 Okay everyone, welcome. I wasn't sure if we'd get any turned out at all, given the date, but thank you all for coming. We hold, this is Chittenden Downey Historical Society, holds talks every other month during what I would call the school year primarily, and we have an annual meeting in July. If you're interested in finding out if you're not members who would like to join, you can find us at CCHSDT.org. If you forget to put into VT, you go to the Humane Society. So I'm really excited about this presentation and my name is Carolyn Gould. I'm president of this organization and we have some of the board members here today who I think a lot of you know because I see a lot of familiar faces in the crowd. But one thing I'd like to point out for those of you who don't know us is that we are an entirely content-driven organization. That means we publish articles, we publish books, and we hold presentations on topics that are broadly defined as historic. And to me that means history of the land, history of the people who interacted with the land, history of manufacturing, history of art and architecture. It's a broad definition as opposed to revolutionary war heroes. So I think it's an important distinction that you make because for someone who sees the world's interacting in various ways that the dwellings that we make reflect the grounds we live on. So you see housing change according to where it is in the United States. And having grown up in Oregon, natives in where I grew up in the valley used cedar because it was rain would not penetrate it because of the oils in the cedar. So we're going to hear a lot about the connection of timber too and I'm sure. So I am so delighted to have these two as our speakers today because it combines two of my greatest passions, historic preservation and conservation. And you can't find a more fascinating organization in this the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps and the project that were that they're working on. One of the speakers, Elliot Lothrop, is the recipient of our 23-24 research grant to do research on Charles Miller who is a barn architect. And I know I was as blown away as you were to hear barn architect because we think of barns being raised by communities not being given an architect or dead alone knowing the name of that architect. And so the barn that they're working on is the East Monitor barn enrichment. And I'm sure we're going to hear about that as well, right? I just have to say that if I were between the ages of 15 and 25, I would be applying to be in this program. No question about it. I mean, it's so exciting. And I'm sure they're going to tell you a lot about the history of this organization. And plus, I think Brecht has some numbers that are absolutely mind-boggling about the impact they have. And if you're involved in any of the not-for-profits in these areas, somebody who went through the programs at UVM as a field naturalist or as a historic preservation, their mark is someplace in the past few years. Anyway, so first of all, some very brief intros. Brett Knopf, who's here, started out in a career as a teacher and administrator and working in secondary and post-secondary education. He went to Hobart, I think. Lawrence. And you went to Hobart and came to here. Probably because you went to St. Michael's, right? So he is the president of the organization, but he started out there in 2008. What did you start out as? And became its executive director in 2015. Elliot, who knows some of you because we've worked together, is the principal of Building Heritage, which is his own company. He specializes in timber repairs of historic buildings. And if any of you have lived in an old house or had an old barn or whatever, you know that that requires a background that's special, not only because of the tension on the framing, the wood, whether it's rotted or strong, how big the pillars are, all of that plays a role in these kinds of old structures. He founded his company after having worked on the field a lot in 2004, right? So his company's named Building Heritage. I don't know if you can see in the orange on the screen, but it has their web sites as well. So without any more blithering on my part, I introduce you to Frank Knopf. Thank you for that nice introduction. And I would just extend appreciation to everyone for coming out on the Sunday before the holidays. It's a busy time of year. Elliot and I are excited to share a little bit about VYCC and the restoration of the East Monitor Barn. We have really a slideshow that's in two parts. I'll start by talking about VYCC, Vermont Youth Conservation Corps, and then we'll pivot and have a real greater focus on the restoration of the East Monitor Barn. And because this is an invitation to come and talk with the Historical Society, my remarks about VYCC are once looking backwards and trying to explain and give an overview of the roots of the organization as well as a snapshot of programs today and where we want to take the organization. I'll also share that Elliot and I have collaborated a lot this year in the restoration of the barn and all the moving pieces there, programmatic, financial preservation, engineering, lots of moving parts. Now we've talked about wouldn't it be great if we can go and go on a little bit of a speaking tour? Wouldn't it be great to go and talk to folks and really generate excitement and enthusiasm and appreciation for what we're doing? This is our first time doing that, so I don't know if we're workshopping this for the big leagues. This is the big leagues and we just jumped right in, but either way it's really nice to have the invitation, so thank you for that. I'll start with grounding us I think and sharing that conservation corps today and VYCC is really what we think of as a living legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps. And Civilian Conservation Corps I'm sure everyone knows was created by President Roosevelt, FDR and the height of the depression for over three million young men, mostly white men who were in the CCC and this I don't know if I can read this, this quote comes from FDR and I'll read it and this is what he had in mind when creating the Civilian Conservation Corps. He said I proposed to create a civilian conservation corps to be used in simple work, more important however than the material gains would be the moral and spiritual value of this, of such work. And we don't necessarily talk today about VYCC in spiritual or moral terms, but the point there is that it's both infrastructure that's that will be addressed and built as well as a really enormously empowering employment experience for young people and it's that combination of investing in people and investing in infrastructure that I think is where you really see the power of the magic of the CCC but also organizations like VYCC. So Elliot, let's go to the next slide please. Okay, the oh sorry there's a typo here I'm already correcting myself it's 90 years not 100 years so my math was wrong but the Civilian Conservation Corps was actually started in March of 33 and here we are 90 years later and what I like about this picture on the left it's from Brattleboro so that's in Vermont I don't know what the project was I don't know if there was a camp down there the caption said Brattleboro 1933 and you can see how pun intended here at the esprit de corps is really similar between what was happening there and what's happening here because this picture on the right is from Marsh Billings Rockefeller National Park just down the road from or up the road from from Brattleboro and again you have folks taking a break really excited and proud about the project it's all very hands-on this is the work that our crews are doing it's really comparable to the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Okay Elliot let's move to the next slide please. VYCC started in 1985 and one of the things that I learned in coming into this role was that federal programs that the the Civilian Conservation Corps morphed into other types of federal programs that went into the late 70s and the early 80s and then when President Reagan was elected and it was an era of smaller government a lot of those federal programs went away but the the states saw that these cores were really dynamic effective worthwhile institutions programs organizations and so you have really the emergence of smaller statewide sometimes regional conservation cores that came about in the 80s and VYCC was very much part of that trend so we started in 1985 and this is our very first crew over here on the left and then this is a crew from this year so again you see the book ending of the experience in our early days to what the experience can look like feel like now. This is a crew that's working on the boroughs trail on the way up to Camelson putting in some stone steps. Really from the beginning we have been embraced by I would say the whole state of Vermont more specifically the legislature of Vermont we were included in statute in 1985 created with a one-dollar appropriation and it built it from that one-dollar appropriation that the the there's a technical reason as well as a practical reasons for the one-dollar appropriation by giving having a state give VYCC one dollar at the start it set a precedent for state funding and support of the organization and that's because we do so much work on state