 Hi my name is Jan Lewandowski, I live in Stannard, if you know where that is, I've run Greensboro Bend and for about 40 years, maybe more, about 40 years I've been working on historic frames in this state and other parts of the country too, mostly in Vermont. But mostly church teoples, covered bridges, I think 14 months on the Cornish Windsor Bridge one time, rebuilt that whole thing, rebuilt the roof system of the Big Breeding Barn at Shelburne Farms in 2009-2010. I rebuilt the deck and much of the post work and the cantilevered turban house at the Robinson-Sommel here, worked on the barn a lot and I built the little covered bridge behind Curt and Eileen's house, which is a new, entirely new bridge, replacing the one that was there. Those were all a while ago. I never worked on this building, though it's one of my favorite buildings in the whole wall because it's among the best preserved and it's so beautiful. Anyhow, I'm going to do a couple of things tonight. First, while we still have some live and I talk a bit about the steeple here, I'm going to show some slides of a number of steeple projects in this state and you'll see how the way they build steeples tells you how to repair them because if you think of it, we now have big, large mobile cranes at our disposal and different systems of scaffolding to get us way up high. Yet, in the 18th and 19th centuries in New England, they were building steeples that were 160-200 feet tall and you have to wonder how they did it. Were they just nailing up 2x6 planks for 200 feet like they did in Stowe in 1954 when they remeddled the steeple? Terrifying things sometimes, but generally not. Generally it was too hard to do that way. They generally built them in pieces, sections on the ground or inside the vestibule of the church and brought them up through or put gin poles up on the tower and brought them up from below. We have a fair amount of good information about that stuff. I'm going to talk about that in a minute, but in case you're curious, that model right there, that's a model of the steeple of the Weathersfield Congregational Church built by a guy named Ted Ingram who worked with me on rebuilding it. That's the Weathersfield Church in 1986 right there. It was burned by some lunatic and the entire roof system and the 110 feet of steeple were burned off. Now to my great fortune I got the job of rebuilding that because it's very rare that someone actually has the money, it was insurance money, and wants you to actually build a collection of 50-foot trusses, six of them in a row, just like the ones that were there and 100 feet of steeple just like the one that was there. One of the problems was that's what it looked like when I got to it. It was a burned ruin on the ground, but we had lots of pictures of it. We had what are called the historic American Building Survey drawings of it which were partly right, partly wrong. You could tell from measuring on these. We had all these, every one of which we figured out what it was eventually, but let's go on and show. That's the guy named Paul Hyde cutting a king post for the big trusses, but that's a steeple model and that model has some similarities to this one. If you look up on this steeple, you've got two octagon, this one's much larger, it's fatter and it's taller, but you have two octagons, you have a little cupola roof, you have a large wooden ornament sticking out the top with a wooden weather vane on top or an arrow, anyhow. This one had an iron rod sticking out the top in a vane. Your octagon, I'm going to go over here, which we won't cause you any problem. On your church, your octagon, the upper one keeps coming down into the lower octagon. Most church steeples in New England and a lot of the eastern part of the US, it may be one of the few American innovations in framing because timber framing reaches high point in the Middle Ages really, except for bridges and maybe church steeples. Most of the time they're telescoping in nature. That is, the great danger of church steeples is they get hit by lightning or they get blown off. And I would say of all the steeples I've climbed down, hundreds of them, well more than a third have had their top sections destroyed, either by fire or by wind. And plenty of other destruction goes out there. But if you telescope a steeple, these posts up there come down into here, then it's kind of hard to tear it off. When it's just sitting on top like that is, it's somewhat easier to tear it off of the high wind. That's on top, though, for stylistic reasons. There was a bell back here, an open column made, and a big bell sitting out. They didn't want the posts coming down through. If you go to Castleton Federated Church, we'll show you in a minute, some of the upper posts penetrate 31 feet down in, of 31 feet of concealed length. That way, you don't have to attach them very firmly. In fact, you'll notice, it's sitting on that. That's how it is. Two reasons. One, if you want to bring it up through, he's camping in the way, so you push him off the side, bring it up through, and throw him together underneath it. Number two, it can rock in the wind a little bit. It's somewhat dangerous to attach firmly a big wooden object way up high in little sections. You're likely to get torn apart. Anyhow, in yours there's no, there is a bell, but it's not an open bell deck, and there probably never was a bell, although there is a bell deck up there of sorts. But the bell, I believe, was 1953 or 73. 53, I think it was. But it's not set up for a bell, really, except for the fact that you have a louvered level, which is not a sound deck. It was 53 for the lightning, and 73 for the bell. A lot of times they built churches, and they didn't have the money for a bell, and they waited for a wealthy donor to give them the bell. So the bells frequently had much later dates than the churches. And then it's a really big operation to get the bell in there, because they're very heavy. They weigh 1,400 pounds sometimes. But anyhow, they've got a cupel up top, and that's set up in this case. It's an eight-legged figure called a crab to hold it down. There's a bell deck in here, but then these columns come down through. They come down, then they shift over to square where you can't see them, have concealed bracing to try and stiffen them up, or give you the illusion of erroneous, and then they sit on sleeper beams that sit down in here. And that's a there's actually probably, I don't know, what number to give? Hundreds of steeples built just like this, from the 1780s to about 1850, 1860, 70, and they still keep timber. Long after churches start being framed with 2x7s or 2x8s, they'll keep timber framing steeples for a while, because of the difficulties people feel in keeping them up. In the case of your steeple up here, there's some very mystifying things. Well, some are simple. One is you do have a mast in the center, that central timber in the middle of the octagon, but your mast originally went out through the top, and that ornament on top was integral to it. At some time in the past, maybe more than once, since the ornaments would, it rotted off. Right now, if you'd go up there, I'd go up there a lot this past week. If you go right up into the dome or up top, the mast ends up there, and you can actually move it separately from the ornament. And the ornament is just sticking up about six feet, and it's nailed into the rafters up top. And I'm not saying there's steeples about to fall down, but one of these days, that and your vein will be on the ground. All it needs is enough wind to push it off. In fact, we did a church steep on Gaysville, which is down below Bethel a few years ago, and that's how they always described it to us. One day, the weather vein was in the driveway, and it happens. In that case, that was a wooden weather vein, and when we took the steeple apart, we found an earlier steeple inside the steeple that had been blasted apart by lightning, and then we found enough information to tell that the iron weather vein was destroyed by lightning, and they built a wooden weather vein and replaced one of it, and which I again built a wooden weather vein and replaced one of it, and faux-painted it by throwing metallic paint at it, so it looked like an old piece of iron, like they did. But anyhow, you've got a mast that comes way down in yours, but it's rotted at the very top. It's in its hollow for quite a ways, in the part that's been put above it, which is probably a nice replacement, but it's just attached to the tops of some small rafters. It's not a good attachment. You will have trouble there. One of these years, one of these days, I can't say when. The odd thing going on in your steeple, the mast keeps coming down. It doesn't stop there. It goes down. It's about 30 feet long, and it ends on a clutch of beams. The mast ends on a clutch of ganged up 2 by 8s that were put in sometime in late 20th century, the second half of the 20th century. I don't know when. It's nailed to them, so the mast once sat on something else, maybe water came in and ran down the mast and rotted them. I don't know, there were little riffs above it and rotted it. The eight posts that surround the mast, they also come down almost as far as the mast, but not quite. They sit on the top of a collection of loose blocks, free blocks sometimes. In one case, one of the blocks is a cutoff piece of one of the posts, but even more mystifying is the mast comes down and it has two diagonal braces that come out of it that go just one direction, not four braces, but it's two braces that drop down and two of the octagon posts run afoul of the braces and can't get any lower because of the braces. This is a beautifully built building. It's hard to understand a mistake this gigantic being made and then be left, but I do not, I cannot tell you that I know what happened there. Why the octagon posts and the mast all don't, the mast reaches none of the posts reach anything solid and it could pass, actually this is probably the most telling picture of all past that. That's a post, that's an octagon post sitting on a collection, on a plank, on a, it's sitting partially on a plank on a collection of free blocks of wood and the blocks aren't fixed. On the other hand, it isn't very unstable either, it's a heavy object, it's bound in by little words, but it's here. That's actually an octagon post sitting on a cutoff piece of octagon post. So someone got up there and it went, oh, WTF or something like that, you know, what are we going to do? But I don't know, I can't figure, I'm hoping that I spend more and more time to figure out what happened, but it's a very strange situation and I'm not saying that people's going to fall down our way because of it, but it's not as firm as having these tenants going into a big, mortice heavy base like that that sits across a frame. It's a strange situation. So in terms of, what do you want to do about the steeple? That's everyone in town's business. I would now, or one of these times, take the epithelial off the ground, take the mast out or scarf into the mast, which we just did in Westford, in the Westford community church, that shows a 45 foot mast. We scarfed 17 new feet of mast into the end of it. We do that sometimes. We replace the whole mast, carve the armor on top and get the thing back together again. Down the bottom, I do a bit more framing to actually pick up the bottoms of the posts so they're not sitting on the little piles of blocks. But it's a rather baffling thing. I don't think these pictures help much, but you'll see. These pictures sort of show posts, a lot of them come down, they just barely sit on a plank because of the difficulties of getting bearing supported up in there. But anyhow, it's a beautiful steeple. Something happened. I'm not sure what happened yet, but I can't. I looked at hundreds of steeples. No framer would leave it like that, but someone did for some reason. And I also read that this steeple was built by the same person who built Eastmont Payer Center Church. One interesting thing in it, that's all. I remember I mentioned that the braces coming down at the bottom of the mast only went in one plane. They didn't go in the other plane at all. It's a little odd. You usually try and stabilize the thing in each direction. Also, there's some bracing at the base of the whole, one of the octagon ensembles. There's one brace that goes this way and there's one brace that goes that way, which doesn't stop rotation really. Eastmont Payer has the odd thing of a tower with all the braces going one way around it, which almost everyone opposes, puts in opposing braces to try and counteract forces. So anyhow, on the other hand, the church is fine. Except you've got to lose the top one these days and you have an unstable situation at the bottom. But that may be hard to follow what I just went through. It's a very difficult place to get to, as you probably know. And when you're there, you're confronted by the framing of one level, penetrating the framing of another level. So you're always looking through two sets of frames trying to figure, is that the post for that level or is that the post for this level? But it's tight. It's full of cobwebs. And unless you like that sort of place, like I do, you don't feel comfortable there. Now tragically, there aren't many bats anymore. It used to be there were full of bats. But I will say I was in the church in East Monkton the other day. It had a bunch of bats. Nice thing to say. But anyhow, I can go through, I'll let you guys show me, talk about this erection of steeples for a minute before it gets darker. The Stowe congregational church, which goes to 165 feet at the top of that steeple. No one wants to scaffold that high in 1861. No one wants to scaffold that high today. I was 67 feet of height in Shelburne and we were just in continual climbing all day long. We needed a pencil or something. It was well covered in the Morrisville newspaper, News and Citizen, day by day. And they built it on the ground where Stafford's store is. They built a tower up to 100 feet. Then they built 80 feet. Then they built 85 more feet on the ground. They finished it in every way, covered in metal, painted it, put the weather vane on top. Then they got a man named Mr. Edderton from Sherlock who could move anything that wasn't fixed down. He came with one horse, a lot of rope, capstones, block and tackle. And he brought, he hooked on, he got a 100 foot tree from Orlo Judson. He put the 100 foot tree up there as a gin pole, hooked onto that spire, it's though, and brought the 85 feet up, 80 feet and plunked in position. That's a real good account of it being done. The center church on New Haven Green, 205 feet, Eiffel town, the person who invented the town by the stress bridge, built it inside the tower, built a tower to 100, built another 100 inside. Put block and tackle in the four corners, ran into New Haven Green, and they climb in two hours. It emerged, but it doesn't