh more than the same number of two-inch-long nails, buyers could know the average length of the nails they were purchasing. When sold, nails were given a classification (4d, 5d, 6d, etc.) to indicate their weight and if this system was anything like the 19th-century American ‘penny nail’ system, as many believe, then each of these categories represented a quarter-inch difference in length. Thus, Addison’s 10d nails would have probably been about three inches long, on average, but if they were 8d nails they would have been about 2 ½ inches long.
Knowing the size designation of nails found at a site would be a useful analytical tool for archaeologists. When a nail is dug up during an excavation it is usually completely removed from any context that could be used to identify what wooden elements it once held together. Nails found in the ground were generally either pulled and discarded or the wood that once surrounded them has long since rotted away. However, since particular sizes of nails were used for particular purposes, the presence of those nails could be used to better understand the nature of the site. For instance, a large number of nails about an inch long found at an excavation could be evidence that a house with lathing inside once stood on the site.
Additionally, if the same size nails are found at multiple sites in the same area, they may suggest that local people were buying nails from the same source or even that nails from one structure were salvaged to build the other. In order to assign excavated nails to particular size categories, some archaeologists measure their length and round them to the nearest quarter inch.
While this technique seems to work well on 19th-century sites in America, when most nails were made with machines, earlier nails made by hand could potentially have much more variation in size. Since nail sets were determined by weight, a nail considerably smaller than the ideal size could be included in the set if it also contained another nail considerably longer than average. Thus, the problem is: how can we be sure that a hand-wrought nail that rounds down to two-and-a-quarter inches long was not sold as part of a set of 8d (2 ½ inch long) nails?
Luckily the collections at Menokin are uniquely suited to answering this question. The incredible work done by the staff at Menokin to curate and identify the architectural elements which are no longer attached to the structure has created very useful dataset.
Figure 2: Lathing Nails from Menokin, red indicates nails which rounded to 1 1/4 inches, the ideal length for the set, red indicates nails that rounded to other sizes.
When Francis Lightfoot Lee had the manor house at Menokin constructed in 1769, his architect and carpenters acquired thousands of hand-made nails specifically for the structure. Since these nails are still embedded in the wooden lathing and roofing elements that have been carefully recovered and analyzed to determine their placement in the original house, they provide an opportunity to study nails which are known to be purchased as part of the same set. This process was more difficult with sections of the roof than with sections of lathing because the roof was repaired several times using different types of nails, but a number of the original 18th-century roofing beams, with their original nails, still exist. By carefully measuring the lengths of nails in several different architectural elements at Menokin, the general degree of size variation within sets of nails made by blacksmiths can be determined.
The results of this analysis were astounding. Despite the fact that there was about half-an-inch difference in length between the longest and the shortest nails from each architectural element, when all the nail lengths from any one wooden element were averaged together they fell within .05 inches of their ideal length.
Figure 3: Hand-made nails found archaeologically at James Madison’s Virginian plantation, Montpelier.
For example, of the 50 nails measured from a section of lathing that was once part of the northwest ceiling of the mansion (2006-357), the shortest nail was 1.02 in. long and the longest was 1.52 in. long but the average nail length was 1.246 in., suggesting that they were all bought as part of a set of 3d nails made to be one-and-a-quarter inches long. If this section of lathing had been left to rot away and only the nails were recovered and measured to the nearest quarter inch, 5 of them (10%) would be classified as 2d nails, 39 of them (78%) would be classified as 3d nails, and 6 of them (12%) would be classified as 4d nails.
Each of the architectural elements analyzed at Menokin had similar bell curves, with the nails equally distributed above and below the ideal length and a small number of longer and shorter nails rounding to the next size up or down. The Menokin dataset suggests that in the 18th century, between 20% and 50% of the nails sold as part of a set were closer in length to other size categories than to their given category. However, in every case examined, the number of nails that fell into the smaller category was almost exactly the same as the number that fell into the larger category.
