House Moving 101
by Cynthia Owen Philip

I suspect my fascination with moving buildings from one place to another goes back to my childhood when I played with little sets of houses, barns and railroad depots on my bed room floor — and, now that I think of it, with the game of monopoly. Then too, I've always been attracted to the waste-not want-not attitude that leads a person to load a structure onto a flatbed and cart it to a better site. The decisive factor is probably that I myself have lived in two moved houses.

The first was a large 1803 federal house that started life on the Post Road in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Around the middle of the nineteenth century it was hauled up a very steep hill to a more bucolic setting. I like to imagine the movers using teams of oxen for the pulling power.

The second is my summer studio in Rhinecliff, where at this very moment, I'm taking advantage of a hot spring day to write this article. Once a lodge on the grounds of St. Joseph's Church a half a mile away, the studio was brought here a long time ago along a farm road that exists now only in second growth outline.

You can imagine my joy when, at last year's Dutchess County fair, my eyes lit upon the handsome 1881 schoolhouse that had just been carried over from Mt. Ross, near the Dutchess/Columbia border, and put down on a knoll between the Antique Museum building and the riding rings. Right away I knew there must be a good story behind it. There was.

For some time, Fairgrounds Manager Tom Odak had been on the lookout for an old building that would enhance the history aspects of the fair. When he heard that the one-room 1881 Mt. Ross school might be available, he got on the phone and made a winning case to the owner, Carl Popp. Popp had inherited it through his grandfather, who had bought it shortly after it closed in 1943. The grandson had reluctantly given up hope of restoring it himself. A public-spirited man, he wanted the schoolhouse to be preserved in a location where everyone could enjoy it. It was a win-win situation. Popp gave the school and its contents to the Fairgrounds Committee, and the Committee agreed to return it to its former glory.

Enter Kirchhoff Construction Management of Pleasant Valley which got the contract to move and remount it. Scott Cruikshank was put in charge. "It was a real challenge," he told me. "None of us had moved a building and this was a big one. Thirty-six feet five inches long, twenty-four feet six inches wide and thirty-seven feet to the top of the belfry, it was far too large to be carried whole over the roads. So I studied it and thought about it until I devised a plan of cutting it into eleven pieces — five walls (one interior), five roof sections, and the belfry. It helped that the interior walls were wood, not plaster; cracking was not a problem."

There was only one hitch. The walls were too tall to ride upright under bridges. With a little geometry, Cruikshank resolved that, too. The hypotenuse of a square being a little longer than its sides, he could rest the walls on a crib raised at a thirty-degree angle. It worked, and off the walls went on a heavy equipment trailer behind a tri-axle dump truck over the intervening hills and dales to their new foundation at the Fairgrounds. The five walls were securely in place for the Fair's opening. The roof and belfry pieces still sat on the grass. Since then they too have been set in place.

Meanwhile Sharran Fingar, who works at the Fairgrounds, was researching and restoring the school's contents. Although the weathervane and clock had been stolen, an astonishing array remain. For instance, there are three bells: the little chrome desk bell the teacher tapped to call rambunctious children to order; the hand bell for summoning them from recess; and the two-inch thick big bell used to announce the beginning of the school day that now hangs on high in melodious clanging order. In addition to the teacher's desk and chair, there are seven wooden students' desks with ink wells and attached seats. Some are in better condition than others, but all are restorable. There's also a globe, a blackboard, hard chalk, framed pictures, more than fifty books, and thirteen years of school records. Especially prized are the American flag with only forty-five stars and the rectangular marble plaque mounted behind the teacher's desk. It's inscribed: "Knowledge is Power/ Hannah (Swartwout)/ Bentley/ Memorial/ School/Erected by her son/ Henry Bentley A.D. 1881."

I spoke with Margaret Vater Grant, who attended the Mt. Ross School from 1936 until 1943, her entire grammar school education. She walked two miles to the school loaded down with a lunch box and a brief case full of books, but she said it was one of the most wonderful experiences of her life. "You learned from the upper grades' lessons," she told me. "And, when springtime came, the teacher took us on nature walks. We learned a lot. We played a lot, too. Out in the yard we made up our own games. Dutchess County Fair was my favorite. We pretended we were horses and awarded different colored leaves for prizes. At Christmas, the whole neighborhood joined in the school program; I was an angel in a fluffy costume my mother made. We also had big community picnics at the school. In winter, we didn't mind going out in the cold to the privies; we were used to that at home."

You can see the schoolhouse at a distance as you pass the Fairgrounds on Route 9G and right up close if you cross on the north/south interior road. Plans are to have it open with the furnishings in place by Fair time. Interpretative talks and exhibits are planned. You'll think that classes are still being taught there and wish that you, too, could enroll.

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When I started looking into the idea of writing an article about house moving, I hoped to find two or three moved buildings. It turned out they are everywhere. The long-distance move of Jim Male's Greek Revival farmhouse from Lawrenceville, New Jersey, to his cherry orchard in Livingston, New York, is another amazing story. The historic house was surrounded by a development and had been neglected for some time. When the town's Preservation Advisory Committee faced a choice between dismantling it for salvage or having it torn down for an office complex, it invested in a two-line newspaper ad appealing for someone to come take it and preserve it. The ad was parlayed into a television story that Jim chanced upon in the wee hours of the morning. A landscape designer by profession, he immediately knew it was just what he was looking for. The only real credentials he had were strong memories of his grandfather's great barn riding down the road in Nebraska, a summer fellowship at Historic Deerfield Village — a group that has expertise moving buildings within the village and also from afar — and studies with Don Carpentier, a preservationist who created an entire village of moved buildings in a field on his family's farm near New Lebanon, New York. Jim had competitors for the Lawrenceville house, but only he came up with a viable plan for its removal.

