By Joanne E. McFadden
for The Sunday Gazette
July 10, 2005
For years, Michael Kelley had driven past a Bethlehem house and never given it a second thought. “From the outside, it appeared to be probably an early 20th century, cheaply constructed farmhouse,” Kelley said.
He had no idea what an architectural gem the ramshackle exterior was hiding until a friend phoned him urgently one day in 2002. As attorney for the buyer of the property, Kelley’s friend had gotten a glimpse of the interior and knew there was something unique about its construction.
Even when Kelley, the president of a construction and historic restoration firm, got a closer look, there was no indication of the structure’s antiqueuity. Kelley entered the house through a side door into a dirty, ramshackle old kitchen, still unimpressed. It wasn’t until he moved into the building two steps up from the kitchen wing that he knew what he had found. “My heart just stopped beating for a second,” he said.
Historically Significant
Alterations to the home hid this undocumented, largely intact, never painted example of 18th century vernacular Dutch architecture. Kelley knew that the structure was historically significant and had to be saved.
And now it has been. His company has taken down the house, piece by piece, and is reassembling it for a permanent exhibit that will open in a couple of years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Kelley purchased the home because he knew it should be preserved. He hoped he would find someone who wanted it.
“Dutch building tradition existed in very few areas of the Colonies. So in general, any example is rare, but a particularly early example in this condition is extremely rare,” he said.
Specifically, the Dutch had a unique way of framing their homes. They assembled a series of timers in “H” shapes (they look like goal posts), as many as needed for as long as they wanted the house to be.
So Kelley put feelers out through one of his clients, who mentioned the discovery to staff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What Kelley didn’t know was that museum staff had already decided to highlight the New York Dutch experience in Colonial times in the undergoing renovation of the American Wing. “Things came together at precisely that right moment,” Kelley said.
Peter Kenny, curator of American Decorative Arts at the museum, met Kelley at the property on a cold December night in knee-deep snow. They walked around the site with flashlights. Kenny was excited to see the home, but his initial reaction mirrored Kelley’s.
“When I got up to Bethlehem, I thought, This isn’t a Dutch house I’m seeing,” Kenny said, “It didn’t appear to have that typical steep roof. It had a lean-to. It looked very much like a small house in the 1940s. It wasn’t very impressive from the outside,” he said.
Planning A New Address
That changed when Kenny entered and saw the opening to the original main house, which had been built on a raised foundation. “Immediately, I recognized the prominent and important parts of this architecture,” Kenny said.
Daniel P. Winne built the home in the early 18th century. The structure is a very basic one, with two rooms, a fireplace in the main chamber and a loft above.
What Kelley was about to have the rare opportunity to do was to take the structure apart, and in the process discover valuable information about how the early Dutch settlers built their homes on what Kelley described “a wild and dangerous frontier.”
Kelley and his crew dismantled the house in early 2003, carefully tagging and extensively documenting every piece with detailed notes and drawings. Later, using Kelley’s field notes and measurements, Latham architect, Timothy Gallagher, produced detailed drawings of the home.
As Kelley and his crew peeled away layers of later additions and remodeling, they found clues about Winne’s construction. For example, a faint scratch mark on one of the original rafters allowed Kelley to calculate the exact pitch of the original roof. “The tiniest of layout marks are sometimes the key,” Kelley said.
A Brick wall extended from the basement up to the main floor as the back part for an open hearth area. Smoke went into a huge brick hood and up the chimney.
Clues About The Past
The floors, which were constructed of smooth, planed and oiled planks made of northern yellow pine, indicated that the house was designed to have surfaces that would reflect the little light that did come into the house through the double windows on the north side and two smaller windows on the south side.
When Kelley removed some of the plaster, the location of the original staircase was revealed through a faint line on the wall. While he doesn’t know what the staircase box consisted of, the faint line allowed him to figure out the rise and run of the stairs.
Physical features that would easily be overlooked by an untrained eye gave Kelley clues about what the people who lived in the house did. As he knelt in the loft area, running his fingers over a slight indentation in the floor, Kelley explained that he suspected that a loom sat there, and that the indentation was made where the weaver’s heel touched repeatedly when she pushed the treadle. The windows behind that area would have provided the light by which to work.
The weather, with wind chill factors far below zero, made the process of dismantling the building extremely difficult. On some days, it was impossible for Kelley and his crew to even talk to each other. “It was brutally, brutally cold the whole time,” Kelley said.
Yet winter was the best time to dismantle the home because the house was sitting on clay soil, and a crane and tractor trailer had to be brought in to remove the pieces. So it was important to have frozen ground.
Another reason for doing it in the winter was that the wood needed to be dry when it went into storage. In spring and summer, moisture from the rain could get into the wood, and if it was stored that way, it would get moldy.
The job also required a great deal of contemplative work. On the weekends, when it was “absolutely quiet,” Kelley would visit the house, walking around and looking at various features to get a sense of the building and to get inside the mind of the person who built the house.
“You think so hard about it, you focus so intensely on all the details,” he said. “I might wake up at 2 a.m. and say, ‘I know where that piece goes.’ It takes a certain length of time to figure the whole thing out. It requires a tremendous amount of concentration.”
Off To New York
Kelley stored the building parts in a warehouse while the museum was preparing the space in which he could re-erect it. During this time, it underwent fumigation to make sure that there were no living organisms in the wood.
Truck drivers transported the building’s pieces to New
York City, and using a crane, riggers lifted the massive beams, some weighing 1,000 pounds and measuring 23 feet long, into the museum. Kenny described the process as “a little nerve-wracking.” Not only did they not want to damage the building parts, the only way to get the parts into the building was through a 15-inch wide window at the top of the museum.
What made the process even trickier was that once the pieces were inside the room, there was not enough room to turn them around. “The pre-planning process had to be 100 percent,” Kelley said. “The pieces had to go into the building in the proper orientation,” he said.
In addition, the space was so tight that instead of assembling the timbers and lifting them up as one would in traditional construction, Kelley and his crew had to stand the timbers up and attach the other pieces to them. “It was really nonstandard, but it worked out,” he said.
Completion In 2010
Kenny said that this part of the new wing may be opened on a limited basis in late 2008, but the whole renovation will not be finished until probably 2010. The Dutch home from Bethlehem will serve as a gallery for the museum’s collection of New World Dutch decorative art objects, including distinctive silver pieces and patron paintings.
“Sometimes when you get a building like this in position and you sense the environment that these things were in originally, it adds value to the interpretation,” Kenny said.
The museum also contracted with Hartgen Archaeological Associates, a Rennselaer-based cultural management firm, to document parts of the building and site.
The museum did a genealogical history of the Winne family, three of whom had built other homes nearby. They also determined the age of the timbers of the home. “We can date precisely when the trees were felled to put this house up,” Kenny said. The museum plans to use this information for educational programs for school groups.
For Kelley, the project was the experience of a lifetime.
“To be able to do this level of restoration and preservation work and work with an institution like Met – very few people get an opportunity to do that,” he said.