emerge all the way. He left 36 feet still down in. That's for safety's sake, you do that. It's scary if you bring the whole thing up and it's falling around in space, like you have to, it's easier if you drop it in a hole. And that one was done that way. There's a book by Guy in Bell, 1852 called Carpentry Made Easy, one of the more sophisticated Carpentry books you'll ever read, and he describes the process. You build your tower to maybe 40, 60, 80 feet, then you use that for scaffolding. You build the rest of the steeple inside the tower, you keep on bringing it up a little bit, and as you bring it up you finish it and paint it, and you keep bringing it up when it gets high enough. There's those timbers underneath it, and your steebles like that up there. It's not, the upper two octagons are not tightly framed into anything. They sit on sleeper beams that sit on other beams so that you can do the same thing. Some version of this was done. Anyway, I've got, you know, a number of instances of this being done. Steebles that weighed 30 tons that had slayed on them were done this way. It's going to be easier to do. And these guys were extremely clever guys who moved everything all over the place. I mean they moved large buildings all the time, much more than we do now in the 18th and 19th centuries. So anyhow, that in general is the clue that repair them. They come apart peacefully. I never cut anything, cut joinery, unless it's added joinery later. And it's funny, well it'll help when I show some pictures. People see the way people did think sometimes. They can't, well I mean someone like us, I can't believe that the stuff sitting on those piles of blocks, or that they actually had a post run a fallow brace, and they just stopped it there. And then that's one of the things I'm hoping to find out. That they may have thought that this was going to be taller yet, but they for some reason stopped at a certain point. And you can't tell what the reasons are. King New Hampshire, not King, right on the border of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, King, I'll think of it, there's a huge church there. And that was once taller, this people was, but it was cut down because the fire department in the 1860s said their water couldn't get that high. And the person writing the book about that, that was a disgrace. That people's ideals had gotten that low. But anyhow, there could have been some reason why they stopped going higher. Because yeah, I know your suggestion is a good one. That's, I'm hoping that if, let's say, finished work is being taken off the outside. Then sometimes you find things, you find empty mortises, you find layout lines, they'll tell you something. It all starts to make more sense sometimes. Every time I spend, you know, an hour or two up there, it makes more sense. It's not made enough sense yet. And as to how that could be left like that. You know, I've been in a lot of churches. It isn't like the old famous or kind of funny old guys who did funny things. They did it. They were very professional. And also, this is a thing, if this thing gets in trouble, your name is mud in town. You know, you don't want to be like that. But anyhow, it is like that. Maybe it, maybe lower parts of it rotted off and they dropped it lower one time. That's another possibility. And it's one thing for me to find evidence. If you could find written evidence, it would be great. But that's hard to find because who's owned this building? It's always been, was it a congregational church? Was it a union church? Did the town own it? It was five different denominations. Denominations, Protestant denominations. Did they all come together to build it? If we add up the numbers on the future out there, it's the Protestant building to build it. So, the individuals and those five different, those five different groups paid for it. And there's no deed. Yeah, there wouldn't be much of a deed. See, if a town builds something, people in towns fight about pennies so much that there's usually lots of documentation about repairs. A church group, no, you may not find it. Or a private donor, you're Noah'sville sometimes. It just happens like a miracle. And there's no written stuff. That's the sort of things I'm curious about. But anyhow, any other questions? I'll show some slides. You can stop me anytime I ask questions. But these may be somewhat helpful. That's actually Ash, that king post. By the way, your trusses upstairs are very interesting. Because you have galleries, you have gallery posts, your trusses do not have to span 44 feet. Like they do in great many churches you go into. You're spending 40, 50, 60, 70 feet sometimes. And there's these substantial bridges, you might say, in the attic. Here, these posts pick up the bound cordless single sticks 45 feet long. But they're picked up at those points. All you span is 23 feet, I think it is, with a little double raptured king post, which looks like a queen post, but in the span it's a king post doing the work. It appears to be a queen post because you've got a brace going down from that post, but you've also got a post. It's something like a bridge you actually got in a button right there. You're not spanning the whole thing in the clear. But they're interesting trusses. They look to be in perfectly lovely condition too. Okay, that's just people putting trusses together. That's the head of a king post with double rafters. This is Wethersfield again in 1986. That's a truss, 50 foot truss that's going to span 50 feet in the room going up by crane. That's the truss, the mortise ridge beam, the big rafters. That's worse. A bunch of trusses, a bunch of tie beams, the front gable still standing up. That's the guy who built the model, Ted Ingram, and he's working with an axe, the mortising axe. They're actually the original tool on steeple posts there. That, my catronial Pauli Ted Ingram, all much younger than they are now, working on a thing called a crab, which is an eight-legged figure that takes the eight posts overhead. That's a crab. That's about 13 feet across, made of 10 by 10s. That was up in this church. We had the remains of that. They were standing up the first octagon, the lower octagon right there. That pairs them on the ground. And that's the crab for the second octagon. That's that top octagon right there being built. And what he, that guy doing, Mike Catronio, goes over in Morristown. He's standing on little braces, a little, a little cantilever plank up there. He's swinging ads because what he's doing is, you see the nice curve called an og curve on that? It's a very natural curve. It's better made by the human body swinging something. And he's, he's finishing off, faring off the ends of those by actually swinging an edge tool at them, which is probably how they were done. And then you get the three parts. You get the square bottom, the tower, which you have here, and two octagons like you have here. These just happened to be different because there was a bell deck up in there. And then they all get put together. Or actually the square tower went up first. Then we put the two octagons together. It's being lifted off by a large crane, and flying through the air. And this church may have been done this way, not by a large crane, but it may have been jid poles up on the top of the church bringing it out of the yard, or it may have been brought up to the inside. I didn't know enough about it then to even make sense of it, of how exactly it was done. Otherwise, I knew it was done in section, it was done in detachable sections. And then you bring it into there. You see those posts went about 12 feet into there, a telescope in. And then you've got that. And the weather vane's on top, and you know, you don't have to go up there. Although, in this case, people were so dubious about what I wanted to do to bring it. I said, look, if you see when you brought it up, there wasn't metal on the roof and the vane wasn't on yet. And I said, look, put everything on it. I said, I'll save you a lot of money. You don't have to go up there and do it. And I said, no, we've got to see it go up first. And since then, people have become more faithful. There it is. Still not complete at that time. But that's a drawing. Like, they're from getting John Johnson, who practiced in the Burlington, Northwestern Vermont, and South, Southern Quebec, 1790s to 1830. He was eventually the Surveyor General of the State of Vermont. He loved mathematics. And if you see, he's taking everything to the hundreds. He sometimes takes things to the thousands. He even takes them to the 10,000 sometimes, full place. And he liked to write things down, which is very rare. But what you see there is a crab. You see a tower of a church and he's got, that's an octagon rolled out flat. This is one of his drawings. And I'm just showing you the sort of thing what was done. Okay. Castle and Federated Church, 1833 in Castleton. I don't know if you know it. It's a beautiful church. It's, I think, fully 60 feet across in the clear. Church is brick. The steeple's 132. And it had a mast and had a very fascinating feature, which this church may have had for all you know, had a pendant mast, which is a technique that was used by Christopher Wren in England. He frequently dropped, hooked together a bunch of 30-foot timbers with iron cramps at the bottom, frame a large floor and separate the floor three inches from the side walls of the building to make it so that when the steeple was pushed by wind, it had an internal pendulum. The center of gravity was moved inward and downward dramatically. And so in Castleton, there's about, those were after it was about 35 feet long and it was a very small light, but in the middle of that is a chestnut nine by nine that went down for 59 feet. And at the bottom, it was attached to nothing. It was actually just an axe chopped off bottom, although since then people have been nailing stuff to it all the time saying, oh my god, look at this. And then, but it was a pendant mast hanging from the apex meant to, if let's say things blow a bit, the mast swings a bit and retains the center of gravity correctly. So the problem is whenever you penetrate the top of a wooden object with a bit large metal object like a weather vane, in this case it was a 200-quarter by 200-quarter iron shaft 11 feet long that went in, no matter how well you flash it, you've got to introduce moisture over time because nobody ever goes up there. And even if they did, you condense moisture on it from the temperature change. So anyhow, eventually that was another case where one day the weather vane was laying in the driveway. If anybody know Kong's book on what he's doing on houses where he has some churches, this one's there and the vane is on the front tympanum of the church because it fell off a long time ago and there was no weather vane at all. I mean the arrow's on there. Anyhow, the top of the vane was, top of the mast was completely rotten and I went up there on a crane one day and I didn't get a big enough crane and so I actually was standing on the, I was standing up on the sides of the basket of the crane with a guy holding on to me. I was strapped in to pulling apart the top of the steeple and a heroic steeple jack had gone up there into the hollow emptiness of it jammed chicken wire and dumped a bucket of concrete in the top and these are the sort of things that were done. Now steeple jacks do some very heroic things but you can't do really serious timber work when you're on a little rope at 132 feet all alone but the truth of the matter is nobody knows you can't because they're not going to go look. Anyhow, I've seen too much but anyhow we decided to bring it out or we needed to bring it out because the vane, the whole thing was getting shaky up there. You couldn't put a vane and they wanted the vane back in and the metal coping was no good anymore so we're bringing it down. See how that central mast, it's possible your mast kept going and it's possible that when they put the bell in they cut the mast off. I thought of that as a possibility because in the bell deck, which I don't doubt the bell came in 73, but there's a雲 timber platform it sits on up there although the back of the雲 timber platform is ganged together two by eights again as if it was there was rotten and someone fixed it. Anyhow, there's that mast going way down below the spire itself and there was a telephone company truck passing on the road. I just had inspiration I flagged it down asking the drill a hole in the ground gave him 10 bucks and they drilled a hole 12 feet deep and that's that spared us another 12 feet of scaffolding height. Put the mast and give us some stability put the mast in there and then pull the mast out and the mast was so bad that when the crane pulled it out and started to put on the ground and started laying it over it broke in half and fell apart. So here you got the steeple back together again lead coated copper on top it was originally just boards and they got bad then it was covered with zinc on the corners. Then it was covered with zinc overall and then we did lead coated copper on it and we rebuilt the ornament too which were quite large and there we got a scaffolding up there as we were rebuilding cornice moldings and things up top all quite high. This is a spectacular church we rebuilt those and of course the day went to put it up at snow so we had the there's a rebuild of the weather vane and it was interesting when you look from below you think the weather vane is 30 inches across actually seven feet across but a guy offered to do it for free from the I think called the Hubbardton Forge and he was shocked when he saw the scale of it but he was a good person and he did it for free anyhow. That's gold leaf on the ball we built the balls again we have we have good pictures we went to the funding museum and got Congress original pictures that actually did show the vane up there and we were able to scale off parts we knew the diameters of the balls and all that sort of stuff and got the real thing up there again so then we got it ready to go and there's the crane ready to put it up and then we actually went up in a basket and stuck the weather vane and flashed it in afterwards just because it was going to be in a way of the rigging and there it is and then how to get painted again so that's 130 there's that man there's the new mask I had to go I asked the person I knew and he said he thought I could find the tree we found a bitter hickory because there's no chest on it anymore and the truth of the matter is there's not a lot of white oak around there we do it right now but we found a bitter hickory that we could get a 59 foot 9 by 9 out of. What town is this church in? Castleton right down near Rubberwood a very beautiful town and Thomas Dake built the church and you know Brownington got hit by lightning and blew the steeple part blew the Balfrey apart and once again we're on the ground signaling you're