He hired a team of three Greene County restoration men to work with him and in thirty days they took apart and carefully identified every board of the post and beam house, interior trim, three staircases, grain painted doors in addition to the white oak framing — as well as immense thirty-foot hand-hewn beams, corner posts, sills, and the pegs that held them together. They even saved clay bricks from the original kitchen hearth. Jim made several trips to Livingston in a rented twenty-eight foot enclosed truck. For the last load, the main beams, he hired a flat bed truck and driver.

So accurate was Jim's numbering system that he and his men put up the main structure in one day. In three days, the wing and the roof rafters were on. In the course of the work, Jim discovered the initials of the original housewright carved into a prominent beam and such oddities as that the arch of the kitchen hearth was supported by a buggy spring. Now, his Greek Revival house stands elegant and welcoming, high on its hillside framed by cherry trees and overlooking his fine barn and pond.

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The two structures I've talked about so far were moved to their new locations in pieces. The next two were moved whole to a better site on the same property.

The first, a beginning-to-end professional job, involved a large, eight-room, early nineteenth century house in Germantown. It was in good condition, but Susan Seidel, the New York City art dealer who owns it, wished it were on the high westerly ridge on her property instead of smack on the county road. After deliberating for ten years, she finally summoned the courage to engage Larmon House Movers of Schuylerville, New York, to do the work. The firm has been in the business for five generations and is so good at it that I've heard you can leave all your furnishings in place — goblets on the shelves, bottles in the refrigerator, even a cup of coffee on the table — with confidence that they'll be just where you left them when the job is finished. The only stipulation for Susan's house was that the grade to the new site be no more than ten percent.

An army of men came at the appointed time. First they dug a huge hole under the house. (Susan told me she was really scared when she saw the house supported only by four skinny corner points; she was sure it would collapse.) The men moved steel I-beams under the building, along with a set of wheels similar to the ones that suspend the body of an airplane, then hitched the rig to a bulldozer with the bulldozer tracks. The bulldozer looked like a tootsie toy in front of the huge structure, but slowly and seemingly effortlessly it drew it up the specially built dirt road to the top of the ridge, turned it ninety degrees and set it down over a partially excavated cellar. They then jacked the house up enough so that men on small tractors could finish the digging. Susan went down into the hole herself to see what she could see. She was rewarded by being able to trace the evolution of the house from the beams. It had begun as a simple one-over-one room dwelling.

Of course, her house does not look as if it had always been on its high perch; neither did my East Greenwich abode. But as Susan correctly foresaw, it has the most wonderful view west over the treetops to Round Top Mountain and the surrounding Catskill peaks. And the sky is so immense and enveloping that being on the terrace I felt as if I were afloat in a mythical land.

The second project, a small do-it-yourself affair, was the moving of a tottering but much beloved outbuilding that belongs to my daughter and her husband, Maria and Martin Clarke. Traditionally called the wood shed, it is also used for garden tools, wheelbarrows, buckets, mowers, tricycles, balls and bats, ice hockey sticks, sleds, and drying garlic. Beautifully proportioned, it is twelve feet eight inches square with six foot walls and a roof peaking at eleven feet. It has a four-pane window in its gable — charmingly off center to fit between the studs — and two doors at either end. A bit tottering, it is useful and much beloved.

I didn't witness the move. Nobody but the immediate family did. Quite rightly, my son-in-law discouraged his pals from standing around commenting on his ingenious, but Rube Goldberg methods. In fact he worked it out as he went along.

Among the many odd items Marty has on his farm is a large round metal pulley with a long metal tongue. He wedged the tongue under the building, put a brace in the rafters, to which he fixed a winch with a chain that he attached to the tongue. Carefully he raised one side just enough for the pulley to act as a wheel. Then he got out his Ford tractor with a fork attached behind. He slipped the fork under the opposite side of the building and off he went, sliding the structure onto its new wooden floor and field stone foundation with scarcely a tremor. Hurray!

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These are only four of the moved buildings I heard about in the course of my brief research. It turns out they are all over the countryside, some moved recently, some over a hundred years ago. The first building of the new Delamater hotel complex in Rhinebeck, for instance, is a tall clapboard house that was carried from the south side of what is now the M & T bank during an expansion. When my neighbor, artist Alan Iselin, saw it heading down Mill Street towards the traffic light with policemen holding back traffic and electric company men scrambling to take down the lines, his reaction was: "Wow, this is fantasy theater."

Before that, Rhinebeck's popular diner got a new life in Kingston. Long ago the beautiful Ellerslie boathouse was moved for use as a barn for a house just down the street from me. Up in Red Hook the Kloses replaced their tragically burned sheep barn with two fine vintage mortise-and-tenon barns, one from Fleischmanns across the river, and the Haddads had Larmon House Movers take a stucco house up the hill from in front of their electrical business on Route 199 so they could increase the parking lot.

Fifteen years ago in Germantown, two hundred people watched with bated breath as the handsome three-story early twentieth century house that occupied the Stewart's gas station lot was trundled up Route 9G then down the long steep hill to the river front in a last minute rescue by the Crawfords; how I wish I'd been with them. Just this week I heard of a houseboat that was brought to land in the village of Athens. It's now a charming three-room cottage with river view.

Moving buildings, it seems, is an up-to-date as well as an old-fashioned thing to do. What we tend to forget is that succeeding generations alter buildings. Sometimes they choose, or are forced to choose, a dramatic fashion such as picking them up and putting them in a new location. More often than not, I like to think, change helps keep buildings alive.