Therefore, thanks to the commitment of the Menokin staff to the conservation and analysis of the home of Francis Lightfoot Lee, archaeologists are one step closer to being able to understand the decisions made by the people who once lived at the sites they excavate. This analysis suggests that if the lengths of hand-wrought nails found at a site fit into a bell curve around a particular ideal length with between 10% and 25% falling into the next smallest size category and roughly the same amount falling into the larger size category then they were probably acquired together as part of one set. If the nails at a site do not fit into this pattern, they may have been sold as part of separate sets or were made by local, enslaved blacksmiths who might not have packaged their work in the same way that British nail-makers did. With this information, archaeologists can begin to make interpretations about the architectural elements people incorporated into their homes and workplaces, the access particular individuals had to the various networks though which nails (and other goods) were exchanged, and the extent to which common knowledge about what size nail was most appropriate for a task was shared between neighbors and families.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sarah Pope, Alice French, and the rest of the Menokin staff for their help and patience. I appreciate their willingness to take time out of their day to help an archaeologist with his odd requests. I would also like to thank Barbara Heath and Matt Reeves for their guidance.
A Special Treat
Menokin Trustee and professional photographer Hullihen (Hullie) Williams Moore also has a fascination with Menokin’s nails. Here is a photo gallery of some of his work on the subject.
Last week we told you about the exciting pre-construction work that is happening at Menokin this summer.
This week, our three summer interns have arrived on the job. After a day of orientation and introduction to the project and the area, they are now busy at work identifying the foundation and water table stones in our collection.
They will be sharing their insights and images with us daily which will be posted to the blog. We are thrilled to have them here!
L to R: Chris Cortner, Sarah Rogers, Bethany Emenhiser
Chris Cortner is a rising third year at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture and is from Boston, Massachusetts. As an architecture student, he expanded his interests further to Historic Preservation and Scenic Design. Chris likes to stay involved at school. He is a member and previous Business Manager for The Virginia Gentlemen, the University’s first A Cappella group, a Committee Member and School Representative for the University Judiciary Committee, and a member of the American Institute of Architecture Students. In his free time, Chris likes to sing, ski, and hang out with his friends, family, and his wonderful dog.
Sarah Rogers is an upcoming junior at the University of Mary Washington, double majoring in Historic Preservation and Geography. At UMW, she is the incoming President of both the Historic Preservation club and the UMW Ambassadors, as well as a resident assistant and a junior class representative in the Historic Preservation department. She wants to one day go to graduate school for historic preservation. In addition to working with Menokin this summer, she is also interning at the Eastern Branch of the North Carolina SHPO. Besides old buildings, her interests include dogs, babies, and reading. She loves a good summer
thunderstorm, preferably watched from a screened-in porch.
Bethany Emenhiser just graduated with her MFA in historic preservation from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Bethany is originally a Hoosier and did her undergraduate studies in history at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, running and stargazing. Bethany’s preservation interests include planning, community engagement and non-profit work. She’s excited to be a part of such a unique project here at Menokin.
Menokin Glass Project team member Ward Bucher is also the editor of the Dictionary of Building Preservation – a reference book of more than 10,000 terms.
The book was the invention of necessity. As a preservation architect, Ward uses these terms regularly in his work. But burdened with a poor memory (high five on that one) he couldn’t always remember the term he was looking for.
Ward Bucher, preservation architect, in front of Menokin’s front door paneling.
So he put together this fabulous reference guide and brought us a signed and dedicated copy today for our library. My hope is to share them with you on a regular basis so you can begin learning the terms along with me.
Find the first term on the Building Preservation Terms post. New terms will be added to the top of the page.
So many exciting things are happening at Menokin in the coming months. We hope that you are able to follow along as they take place and encourage you to visit and observe as the archaeologists, preservation architects, masons, builders and
interns undertake preconstruction work for the Menokin Glass Project.
We’re bringing the Menokin story to the Hampton Roads area with our traveling exhibit of Menokin landscape photographs by our own Hullie Moore and Frances Benjamin Johnston. The exhibit is up now at the Botetourt Gallery of William & Mary’s Earl Gregg Swem Library and runs through October 2. Please be sure to check it out!
The exhibit and our portrait of Francis Lightfoot Lee hang in Swem Library’s Botetourt Gallery near the 18th century statute of Lord Botetourt himself. I think Frank Lee would be pleased to hold court with Botetourt.