rebuilding a spider was completely burned off up there it was a real real mess it was this bad place to work you were covered with black char all the time up in there quite a lot because there's no I don't can't find anything that's burned up inside there here and usually stays around and we're taking these things up and yeah that goes up and that goes you can go see that anytime out in Brownington Center at the Old Stone House Museum that's the church up there and we built both the Balfrey and the little steeple roof now here is an interesting project that's um Salem New Jersey Salem Presbyterian Church 1854 gigantic parts with tremendous deep telescoping that's 90 feet of scaffolding off the ground there that's 65 feet of scaffolding there that's how big the segments were that and they all started at 54 feet up on the church this church was very tall but very very deep telescoping and once again doing the same thing but you could see how this was done stuff being brought up from inside itself um no one's let me do that yet mostly because no one wants their vestibule destroyed again because you really you react if it's bringing up from the inside you're unfinished you've got you know you've got a completely open area out there no gallery you've got to be using it for construction for a long time but I really love to do it the very top of there what you're seeing when I shadow my fingers those are five-foot long scarf joints in which the scarfs on the rafters in the 90 foot segment are going to go on top of those and be attached to those too this one though didn't have um timber hanging down it had long iron rods it went down and kept buying it down until it was a more modern area you might say around there there's one section going in already way up on the church um there it's in and we're getting ready to take this thing up very finished pardon what's the name of this sale and presbyterian right you know sale in new jersey new jersey at all yes it's extremely southern new jersey it's a very nice town surrounded by a lot of junk and uh there's some more sick ones of that going in um that's actually from Amy a french book I think the construction details of the crocheted uh somewhere along the crochet bell tower they're calling it but more us in France too these different types of crabs are used um that is um this norman isham his idea that that's a drawing of the first church of Providence first Baptist Providence around very tall steep I think over 200 um and that's how it's thought it was built there it kept building sections inside and drawing the sections up from the inside until they so until they had the uppermost ones pushed out and um because they all fit and everything comes apart well enough to do it it took a long time to find actual more than conjecture evidence but I found in the same year 2007 in the Stratford townhouse you know that beautiful building and the south woodstock community church both of which instead the Stratford townhouse I didn't pull the steeple because there's no where to put it because it sits on that tremendously steep hill so I put up 67 feet of scaffolding put i-beams through the church jack the top off the bottom and then repaired stuff and south woodstock we pulled the steeple which was fantastically rotten and um but in both those churches I found down at if you can imagine at around this level finding across the corners thick planks just cross the corners on top of the planks one inch boards and in the one inch boards six inch diameter circles cut out those are the bases of or they're actually down here they're the bases of the gin poles which we stick up quite high tie off to here grab hold of this way down below and just slowly bring it up and um the truth of the matter is they're not these wooden ones they're not really heavy that might weigh 16 000 pounds so everyone's got 4 000 pounds on a blocking tackle which you may have a 55 to 1 ratio if you have enough stuff it's it's not a question of weight it's just a question of rigging it and figuring it out things like bridges they're very heavy and they're hard to move but not these really that's just more the first Baptist Providence um San Luis Chester Vermont English Gothic style with um certain problems endemic they really took it all we took it off and we're putting a temporary roof on top of it so we can work on it but frequently what it is you have to work on the plate there but we have that roof's going to go that's all bad that's a lightweight roof you slide it back and forth and you work on things we had to change the whole post down inside um there it's raining we're going to put it up again I think um no it's a nice thing we're going to put no we're taking it off there now we're putting it up I think anyhow and I guess I'm just showing you this is done all the time and it was done historically in sort of the way it's normally done it's easy and it's safe um and it gets and it gets around the problem we got we did we worked in Salisbury though two years ago and there the top very top we didn't think it needed to come off we may have been wrong about that but we didn't think it needed to come off but there are loads of stuff including all the little roofs down low that did need a tremendous amount of work and there we you did almost all from a lift and 125 foot maneuverable lift but um there that one cost $8,000 a month it was very expensive you can get shorter ones cheaper than that but um it's hard to do really heavy structural work from them because they move when you push things I worked in St. Paul's and Barton which is we were working at the 80 foot level from a crane basket my neck didn't stop hurting till Christmas and I did the work in August just from continually moving around as the basket sway trying to stop yourself it's easier not to be up there um scaffolding is okay but you got to climb it all the time um here we are this is that same church actually um English Gothic like a lot of ones that are made of wood and they are they should be made of stone they are not heavy enough on the outside walls to support the thrust of the roof system inside and they have false buttresses we're trying to put real buttressing inside the false buttressing but um there are some that do have real buttressing I looked around in Claremont and Hampshire the other day that did but um they were trying to work you see they don't have a continuous tie beam across so you get the roof thrusting on the outside of the walls we're picking up from inside the basement there somewhere in there that's my controlling I'm making one of those wooden balls I go to that that takes the gold leaf um yeah it's playing field in Hampshire that's a that's the condition we got to where you see there birds actually made big holes in it and uh the ball was really rotten but um Nuremberg Vermont we pulled the see how deeply that telescope all the unpainted wood was down inside there and now we pulled it out and we're building the rotten stuff up there by sliding the riff over and you can work on the rotten stuff up there and you can work on the stuff down here half the reason we're taking it off is frequently to get it out of your way because it's sitting on things especially if you have a tall spire may have trouble at the top but water runs down it pretty well otherwise you know you can actually have them out of wood we put one back up and lens in the corner just a couple years ago is what was wood and is wood but when the water comes to a stop add a little scurdy roof or an ornament where pigeons sit and poop then you get terrible trouble and you get all that area gets rotten it rots the base of tall spires and cupolas all this place is down lower where water comes to a stop and slows down getting trouble and then there we're just trying to put this thing together new new big 24 for 12 by 12 posts and some old parts and get that back together again too um that's England I think that's probably yeah that's probably all the spires of Vermont it's probably all England wants to see that's the one I see a twisted spire in England so I did more than that any any questions yeah your sense of having spent some time additional time up there recently yeah this week you know what given some of the photographs have shown lighting damage some of the some of the times the conditions catastrophic yours isn't anywhere near catastrophic except the top ornament will be in your yard one these days I will sign me next week it could be any day at least powerful of gust of wind is attached by almost nothing and it was meant to be attached to the central mast so that but the stuff down below no I can't move it easily it's just that when you look when if anyone if you ever took an engineer up there they'd have a heart attack and say this this is impossible I can't nothing can be built this way just coming down and sitting on a little pile of blocks and the blocks aren't attached to anything some of them sit a little planks and they're not attached to anything either that actually doesn't scare me to not attach it's the thing on the power blocks but no I don't think the seable is about to fall down I think you're about to lose your ornament on top and if you want us in the only way to fix that if you went up there aren't tremendous lifts that cost quite a lot of money and tore things apart and tried to fix it sure you could someone might tell you don't want to put iron straps and run them down the top of your cupola that's you see that too often you don't really want that I recommend keeping the historic engineering intact but that's where you're at you're not about to lose your steeple you're about to lose your ornament one of these days and then then you'll have a hole in the rough then you'll have to go up there and do something about it anyhow and so it's really just a question of one of these days when you and you've got other work that can be done up there that is much cheaper done on the ground for instance one of the things I know it's looking out the window is a lot of your little molding ornament GM's right down on the metal and is in bad shape because it should be separated from it a little bit around the shingles but there's work to be done if we down the ground it's really a question of the town to decide when they want to do it there's one thing that's pressing the rest isn't pressing so if you were to do all the work that you kind of see done over the model term yeah um how long a time period would be needed to dress three months three four months yeah yeah um because what it is is there's there's probably trim work there's work on the louvers in the lower area there but that stuff isn't very bad you could leave that up there and that could be done by people from loom trucks and lifts and things like that um but the work I'm talking about dealing up top I pulled the upper octagon and the mast and the eight post in a couple weeks two three weeks um while it's down you might as well do anything then change the mast figure out what's gonna get framing up in there that will at least give you solid bearing now that a couple months and then you've got other work to do you always got an ability to decide you've always got work to do um like I noticed some of the louvers or clavars are slipping on the lower octagon up there after a while you get birds coming in through there and birds come in they start they push things and then you got openings then you got water in the in the nest you know that sort of thing but um no I'm not trying to alarm anybody and when your upper thing comes down it won't be the first time probably it's come down in history and it probably won't hit anybody because probably no way up here yeah looking at them what is that they're right there around the room well the very base of the steeple is down in the attic that it penetrates the roof but out of parts of it flash onto the roof that's a perennial source of trouble and generally you look up in the vestibule you see water staining almost any church I were to go into in Vermont I can look up in the vestibule ceiling and see water standing at the back of the steeple because the steeple think of them as a huge lever and the wind blows like you know push it around a bit every time it does that it opens those flashings a bit so it's just a thing I can't I haven't been on the roof looking at that but it's a thing that when you do this sort of work the pain the problem is painters like to get done fast and they don't want to discuss they don't want to suddenly stop for a new problem they find but um yeah you see it's wise to redo redo your flashings periodically at those points where you notice the right now I didn't find any water up in the steeple itself and it's been certainly wet enough the leak if you want the leak right now in the 50s and 60s the in the 50s and 60s they had trouble yearly with water leakage where the roof and the steeple came together I saw the little pans and things up there where they used to catch leaks yeah yeah generally but you're quite where the steeple whenever you penetrate a roof you you're running a risk and yeah I'm just wondering if you had actually no I haven't I I figured if I if I if I end up working on this it'll be out on the ledges and tie it off and we'll look down and get on there's a little door that'll put me out on the roof as a matter of fact and I can see what the flashing is like but I haven't yet have you been able to see what the roofs look like we had there is documentation that the first of the three roofs was roofed I think in the mid 60s yeah and and they didn't go up to the second and third tiers right and we don't we don't know and when they did that one in the 50s or 60s it was probably asphalt that first one but we don't know what's on the second and third bell that's not metal pardon bell that isn't metal um I'm sorry the the cupola the cupola itself that was like yellow but a tower roof the bell that we don't know I wouldn't assume I the rest of the shape obviously well and you haven't seen it no because you've only been inside inside all right and we do have some leakage because the painter uh five years ago four or five years ago watched it leak when it came down through the ceiling well yeah I can see the stains on the ceiling out there yeah I just didn't see any now and I was like I say it's been so wet I'm surprised I didn't see any witness up there it was suggested initially Jerry Southgate was the first one to look at it and he suggested that we get a carpenter to seal the roofs off and seal the sides and and wait some years while we raised money and then just today just this morning one of our residents said that it was a carpenter Ernie said that he would do it if we paid for the lift what thoughts do you have about that well I just don't know what you do from a lift otherwise and attach metal straps to the ornament up there something like that we put a rubber roof over it or something well but I don't consider