land that it makes sense for the state to be investing in infrastructure in a way that also supports workforce development here you see Governor Coonan and both of these pictures you can also see my predecessor Tom Hark who was our first leader of the organization and really deserve an enormous amount of credit for building something that we're hoping to carry forward. Let's move on to the next slide. For the first seven years VYCC was actually not an independent 501c3 we weren't our own nonprofit we were part of state government the initial statutory language has us being part of the agency of natural resources as well as what was then called Department of Education and Training which is now the Department of Labor we really work most closely within agency of natural resources and even more specifically forest parks and recreation and as part of that we were running state parks doing a lot of work on state land and then in the early 90s 1992 we really realized we could keep this great dynamic effective partnership in place with the state but we could be a little more nimble and be able to raise more private funds if we became an independent 501c3 so we transitioned to be in a nonprofit in the early 90s and have been ever since. Next slide. So I'm going to fast forward this is the moment in the movie where Wizard of Oz where it goes from black and white to color. So we're in modern times here both these pictures are actually taken on our campus enrichment but sure if everyone knows this we have a 400 acre campus right along Route 2 in Richmond it's where the two monitor barns are we moved there in 2005 and then in 2008 purchased what we think of as our east campus which is the east monitor barn and here we are now 15 years after that second purchase restoring the east barn in LA we'll talk about that. One thing I want to point out this is our current mission take action and build community by working and learning together with the land. A couple years ago we went through a really awesome community conversation to take a hard look at what is really at the core of the core and part of that process we spent a lot of time talking with young people and young people they really want to take action they spend a lot of their time in classrooms and when it comes to actually public service they want to roll up their sleeves they want to get their hands in the dirt they want to do things and they want to be part of something that's a larger than some cells so those first five words take action build community are really the spirit of the mission and then there's last piece is the second half of it if you will working and learning together with the land is a little bit of how we do two main programs we have a food and farm program and then the conservation program and I'll get into those a little bit more. You can see that we continue to work in state parks Caroline I was really appreciative of you hyping the impact that we have it's hype that actually is grounded and it's well deserved you can see just this one crew that was working at Brighton and Stillwater State Parks I just want I'm not a huge fan of folks who like put up a slide and then read it but I'm not sure if everyone can read it in the back so 1300 square foot boardwalk replays demolished and rebuilt two viewing platforms 1600 square feet of buildings painted painted 100 square feet of roof re-shingle two life jacket racks constructed 1300 feet of trail maintained 256 square feet of rot repair so crews get a lot done there's a real focus on supporting members but there's also a focus on productivity it is a job there are high expectations it's a paid service experience and part of what we're doing is we're helping a young adult for many folks it's their first job and this is what the workplace is like and so there's the technical skills of how to make a building straight and true and plumb and everything square and put together in a way that lasts but there's also what are sometimes called soft skills are now referred to as durable skills of actually being able to show up at the work site and work alongside folks who might be different than you take care of yourself and come back to after-date really be a contributing member of the team okay next slide here Elliot um so I'm going to talk a little bit over the next few slides about what the projects are um but before I do that let me just zoom out a little bit and say that in any given year VUICC will offer paid service positions to about 175 young adults so mix of high school students folks who are in college folks who've graduated or maybe haven't gone to college almost all of our participants are from Vermont but others come from across their country to hopefully put down roots and stay here in Vermont you'd figure out our housing situation but lots of other good folks working on that um and they work in small teams and each team will have one or two leaders and then about four to six members so you have two crew leaders handful of core members crew members and then that crew is assigned projects and sometimes they'll be on that project for a month at a time other times they're a week at a time and then they will row around other parts of Vermont we have projects that are on our campus and we have projects in count on we have projects in Newport and everywhere in between so we're very much a statewide organization um nearly 200 core members completing about 70 000 hours of service work in any given year um and within that broad framework there's different project initiatives one of which is water quality so if you think about water quality we all want a lake that we can swim in enjoy and fish out of um water quality it takes on a few different forms you can see someone here planting trees um it looks like a core member of the middle is pulling invasive species doing probably the same on the left we also do what's called GSI green storm water infrastructure rain gardens things of that sort um uh and um this is a dream job you get to go out kayak on the lake uh all summer long so um that's what ellie and i are shooting for next so in addition to water quality um trail work of course uh that's a bit of our bread and butter last year i think we did 52 crew weeks of trail work um roughly i think we did 80 miles of trail maintenance for uh restoration um and you can see that it's both um you know it's both digging in the dirt um as well it is some technical aspects here of actually building a boardwalk it's really fun when um when the community comes out and it's actually sees the crew on the trail um it can be a little disruptive if everyone's giving us high fives and interrupting us all the time but that's an interruption it won't take um all right what's next forestry work forestry is is a relatively new initiative for us um what we're seeing in in that kind of um within that initiative is that there's a niche and a place for v y cc you have uh forest foresters who really professional foresters who want to take out larger timbers and might go in there with a skid steer that's not work that we're doing instead what we're doing is a lot of wildlife habitat management um also invasive work so for example there might be an old historic apple orchard where a lot of vegetation small trees have grown up around the apples apple trees and we can go in there and take all of that out and release those trees it's good for um for itself it's good for wildlife and we're doing more and more work with um not just federal and state partners but even some private individuals who have conservation easements on their land I think next last two years ago we had six crew weeks next year we're going to have 36 weeks so it's really funded significant trajectory of that all right I'm moving towards the end of my time I did want to make the note that we have different levels of experience within the organization so we don't have high school students with chainsaws quite as funny we do have we do have high school experiences for folks we have americorps experiences and we have our more advanced or pro crews and so chainsawing is something that you'll have on our americorps or what we call our pro or advanced crews this past year we did 26 weeks again next year we'll do more you can see that there's a whole series of credentials that people get it's called game of logging there's different levels game of logging one two three and it's a technical type of course you take in order to not just be safe but be more ergonomically efficient and use the saw in a way that really is different than just a regular pull saw and then other we try to layer in other credentials along the way okay eliot next slide this is a fun initiative as well our carpentry crews are build crews a lot of infrastructure work happens and stay parks this middle picture here is a picture of the hut that we built for the vermont huts association down in graupond to call it a hut is really underselling it it's really a it's really smartly designed for season small house but that you can't have an organization called the vermont smartly designed so it's called the hut and it's it's particularly awesome when you have folks who really didn't think of themselves as carpenters and then with training and support you put a power tool or even just a hammer in their hands and the whole new world opens up and we see that time and time again it's