The Year 2000 Celebration and the ACBS 25th Anniversary Jubilee emphasizing preservation has perked an interest in the concepts of preservation and restoration. An ACBS member brought to our attention the following essay, by Howard Mansfield. For those of us who are caught in the spirit of preserving history, or the love of restoring it, this will put into words what runs through your soul when you are searching for the right brass fitting, or bringing old wood back to life.

Howard Mansfield, journalist and author, believes that the act of restoration, whether it's rebuilding antique engines or reviving the village model of community organization, must contain an element of renewal. Rejecting the sentimentality of nostalgia and the superficiality of commercial appropriation, he argues for an understanding of restoration that is concerned as much with the future as it is with the past, that preserves and communicates a spirit as well as a form

 

THE SAME AX, TWICE

Back when I went to school, there was an administrator, a vice president of something or other, who was given to rough-hewn homilies that were meant to show his populist stuff. He was particularly set on tearing down the wooden houses on campus. They just weren't practical.

We said: They can be repaired. There are wooden houses that have stood for hundreds of years. And all the buildings, no matter the material, need repair and renewal.

He said: I know a farmer who says he has had the same ax his whole life-he only changed the handle three times and the head two times. Does he have the same ax?

I did not have a good reply then. But in the 20 years since, talking with preservationists, carpenters, and architects, I have come to realize that so many controversies about saving and rebuilding are to be found in this one old joke. The debates about the restoration of the Parthenon or about the vinyl siding your neighbor has put on his 1789 Cape come down to this one question: Do we have the same ax?

So, does that farmer have the same ax? Yes. He possesses the same ax even more than a neighboring farmer who may have never repaired his own ax. To remake a thing correctly is to discover its essence.

A tool has a double life. It exists in the physical sense, all metal and wood, and it lives in the heart and the mind. Without these two lives, the tool dies. The farmer who restored his ax has a truer sense of that ax. He has the history of ax building in his hands. Museums are filled with cases of tools that no one knows how to use anymore. A repaired ax is a living tradition.

New England has its own U.S. government-size farmer's ax: the USS Constitution, "Old Ironsides", the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world.

The Constitution saw its last battle in 1815, but it is still commissioned on the active roster, a part of our national defense. A duty crew sleeps on board each night. The ship has survived some close calls with oblivion-being saved one time when a poem, "Old Ironsides" by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., rallied the public and another time with pennies collected by the nation's schoolchildren. In 1905 the navy had recommended using the decaying hull for target practice. In the early 1920's, the ship leaked so badly that the hull had to be pumped out by a tug each morning.

Saving a wooden ship is a job that's never finished. The Constitution has been rebuilt and repaired in 1833, 1858, 1871-1877, 1906, 1927-1930, 1953, 1963-1965, 1973-1975, and the most recent and most extensive restoration, 1992-1996.

Anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of Old Ironsides (depending on whom you talk to) is original. The farther down you go, the older the wood is: dating from 1851 below the waterline. The keel is original. "Salt water is not an enemy of the ship. Fresh water is what rots the ship," says ship restorer Ralph McCutcheon. A ship is like an old house without a roof.

How could this be the same ax? Old Ironsides is more like a wooden garden. This is an ancient philosophical question. But then historic preservation is old-time philosophy. Any time you open a wall, try to match a historic color, any time you stop to ask, "Now just what is it that we are looking at?", you are back there with the ancients questioning reality and its perception.

When I visit the U.S.S. Constitution, the ship, undefeated in battle, looks as if it has been seized by the crew of This Old House. Squeezed into the pinched quarters of the low-ceilinged decks is a modern construction site: metal scaffolding, yellow "caution" tape, work lights, workers in hard-hats hammering, sawing. Up toward the bow a radio is playing a wailing guitar riff from some early 1970's rock hit.

A drill whines as it bites into some dense live oak. Behind the small tour group several men are guiding a new plank in through the cargo hatch, calling and signaling to the crane high overhead.

Some visitors go away disappointed, sorry that the museum has been disrupted. But far from being an interruption, this restoration is the life of the ship. The Navy's oldest commissioned warship is kept alive with a mix of ancient skills, power tools, and materials both traditional and updated. The Constitution is not a ship in a bottle.

Inside the repair and maintenance shop, up in the rigging loft, three men are carefully tailoring 27 miles of line. This is the first new, complete rig since 1927. Thick black ropes like all over the floor. There is the strong smell of pine tar. Frank Brackett, age seventy-three, whose father was a rigger, works at a rigging vise that can be seen in use in a photo from 1890.

"Rigging hasn't changed in five hundred years," says Dave Mullin, a rigger expert in the old ways. The tools are the same-marlin spikes and serving mallets-the limes, though, are a stronger, lighter synthetic.

Mullin works from old sources. He uses the notebooks of the Constitution's designer, Joshua Humphreys, a ship survey done after the last battle in 1818, and the old rigging manuals of the era. Mullin picks up tricks where he can find them, like the technique of stacking the rigging on the mast. How do you do it? In England he found a 1905 book. Someone had devised a formula. The book was in a glass case. He found the curator and got him to open the case and turn the page. He wrote down the formula.

"Most people will never see the work we do-its up in the air. It doesn't matter. The guys we want to impress are the ones taking it apart twenty years from now," Mullin says, expressing the spirit of a good restoration. This is work for the joy of doing one thing exactly right, as it used to be done. The greatest restoration at this site is not the Constitution , but the art of wooden ships.

Two hundred years later they are still building the same ship.

Endeavors guided by the spirit have a double life. Restored tools, houses, farms, nature sanctuaries, telescopes to observe the night sky, are important in themselves, and in the acts of preservation and loving attention they call forth.

Each time we renew the meetinghouse steeple, replant a forest, heal an injured animal, teach someone to read, each time we do this we are restoring the life, the best in us, as well. Mending the world, rebuilding it daily, we discover our better angels. We are on the side of life.

Good preservation is a life preserver thrown to us in a shipwreck. Good preservation keeps us in touch with the graces of this life. It's bricks and mortar, yes. It's arguments about true colors and authenticity and representation. But true preservation is like the hand that shelters a fire from the wind. It protects the spark of life.

 

Howard Mansfield, excerpts from "The Same Ax, Twice. Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age", pp. 3-10, published 2000 by Howard Mansfield, reprinted by permission of the University Press of New England, Hanover, NH. This book is available by calling 1 800 421-1561, FAX 603 643-1540, or e-mail: University.Press@Dartmouth.edu.

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