- Traditional Timberframe Research & Advisory Group
- A Report of the 20th Annual Symposium
Topsfield Congregational Church - Dan Boyle Photo
Credit for Images below -- Ken Rower
TTRAG 2011 brought together about 90 timber framers with historians, preservationists, architects and engineers for a weekend in Danvers and Topsfield, Massachusetts, at the beginning of April -- whose sweet showers looked, north of Boston, a lot like snow. The gathering, the 20th annual, was hosted by the Traditional Timberframe Research and Advisory Group and organized by Dan Boyle of Preservation Timber Framing in South Berwick, Maine. Unique among Guild conferences, the TTRAG event runs on a single track, focusing in historic timber-framed buildings, their origins and their preservation.
The Gould barn, English tying joint
Essex County, Massachusetts, has a remarkable concentration of early framed buildings (see Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625-1725). We were able to examine a few in Topsfield, particularly the Parson Capen house (1683, preserved in good measure), the Gould barn (1710), a composite structure reconstructed and repurposed in the 1990s, and, adjacent to the Stanley-Lake house (1680-1690), a turn-of-the-18th century barn nearly unaltered. On the Saturday afternoon walking tour, we also examined the well-made original roof trusses and new oak-and-spruce steeple framing of the Topsfield Congregational Church (1842) whose elevation is Classical but whose steeple is Gothic.
The Parson Capen house in background
Presentations Friday evening, Saturday morning and Sunday morning surveyed, among other subjects, local structures, the New England timber frame and its evolution from English antecedents (which began very soon) and the German Zimmerer carpentry training system (which annually produces enough graduates that the Guild apprenticeship program would need to produce some 10,000 each year to keep pace proportionately). Saturday night's slide show, a good many of its presenters with full heads of ungreyed hair, would have encouraged anyone who worries that the little world of timber frame preservation might soon perish as older practitioners retire.
Parson Capen house, upstairs chamber summer beam
Out-of-doors, Peter and Mike Dellea bandsawed logs on a portable mill while Tim Wohlhueter rough-hewed at another site not far away, demonstrating two methods of obtaining more or less authentic-looking timber (and as lengthy as you like) for work older than the advent of the circular sawmill. Indoors at the Gould barn, Jim Derby erected his graceful one-fifth scale model of a white pine English barn, which lives patiently in a fitted pine box until such occasions.
Topsfield Congregational Church, kingpost truss and longitudinal bracing
For me, TTRAG 2011 concluded with two outstanding presentations. Al Hodson, P.E. (Resurgence Engineering and Preservation), explicating several cases of historic building distress, exhibited such good humor and good sense that you would just naturally want his advice and personal company if you had a structural engineering question.
Topsfield Congregational Church, view from bell stage up into spire
Peter McCurdy, the accomplished English framer famous for directing the building of a new Globe Theatre for London, and who directed repairs to the immense Harmondsworth barn in Middlesex and the reconstruction of the superb Pilton Barn roof in Somerset, on this occasion showed us as well the details of two domestic-size 15th and 16th century shop buildings which 15 years ago had stood in the way of a municipal renewal project on the high street in Uxbridge, a large town between London and Oxford.
The Stanley-Lake house
McCurdy and Co.'s first job was to document and take what was left to pieces, and store the latter. Fifteen years later, the job was to repair what was reparable, remake from new what was missing -- in one case a great deal, since two stories of steel and glass had been cut into the front of one building -- and to reerect the frame on a new development site nearby in the same town. To spend an hour looking at images of traditional English framing, with its intricacy, its curliness, the beauty of its oaken surfaces, was a moving experience. By comparison, the utilitarian Douglas fir and the simplified connections of so much American framing today seem to me rather heartless.
The Stanley-Lake barn
-Ken Rower
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