particularly true with young women and I just love that part of the program next eliot okay so I've just been talking about the conservation side of the house if you will we have a working farm on our campus and vermont is this great ecosystem for food systems and agricultural innovation and collaboration and vycc is really part of that so just as a conservation crew project benefits the greater good so does the farm so the farms project that is benefiting the greater good is called the health care share so our core members are growing food that's then we work with medical centers or partners who identify families who have struggled with food insecurity or diet related illness and then they'll get a weekly health care share it's one of vermont's largest csa type programs this past year there was about 425 families who were enrolled through different medical centers across the state and you kind of think only in vermont and let's have more of that and so here you see on the left core members bagging up groceries harvest if you will from the farm of vycc and that's a lot of fun hanging out with chickens too I think that's the point there what's next eliot yeah so at risk of state in the obvious you saw young adults at all these pictures being part of something that's larger than themselves and to be a catalyst for that personal growth workforce development a sense of belonging a sense of connection to the state and feel like they are contributing in ways that are meaningful that that is a strategy for wellness and resiliency as much as it's a strategy for infrastructure and as much as it's a strategy for economic development and what's really fun is about the way that vycc is at the center of those different outcomes and if you come to the barn open invitation to come to both the west and east monitor barn and the restored west monitor barn all the hallways and rooms are lined with all these pictures I've really just scratched the surface it's pretty fun inspiring to walk around and see all the pictures and check out these sunglasses all right uh eliot I think we're wrapping up here um yeah this is the beginning of a segue to eliot what one thing that we're trying to do as an organization we start with the premise that the core experience is really awesome it's good for a community it's good for a group it's good for a young person so how can we find ways to bring more young people into the organization and we looked at some of the barriers to participation and it's some of the obvious things like transportation compensation and we're working on addressing all those but another big one is housing and accommodation so we have an americor program which is helps underwrite the costs and supports the learning outcomes and each americor member gets a modest stipend but that modest stipend is not enough to pay for an apartment on the open market so what we're trying to do is build infrastructure so that we can actually have more of them folks who are actually staying on our campus and so the restoration of the east barn in a broader sense is part of vycc strategy to build increased accommodation on our campus um and it's not just uh and so it's a two-pronged one uh initiative one is through investment and infrastructure but then the other is making sure that we're able to support members and compensate them in ever stronger ways um as as time moves forward so for example if you're a what here's an example of what support looks like if you are working really hard during the week on a crew and you're sleeping in a tent and it's rainy and it's buggy when you come back to vycc on the weekend you should be able to sleep on a bed um and right now we don't have the capacity to do that and we're in this quiet stage of a campaign in order to make sure that we can do that in the coming years um i think this is my last slide um oh no i've got a couple more but i'll be quick just quickly vycc is part of one of many cores across the country um in this sense it's not just an organization but really part of a larger movement next slide um we also have a web of partnerships here in vermont so uh vycc started a coalition called serve learn earn of different nonprofits here and each of these nonprofits autobahn and vermont works for women our resource have different missions work with different groups of people but there's a through line where we offer paid service and training experiences um and um and this is our collective impact the serve learner impact impact over the last few years and you can see thousand participants almost 10 000 weeks of training um nearly 2.7 million dollars and wages directly to our participants so you know collectively we're a real economic engine really excited and this next year we're going to be also including northwood stewardship center north east kingdom because you can see there's a little bit of hole there i really want to be covering all parts of the state um you can go two slides forward elia and this is um not our first shorty so we're restoring the east barn um this is a picture of both barns along with the farmhouse um before the west barn which is this barn was restored and we're enormously proud to be stewards and the folks who are restoring these barns this picture was probably taken uh in the summer of 2005 you can see the vegetation is in in place the landscaping is really fresh um and uh and it's very bright red so they freshly painted um and uh the last slide is a really fun one it's a picture of dan lee so dan was a crew leader for us for two years back in 2008 and 2009 first time he was first summer he was down at qui chi state park and then he was at the muslimu rec area um and uh he was doing water quality work so as part of that water quality work during that time he had a bundle of willow facines which is what he asked over his shoulder well uh fast forward to today where dan is working on elliott's crew uh and the restoration of the east barn and i think it's it's just a great feel good story because dan's an awesome guy and uh they have him stay connected to vycc is really wonderful but also if you invest i think in a young person at a really important time in their life that investment really just sticks and it's it's you see many many core members who look for ways to keep giving back to them on and um so you got a picture of dan there um where he's striking a comparable pose to what he was doing in 2008 so um i've now taken us into the basement the ground floor of the east barn which is maybe a good time to hand it off to elliott and then we'll do questions at the end is that work too carline okay great okay and i can drive the train here hello everybody i'm elliott luther from building heritage um so i'll talk a bit more about the east barn and the work that we've been doing this year um as caroline mentioned i had to get a grant to research charles miller the builder he's sort of a architect builder um what we would call a master framer so at that point in time you would have a timber framer who would come in and lay out all the timbers for other folks that caught but they would have a really good understanding of geometry uh engineering and how to raise a four-story 54 by 112 foot structure um and so we'll do another presentation hopefully in the future more about charles miller the design of the building and uh and other buildings around chitin and adison county that charles miller posing mostly on chitin and county that charles miller built but this is the east monitor barn a super impressive structure one of the largest barns in the state four story is tall it's a bank barn and so it's accessible by horses in this case for for machinery operation the horse is driving it from every level so you can come in at the basement where you pull your manure out well actually i'll reverse and start from the top down um you would bring your hay in at the top level here you just see the only photo we really have there's a high drive here so there's a stone above it with a wooden ramp that would take you into the high drive level of the barn um so you'd have a hay wagon with loose hay driven in this case by horses um and you would bring your your hay wagon into the barn and you'd be pitching loose hay with a pitchfork over uh sort of a parapet wall um so you're going down this thing that's a catwalk and on either side of you it's 12 feet wide um you've got a parapet wall and you're throwing the hay over and then this entire space here the haymow below would be full of hay um there are shoots inside that you'll see later on where you can throw the hay down to the cows below uh the line the layer there with the um level with the the windows was the stock level where the cows were and you could throw the manure down to the basement below where you would have sleds that you could drag the manure out on spread it in the field um built in 1901 in this uh gravity feed bank barn you know notion this is kind of the culmination the kind of pinnacle of it this was a notion that the shakers that sort of started in the mid 19th century um with round barn and and Hancock shaker village um and other lots of other folks are using this notion but this is kind of the culmination of it before we get into sort of electrical and more industrial farming um yeah just a great photo you can see also all the other great buildings that are in it sorry yeah yeah a bunch of