the rifts are a thing you'll do many times in the history of this church they just keep going away it's the top of the mast in the ornament that that's that's the only like new I'm used to seeing rifts leaking all over the place they're that's normal but the structural problem is the top of the mast and the six foot ornament above it in your vein that that's what's got to be remedied that's that's the source of of the desire to do more than just a bandaid and if you take it down you can do any roof you want on there and you've also made that roof exposed too so I wouldn't I wouldn't try and do it from a lift if it was just a roof it might do it from a lift but if it's structural timber work no you're not going to do that from a lift it's hard to do so so I'm not terribly familiar with your proposal but your mast is entirely new not necessarily I'm going to follow the rock down the mast is about 30 feet long it's based on a 10 by 10 but it's octagonal shape and at the bottom it may have been cut off I say it's nailed to the bottom to a ganged up timber of two of two bites up at the very top right under the top of the cupola there where the continuation is not attached to it anymore it's hollow and rotten up there the question I would take I would open up if I had it down below I start cutting down cutting down it until I got out of the rock and then if I thought there was enough to be worth it I'd scarf in make a long scarf joint probably even put wooden fish bites around it and then drop in another piece into it and attach it and have that piece have the curve stuff on the top end and um do you think the mast is original or is it I think the whole thing is original except for the top this part of sticks out the top okay yeah and maybe it's maybe there's something missing from the bottom so it's survived the fire in no hint of a charring up there um where was the fire in 1953 there are no written accounts of the fire there I talked to David Morse a year or two ago about it and a couple years ago about it I talked to uh George Morse probably 10 or 15 years ago they both were involved in it Alden Belcher told me a story that he was driving by on his way to a date and he noticed it smoking right after a thunderstorm and what they they and several other people pulled together and formed a bucket brigade climbed up inside the staple and my guess is is that that the roof up there on the very top maybe new it's not yeah uh just from the pictures I've seen of it I haven't I haven't gotten best the bell that's the highest any of us have gotten except for uh Jan and Jay um but in the picture it's pretty clear to me that it that there was a new roof put on and that there's a butt joint they just cut cut it off flush and stuck another piece right on top of it and whether that iron rod coming down through when um when uh I'm blocking on his name right now the painter was up there and uh he found that there was iron rod with a nut on the top of it holding on the weather vane Alden Belcher copied the weather vane so we've got that's at least the third weather vane that's up there now we know of two others and um so that iron rod may or may not go down you know we don't know how far down it goes but uh so the fire was really only in the lantern we it was not it's any charring on anything up there maybe just in the extended part of it and the here's a shingles roof up there maybe there was a tremendous pest of straw from birds living up there which you find all the time yeah if you're going to repair the moss what what is the most uh what what kind of wood is it first one was that just right now it's spruce it's spruce yeah um so you can splice that and then you fix it with wooden pegs oh yeah is that how you do it yeah no glue and you can make a really tight what I probably do straw I make a start joint for a long I probably put some long pieces of hardware on the outside and pin them through it's in the form of a fish plate you might say yeah just to stiffen it up and you can make that as strong as the original I never I always think a single saw piece of wood is stronger than the original but it'll be really plenty strong and so that's spruce so you could match up and use the same wood I can not use the same species yeah for those of you who don't know this whole church including all the pews and the sunbathing woodwork is spruce and standing horses the first one to point that out to me if you feel it the grain is raised that doesn't happen with time you don't get the knots they're not the same and so beyond the mat what else do you see well I had that out of there I build up new bearings on top of the existing bearings more or less for the eight feet of the post posts are all 15 inches off the frame where you'd think they should go the two but two of them are 23 inches off it because they run afoul of braces I probably build up 15 inches of maybe I might build it up out of like three by 15 plank and you know build a a frame that comes up to those points and then one like an eight inch timber across that and pick up the ones that are 23 inches short and try and work them in around everything up there I think that's that's the main other thing I do and then while the thing's on the ground you should get any new rough the new the mass has got to have the new ornament on the end do whatever you have to do to the weather vane to make it better and you can paint it while it's down to that's one phase so what would be the time frame then if if we're discussing doing all of the work you're pulling the steeple not repairing the mass yeah I mean all I've all it's been discussing recently is pulling the pulling the steeple and putting it on the ground safely I'll do that in two three weeks and get a temp I'll build a little temporary octagon rough and plunk it on top one that can you move to the side where it has to be so you can work in there and bring things in but then if I were to want to finish it all off finish finish the work with the mask and the ornament and everything else on the upper octagon take another six weeks or two months and sometime into the fall what's the estimate of the possible overall work I think I for all the work on the steeple including painting and woodwork repairs and new riffs on all the levels I quoted I didn't quite estimate it something like 80 to 90 thousand this section this part wouldn't cost that much I had to think about exactly how much it would cost to do this but substantially less than that depends on there to be one rough but while it's off you might as well do the other rough too might as well do at least two roughs um as those would be lead coated copper yeah that's what I recommend anyhow is this that it's it's flat for cedar shingles that has been done up there at times and galvanized only lasts so long lead coated copper is probably the longest lasting metal you can get what is lead coated copper it's copper but it doesn't turn brown on you and stain your white paint it's got lead bonds to copper extremely well and so it's copper but it's coated both sides with lead and it produces a dull like mostly with steples you saw there like castleton particularly that's leaded copper and it produces a dull silvery color that looks a lot like the lead and the zinc and the tin that was used in the past so it's just kind of sandwiched away doesn't it not to make with the uh is the lead the lead bonds extremely well it doesn't seem to come off at all it seems to just make like a sandwich up yeah if you view it purely you'll see the red copper inside and then the silvery lead on the outside of both sides so it's one sheet and another it's not one sheet and it's it's it's one piece it's one sheet of metal but it's copper that's been somehow had lead bonded to it i think it's thermally fused thermally fused yeah i'm sure it is our electrically fused maybe what is it thermally fused just like silent but on yeah yeah actually because you see it's somewhat runny sometimes it's very interesting surface i've been using it for a long long time and quite and again you get really good results out of it it doesn't cause you trouble later and whereas people copper is a beautiful substance and you get that glorious look for the first year or so and it turns a brownish color and the air is not dirty enough anymore or never was around here to turn green um you need um hypochloric acid or sulfuric acid in the air you need to burn more coal if you want your copper to turn green or this is very expensive you can dump a after a miracle grow after the violet on it apparently and you can turn your copper green i think you need a lot of miracle grow after the violet so so assuming that the advantage of just pulling the steeple now and the various stages of the phases the incentive for doing that is is to kind of break up the process of the project as we're adjusting the various things will you speak up please i can't hear you so i'm assuming that the the reason or the the approach of pulling the steeple and bringing it to the ground so that we can start addressing some of some of the other bigger issues impressive issues is to kind of break up the cost over the project just wondering about the time frame having that pulled you know at this time of the year building a temporary roof and what what's the advantage of or is there a significant disadvantage of pulling it at this point not necessarily having the funding to uh to complete the work and then having it set over the winter time i'm not i'm not advocating one way or the other i got plenty of other things to do but but many churches and the presentation trustee of ma was found that if you pull the steeple and put it on the ground people get alarmed and they give you money whereas if it's up there they say it looks pretty good what's the problem so that's one reason um the only your other reason is is to avoid having to think but you could go up and take the thing off the top rather than have it fall down someday but but it may not fall down for six years it may fall down in six days i don't know but that's that's the only reason but um it's not a question of client i've done these in the winter you can win is actually a really dry time here you just can't paint in the winter very well but um but no it's up to the town life they want to spread it out in a bunch of stages but getting it down frequently causes people to think something's being done and they give money that's one of the things it's on well my question is that that provides the town and community incentive for for giving money um to finish the rest of the repairs it seems like time would be an advantage to do that sometime in early spring as opposed to just before winter and finding yourself in a position where the town hasn't come up with enough money to make the rest of the repairs while the frame everything is sitting over the third time yeah if you if you only have enough to bring it down you mean and not enough to even fix the upper section i don't know that's the question how much money you've got yeah i'm timing we have enough money if we cash our cds we've got approximately 140 000 dollars if you're a little more including the 30 000 dollars which was an endowment we can't spend so we have to subtract 30 from 9 to 40 which is about 110 and uh so we always worked at um we have gotten some grants in class to do things we hadn't looked into it yet for this but um we've always just figured that we were saving this money up over the years over the decades so when we got a project like this we think we were ready for it the roof has just been looked at just the last couple weeks we've been five six years at least on the roof it's an asphalt skate i think they said schedule 40 roof was put on about 25 years ago and painting can go in different stages after you get off the the sequel being the hardest and most expensive when we got our last estimate on pain it was pretty cost which was about 10 years ago it was pretty cost uh $4,500 a month to grant the lift to paint it and that was going to be uh about a third of the cost of more pain in the road trip it's it's good to get the highest price done first we can't reach for the ladder so i just want to clarify we're we're estimating what you're estimating is that to bring this down to do the work that you've ever been up on in total the whole job really well um put that back up in place your work done it's going to be in there that'd be loads of other things on a whole tower too just the upper octagon coming out getting the work done on that and putting that back in probably 40 to 50 i'll bet just for that but then you've got work to do on the lower parts of it too that it stays in place when you're doing it does it stay in place when you're doing the work on the lower parts yeah i'm just taking the upper octagon out right and leaving the lower octagon in right and um yeah that can be that can be pulled too but um but if i look at it more to see how bad it is because indeed these lifts are expensive forty five hundred dollars a month starts adding up they have to be paying eight thousand a month for much total one point in time but um and but maybe if it's just exterior woodwork and roofing on the lower one you can leave it in place and you'll still spend you know twenty thirty thousand dollars right there so that's where we're getting up to the 80 to 90 sort of thing and you mentioned flashing at the back of the seat well sure it's almost undoubtedly there's a problem there um and there's woodwork on these to go so flashing up there is over the diamonds on the outside of the diamond yeah that's it right now the unbelievable thing people do sometimes and um i thought the 90 figure would do almost everything you needed on those people maybe not painting i didn't include painting but because painting sometimes people because paintings don't buy volunteers so often or by someone in town that they generally i'm generally asked to leave it out and i i don't generally contract that um but when it's on the ground painting is not expensive when it's up high painting is very expensive is that you're going to get the whole of the ground for the master are you going to we can't no right now your mass is only 18 inches longer than the posts but the real question is how long was it i don't know how ever know but but i'll put it down i'll build a big frame on the ground made of 28 foot 26 foot timbers and i'll have it sitting up a couple feet i'm cribbing the octagon posts will come down onto an octagon shape or square shape looks like those are that takes octagon did that you can put an octagon into nonetheless and brace it off then they may have to be hanging down there if we found we needed to work on it more let's jack it up with structural scaffolding there pick it up by the rigging but at first i just leave it there until you guys decide how much money you want to spend how much progress you want to make how high would it be off the ground oh it'll still