On the 3rd of June 2023 at approximately 1:25 pm, the last shingle was nailed up over the south gable end of the log addition of the Stone House. (See image below.) This momentous event was the culmination of over thirty years of research, planning, skilled craftsmanship, and fundraising. This achievement was finally made possible because of cooperation between three different companies. Mr. Frank Stroik, the former proprietor of the Country Homestead in Kreamer, Pennsylvania, was the principal contractor, and it was he and his crew that completed the roof over the stone side in October of 2021. Mr. Stroik has since turned over the reins of that company to his son Caleb Stroik, who also worked on the roof over the stone side. For the roof over the log addition, Frank Stroik was joined by James Robert Mitchell II from Vintage Inc. out of Winchester, VA, as well as Seth Fritz, who, along with his boss Chad Wolbert of Catoctin Valley Roofing, helped to complete the job. (Seth Fritz is featured in the image below nailing down the last shingle.)

One of the benefits of this approach was the dissemination of the skills and knowledge that Mr. Stroik had in regards to the installation of this kind of side-lap shingle roof. We now have two local companies with staff that are able to do repair work on our roofs over the Stone House. On the day that the job was completed, Butch Fravel president of our board of directors, asked that the work crew members sign a shingle that we would keep as a memento of the finale of the project. (See photo below.)

As the newly installed shingles have not yet been painted, they are a bright contrast to the shingles over the stone side that were painted shortly after they were installed in October of 2021. (See photos below.)
One of the things we have learned by our experience with the roof over the stone side of the structure is that after these shingles are installed they shrink a bit, and a few crack or split along the grain. In turn, we are allowing more time before we paint the shingles over the log side of the house to minimize the shrink factor. We are also going to replace shingles that have cracked or split along the grain before they are painted. Additionally, we will apply another coat of paint to the roof over the stone side at the same time for good measure.

As we move forward with the restoration of the Stone House, the maintenance of this two-sided roof will be a necessary part of the work. One of the reasons that side-lap wood shingle roofs are no longer common is that they require maintenance that other roofs composed of more durable materials do not need. Despite its required extra maintenance and the need it has for specialized skilled craftsmen to conduct the repairs, these roofs over the two sides of the Stone House are a great achievement and a remarkable educational resource for all to enjoy.

Sometimes, when you make a plan and you think you have all your ducks in a row, stuff happens. It seems that with the Stone House roof project, we have suffered more than our share of setbacks. We have been poised to finish the roof over the log side of the house since last fall. Between scheduling conflicts with our installation contractor and the weather, the plans were deferred until this spring. When we finally got everything ready to start the job, we discovered that the cypress wood we had stored for the skip sheathing (also called roof lath) had a fungus problem, and we had to locate more to replace it.

The reason we are using cypress wood for the roof lath is based on the advice we received from our consultant, Mr. James Houston, who is retired from the Pennsylvania Historic and Museums Commission. His experience with side-lap shingle roofs like the one we are installing on the Stone House caused him to realize long ago that the inevitable repair required is much easier when a roof’s lath boards are not hardened and rigid. Most types of wood commonly used for roof skip sheathing grow hard and rigid over time as they are exposed to temperature extremes and the elements. Cypress does not age this way but remains relatively easy to drive a nail into it when a shingle needs to be replaced. We now have our cypress skip sheathing installed.

Mr. Houston also recommended that we install hardware cloth over the skip sheathing as a way to keep animals like squirrels and other critters from getting into the roof structure and building nests. Due to the nature of wood shingles, animals have been known to exploit small openings that occur over time and have even been known to chew holes to enlarge them for greater ease of access. The use of hardware cloth is a modern trick that will be invisible from the outside of the house once the roof shingles are installed. It will help preserve the roof as well as the historical fabric of the roof structure. We also will be installing a material called Cedar Breather® by Benjamin Obdyke, which is a modern crenulated mat that creates breathing space for continuous airflow between the bottom roof lath over the eaves and shingles above. Once again, this bit of contemporary technology will help preserve the roof and the historical fabric that is beneath it.

On the 18th of May 2023 our contractors started installing the shingles over the log side of the Stone House. (See images above and below.) For those readers that do not live locally and who cannot drive by the Stone House and see what has happened, the last shingle was installed over the log side on the 3rd of June 2023. The next step will be getting them painted. We look forward to sharing the images of the finished product in our next post. Good things come to those who wait.