This is what he wrote to William Lee in July of 1770:
“Lord Botetourt, in the opinion of every body is a polite, agreeable man, & it is probable from his universal character that we shou’d be very happy in a Governor, if it was not for our unhappy dispute with G. Britain in which he must no doubt think & act with the ministry, indeed he honestly says so, & from what little he speaks about it, it appears the ministry are determin’d to enforce.”
Lord Botetourt died only three months later and was replaced by Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s last royal governor (the Lee brothers were no fans of Dunmore to say the least).
Working in less than ideal conditions this week, these Menokin Project Team members have spent the last four days outside in the cold and wind (note the attractive head wear) to add some urgently needed bracing to the remaining walls of Menokin’s office dependency..
In addition, the metric survey of the entire structure, required by the architects and engineers on the project, is underway, as well as updating the evaluations on the conditions of the stone and the framing.
Meet the people who are doing the work and look for updates as the project continues.
Thirty six years experience as an architect specialising in the conservation of historic buildings and areas, ancient monuments and archaeological sites.
Currently working on condition assessments of and repairs to several National Historic Landmarks, buildings listed in the
John Fidler
National Register of Historic Places, and on State and City registered landmarks across the USA including a ruined plantation house, iconic 20th century Modern masterpieces, replica Ming dynasty Chinese pavilions, museums and downtown skyscrapers.
Formerly a staff consultant and the corporate practice leader for preservation technology with Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc., Now supporting SGH and its clients as necessary as a sub-consultant.
At English Heritage: with 60 staff and 25 consultants responsible for technical policy development, research, advice and standards, publications, training and outreach. Delivered EH’s Research Strategy, Conservation Principles, Estate Maintenance Standards and established the National Heritage Training Group. With others developed professional accreditation in building conservation and published the EH Research Transactions series and many award-winning books and technical papers. Project manager of the European Commission DGXII research project, Woodcare.
Repaired numerous ancient monuments including ruined abbeys and castles and parts of the World Heritage Sites at Stonehenge and Hadrian’s Wall. Established English Heritage’s emergency responses to fire disasters at York Minster, Hampton Court, Uppark and Windsor castle. Devised EH’s first Buildings-at-Risk strategy.
At the City of London Corporation: repaired the Roman City Walls and Baths. Safeguarded Wren’s St. Bennet’s Church and Barnard’s Castle ruins from adjacent development work.
Specialties:Expert of non-destructive diagnostics; cleaning and repair of terracotta; cleaning, conservation and repair of masonry including brick and stone work; mortars, plasters and renders.
Joint author of the New Orleans Charter reconciling the preventative maintenance and care of historic house museums and their collections.
During more than thirty-five years in business, Oak Grove
Patrick Handler
Restoration Company has evolved from a high-quality woodworking shop into a full-service general contracting and consulting company specializing in historic preservation and the careful conservation of irreplaceable historic architectural fabric. Our diverse client base includes state and local governments, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, private homeowners, historic sites, and house museums.
Oak Grove Restoration Company possesses strong capabilities in design-build, general contracting, and construction management drawn from the individual backgrounds of our personnel and from their collective knowledge of historic structures and experience in building conservation. We also maintain a staff of skilled preservation carpenters and continue to operate our own traditional millshop, allowing us direct control over the repair and replication of historic millwork, windows, and doors. Utilizing this broad range of services, we work with each client to develop and implement projects that meet their particular budget, schedule, and other operational requirements. We pride ourselves on our long-term relationships with many clients and on our ability to work collaboratively and creatively with a wide variety of preservation professionals, trades, and property owners.
The Downland Partnership offers unrivaled experience, quality and value for money throughout a wide range of measured survey products.
Their technologies include high definition laser-scanning, the latest in Leica total station technology and photogrammetry.
Precise dimensional survey since 1989
High resolution photography since 1990
Photogrammetry since 1995
Laser scanning since 2005
The Downland Partnership offers a wide range of products from simple site surveys to complex and detailed record surveys of historic buildings, intelligent BIM models and 3d spatial data of oil and gas installations. They also operate an experienced and successful resource carrying out surveys on the railways and undertaking high precision monitoring.