be around 30 feet tall 30 feet you know that's why you bring that they're still they're bad enough when they're on the ground they're terrible when they're up high the projects you described that where there was a incident like a lightning strike or yeah um are where any of those projects was where it was similar to this where there's a situation but not necessarily a crisis um you mentioned that you know the community deciding i'm just wondering if you were to experience the community process yeah what what that you can share how that might have gone but no one well i don't want to show you in castleton that the weather they had fallen off a long time ago but they've actually but then they noticed that the metal was getting bad on there and it's hot hiredness too and they figured well it's going to be so expensive to fool with that up there and we'd like to get our weatherdane back on again one of these years but then they couldn't put it on because they the basis that went into was no good so that came off but the steep wasn't about to fall off the church south woodstock community church was a catastrophe it was you weren't there you thought you needed a gas mask there was so much fluorescent white mold you know up in there rotting things um where this field was burned um the one in chestern now there was just so much water leakage that it was starting to show up in the church all the time so but no some of them they just get the people decided they know there's trouble and let's like let me go in the town that i was slept in town and then for 31 years and we think about buying a new truck right now people come to the truck meeting and they say well the truck is still working it's cheaper to run an old truck than to buy a new truck we say yeah but if your truck breaks down we'll all live if our truck breaks down in the winter everyone's going to be screaming angry and we won't live it's if there's a fortuitous truck needs a lot of work it's a fortuitous time to do it why not do it it's done that way sometimes by churches still um but but it's usually done when the water is dripping into the ceiling here you're not in that situation although you said the painter did find water dripping in it was coming down through the ceiling near where the yeah the bell is yeah and yeah we've been working on the rest of the building because we could see what was wrong with it and we were afraid to go up any higher than right not even as far as the bell yeah and uh so we didn't do anything about it and uh it's been making for a long time i was supposed to pull away tomorrow and we just think i'll come down i have to be in new blue tomorrow and we can see something that's actually done is the only chance you get when it's really pouring rain and the water doesn't necessarily show up where it's leaking either it comes in and it runs along something and it runs down something well i i tried to do that last time when i checked it out i only got up yeah by the bell right didn't even get up as first right right the three month time for it it seems since considering the organization has been wanting to do all of the work in its totality that would be the most cost effective way to do it you know do it all in one shot um and it's only three uh three month time frame um it would seem that it'd be advantageous to to to pull it in the spraying when you would have the opportunity to fundraise and offset existing fines uh as opposed to depleting funds to try to get the work done in its totality before before the onset of winter yeah well that that's up to the town but i would say that pulling the upper octagon and doing the work on that and putting it back in again that isn't tightly linked with any work lower on the on the church just to start like that would be done from lifts and things like that so and the and the and the first part could be done this fall but i could also be done next spring so to do it the way you're starting there if you were to do it in sort of two phases people decided to do all of it but in two phases yeah that wouldn't um the upper octagon when you back up there again in November or something this year sorry no that would cause an increase in the estimate overall that's still being sort of what you're you have different people do parts of it um the if most of the work on the lower octagon is carpentry work to be done from a left i could do it somebody else could do it but they're not they're not tightly related the lifting of the steeple out when it's on the ground over here then you could do all sorts of things to it much more easily everything else is substantially lower in height so high but it's lower so i don't think it makes it cost more no you think you don't want to take the lower octagon out i i don't see any real rotten it anywhere if there was enough it's the thing is it's it's easy to do and so if you he felt you really want to do a lot of work on all the rumors and clabbers and trim of it it'd be easier with that out it's not it's not easy working from the lifts is not fun and you won't do as good work from a lift but i'm not necessarily might leave the lower octagon in unless i found let's say this mystery became clear somehow and it was related to the lower octagon i don't think it is um the clabbers maybe two ferries and more of the building are original yeah and when i climbed up into the bell section with you uh up by the bell those were up and down sawn half inch boards so they're not ready to be sawn so yeah let's look at the region yeah they probably are some of those are starting to slip which means they're almost 200 years old yeah right now um would you leave them on or would you replace them oh no i try if they're if they're unless they're paper thin as long as they'll protect the building i'd leave them on i wouldn't back them plywood for sure that's the last thing you want to do the only way you can keep this stuff alive is having it with lots of air circulation around so forth but um i've i've made firstly sawn clabber before to replace stuff because usually i don't it'd be interesting to see if on all faceless because usually on the south and the southwest clabber gets destroyed pretty badly on northeast as long as it's not a damp northeast it lasts a long time has to do with sun and wind and wind driven water but um the regularly sawn clabbers that were that there were building replacements around the south side although the west side was replaced um half a dozen years ago yeah and those original clabbers are still in the attic they can reuse yeah well it just let it save yeah he does my hair is good for proposal i'm not hearing a total of either what work will be done i was going to start tuesday but i don't have to what was your plan and what do you do on tuesday well peer to peer show being a schedule of when you have various weddings and concerts here and we and i'm trying not to make a mess i find a three-week window and a cd one starting right away and going for about three weeks and just putting on putting that out putting it on the ground back there braced off and having an octagon riffle over the top of that and um then we either go on with it or i go out to lake shamp plain to a boat house where i'm waiting for the water to go down all the time no i i was supposed to work on it in the winter the ice never got to get to drive trucks on and then um then in the spring the water never got low enough the water's higher now than it was in the beginning of june but yeah that's that's that's the other obstacle you might say that's that's that i would stick this in around but um but no it people have to be comfortable with what you want to do is i don't want to work in a situation where people are uncomfortable with what's happening so i just have a clarifying question yeah when you say that three-week period you take it off put it on the ground yeah also suggest that you're also saying that then you would return it in that three-week time frame no no no no no three months okay so the upper one i guess return it's completely done okay the new masses in so what is the three weeks covering i'm sorry taking it apart okay building you have to go up there and you have to see there's all these little the scurney rifts that go against it sure they join into it in every way you have to take them apart and you have to open up a lot of that so you can get rigging in for the crane to grab hold of it then you have to separate it from everything that's added to it inside then you have to go over the walk to gun rough right so that's the three weeks right then all in one day oh the electric crane goes boom you build a big base out here and it figures boom and pops that thing up and you tie that thing down and those little rough weeks we've tied now with ratchety straps you know i'll stay down for a long time you need to think of it they're just a little low rough they're much plus exposed in a big object that gets pushed around so they don't get in much trouble that would go on in three weeks and um and at the end of three months we should probably be able to put it up three months yeah that's the idea yeah October every October November depending on how much i need three months of working time probably and i have to get you know a couple of workers to do things the guys who work with leaded copper and um yeah so before it got snowy and cold but you saw we were doing it in the snow a couple of times there we have to have no choice so you gave us price for taking it off yeah and then it was just for that yeah i'll figure out an exact price for you for redoing the work but it was we have the cash in the checking account paid for taking it off yeah and so we don't have to cash in any cds or anything right now it leaves us a little tight but we can do that and then it could stay like that theoretically um for as long as somebody wants to keep it there or it could stay like that for quite a while i think we kind of want to put it back up because some people have said you know there's been a lot of opinions about this and so i'm just trying to see what all the options are and my main interest was keeping it stopping it from running and keeping it safe and and putting it on the ground we'll do that it'll get a roof on it with some sort of maybe a cap on that up there so that's sort of like the the slowest way yeah and you can take the weather vane off right away and if it's good protected then then you can work on it you know i'm sure it needs to how long go that vane club however the wooden vane club wooden arrow definitely not about as i recall and i have it written down but i have to look for it that went up about 25 years ago has it been painted since then no well it's gotta need something things sitting way up near do pretty well sometimes because of great air drainage so 25 years it's a lot but you know at the very top plate you might say right below the dome right below the curvy roof all the plate members have a little round hole drill through the middle of them which i think was from bracket scaffolding you know that stuff where you you stick a bracket through you tie it off inside and there's a i think someone in this bracket probably that could that could have happened in 1930s yeah it's not it's not a new technology but it's actually set up for bracket scaffolding but you don't think anyone's painted the weather there over 25 years it's a brand new one well it'd be great if it's you'd be great if it's in good shape but then the same day it came down and get it off there and get this somewhere and um there's one weather vane up in the tower yeah and that's the oldest one that we know about yeah and um then Greg Belcher's father made a the second one yeah and then uh and then Alden Belcher made the third one yeah it's uh oh there are undamaged pitchers of unidentified workmen with a truck with a crane on it that we think was a fellow from Waterloo and they're standing on those roofs yeah and they're you know hanging off of things and uh it seems like maybe it's not strong enough to to trust doing that anymore when they built it huh you could uh that that's that's i would be afraid of of uh somebody stepping onto the roof and going through it yeah yeah depends on what's made of i don't know we have to look at them more carefully when it was new yeah you could hang on it like you were right there but so the prep work for uh preparing to take over off the gun uh just three weeks of work uh to get that prepared yeah uh build the temporary roof yeah then we can get really build the base out here uh yeah or is that being done with with the lifts was that less sense so the prep work yeah for preparing preparing for such a number uh is that being done from staging uh or is that no we probably we'll probably actually put safety harnesses on and walk on the little roofs and also see wait those depend you have those false lights up there the the false windows that takes some of those panels out to get rigging through then we go up then we actually can sort of be inside and play with flashings and things like that and i actually want to take off some of the cornerboards one of these lower columns because this thing is a very unusual feature also the inner octagon upper one has a through more there's a through mortise to the mast the mortise then there's through mortises through the inner octagon posts then there's mortises in the outer octagon posts and there's a piece of one and a half by five that runs all the way it transfixes all of them and the one and a half by five is so smooth it appears to be mechanically plain or else they knew they were going through so many mortises that they had to get a super but generally i can feel hand planing on a thing and also it's odd that they were attached the inner octagon the outer octagon unless that had to do with some alteration they made down below when they decided they needed to suspend but anyhow i'd love to open up one of the corners of the lower octagon and see if indeed those one and a half by fives go all the way through and have to be tapped back out again to do but i find it hard to believe they're original they just um you know how you can distinguish between hand planing stuff and mechanically plain stuff i don't think there's much mechanical planing around here in 1825 or 23 but um anyhow that's the sort of things we'll be doing up there but we'll have a lot of probably four different panels off of much more light in there easier to get at and we have to be rigging up and attach rigging to the post so when the crane comes up with four lines probably because i've tried to try to keep the lines away from the ornament up top two and away from the vein and uh yes sort of play around with them and get it to come out and put it down and so that's what that period that's what will happen during that period and if there's a lot of rain which you know how that happened um maybe it'll stop raining actually and um it takes time too jammed to use