We had hoped to be reporting in this update on the completion of the installation of the roof over the log side of the Stone House. For the majority of time we have been working on this project our progress was held back by the slow pace of the shingle production. It takes a long time to make 4,900 shingles by hand when you have a shortage of hands that are willing and capable of that kind of work. As we reported in our last post, we now have all the shingles we need to install the roof over the log side of the building. This time we are held up again by a shortage of what might be called “low-tech” skilled labor. This term low-tech may sound sarcastic and disdainful but in fact it is quite the opposite. The kind of laborers needed for low-tech preservation trade work are an exceptionally rare group of people who are required to acquire and hone very specialized hand skills. Hand-guided and hand-powered tools are considered low tech in our modern world of power tools and machinery that is designed to get jobs done quickly and efficiently. Prefabricated, mass-produced, and interchangeable building materials are now the standard in the building trades. David William Pye (18 November 1914 – 1 January 1993), was Professor of Furniture Design at The Royal College of Art in London, UK from 1964 to 1974. He identified and contrasted the two basic types of workmanship that are required for all trades: the workmanship of risk verses the workmanship of certainty. Pye defined the workmanship of risk as “workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgment, dexterity, and care which the maker exercises as he works.” The progress of technology throughout history has been a sustained effort to move away from the workmanship of risk toward the workmanship of certainty. To say it plainly, historic preservation trade work requires people to have knowledge and skills that are considered by the for-profit construction business world to be largely obsolete technologies. The installation of side-lap handmade split shingles might be considered the epitome of the workmanship of risk.

The photos that accompany this article were taken in late September 2021 when our roof installation contractor, The County Homestead, was working on the roof over the stone side of the building. Our Manager of Collections & Programs, Rick Kriebel, worked for this company in 2015. He recounted the following: “The first job I had out of grad school was working for The Country Homestead, our current contractors to install the roof. They had a longstanding agreement with the State of Pennsylvania to hire interns every summer and train them in historic construction methods; I was one of two interns that year. I quickly learned that I am even worse at working with my hands than I thought. By the end of the summer half of my duties were some variant of gofering. The other intern had a job lined up somewhere else, and left before the internship was over. Most of the crew were guys with a construction background who learned historic methods on the job. Six years later, when The Country Homestead came to install the first half of the roof I expected to see some old colleagues, but the only ones still around were the owners. Everyone else had left for some reason or another.”

This anecdote illustrates the challenge of the building preservation trades. Mr. Frank Stroik, the proprietor of The Country Homestead, had all his work crew leave at the end of the summer of 2022 to pursue other opportunities. At the time of this post, he is looking to hire and train new workers. If you or someone you know is interested in this kind of low-tech work, please give us a call and we can get you or your friend in touch with Mr. Stroik. In the meantime Mr. Stroik is hoping to have his work crew back up to full strength by the spring on 2023 and plans to come and finish the job of shingling the Stone House roof at that time.

In the Holiday 2021 issue of our newsletter, we happily announced that we could finally help people envision what the Stone House looked like in 1830. We shared a digitally created mock-up of a painting that is being donated by our Stephens City Main Street neighbor, Mr. Joe Gainer. (See image below.) As a talented graphic artist, Mr. Gainer graduated from the Maryland College of Art & Design and worked for thirty years as a graphic illustrator for the Department of Defense. He was inspired by the works of Norman Rockwell and the old masters. Mr. Gainer has experimented with a number of painting, drawing, and sculpting mediums throughout his career and just recently started working in oils.

In this post we will explore the reasons why we believe the Stone House looked the way Mr. Gainer has depicted it in this image. While there are no period photos or paintings of the Stone House from that time, we do have evidence remaining in the structure itself, as well as surviving architectural artifacts from other buildings in town that date to that time period. As we have explained before in previous articles, the surviving weatherboards that we discovered under the roof of the shed addition behind the log side of the structure had remnants of whitewash buildup on their outer surfaces. We also have previously related how we discovered that re-laid stones in the reconstructed rear wall of the stone side of the house also had surfaces that were coated in whitewash. Those stones with whitewashed faces had been preserved behind a dado panel of the southernmost room of the house. We therefore can conclude that all the exterior wall surfaces on both sides of the house were originally whitewashed.

The color palette employed on the exterior window shutters and doors is more speculative but nonetheless based on historical precedents. In addition to historical documents that mention the common use of dark green paint on shutters, and its continued use on traditional shutters today, we also have a surviving period example of a locally made shutter in our museum’s collection. (See photo below.) It, too, has its original green paint. It is this shutter that we will be using as our pattern for all the reproduction shutters that we will be making and installing on the Stone House. Mr. Gainer also used this shutter from our museum’s collection as his model for the picture.

