Preservationists Aim to Restore Sagging Fort Pitt blockhouse Thursday, June 01, 2006 Mark Stafford raised his thin, fine-toothed razor saw into position, ready to perform a delicate operation on a critical part of a very old patient. Gently but firmly he worked it up and down, making almost imperceptible progress on an incision in the ancient timber and getting nowhere fast. He put down the saw, took out a chisel and wooden mallet and began chipping away at the mortar above the beam. A handmade brick loosened enough to allow Mr. Stafford to remove it. "Ahhhhhh," Mr. Stafford said, turning it over in his hand. "I love old brick." There is a lot of old brick in Pittsburgh's oldest building, the Fort Pitt Blockhouse, and it's supported by white oak timbers that are themselves in need of support. Some of them are rotting from the inside out. Mr. Stafford, an experienced woodworker, is a second-year student at Belmont Technical College in St. Clairsville, Ohio, where he is learning techniques for preserving historic buildings. Yesterday morning, he performed the first stage of an emergency repair to the blockhouse beam, one of the logs that lie between the building's stone foundation and its five walls. The timbers also accommodate the gun loops -- the narrow openings through which muskets were fired. "You can see what's starting to happen here," Mr. Stafford said. "The wall itself is starting to drop." Mark Stafford of Belmont Technical College in St. Clairsville, Ohio, works through one of the gun loops of the Fort Pitt Blockhouse as he tries to determine how deep the white oak timber is rotting. He and other students will remove bad parts of the original timbers and shore up the 242-year-old landmark. If the timber fails, it could result in catastrophic damage, said blockhouse curator Kelly Lynn. "The full weight of the building rests on the lower wood members." The plan was to remove the exterior face of the hollow beam and clean out the rotted portion, which Mr. Stafford estimated would measure about 5 inches by 24 inches. He then would fill in the rough edges with an epoxy resin, creating a more regular, squared-off interior that he would measure and, back at Belmont, cut a new piece of wood to fill. He also would take the beam's thin, uneven facade back to school and straighten it with clamps. By the end of the very warm day, everything had gone according to plan. As early as Saturday, Mr. Stafford will install the new piece of wood and replace the beam's facade, which came off in two pieces. "The goal is to preserve the original wood as much as possible," Lynn said. "Replacing them is not what we want to do." Some of the timbers at the base of the walls date to the original construction of 1764; others are replacements gleaned from a Monongahela River lock and inserted in 1894 when the 18th-century house adjacent to the blockhouse was demolished. Ms. Lynn, who has a master of arts degree in cultural resources management, is seeking funding for ultrasound or X-ray imaging to reveal the extent of decay in the timbers of the blockhouse, which is owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution. She also wants to replace the building's leaky shake roof, installed in 1947, and address drainage problems. As part of their training, Belmont students recently built a picket fence for Woodville, the John and Presley Neville House in Collier, said Jim Galbraith, director of the Belmont Architectural Heritage Center, the entrepreneurial arm of the school's preservation department. They also worked on the historic home of Ohio's Lake County Historical Society, recreating tiles for the fountain. (Patricia Lowry can be reached at [email protected] or 412-263-1590. ) http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06152/694753-53.stm