other structures nothing else is here at this point other than the small carried barn that's on the park side of east barn the farmhouse burned in the 80s and is reconstructed on the same foundation but it's a new structure all right um so Breck talked a little bit about Dan uh Dan Lee uh he showed a couple slides ago his connection to uh both the UICC and to the barn um and there's so many levels layers of of connection things coming full circle for so many of us in the project um I myself have a similar one uh moved up uh went to undergrad school for uh pre architecture went to UVM for grad school and historic preservation I had a dog and was trying to find a place to live in Burlington with a dog which is nearly impossible I'm sure it still is um and uh had this notion that maybe I could find like a little single wide trailer on some farmer's land and I could do 10 hours of work a week in exchange for room and board um seen like there are a couple things like that but I couldn't find like a Bolton board that had all the names of those people uh so I was for a long time driving back to New Hampshire and instead of taking 89 I decided to take route two uh on a Saturday and lo and behold I drive by the Vermont farm bureau on a Saturday having to stop in and um the director of the farm bureau uh Tim Buskie was there never there on a Saturday uh but he happened to be there on Saturday I said hey do you have a list of farmers in the minority he said well no but we do have this milkhouse right there and this can be up for rent in August I said well how do you feel about dogs we love dogs so for $400 a month I got to live in the little milkhouse here um the farm bureau had converted into an office for them and then I was a second renter um and yeah I mean it was wonderful and awful at the same time there were black moons uh living upstairs and you turned the oven on and it would smell like mouse pee a half an hour later um but it was just amazing and uh another quick little story I had taken a timber framing course before this uh in between undergrad grad school at a place called Heartwood in Western Mass it was really interesting I knew that I wanted to do a timber framing thing but I was totally green didn't know what I was doing and everybody said well you get to Vermont J and Lundowski you get in touch with J and Lundowski so I called up J and Lundowski who um was at this point working on the west barn or was just about to work in the west barn and he said well it's funny you should call I'm going to be working in Richmond in February on the monitor barn and at this point it's like November I'm in graduate school for historic preservation and I said well what's a monitor barn what it was and so he's describing the roof line to me I said well geez I think I live there and so you can just barely see the timber frame from the west barn is right there and so I got to work for Jan for a couple months on on the west barn so yeah wonderful full circle um and uh Jan uh just amazing I'm sure most folks know Jan at least know the name um he's done the shoulder firm breeding barn uh did the west barn restoration um all sorts of great stuff he did two conditions assessments on the east barn uh and the thing with the east barn so it's it's a platform frame so it's basically two timber frames so the lower box here from this lying down is basically one timber frame with plates posts that go all the way up and then you've got a cat here and another timber frame above it so if you walk in that upper timber frame it's basically its own giant barn um and there's a hinge point in between the two and what happened was this foundation on the back side the hill the pressure from the hill behind it pushed that stone wall and it pushed this lower box downhill so that this point here is about a foot further forwards than the foundation was the upper box went with it so it was hanging out a foot beyond its foundation and the lower box of leaning um in concept do you think well geez we should pull this thing back to where it used to be which would be an enormous undertaking um in Jan one of Jan's conditions assessment he came up with this great idea makes total sense um and maybe I would have gotten there on my own uh but it was really nice to read this thing and say well that's a great idea to lift the building up and instead of trying to move it back uphill to move the foundation forwards towards the road um so you can see here the lean uh in the structure um there's other photos that maybe showed even better but uh on the left I had put some uh one of the first projects I got to do on my own when I started building heritage in 2004 was to work for the farm duo to try to just stabilize the thing to keep it standing um so I put some braces in you can see down below and some tie rods in the other direction um that kind of held the other interesting thing that really shows how much force is on the building as there is a stud in the middle of all the braces and you can see on the uphill side just how hard the building is leaning against that brace to bend it that way um so one of the things that we we've started to do is to do these sketch up drawings models of the whole structure and to try to especially on a building that's this large with so many individual members um to try to identify what's rotted what needs repair what needs replacement uh and then we also took that drawing and plugged in the jacking plan into it and so in order to do all this to to move the billionaire they had to lift the whole thing up and at the same time we had to replace a bunch of timbers and so trying to anticipate the sort of chess moves of all right well if this beam needs to replace what we can't be lifting it here so this drawing helps us sort of start to identify those various pieces this is the haymow upstairs you can see the two shoots and the four around here there's another two in the middle now they're two at the very back the up at the monitor there are um there is a series of windows and uh in louvers and so it's two windows a louver a window louver um and so you're getting the monitor provides for both light and ventilation so you're venting both the haymow here and it's also exhausting the stale air from the cows down below up through that monitor um the shoots also have on the backside there are doors uh i think they're like three feet tall basically the whole thing that's doors on hinges so no matter what the height of the hay was inside these are constantly starting with this thing full of hay in the fall and you're constantly dropping the level of hay down as you're throwing it to the cows so you have various doors at different heights you're constantly just standing on top of a pile of hay pitching it to the cows below and this is from up above that um it's with a weird wide angle lens this way it kind of looks a little curvy everything is actually straight there um but this is the high drive so this is the catwalk that's all pigeon poo there um backpack uh really neat detail that charles miller did on a couple of his barns the jubilee barn and huntington the uh big white uh barn on the main road same detail as this so you bring your your horses in a hay wagon um unload your hay but you don't want to back the horses out with the wagon that'd be musical on that that bridge so this is actually a turnaround here we left out a post and so you actually turn the hay wagon around and go out forwards the other barn jubilee has the same detail and you can see the monitor windows and fence there um so because i'm kind of geeky with all this stuff one of the one of the things we got to do uh there's a great neighbor uh to um to the property um that was generous in donating uh stumpage so donating some of the trees uh for this year's work they were doing some logging anyhow uh and so we were able to identify using that drawing that I showed identify which timbers need repair replacement figure out how many logs that was and then work with the landowner to say hey we need you know 10 22 foot logs eight 16 foot logs and then we brought in a woodmizer portable sawmill to mill up those various logs to the correct dimension for each allocated timber um and I knew we were doing this and I said well geez I remember that happening back in early 2000s I'm pretty sure I have a photo and so I uh be the geek that I am we oriented all the logs and the woodmizer in the same way that it had been uh for the west barn so killing envy yeah yeah yeah um so this is a stock level this is where the cows are um and you can see there are there are four lines of cows the stanchions the only remnants of stages left we saved everything that was still there but these stations would have gone straight down through the length of the building uh and so their face to face the cows are the hay would drop down in front of that uh the stanchions there uh and then you can see just barely and it's going to even tell this area here where the cows are standing this is the newer chopper here this is actually sloped so the floor joists are higher here lower there so everything is pitching towards the manure gutter um four lines of that and so they actually cut all the floor joists are different you know they all taper this notch that sits here on the beam is different heights depending on where it sits um in order to jack the building up again we had to