Mr. Gainer similarly used another piece from our collection as his model for the front doors in his picture. Our restoration plan for the house calls for the front exterior doors to be reproduced based on this circa 1800 piece that came from the house located at 5342 Main Street in Stephens City. (See photo below.) The original two-tone, greenish-gray paint job survives on this remarkable six-panel door.
Archeological and structural evidence indicates that there were most likely no covered porches on the front of the house in the 1830 period. Instead, we know there was a stone block stoop in front of the stone side and probably something similar on the log side. We look forward to exhibiting Mr. Gainer’s painting in our museum once it is finished. Viewers can then learn more about it and read about the other items and people it depicts.

With the painting of the newly installed shingles over the stone side of the Stone House, we have completed a milestone phase of the Stone House Restoration Project. As we explained in our last issue, the shingles have been painted with a red linseed oil paint mixed with copper naphthenate. In this article we will address the historical evidence for red paint on early-American wood shingle roofs and explain more about how copper naphthenate is a modern compromise to extend the life of the shingles themselves.

Historically, the red paint used on wood shingles was made of red iron oxide and linseed oil. Iron(III), also known as ferric oxide, is an inorganic compound with the formula Fe2O3. Basically, the historical paint was iron rust mixed with the oil from flax seeds. The paint we are using for our project is Ottosson Linseed Oil Paint, Iron Oxide Minimum color #LFRM. It is mixed with one part copper naphthenate to around three parts of the linseed oil paint. Copper naphthenate is a wood preservative that is the copper salt of naphthenic acid. It makes wood and other cellulosic materials inedible to insects and fungi. Historically, copper naphthenate was not available in the period to which we are restoring the house. Nevertheless, people of that time may have noticed that wood shingles abutting copper flashing did not deteriorate as fast as the other shingles on the same roof. The copper naphthenate will help to ensure a longer lifespan for this expensive reproduction roof.

Our consultant for this roof project is Mr. James Houston. He is retired from the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission, where he was involved with roofing projects like our roof on the Stone House at historic sites such as the Daniel Boone Homestead and the Ephrata Cloister. Mr. Houston salvaged period examples of side-lap shingles from a structure in Frederick, Maryland that had surviving red oxide paint on them. (See photo below.) In 2008 Mr. Houston, along with his former colleague Mr. John N. Fugelso, published an article in the APT Bulletin: Journal of Preservation Technology titled “Fabricating and Installing Side-Lap Roof Shingles in Eastern Pennsylvania.” In that article they address the historical use of various methods that were employed to prolong the lives of different wood shingle roofs. They note that even George Washington had the wood shingle roof at Mount Vernon painted red. In coastal regions fish oil mixed with brick dust was applied to shingles to achieve a similar effect.

For those readers who live in our neighborhood, please make a point of coming to see the newly completed roof over the stone side of the Stone House. We hope to have the rest of the shingles delivered soon so that the roof over the log side can be finished by this time next year.

One of the greatest challenges we face in the business of historic preservation is controlling unwanted moisture in and around our structures. Water will find a way down. When it gets down and is trapped in between things made of wood, it can cause serious deterioration and rot. We have found evidence in the Stone House that there has been a history of serious water leaks where the roof over the stone side meets the south gable wall of the log addition. Sheet metal flashing has been the method used to prevent and repair leaks in this part of the house for over a hundred years. This has certainly been the case ever since the metal roof was installed over the stone side of the house. Before the advent of rolled metal roofs, wood shingles were tucked under weatherboards in places like this, where a roof met an exterior wall. The weatherboards were cut in relief to the profile of the shingles. This would leave a sawtooth pattern on the bottom edge of the weatherboards. We have an example of this kind of woodwork in the attic of the Steele & Bro. Store. (See image below.)

In this instance the weatherboards of a former exterior wall were left in place and were encapsulated under a new metal roofline that was installed above. Even though the old wood shingle roof and its supporting structure was demolished in the 1880s, its profile remains in the surviving weatherboards.

We are using this method of tucking our wood shingles under the bottom edge of relief-cut weatherboards on the south gable of the log addition. To minimize potential damage to the wood shingles over the stone side of the structure, we began by having our roofing contractor Frank Stroik, and his crew at Country Homestead, install a few courses of the side-lap wood shingles in that place where they abut the south gable wall of the log addition, leaving the remainder of the roof structure over the stone side covered with temporary tarps. This made it possible for Vintage Inc.’s crew to install the weatherboards above without requiring them to walk on any new wood shingles. After the abutting shingles were installed, they were painted with a red linseed oil paint mixed with copper naphthenate. There is historical evidence for red paint on wood shingle roofs, but the copper naphthenate is a modern compromise to extend the life of the shingles themselves. When the rest of the shingles are installed, they will also be painted with the same mixture.