crane to prepare this to be lifted off to get beans up there maybe just a boom truck and may and may haul stuff to the actor i may just have enough stuff on the ground gets a smaller boom truck to bring stuff up and drop stuff in on us and move them around i don't need the big crane but the big crane i need because we have to have rigging that goes way above the ornament and it's out far enough from it so you're not pressing against it you might say it's an opportunity about keeping the center of gravity below where you were attaching it to well yeah flip over yeah i'm gonna pick it very high but i don't think this will be very difficult to do and maybe i will figure out what went on up there but uh and you know it didn't be when we were up there it was a good time to come up there too i'd be happy to have anyone else opinion on it you will guarantee you anyone who goes in a lot of steeples will never see anything like this as an original condition the sets of three blocks the cutoff posts and the thing wearing a foul embrace how it could happen um and and i can imagine whatever happened would have made it embarrassing and no one wanted to write about it in 1861 or something like that but something strange occurred well it was lowered by chance so do you think it was possible that it was higher and then if something happened that's what back here suggested to you that maybe it was a little bit taller and they they and maybe they got a lot of maybe maybe they may have cedar shingled the roughs eventually or shingled the roughs the pine shingles and they got a lot of leakage they may have rotted the whole level down there and rotted the bombs as opposed to and they decided to cut them off and drop the whole thing or something like that because it's just unimaginable that no framer would think about it or they would take the brace out of the way they do something different than what they did are all the feet cut off the same level yeah six are cut off at 15 inches above a certain point above another set of old beams and the two are cut off at 23 inches and they're the ones that run a foul brace some just that unlikely thing there is some mention that they had some work done in the stable by the fellow from yeah and they it was more expensive than they planned out and but it doesn't say anything else it gives the amount of money and it just says it costs a lot more than they planned out. The strike speed is older although Percy would be working the 50 that is 70 years ago and it starts things start to look old but um strike speed is older than that and I look at the mask and I look at the braces coming out but they have nice little all scribe marks you know they look original um and yet it's almost as if two different things happen except the mask is actually related to it so I don't see how you could put the mask in with its braces and then put the octagon in and have the octagon run afoul the mask and go oh what can we do just close it up and um I mean it's still but I think it helps have if there wasn't the mask in the center which is bigger than any of the posts and heavy and it's I think it rattled off once because it's nailed down and it's nailed to actually it's nailed down with wire nails big wire spikes two a gang of two bikes to go across but the mask in the center is doing a lot of the work because you wouldn't want to balance those eight posts on the little three blocks over and if you could but the mask moves the center of gravity itself and work quite a long ways and people got more questions Jan is all set up to go to work on Tuesday uh and we need to decide what to do now this is a new situation because this has always been decided by just the officers who we always church association before all the work that's been done previously and how what do people here want to how do they want to know about this deciding Peter I think I should need to be here first um live it might be you know if people have more questions who are the officers right now here if uh Rain Whitelock is the president and he's not here he's not here uh Thomas the trader he was here is he here now I think Jan is filming you yeah I think I think I'm that was the reason it had to be different even then I was I've got an economic interest in it I'm the wrong person to be here I just want to say how much I appreciate you yeah thank you yeah my pleasure I'm always very different get this stuff off yes okay so you're saying the president's not here the president's already back right here on the right side of the second area she's uh well I don't have any decision like you have the authority to make a decision tonight it's it's it's been um it's been we have argued about the lives several months as to who should be making these decisions and people haven't some people haven't been happy with the officers we really have a board we have officers do we have bylaws right we have bylaws and all of these decisions have been made by the officers ever since forest areas which was the first time I started having reported events and I can find there's no it's in the 40s or something in 1953 to four to the forest of Eddie in the next store so uh I'm open to discussion as to how the people that they're going to show up tonight want to proceed with this and do they want to take the responsibility for making that decision or do they want to leave it to the the officers the officers have already decided what they want to do which is they've hired you but we're stepping back from that now and we're saying we are we're willing to thank you what everybody has to say but the board decided the officers have decided to hire the person that just did the talk yes and what is the question like what would the what else would happen well there are a couple of questions there have been um there was a group of five people that came to what happened was at Christmas to be kind of to try and sketch the whole thing together at Christmas time when we first started talking about this people and lots more people than um then the group that showed up with the last couple of annual meetings and and a group of six that was appointed by or eight it was appointed by the the office at the last annual meeting been involved with on and off for a year they got the information here though but we didn't have a meeting until just a few years ago okay so all right we so after this meeting of days i went over to to rather luck who had offered a Christmas time to help us with their finances because we didn't know how to cash in a CD of national investment trust not a CD but a trust it's not really a trust but it's called trust fund for you and can i copy those for you i think i can use them so i'll get them back to you in a couple of days okay i'll have them uh did you do that for us thank you i know um so we did i went and i made a lot said i spent a lot right after that meeting just walked across the room and i said brother we have a couple of cash releases this year can you help us with that um and i said yes i want to see all the rest of your financial um what your investments are CDs basically and checking accounts and the CDs and um so i had a couple of days later i got sent to get the down and it's just a moment here well that's kind of what you want you want to hit that off the side and we'll get my money back um didn't you make that model is that of you as church that home but no no that's another church and it was made by um i met the fellow when i started building my house but um so ron i want to see everything and then ron talked to Donna fish on the fish gather together a group uh that includes some of the people here tonight uh they asked us to meet with them we met with them three times we couldn't agree on how we proceed uh the officers wanted to take it off right now and we we didn't need to finish it by the way we just wanted to make it safe and then uh the proposal for ron um who was that the main one putting this together ron and Donna was that they had two people to deal with finances two people to do fundraising and one person to do the architecture and uh what ron wanted to do as i understand it it wasn't spelled completely out to me was all the money we've got there's almost all of the money we've got just leaving some operating funds and put it in a essentially into a trust fund and start raising money again for working on this people which would mean delaying for another year or two or whatever it took to raise the money before we started and meet this people out there um we initially when we talked to jen rather uh j southgate he said and i think it's in this report he said hire carpentry to go up there and tighten everything up i did a lot of looking around and couldn't find a carpenter to go up there and tighten it up it's it's a steeple jack's job and carpentries don't like to get that hot and hang on the uh tables and stuff um i did talk to ernie about doing it and then i but i'd already made an appointment to talk to jan so ernie uh today so we went ahead and we said it's going to cost a lot of money to just tighten it up and then we're going to tear all that up that was the conversation with the with the four officers so um ernie just today sent me an email and said that he would be willing to go up there and tighten it up i'm not sure just you know how we would do that he may not know how he's going to do that if we made for a lift um it could cost several thousand dollars for a lift to do that so i just i personally and and speaking for the other four officers too because we've all agreed on this would prefer to just get it off and after that slow down i think i can slow down i don't need to slow down but i can slow down after that and as opposed to doing stuff we would just waste in one two three years because we could leave that gap on there for three years more longer if if we need to i think that um when when your government with gathering opinions are i think that i'm sorry but as we're as you're looking for opinions from the audience and like the community numbers i think that that's that's a concerning feature of this proposal you know i'm coming from jan he's great i'm really impressed he seems to to be the guy that you want to work with but when i hear tuesday morning i'm like whoa i just wrote about this four days ago from perform and all of a sudden it's like you know i'm i'm here we're all here no concerns this is you know well to me it's the most important building in this area so i feel like that to me implies you know smart this is making thinking things through and it doesn't and higher in jan you know all the things that we want to take our time about but it being take the roof off and then see or tuesday morning that feels to me like those are red flags and i feel like i want to say you know in big decisions in life the students someone says hurry up your mining directions now i'm going to slow that down and so that's that's where my concern is okay so that i would step back and say who's going to make the decision i would say i'm afraid that that's it i've been hearing about the working on the roof of this people my whole life like when i grew up here i'm george's daughter and there's always been a place to set the funds aside so i think it's the people that have checked into this and and that's what you have that um i don't know what i say before that the officers that's what the officers do and it it sounds like some input was sought from community and maybe there's some it was i'd like to say um that i agree with what ron and saying and i don't know your name george the issue you raised about maybe starting in spring sort of appeals to me and i think about doing something in my house and taking something off now sort of over the winter it feels like well maybe wait because what jan was saying is something could happen in six months but it could happen in six years he's not seeing water leaking i feel like there's a little time there's not a crisis conversations have started to happen i'm so grateful to have been at this but i also came to thinking it was going to be an hour long presentation and wasn't expecting a longer discussion and a consultation about voting to do something on Tuesday taking a substantial piece of the people off um on the note of um inviting people's opinions on a couple things it sounds like there have been more opinions offered from some people who aren't just officers this year after the discussion of the um steeple and roof means came about um and every year i often thought i might want to be a part of the old west church conversations but the meeting is always right after the fall foliage concert it was only for the last three years so then i i come to the fall foliage concerts and then i want to go to the closing celebration at the kent and so and i just i don't want to say like it sounds like now more people are interested in taking part in things bring some of their expertise to the situation and it does feel a bit like rushing if you're going to include new people's opinions along with officers this would be an entirely different direction for the old west church association officers to go in for what they've done the last 60 years um the last 55 or 60 years the old west church is it's left along on just the officers and a few other people and in fact one year force showed up as a president and nobody else showed up um and so it's always left along and half a dozen or six or eight feet um so opening the idea up and and saying that you know you want to have the rest of you make the decision instead of us is a huge difference and that's so three and a half years ago or so almost three and a half years ago we started talking about this uh looks the officers and we brought it to the uh and made the last two years and um and that's that's where it was discussed so i guess i'd like to hear from more people we've got a kind of extraordinary situation here i've been to this meeting i went to another meeting a couple of weeks ago i am on the advisory board as john mccollar is it seems to me that peter you're the only one that's doing anything i can't understand why the officers are not here if they want to you know if they're serious about the job they need to be here at these meetings you shouldn't have to carry this whole thing yourself well tom and his wife have been trying to retire for a few years this is oh they're they're both 80 yeah and um and they've really gotten tired of the arguing that's been going on for the last couple of months and tom about it walked out of the last meeting um Wayne lives over in uh over in uh where is it uh lived in dope and he hasn't been well for the last couple of weeks last last three or four weeks so he was at the uh the second and third meeting with this group uh and uh and we've all agreed on what we want to do so um they've said just you know i can speak for them um that's uh well it puts a big burden on you and as we've seen for now i'm wondering here