lift from up highs or looking from this upper level there the crimping towers had come up through this floor and so that's why this floor is being removed um because this is a big tall lift and so in order to start with the crimping towers uh there's the basement is full of concrete there's actually three slabs um so you're looking at the most recent it's probably like a 1960s slab maybe a 1930s underneath about a foot of dirt that you're seeing here and then another foot of dirt below that and then we got to what we think was the original slab um presumably from 1901 we'll see some pictures of that uh but this the process here is to um excavate all the slabs dirt everything down to the footing height uh x1 um so that when the building is jacked up in the air and these crimping towers you're not digging below the height of the crimping towers and undermining them so the the way it's all going to be on these towers they get built here like jenga towers um but if you then had to dig out everything around it you'd be undermining so that's why we start out digging down to that height initially and then start building towers here um so i think there were two or three truck loads like the one on the left four thousand pieces of crimping um we worked with this great guy loonop out of middlebury um to work with us on the jacking and um yeah it was a huge undertaking went went really really well so because they are incredibly tall crimping towers there's a lower network of steel i-beams here uh that are just meant to stitch all the crimping towers together um so those are just stiffeners you don't have 16 big tall towers that might be wobbling and moving around um and then you have your main beams that go uh longitudinally there and then there are picking beams cross beams that are on top of that so that's them putting in the live beams with the crane and this is this is what the full pick looked like um so you'll see the photo of the the west side of the building on the left for the east side of the building on the right and you can see there are very different setups uh so on the east side of the building all this additional steel you'll see in a couple pictures is just to replace what we call the upper sill so there's a horizontal timber at that level that was in need of replacement um so all that additional setup is just to replace that timber um but it was a really cool and worked really well so you'll see the process coming up here i think of what that looked like this is a little bit about the actual jacking um so this is called a unified jacking system so there is a small uh it's basically like a little Honda um like lawnmower engine right here uh and these are all pages um the hydraulic lines and those run to these jacks and so it's like it's called trip jack so instead of a regular you know hand pump hydraulic jack it's run off this machine um and you can basically lift one point and then it levels uh it auto levels all of the different hydraulic lines so you can start to pick up the weight level everything and then the entire building then comes up uh completely level so they have one built on each side of the building so this is this upper sill you can see right here this is us getting ready to replace it this is this whole setup here that was necessary uh to do that it's basically a class we need to close with two ski laggings uh lifting this upper post off of that sill the sill has a horizontal beam that comes into it this way you can see that tendon there and there are posts that came up from below so there's no that piece has to slide in from the outside without the piece above and below it so that's why that's all necessary and as this all sets here what we've done here is to excavate the backside of that stone wall before the lift bob kneel of engineering ventures was our engineer we worked with on this and he made a good point that if there was this you know massive amount of earth pressure that had pushed the stone wall we lifted the building off it and there's still this pressure behind it it might then push the wall more the building may have been acting as a sort of buttress sort of diaphragm resisting that push so we we excavated halfway down on that back wall before we did the lift and there's the new sill on the left uh yeah it was two 32 foot long timbers a 30 foot long timber and a 28 foot long timber so we had a bunch of the woodmizer portable sawmill can mill up to 21 feet and so all the shorter stuff got milled on site we brought all the medium-sized stuff to Fletcher where they can mill up to 28 feet and then there's a guy in Huntington Miles Janass who can actually mill up to 60 feet and so we had I think four timbers that were 32 foot long that got milled in Huntington so just trying to kind of allocate all the different mills there you go and so in July so that was that last picture was just days before this all happened we're basically trying to get to a point where we get this sill in and then remove all the timbers below that so that entire wall is removed at this point and we did this really great community build workshop with the timber framers guild where we had a week-long workshop to teach repair techniques and and actually got into a little bit of reinstallation of all the repaired pieces really great collaboration that we're working on continuing to foster between the UICC and the timber framers guild and trying to combine sort of missions of both great organizations and so this was and this just occurred to me actually as you're talking about your annual meeting so these folks arrived on Friday night we started to work on Saturday I think I came to your annual meeting on Sunday and I remember being ridiculously humid on Sunday go to the next slide and then of course we know what happened on Monday so your annual meeting was a day it was like the day of the flood day before the floods so we had 12 people somewhere from Vermont but most of them come from other places kind of welcome to rot you're stuck in Richmond now yeah so you can see this is actually the river it is you can just barely see Crom and Cockridge right there just a little like riding ramp is right there the horse farm is right there in the salt cornfield so the river route is closed right here so myself but going down all the way up here to Jericho all the way around back down into the center of Richmond so 45 minutes to get five minutes but hardly complain considering what other folks went through to um so and thankfully for our workshop it didn't really affect much yeah and it just goes to I mean I'm speaking preaching fire here I you know goes to show just how well older folks knew how to had a place and locate buildings and development and everything I mean it's just like so much more space it didn't do anything yeah we had a where we had some open excavations or is there's a lot of water that comes down the hillside there so some springs opened up and there was a little bit of kind of washout but I mean nothing really yeah yeah so it's a little bit more from the workshop this is Kelly who actually came after the workshop to work for VYCC for a couple months it is actually now working for Jeff Spencer stewardship slate who's gonna be our lead slate contractor for this coming year for the work on the barn but you can see a little bit of what we were doing that's a have them bladed scarf joint on the left it's a half lap basically right that's where the half comes from and it is bladed those were two little cogs are and it's a really really great way to sort of artistically you know prepare you know really you know solid structural way old and you would in combining the two and in matching species size all that great stuff and a little bit more insulation so this is the kind of final days most of it was really working on repairs but then Thursday we started to get into a little bit Friday was the last day of doing this install which is really fun for people to actually get to be fitting up some of the stuff that they've been working on cutting and then as soon as timber framers were out we brought our excavators back in so it but timber framers guild was there we still had all of except for those two trenches we still had all of the rest of the concrete in the basement so as soon as timber framers left we got our excavators back got rid of the rest of the concrete and so this is the lowest slab here it's really cool odd ripples down the whole length of the barn must have been in how they were screening it I don't know what the original sort of tools for that would be but you got these granite blocks that are in between the original timber posts sat in those granite blocks and the whole floor sloped from the back of the building to the front like 22 inches so again everything would run run downhill it'd be easier to drag those sleds out and they would come in sorry come in right here there's a side door and you just keep making circles one of the cooler definitely the coolest discovery we made during the project was this amazing grand threshold we had discovered so where the side door was I was just pointing to a second ago we had found a granite threshold there we knew that this was the front door I kind of realized this in grad school and I put in this piece of wood up here it hadn't been the entrance for a long time but it was it was obvious from some siding details