National Park Service Repairs Carl Sandburg Home
By Danielle Del Sol | Online Only | June 3, 2010
While many National Historic Sites are losing funding, the National Park Service recently completed a minor restoration project at the Carl Sandburg Home in North Carolina.
Credit: NPS photo courtesy of Carl Sandburg Home NHS
With a wandering herd of goats, five miles of hiking trails, 50 historic structures, and a historic house dedicated to the life and memory of one of America's finest poets and authors, the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, N.C., is a popular destination. The home of the Pulitzer Prize-winner and his wife, Lilian Paula Sandburg, where they resided for 22 years before Sandburg's death in 1967, attracts more than 80,000 guests per year. In recent years, however, visitors may have noticed that the main house's exterior porches were decaying.
The white farmhouse, an example of early Greek Revival, dates to 1838, when it was erected by Charlestonian Christopher Memminger, a secretary for the Confederate Treasury.
While the National Park Service has had to oversee some restoration work since it acquired the 264-acre property in 1968, the house is generally in fine shape. Still, the elements have taken their toll on the house's north porch: moisture had rotted three of the four columns holding up the porch and left spots in the wood flooring.
"One of the historic columns is still okay, but the other three—which the NPS replaced in the early years that they owned the site—needed to be replaced again," says Connie Backlund, superintendent of the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. From May 5 to 29, a team from the park service's Historic Preservation Training Center was on site, repairing and restoring the home's north and west porches.
According to Project Leader Trevor Thomas, on the north porch, the team laid new tongue-in-groove decking, replaced three columns, restored the fourth column and half-column features on the house, and made framing repairs to the timber flooring.
"Unfortunately for the three columns the National Park Service had already replaced in the 1970s, there had been poor material selection, and for those columns, preservation was not an option. Replacement was the only option," Thomas says. His team erected three hollow, load-bearing steel columns with exterior mahogany to match the one original porch column. The remaining column needed some epoxy filler, but generally is in good shape, Thomas says.
Good Neighbors
The preservation community in Flat Rock, N.C., has worked hard to preserve the character of the area that surrounds the Carl Sandburg Home. Preservation North Carolina recently worked with the Historic Flat Rock Foundation to place protective covenants on a historic post office located near the Sandburg home, among other efforts. "It's a community that's truly concerned about protecting the character of the entire town," says Ted Alexander, southwest regional director of Preservation North Carolina.
In addition to the extensive work on the north porch, Thomas' crew replaced balustrades and other millwork on the home's west porch, which is located off the Sandburgs' bedroom and was added to the home in the 1950s, and completed some minor plaster repair in the kitchen.
The project's first phase began in November 2009, when Thomas' team removed and restore the north porch's original balustrade. The balustrade went back with Thomas to the center in Frederick, Md., where he and his team completely restored the wooden handrail.
Because National Historic Sites are not guaranteed restoration work whenever a site needs it, Backlund is quick to point out that the Carl Sandburg Home was fortunate to receive the funds it needed for this project. "Whenever we get money, we're always very grateful," she said.
Now that the work is completed, the Park Service can continue to keep the site historically accurate and accessible for visitors, whose numbers grow each year. Most of them hike on the property or stop by the barn to see descendants of Lillian's award-winning dairy goats, which she bred and kept on the farm, but many tour the house to get a glimpse of the writer's everyday life.
"When [Carl] died, Mrs. Sandburg donated all of the contents of the house: furnishings, thousands of books, Sandburg's papers and magazine articles, clothing, and more," she says. "The site truly is a snapshot of their life in the home from 1945 through 1967," Backlund said.
Sandburg, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, author of the defining poetry of Chicago's industrial age, Lincoln biographer, folk music collector and avid journalist and historian, was an artist who strived, as Backlund puts it, "to define the spirit of this country in all that he did."
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