as we've seen from front porch forum and the various emails that have been floating around there's a lot of different opinions nobody about this whole project and i hate to see so much uh uh uh ranker quite frankly over this building this is the first time the public is cared and so that's thrown us off and so we've got to decide what to do with it well it sounds like the it sounds like the overwhelming uh opinion particularly the group here isn't necessarily the work has got done the expertise of jannett seems like there's a lot of homework done and preparing the funds and making sure that uh those are able to do the job well and then going out and finding somebody to do the job but uh selfishly being one of the individuals who's getting you know married here in three four weeks now um it seems like there's a rush into the time frame um where where it's that there's a little more advanced notice to the community that the the work was going to be done and that the church fulfills obligations to function as a community center in its totality um you know for the rest of the calendar year it would it would be advantageous to postpone the start of the work when when when the the church isn't going to be operating you know we've got that holiday season that would be coming up um having advanced notice of working setting a date in advance you know several months saying this is the work that's going to start it's going to start on that plate as opposed to saying you know next week next week we're going to start initiating work it seems like a rush to you but we've been working on this for three years so it isn't a rush to i understand why so many people were aware of that but but nobody else is here did you let people in the reserve of the building know that there's not going to be a steeple how's that i mean well the reserve of the building that doesn't have a feature sleep file we've gotten married at Morin Hall the common dance expected that the porch is to be unknown on right these things happen i mean you you go and really dance the point there's no porch so that's not happening i have talked here i've talked to everybody uh that has been three or four more weeks this season two this month or two next month something like two and two and uh ten steeple would be out of the way and it wouldn't be nothing inside would change and if you don't aim for the very top of the steeple nothing outside will have changed if you don't shoot from that corner but you shoot from straight down to that point over there that's why we're talking so i don't think that's i don't see that as the problem i see the problem as being we've got a change now in the community where sixteen or eighteen people that are here tonight and a few others who aren't here tonight want to get involved and that's brand new that's never happened before ever and i would suggest that's a positive thing yeah that's a positive so i what i what does worry me is not so much that this is being rushed but that we think about all of the advantages that can be gained by doing it now as opposed to the advantages that could be gained by doing it later there obviously is no earth-shattering reason why it has to occur now other than that i mean we don't know the assessment for each hand was clearly not an emergency and the ornament the ornament coming off which is the only potential emergency that he identified is not an old ornament it was made in 1989 right it's made in 1850 well it's probably going back to the atlantis oh well anyway but it's not below that too but it is i understand what i what i'm wondering is with the new energy how can we harness that to potentially go after some grant money no one has looked at that this is one of the most heralded buildings in vermont yes it is and for it not to be able to get grants uh is pretty pretty amazing it hasn't happened it hasn't even tried to get well that's what i'm saying so all i'm saying is the potential to get grants the potential to get additional funds so that we don't spend everything that the church has on this one project that to me is is our moment in other words taking new energy new volunteers who might be willing to write grant applications and go forth and produce more money so that we can address all of the needs in the long term would people be willing to have any tighten it up whatever that means and pay for that is that something no i'm not in favor of that i'm actually not in favor of that i think jam is the right guy for the job he was wonderful but i think that's what everyone is going to say if we're going to wait and not have him do it do you want to leave it unprotected out there it's it's not just some sort of task it's the rules it's all true right that's not unprotected according to what i heard tonight and jam is pretty clear that it wasn't an emergency correct so you said four or five people got involved and are those people here tonight summer i'm here with Barbara McAndrew i'm married to brian clark i live over on novice in cemetery we asked to have a couple of meetings with the board members to try to understand if there was some way we could help because we saw an opportunity um richard maizelle is another gentleman um lives around county road and uh donnell myself john we uh and ride all thought that you know there's some clear need uh given the comparison to what was going on with mr rickett's corner in very good shape with good leadership and uh with the robbins ensemble work going along well although very complex that um the old west church all the people who've been working along the west church have been doing that without a lot of support and so um when it became clear that there was a fairly large effort or project that needed to get addressed it seemed like the place that some folks who were ready to volunteer more time would be able to make some make some paddling and support the people who've been carrying the burden for very many years so there was never an intention to um there wasn't an intention to get involved in the steeple the decision-making process it was an intention to support and provide more um hands on dak to around fundraisers in an investment approach rod said something very different he said that he wanted to be involved in all the decision-making and that has to be consensus it has to be i that's fine i think the point is that the um they're they're as david's expressing when you do have a project like this it is of course a great time to do fundraising um to do it um with the community's engagement the community's understanding and enthusiasm to to job more people to the annual meeting so that more people are aware of what's going on for the church and and re re-invigorate um it's a tremendous time and i think um plan some planning is needed for that to happen so i i share other people's concern about sort of Tuesday being the day you know it just feels like okay um not very many people in the community know what's going on or have read what are very lengthy messages in in the front porch morning about what is even intended so i think you would have more people engaged if there was clarity that for example this was a two-part meeting and the first part was jammed for you know making a presentation and the second part was maybe some community engagement and conversation about what what folks are interested in seeing in during the course of those three meetings um the only part about fundraising that if you got talked about was looking for grants what what did you see i know you and richard talked about things uh besides looking for grants do you think that for fundraising well i i think there's a lot of opportunity of course when there's a um there's a project like this i mean why are there sources besides grants the community the community itself of course but the community needs to know i i you know other people can speak to this but if i see the opus church people on the ground suddenly one day um that is alarming more than it is engaging and what you'd want is come see you know you'd want some build-up and some preparation so that folks are engaged and interested and there's a reason for them to participate you can buy a paintbrush from other donors and be able to paint on this you know part of this people whatever it is whatever there could be concerts yeah concerts and there can be arts and everything else but involve people contributing things that were based on the church or based on boxes and tonight was an excellent day yeah i really need to backpack and say in a way that i really appreciate jan and me here and his wisdom and his great job at educating us i also appreciate you and all the work you've been doing very little help for all this time and wane and and tom and nancy as well it's just any more any more and and and all the fun stuff too all of it the community yeah i totally agree yeah and i think this is a community that is shown over and over again how much it loves this place loves many other landmarks around it and i do think that the good news there really is a lot of good news here is that we're all waking up to the resource and the need to be more involved and to share more of the responsibility so that you're not saddled with all of the responsibility for this place that's not the way it should be working at all and i think that there you know you don't have to put the steeple on the ground to wake us up i think the mere prospect of putting the steeple on the ground obviously has already got the community churned up a little well i i appreciate your your description waking up because that's what we've been trying to do for the the twenty eight years well i don't even know we call us has a lot of landmarks we have a town hall that has needs we have a sawmill that has needs we have the camp we have the maple corner community center so we have a lot of needs and we need to work together because there are only so many of us who can share that responsibility but i think this has been a great way to kick it off and what i think is also great is i don't see anybody saying that jan levin doski is not the right person so we're even unified about what should happen it's just a question of how we go about but i need to leave here tonight with some direction so that jan knows what's going to happen and i'm do say i i feel like i'm sending these questions or are there bylaws and what would this say pertinent to that i don't know the process is the problem for me i think i can vote on something but i don't know that i have to write to it yes there is janet anselt email me said is there a membership book and i said no jan is a membership book and she was apparently reading bylaws i don't even remember that phrase in there i've been flat out all day today on the phone and emails about this and then i came to the conference this afternoon and then i went back home and get some more stuff on the computer so i had another chance to look by Barbara you've read the uh the bylaws do you remember anything about a membership book in there um yeah my understanding of the read of reading the bylaws is that uh they're the members of the old west church association are people who sign a membership book and no one's i'm not i'm not an officer so i have no idea if there is no officers have a membership book but the sense seems to be that there isn't one um the other piece that's important to this is that i mean this is not an official meeting of the old west church association unless no i don't understand that but oh it's more and it's open to the public and all we've ever had before is anybody who walks through the door well that's what i was gonna say is that the the people who attend old west church meetings association meetings are voting numbers so anyone who goes to the annual meeting votes on the officers at the annual meeting the annual meeting is held at the same time is another major event in this town that most people want to support well we will get to after just not so people would be here and and then because many years in august there would be a handful of people and they start a good call so i understand that yeah i know it's a challenge one with one you know damage you don't but i think that the the i think what i 100 agree with where david's going which is that it's all positive it's all good and it's not about negating all the good work that's been done in the past it's about now that you've got some people interested in there's some energy around it what do you do going forward and one option is to is to do you link the um annual meeting and maybe maybe just call it for a certain day sometime that's not the you know foliage or even your concert so that um sure it's just that i know there's always a so from the past that it's in the first one way maybe in a round different way people here are saying they'd like to be able to find ways able to look for some grant money and see if we could do this in the spring and it sounds like the man involved is interested in doing it in the spring although he's also available too i guess i would like to see a proposal on a show of hands that i have an idea so i have i have a question is anybody that experienced a grant right is anybody you want to write for these grants yes yes there's a number of people who are interested in helping others people like three or four like three i've been aware of at the moment yes Barbara is one of them she's great you've had 20 years there's a real procedural problem here too because there's no quorum because there's only one of you all you can really do at this point is go to your offices and say it is the opinion of this meeting that we should do this and this but we we're not in a position to make any decisions only they can really make the decisions and it sounds to me like you're you're not operating with a quorum very often so how can you make decisions it's i think what i if i could just make a decision to come to the community and ask some questions and find out where the take the pulse is that what i mean i mean i that's really just me okay because i haven't had a chance and that's been you know this happened what we arranged this a few days ago and and so i feel that i can be you know almost certain that i can say that if enough people in the community want to take the responsibility that that means what i'm afraid of is you know all of you will say you know we want you to do this and then none of you show up afterwards we're left high and dry again you know it's like me doing all of the work except for the music for their christmas eve concert for the last number of years because nobody else shows up they just they say well they want this to happen they want me to do this they want me to do that and then i'm up here shoveling out a path to the door all by myself again on the christmas eve afternoon and so we don't want that i don't want that to happen you know i want to commit from people who really want to work on it and it's not enough to say we