that it had been originally but I came in on a on a Monday our experts had worked on on the Saturday before and he said well you know rain into this thing on Saturday and you were here so I didn't know what to do he's he's jumping around and he points to one of the same hand split granite 14 feet long two feet wide and 14 inches thick and it has all the original all of all the holes that were you know hand drilled with a little star bit and then wedged and feathered to split it all down the length of it and so we're able to set the foundation so that it's actually reincorporated back in the original location we'll have some pictures of that in a second so as part of the moving of the front wall to to plumb the building up we had to pour a new concrete frost wall along the front of it you'll see some pictures of that and again you can see on the left this is what things look like before that and then the entrance to the concrete in the middle where the recollection is in there because really the corners would be the only original stone on the on the front side so we went through labeled them to close labeled all the stones put each layer of stones on the pallets and so each one is sort of identified with a sharpie on top and then pour the new concrete frost wall and then work with the stone mason's to relay all the stones at the same elevation of course the top of the wall is critical because you got to get the top elevation right and so starting in the right place down low to end up in the right place up top and it it turned out awesome yeah so here are all the pallets on the right you can see this is like southeast three you know photos and stuff as far as orientation and it was a bit of prep work doing this documentation but it really made for such an easy rebuild so this is the frost wall getting excavated this is our wonderful lead excavator Bill Atwood here from Bolton his grandfather was actually born in the white farmhouse he was a farm man for the Wickham family yeah so again I mean there's just I've skipped over 10 other sort of connections that various people have had to this project it's really amazing yeah so there's some new concrete going in just a really robust front wall just because of the weight of this you know monster structure here and because we're also putting we're laying stones back on top so we want a really wide base to set those stones on so concrete just goes up to grade and then it's stone above that so you never see this concrete and as part of the removing all the slab on the inside it meant that on the outside of the building your grade is up higher than your floor is so in order to compensate for that and to make a more robust sort of retaining wall out of the stonework we poured concrete on the inside so you can see this is all the formwork for a one-sided wall just a lot a lot of wood to make sure that it doesn't explode as you're pouring it this is probably one of our our busier concrete pouring days in my history of doing barns at least it's the first time I think I've ever had two mixer trucks pouring at the same time so one one spilling the pumper truck here is really important to the pumper truck and the other one is pouring straight into the forms on the front side so both things are happy the picture you just saw down the length of the barn is having on the inside that front wall is having simultaneously and here's our stone mason so pyramid stoneworks out of stone they were our our stone masons just did a wonderful job so again all this this front wall you know the corners were original still but all the rest of the stonework had been removed as they kind of patched in different areas with concrete over time so they were working on both coming up with enough stone that was on site either through different piles that we had around or really like looking to find piles of stone and then trying to put it together in a way that was authentic to the original stonework and they really did a great job you see the granite threshold there yep on the interior the the posts had been just round metal posts originally they had been timber you can see the top left picture you can actually see the grain in print so this is upside down the posts this would have sat on the posts so this is you actually see the grain of the post as it pressed into that piece actually stamped into that piece and so we cut out all that we we patched in new pieces of white oak so it's much more dense and terrible and less likely to crush and then have replaced all the posts with two steel square steel again in the left here everything's hanging everything's elevating it's hanging from above and so we had to put in all these posts everything from below and also hang them but hang them plumb so that as the building lowered down they were in the right place because you can't then pick the building back up just to crack the posts so this is all holding it in place but it's floating there still it's two inches off the ground and so here you can see everything's floating everything's hanging those two inches off the ground we've got the sills hanging on the cum lungs this corner has been rebuilt here this is that side entrance where the manure sleds would come in and go out and around you can see a new concrete just on the back you can see this is sill and again yeah everything is here so these posts are hanging out so those are hanging off of the straps are out there and this beam is hanging off another trucker strap that's hanging off the steel but yeah it's one of roughly a good sense of everything from here down is hanging off of the trucker straps and yeah we're really good we'll keep you around yeah and so yeah here's the grand threshold and see how well the kind of corners you know kind of taper into the new stone mark that they've built there yeah and the front entrance redone myself so myself I'm working as the project manager Dan Lee we saw is the site supervisor the project supervisor and so we've been you know spearheading this thing the whole time didn't really give you any of the timber framing which is of course what we love to do so the only little bit that we've gotten to do we're repairing these posts but then again it's that really cool halved oblated scarf joint so I got to cut this one on the right then I got to cut the one on the left and those are going to be up where the offices are too and so they'll be they'll be visible forever really fine exactly happy yeah well we will yeah yeah so this is with the building set down in the top left there that was September one of the things that kind of glossed over a little bit we had three months to have the building up in the air so do provided his steel and trimming for three months and we had to do all the timber replacement foundation repair and everything and have the building ready to set back down or he was going to charge us $500 a day that were ready for him so September 24th I think it was was our day we had to be ready and when we were and I mean it was pretty anticlimactic going up in the air it was a little over a month putting all those steel i-beams in building all the cribbing towers and it was a Tuesday they were going to jack the building up and I had to go pick up a kid and I was like oh jeez I'm going to miss this thing but it literally in the course of about 15 minutes the building went up in the air the six inches or whatever that they initially need to leave it lift it so it was you know a month month and a half worth of doing all this stuff and then lowering the building was even more anticlimactic because they've got to go up with it so they've got the the gas engine running and so you know that the building's going up a little bit to take the things they're holding it out so you can lower it down but then when they lower it down the engines are off and really all it is is cracking a valve and releasing that hydraulic pressure so you're ready for it and then slowly like and you're done and the only reason it would be a climactic of course is something goes wrong and breaks and you know so it was quiet and peaceful and yeah so you see we put the framing back together in the middle re-sheathed here eventually we'll end up re-sheathing the whole east side it just takes a lot of weather right there but we've just really tried to work on this lower box this year all of the new wood that you see there is all from this the prelco land the neighbor and all that stuff that you see there was milled on site which is really cool right right let's try to cruise through these uh so the culprit of all of this movement and everything is the hillside behind it and so in order to try to isolate the the pressure from the hillside behind it and make it so it isn't pushing on that stone wall we had to create what's called a gravity retaining wall so you can see Bob Neil just drawing on the left there and it's this giant mass of what's called flowable fill so it's a really weak concrete it's concrete with a bunch of air added to it and sometimes we use other additives like fly ash but it's just a giant mass but if you port it into like a six or eight inch wall like you would with regular concrete you could probably break it with your hands it's so weak but basically the idea is that it's this large mass it's it's heavier on the back side of a higher so if there's ever any you know pressure against it it's