The installation of the weatherboards over the shingles required careful measuring and the leveling of each board in relation to its vertical alignment. Every effort was made to ensure that the gap between the top of the shingles and the bottom of the weatherboards is about the width of a carpenter’s pencil. This allows both the shingles and the weatherboards to “breathe” and prevent water from getting trapped.

This method of weatherboard and shingle installation works because water does not run uphill. By sealing the end grain of the weatherboards and the shingles with paint, we are also significantly reducing the capillary action and absorption factor of the boards themselves. In our next installment we will unveil the finished roof over the stone side of the house. We have been looking forward to this for years.

We completed the work of fitting the gutter brackets to their respective places along the bottom edge of the roof sheathing boards. It is last thing we needed to do before installing the shingles on the stone side of the Stone House. This project was not as easy as we had thought it would be on the rear side of the building. This is mainly because the roof rafters and eaves on the back side of the building are very irregular. They have suffered the most over the nearly two hundred and sixty years of the structure’s lifetime. Additionally, when the ell addition was built on the rear of the stone side of the house in the early twentieth century, the workers removed the part of the soffit that was in the way. Everything that was missing had to be painstakingly restored while preserving the remaining building fabric. Consequently, the eaves and the sheathing boards above, to which the gutter brackets are attached on the rear side, are not completely straight or level. This is in contrast to the front of the stone side of the building. The work of attaching the gutter brackets to the front of the stone side was accomplished with the help of Dennis Clem, the proprietor of Cedar Creek Blacksmithing. Some of you may have seen the posts on our social media pages featuring photos of Mr. Clem while he was working.

Mr. Clem had to bow out from the work on the rear side due to scheduling constraints. As noted above, the work of fitting the brackets to the rear side has proven to be very time consuming. Our President Butch Fravel took over the project for the rear of the stone side. Mr. Fravel found that the irregularities of the rear side eaves and sheathing boards made the task very challenging. As the detail from the architectural drawing below illustrates, the angle of the bend below the shank that is attached to the sheathing board would theoretically remain constant while the amount of the drop below that bend would vary to insure the gradual slope of the gutter toward its downspout.

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Because of the irregularities in the placement of the sheathing boards, the angle of the bend, as well as the amount of drop below the bend, varied from one bracket to the next. The number of compound angles and the variables associated with them required approaching each bracket with new measurements. Some brackets had to be rebent and adjusted more than twice to get them in the right places. Mr. Fravel used a settling torch and traditional blacksmithing tools to accomplish the work. (See image below.)

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Once we were sure that all the gutter brackets were fitted properly to their respective places on the sheathing boards, we then took them to be powder coated on the 16^th of September. That work was done by Coatings USA LLC in Front Royal. This will ensure that the brackets will not rust and deteriorate as quickly as they would otherwise. After the brackets were powder coated, they were reinstalled in their respective places. Each bracket is uniquely marked with a lettering system that will be used to denote where they belong in their respective slots on the bottom sheathing boards. In our next instilment we will report on the installation of the shingles.

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On the 26th of April we received our first load of shingles for the Stone House roof. Many of our readers may recall the previous post on 5th of February 2019 titled “Long Biaxially Tapered Side-Lap Shingles.” As explained in that article, these shingles “are biaxially tapered, or wedge-shaped in profile, because they are split out of large red oak logs and then finished by shaving them smooth with a drawknife.” They are also free of sapwood and core heartwood. The only way to manufacture these shingles is by hand. They are not sawn into shape. They are split along the natural lines of the wood’s grain. This helps them not to warp or “cup” after they are installed and exposed to the elements. Because they are made by hand, they represent many hundreds of hours of hand-skilled labor. The skills and obsolete technologies used to manufacture these shingles are no longer commonly understood and practiced by those in the carpentry business, finding contractors who can make them can be a challenge. Fortunately, our consultants Doug Reed and James Houston were able to help us connect with a man named David Dauerty who has a great deal of experience making this type of shingle. Mr. Dauerty personally delivered the first load of our order for the Stone House on that day. (See photo below.)

Mr. Dauerty also delivered a punch bench that will be used in the installation process. This device ensures that the nail holes are correctly placed on the shingles. The pre-punched holes prevent the shingles themselves from splitting during their installation on the roof lath. (See photo below.)

This load of shingles will be enough to cover the stone side of the Stone House. Once we have the remaining part of the order from Mr. Dauerty, we will finish shingling the roof over the log addition of the house. The next steps we will be taking this summer will involve the necessary work of removing the old metal roof and installing the gutter brackets which will be mounted to the rafters and roof lath before the shingles go on above. This is an exciting time in the history of the Stone House, and we will share our progress on our social media pages, in our next newsletter, and on our website. Stay tuned!