want you to do something that we want you to do but we don't want to do it and and so i need a commitment from people and what i would like to have people do is have everybody sign there saying that they want to work on this it's it's not going to work if all of you show up once or two hours tonight and never show up again but complain about it from now on i think it's membership and it's membership book sounds like a great idea maybe we can reinstitute that so at least there are people who will put their names down yeah and say we want to be members of the church but then you can then call on so you're not stuck here doing everything you're so right do people want we've got jan has to know what he's going to do the day after tomorrow that's the proper and uh and so we have to come up with something i'm willing to change direction change course and how how things have happened in the past but i need to know that it's you know i can hear it sounds like you do that's got a paper with some names on she says there's two or three more sheets i've got i've got four sheets with 30 names you know places for 30 years six sheets so there's more than they're here we can all fill that out on one piece of paper and i don't know how many people signed up but you know our people i'm most interested in hearing from the people who are willing to work and um and barbara has said that in the past jonah said that in the past um so and that's what's going on yeah but people in here people that are here you've got 16 16 ages almost all of them i think i have 18 people here but that included uh tom left so here yeah i've actually watched you from a month or so since we went to the trees that were in the greenhouse yeah i can't hear a lot here i went to a preservation trust for the trees that were in the greenhouse so i've spent a lot of time with peter hearing about where is that and what he's trying to do and i really believe that you spent maybe 30 hours a week for the last six weeks um keeping getting getting to this point and if i really i would i would wonder who's going to do that 30 hours a week because it seems like it's actually been more like 50 or 40 50 for the last three months so who here is going to what what are some of the things that you've been doing you spend a lot of time on your computer you're talking to god who's how many people you come here and get the arrangements made for the weddings and the concerts is is that are you uncomfortable this item that if suddenly there's a new organization running this there's just a lot of something to get done because you've always done that and you know maybe maybe people will do it for a little while well let me here back up to the middle of december or beginning of december and say that nobody would step forward to organize a re-responsive for christmas eve service and then after that and what i started doing before then was nobody's gone through and read all of the paperwork in the boxes and the notebooks but he always church as far as i know ever so that's what i started doing in november and i was still doing in march or maybe a little later than that and then and i'm not probably i'm still not completely done with that yet but we found out we had a twenty five thousand dollar what's that trust twenty five thousand dollar and i'll be giving to us that we lost active because it's a volunteer organization and people serve for one year or four years and then things get lost so that's what i spent almost all my time doing before we could come to a decision that we had enough money to be able to pay for this so that's that debated until early spring this year and we finally could say we're not really sure yet how much money we have available how much money is locked up or we should be having locked up but we're pretty sure we have about a hundred and ten thousand dollars we might be wrong we might only have a hundred thousand dollars but it's it's getting in touch with the mass investment trust which we first opened up in 1921 or 22 i think it was 21 and they aren't going to really have those records available it's going to cost us money to find out what happened i guess that is something that feels to me like that's another check in the column maybe it's a good idea to await because of all of the sort of unknowns and ifs and it seems like there's some changing energy and like the current officers you're doing the majority of the work too and some officers are maybe okay so so then about three months ago shift appears entirely into trying to explain what's going on and how i look at this place and find out how other people look at it and we look at lots of different ways and so i've spent the last three months trying to learn how other people look at also trying to explain how i look at it uh last christmas eve uh richard miss elf who was first time i met him who was on the choir came when he found out that we couldn't have a lead sold any longer because of the transfer this is uh the insurance company goes we couldn't and so he came and he said well all we'll do is getting that insurance and if the place rebuild it well um it's taken me a couple months at least maybe three months to put into words how you can't rebuild it how i don't think you can rebuild it this is if you're sitting on this bench now other people have been sitting on that same bench that same piece of wood for almost 200 years and when you come and you sit on the inside of this it hasn't changed since 1831 when they lower the pulpit and put the wood stones in that it just hadn't changed and that's an extremely unique building now a lot of people just don't care they look at me and say well we can make a copy of it and we'd be perfectly happy and so it's taken me a long time to try to figure out how they're having to do this so that's been a lot of what i've been doing too rewriting rewriting talking to people going to this uh this workshop going through another one um and talking to people and and finding out that uh people have very different ideas about what preservation really means some people think that preservation means taking out wood stoves and putting in copies of the sticks missing pears um that's not what the state that's not what the national forest square in the parks uh group says they call that something else so it's a really it's turned into a very complex issue that most of us kind of wing and say well this is what i feel about it so you know it's sort of like you know the the political party saying uh this is uh you know this is right because this is what i think uh peter how often do your offices meet how often you have like board meetings we don't have well we don't have a board we only meet once a year and officers get together when they need to why don't you have a board or why don't you have committees which is usually the way things that couldn't get anybody nobody wanted to do it nobody wanted to do it because if you have committees that then you delegate you say okay this committee will do some so and then they don't do it they don't do it even if they commit to do it they don't do it the president well Wayne got one person to uh to agree to committing to uh to uh taking over uh to working their way into being the treasurer they never showed up and that's that's the way things almost always go that's why we only have four or five or six people show up in the end of the meeting it's uh and that's one of the things that came up that if this uh meeting a granddad it's gotten away to you don't people don't want to be members of things anymore because they feel like then they have to do something they were obliged to do something they wanted money without being a member which was a brand new idea to me and it's a whole lot different than it was in the 60s and 70s when this sort of thing was popular and now this sort of thing is neglected uh this you know is like um you know the historic building site places like sheldon farms are they're working in the red now and they're trying to find other ways to get money it's just not uh people like to show up for their wedding and uh that's it it's just on the money it's the commitment to actually do some work that's that's the problem man it's a change in times i just want to say this is the steeple event is like the septic system event at the community center it's triggering involvement and engagement which can be a good reason to be great that's what i i take this it's very true do you see any calendars out there? calendars? they take them i think that was a really lucky evening i was just getting in there i don't do art for a church i think this is a really good looking bridal party opportunity to take advantage of the you're getting married you're coming and you get to do it i'd be happy to do it you promised to put it a frontal shot i heard that a frontal shot walking down the aisle if you promise to take this steeple out in this break i'll do it all 12 months i'd really like to see uh somebody make the clothes off the shoulder i have some direction to feel like it's either everybody here or almost everybody here wants to do it that way cindy you've been i haven't since to wait until spring to use some of this energy to see what happens it doesn't sound like this man is saying i will only do it on tuesday i will not do it i hear him saying i can do it in the spring yeah and i think it makes sense to step back to give it till spring it makes more sense to meet these people off in the spring you know the work we've done up at our house it should have been done and oh my god it rained all the time this year so when i hear him say okay three months in my life i think okay certainly six months maybe nine months this year goes without being so harmless to make a motion how many people agree with what cindy just said can you raise your hands to wait till spring i'm going to remain well my next question was is there anybody that disagrees with her and by spring i guess i need like two first how are you i think you can start before then does that seem like how you would if you were ready to do spring i think we've done that jan didn't know better than me but okay so early spring so how many people disagree and how many abstain how many abstain one abstination how many people think we should start Tuesday instead because we've got to be ready for spring and it's a big project sometimes it's busy going the way you got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and i'm not going to vote fifteen to one one guy to the left wanted it done brian later brian and he wanted it done later so what's that 16 16 early spring one abstation and i'm not voting brian i'm voting i want to say thank you for all the years you've stuck with this the work of my dad you have done so much for this whole community not just for the old church i'm so glad you moved to callus you're the reason we moved to callus because of just the two babies just the other just the other brian later and you're also the reason i got involved in this is three months after i moved here four months after i moved here you stuck me at the bottom of the stairs to limit the number of people going upstairs we learned that this wasn't really strong enough to hold the number of people that were out there and we got worried about the amount that decision so then it started to limit 125 people upstairs and we had colored programs and the knowledge that decision actually goes back to the early 60s that was way back it wasn't as recent as you think and only by reading for months and months and so i've come up with a 103 page index with notes to be able to find those things i'm just going to speak and now i come out i didn't get married in here my parents didn't get married in here 50 years ago or whatever but i come up with this from having copy furniture to learn how to make old furniture which goes back to the late 70's which predates this a little bit but i understood the value of learning by copying and it's not that i think copies are copies they're not the original but there's a great value in learning from something like this because if you go out and look afterwards on the side of that pulpit you'll find a pure door that was used for family and i only just saw that 20 days ago in almost 30 years and looking at this place all the time and looking for things like that it took 28 years to find that and that tells us a lot about when that was loaded it was lowered after these shoes were at the same time as these 6 shoes were taken out and that's how i got hooked on this so it's i just feel very protective of this place i'm glad i'm going to call jan up not tonight i will email him tonight and i'll talk to him tomorrow and i will tell him that and i'll actually i've got to talk to the officer first so i will call him tomorrow i've got to talk to the officer but also pass on that i think he's very impressive and very thoughtful i think he got that idea and i think he has a chance to figure it out too okay, so tomorrow i'm going to tonight i'm going to email the officers and tomorrow morning i'm going to call the officers and i think they're going to go on 90% surely they're going to go along with this and all of you sign up here and we will keep in touch that way as well because i want to make this as public as possible and i want to put all of these things on i've been recording just the end of this since we've been meeting before jan stopped and it's something that i started doing a long time ago for the select board and then for the school board more recently and so that will be available to anybody who wants to listen to it and it's just i'm not going everything has got to be public and please tell the officers at least i'm saying thank them for all the good time for all these years sticking with you it wasn't very long for them to stay with and help them feel that there's some energy and the idea of these people coming off the race the money and trying to keep us in good financial form and i have to say that the way he's been doing this for something like 20 years since paladin did it because paladin didn't want to do it anymore wain is the one responsible for having bylaws first place is responsible for the 101c3 and he's been trying to drag me into this and he may not be the easiest person to deal with but he really cares about this place and it's only because of him it's happened to where it is now i hope he gets a bit well, when stanley phish tried to get off he was president for like 3 or 4 years trying to get off of being president and he couldn't try to replace it for him and he finally listed all of his accomplishments and we're going to have to do the same thing for everybody who's been president starting with forest actually there was that's the only ones we have and i know it's late so thank you everybody thank you and i will put the results i will e-mail to everybody tomorrow and then i will put something in the trunk which will help me out thank you stanley thank you