actually rotating back away from the direction that it's been pushing it so it's sort of neutralizing it so there's never any horizontal pressure on that on the stone wall so you see here we've exhumated all the way down those made a road so we can get down in there the stone mason's parched this all the mortar joints are just filled in really roughly just with concrete cement just to seal them all up she's a little bit more than on the left just to get everything sealed up so we're not getting things moving through there spray fondant all the way down to the footing there next slide and so this is a concrete slab that's poured across the bottom just to seal everything up there's you'll talk about a little bit in a second here but all this other material around is all crushed concrete so that's worth paying attention to the road base a bunch of stuff next for so yeah all this stuff right here is crushed concrete but so this is the flow we'll fill it's super liquidy so we would take that says right there yeah we have five trucks one day so we had to work with the concrete company to figure out how much volume we needed for each course every time we were pouring two feet but the higher up we went the more it was because of the slope so one day there were five trucks but then by the end of it it was 11 trucks and so we just have trucks coming in from both sides sometimes we'd have shoots sometimes there's no shoots it it would flow all the way across but sometimes it would kind of stop in the middle and it would take about a day a full day to harden so then every other day we would do a pour and eventually fill the whole way up yeah so mentioned a little bit about the crushed concrete so concrete has the largest carbon footprint of any building material out there by far accounts for roughly eight percent of the world's CO emissions mind blowing and everybody uses it all the time we used a bunch of it and in order to try to feel a little bit better about that and to offset our usage of it in knowing that we had to pull out a bunch of old concrete we actually brought it down to McCulloch crushing down in berlin and they have a big jock crusher and so they they crushed it into a little three inch chunks and then we got it back so we had to pay for trucking to and from but then we were able to reuse all that concrete that was part of the barn forever back in the barn and so you can see this whole material here and filled it up to the piers and all that stuff that you saw on the outside of the building is all crushed concrete and we've still got probably two or three hundred yards of it that um vycc can use for roads for other future projects yeah everybody gets to take a little bucket um the other building material choice we were still kind of in the beginning processes and basically going to try to make these sort of choices whenever we can as far as building materials to use this product called glaval which is a relatively new product it's a a glass foam aggregate and so they pulverize recycled glass they add a foaming agent and they expands and they cook it and it goes across this conveyor belt and it cools off and as it cools off it just breaks in the little tiny pieces that are just these perfect little chunks they're insulating and they're they're solids you can drive over with a piece of equipment and so it works as a as a base layer you tamp it and everything to then be able to pour concrete on top of um so we had to insulate over the top of those piers and the initial call was to do four inches of foam of rigid foam the blue board that you see which is petroleum based uh and for not a whole lot more money we really use glaval and the glaval instead of being just four inches of foam this is actually 12 inches and it's the entire space um so we basically saved money using the glaval look at the same insulation value that we needed in its recycled product and there you go um yeah we're working on the not having a great inside pose right now but we've uh put chain seal on the inside of all these beams on the inside or putting the floor joist back in in that the floor that was removed um so we'll get about three bays uh the floor put back in um in the next week or so and then kind of put things to bed for this year uh start back up again in march or april work our way up through the building and then in the summer we're going to open up the roof a bunch of framing repairs that have to happen in the roof and uh and then kind of work to turn it over to brekk and crew for uh fitting it up for offices there you go yeah this was a lot of talking about how did you get those lights we don't lift yeah putting a big personnel lift you actually had to yeah we had a we have a 60 foot lift that's there normally we rented an 80 foot lift uh and then drove it over to do the west barn as well so both barns have holly lights uh i think that was was that your idea yeah brekk's idea um yeah really nice yeah definitely yeah the flowable film yes i do yeah i don't have any that i can pull up and show easily uh tons of video yeah i do yeah yep um yeah yes i i'd love to yeah yeah if anybody's got any connections to anybody yeah from on public or any um there they had done i don't know if you saw 20 years ago from on public college i guess that one was they did a movie called barns a legacy of stone and wood um and jan was featured in it i think at that point they were doing the west barn um so trying to like that'd be a really neat thing to do again at some point to have from our public to uh you know a renewed version of that so yeah but we have lots of videos uh i got a drone and so we've been doing lots of drone flying with it and taking videos with the drone um yeah trying to document lots and lots of stuff what about this old house i mean yeah yeah should submit it to the this old house barns owned by the same family yes yeah so that's a great great question so it's a quick come family uh over the original builders the east barn was the original barn so that was one that was built by charles miller in 1901 uh the son um who seal was the father and this was the son uh what comes so the son built the west barn in 1904 we're not really sure uh how how that was built we designed it my my personal guess is that they hired charles miller to build east barn you knew he was doing uh they may have still hired a qualified timber framer to the west barn but it was the west barn isn't as highly engineered uh the material materials weren't as high quality um so the son was kind of trying to build the same thing as the father but maybe not with exactly the same level so that's why the west one was done before the east because it was threatened more yeah the west barn had a inferior slate on the roof was probably its biggest materials sort of defect so i had pennsylvania black slate that was on it uh whereas the east barn has a weathering and feeding gray which is a much stronger slate and so the slate on the west barn um we have a photo an aerial photo from the late fifties i think and you can already start to see huge patches of new slate in the you know 50 years later um and then by the 80s it was in really bad shape uh jan uh dismantled it with this guy microtronio and the two of them say it's like this scariest thing that they ever um they ever touched the dismantle of the west barn um at that point which is my boy concerning the condition that the east barn is in well you had a lot to contend with this summer because they were construct there was a lot of construction on route two and it was yeah and then the floods i mean it was quite a summer and i drive that portion of route two fairly frequently and um yeah there was a lot going on down in that neighborhood so you did a great job overcoming a lot of um problems and and they replaced uh route two this year i don't know if they uh did the whole road base and everything so going on the hold those are actually digging down two three feet and then replace on the road base and so the whatever four mile stretch took all summer a lot of it in front of the barn one in the back it was great but uh the 80s the late 80s uh it was called the venture farm at that point it was again in zen wheeler who is the one that left it to the farm bureau um and i think at that point though they had a series of just unsuccessful um goes at at things and they would just have sort of farmers leasing it for a couple years and not able to make a go of it and like will you tell the story of um the flood of i think it was 76 oh yeah on the way rest of the yeah yeah yeah yeah um did you have one other question yeah i think they um they got a little bit rental income from it from the the farmhouse there are a couple apartments in there and they were given the the property and i think they just um it was a large burden for them really ultimately um exactly exactly yeah yep exactly exactly yeah we've worked on a number of large barns around um we're trying a huge one up in craftsbury we'll cut um and it's really hard to come up with new uses uh with uses for for large old berry barns um the couple that we've done they're wedding barns and uh there's a lot of wedding barns and i know i'm sure we need more wedding barns sure but it's really hard to figure out other uses and aside from you know organization like like v y c z stepping in and saying like we've got a need for this restore barn hey we've got a need for two restore giant barns like uh i mean it really upset it a couple times it's it's really a privilege to be in this time and space where like i feel like personally i've got the skills to do this stuff the barn has the need and we've got this organization that has the need and the ability to take this on and it's just such an honor and privilege to be the folks that are able to be here doing this stuff and it just couldn't be a more perfect combination all those things um so the Brett was talking about this um this flood uh one of the really neat moments we had so um Bill Atwood is our our ex we are there mentioned his grandfather was born in the farmhouse he was just that old right under two and he said oh i get this guy rod wheelock who's you who worked in the barn you'd love to come by and tell some stories um so this guy rod shows up he's probably in his early 80s and he steps out of the truck i recognize rod he used to work at richmond home supply um so he comes over and sits down and he's just got he worked there for 10 years in the 70s and 80s um and just so many great stories uh we'd found a couple cow tags the little tags all the cows were and we had i think 140 and 102 and i said if you brought them to rod you do you like collecting stuff you're like well thanks yeah yeah brought over 140 is it 140 she was the sweetest girl you put your arm around her and she would nuzzle right so whatever 102 oh she was mean she would kick um so he gave him 140 i said rod you should you should have this is amazing um but that uh that uh the high drive ramp uh that that one photo i showed at the beginning it's the only photo that we have of the high drive ramp we don't know when it when it disappeared if somebody came in with that skater there was a pile of pile of stones out back there from that ramp but that's the only thing that we have um and he said it was the flood of 76 was a big uh it was a springtime heavy rain a lot of snowmelt runoff and that hillside behind the barn just washed out and it actually blew out the abutment but at that point they had tractors so they weren't using the the haymow the high drive in the same way but what they would do in the winter time is they would park all their tractor implements up in the high drive because they could drive their tractor up there drop an implement go back for another one so you lost the abutment so they had to drag all their equipment to that front door had a crane come and had to swing all their implements out of the high drive with a crane yeah just made so 76 is when it was when it was taken out and um yeah endless stories not that we know of no i'm guessing it probably didn't i mean considering what we saw this year um and because this this year was slightly higher right i think the when you ski level was i think it was like an inch or two higher than 27 but no no evidence the question let's go back to b y cc programs how do the health care shares get to all the different families who receive the weekly shares so it takes a fair amount of logistics and coordination but i think we have 14 medical centers partner hospitals clinics who help us identify health care share members and then every week we'll have vans that go out and drop them off at those clinics and then the families go to the clinics where they pick them up there your question is uh our applications for a lot of positions are just starting to go live our programs really start in march and go through into november and we'll have one month to year-round positions so and some are residential meaning you camp with us and some are day crews where you can go and work on the crew and then go home at night so depending on how old you are how much of helping a bite of the apple you want there's probably a position for you there is yeah absolutely yeah yeah more and more is what i would say when we first started working more closely with resource it felt a little bit like parallel play which is a child developmental term when you're about two and a half years old you play like next to another person rather than with that other person but now we're really developing ways in which our crews can work together so resource is doing a lot of great flood recovery work down in berry and they're going to be working to repair a lot of homes and and our crews will be coming in and out of that effort we're also seeing youth build members which is a which is a resource program start to be applying for and working on some of our crews and so we're we're trying to build ways in which we can the run programs concurrently but also pathways through our organizations so if you have an experience say at youth build you can then come and work and learn on a vycc crew or if you have a really good experience working on a vycc forestry crew maybe you then go on to autobahn and you're part one of their interns and so building this whole ecosystem of both service conservation and learning there's a great quote um a dance myth of the community foundation once said there he said vermont is program rich but systems poor and so by bringing our organizations together we're really trying to build a system of workforce development that's accessible is it fair to say that who would be the other answered their knowledge oh for sure yeah learn new things 100% yeah yeah i was astonished to hear the number of these nationwide 150 which we give what three is eight right yeah so so uh on average sure uh some are really big so you have the northwest youth core uh which operates out of washington or again i don't know but you'll have multiple cores in california so you have los angeles cali los angeles conservation core you'll also have a california conservation core you have cores affiliated with universities and colleges summer county-based and vermont has to be ycc as well as northwood stewardship center and one of the for me it's been a great discovery of my adult life is to just kind of get a window into this service ecosystem here in the country it just represents not just the best in the united states but all of us it's really something to see so are any of these as successful as you think they've been um yes i'm tempted to be tempted to be like falsely modest there no but they're the cores are doing great work and uh you know some are a little more innovative and entrepreneurial i think ycc tries to always be trying new different things um but when i go to the core network conference i'm just i'm just marvel at the high quality of leadership and the way in which cores are really representative of folks the entire country yeah are there any more questions can we just come by and look at the farms yeah yeah i mean and or you can give us a ring i'm on the website everyone should leave without taking a gratitude report aka a new report from vycc get a quick uh better glimpse of the organization through that way but with with love love showing it off and i think i don't know finding thirty tours this summer yeah yeah you want to make sure there's somebody there so you can feel free to reach out and give you a you know a guidance or whatever it's all yeah we're going to stop then for yeah self-directed or around reach out well thank you all for coming i have one more question okay for for ellie you talked about concrete and uh carving and uh reusing uh if i i often read that that making concrete and using it is so energy intensive but i've never really known why can you elaborate on why that that that's so important to reduce yeah that's a great um great question i know part of the answer and i i we're trying not to um yeah speak about things i don't actually know but i so it's it's the number of different things are involved in the making of of concrete um so you've got the quarrying of cement of you know getting the porcelain spent and then that's there's a cooking process and all of that um and so i believe a large a large part of is the electric the electricity use in the um in the heating process of the making of the cement um but then a large part is also just the trucking of all the materials around um but it's in the production of all those things in the quarrying and then the the whole infrastructure around using exactly exactly yeah the yeah all of the concrete uh the cement companies and everything all of um batch plants i guess that they're it's getting made at game we had to get rid of it uh because there's no way to keep it but it was really kind of a shame it just had the the ripply effect to it was just it was really cool i i mean i don't know when they were first doing large slabs like that um 1901 seems early um but it's just though you saw those granite blocks there the slab was all around those and it would be hard to and so those those granite blocks all had to have stepped down with the slab that was all stepping down so they're all at that same pitched elevation that the slab was at so it'd be hard to conceptualize how you would do that and have a different floor in there and then work slab but it's possible i try to i try to be really cautious about making assumptions on dates or anything like that um what people you know claim to have the oldest house in town or whatever so i try to really be reserved about making a claim that that is the original slab um any more questions uh please join us for thank you again that was so you guys yeah thank you all