Traditional Masonry Archives — Restoration Case Study

An Immigrant Story: The Bowman House
Documenting, dismantling, restoring and largely re-erecting the Bowman House so it could serve as the centerpiece of an 1820s American Farm exhibit at the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia.

The Bowman House, an extraordinary dwelling that dates back to 1773, was built in north Rockingham County, Va., by or for a German-speaking immigrant named Georg Baumann and his son, Johannes. The story-and-half building owned by the father-and-son team, who eventually became known as George and John Bowman, is a rare surviving example of a Flurkuchenhaus, which is loosely translated as a hall-kitchen-entry house. It is a type of vernacular architecture brought to America and adapted in the 18th century by German-speaking immigrants who settled in regions of Pennsylvania and as far south as Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.

Like so many examples of vernacular architecture, the home was expanded some 47 years after it was built. In 1820, George’s grandson John Bowman Jr. added a hall and a parlor.

A floor plan of the first floor of the Bowman House. Room 1 is the Schtuppe, the room that served as the center of family life. Room 2 is the Kammer; a master bedroom of sorts (the children slept upstairs). Room 3 is the Kuche, the kitchen. Room 4 is the hall and room 5 is the parlor or dining room, both of which were added in 1820. The partition between rooms 1 and 2 was also added during the 1820 remodeling.

It is this expanded 3,271-square-foot home (including the cellar) that now serves as the centerpiece of an 1820s American Farm exhibit at the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia.

Originally built about 52 miles from the museum, the Bowman House was painstakingly dismantled by hand with hammers, wrecking bars and wide pieces of wood so components such as trim wouldn’t be marred. “The biggest technique we employed was care,” says Frontier Culture Museum curator of historic buildings Ray Wright, who managed the project from field documentation to on-site restoration. “And we didn’t rush things.”

Materials and techniques
The largest piece of equipment used in the dismantling was a small crane used to load the trucks that carried the pieces away. A loader was used for the stone.

The central hearth, prior to dismantling.

The north facade of the chimney.

“The dismantling process is as much careful documentation and investigation as it is painstaking razing and removal,” observes Wright, a restoration carpenter and stonemason who holds a master’s degree in historic preservation. “The first phase, called surface mapping, records every surviving detail of design and construction and notes every structural problem of each interior and exterior surface of the building.”

To begin, Wright took copious photographs of each room and drew a half-inch to 1-foot scale elevation of each wall with every wooden piece numbered and lettered. “We assigned a separate tag for each piece in the room, from the baseboard to the trim. Each surface was drawn and tagged all the way down to each window piece, tread, riser, door, chair rail, everything.”

Stones visible to the eye, such as those of the central chimney, were also photographed, lettered and numbered, Wright says. “But if the stone was plastered over, we did not document its exact placement.”

The second phase of documentation occurred as the building was dismantled. “The removal of some architectural components often reveals evidence of earlier features, such as whitewashed logs under plaster walls or nail patterns on rafters,” he says.

Two trailers transported the house in pieces to a former truck mechanic’s bay in Verona, Va. After all the timbers were fumigated to destroy any harmful insects, the museum crew began the task of rebuilding the 1773 log pen. The rest of the house remained stored in the enclosed trailers.

The latex enamel was removed with paint thinner.

This summer beam in the 1820 addition spanned the entire length of the room and carried the floor joists in pockets cut into the beam’s upper corners. The joists are beaded, but the summer beam is not. The ceiling was never plastered.

If over half of the timber was bad, they replaced it. Otherwise they added new material to the existing log and repaired it. As may be expected, protected logs under porches and those on interior walls were in good shape, while most of the wood at the gable ends of the house had to be replaced.

According to Wright, timber repair consisted of replacing decayed or structurally unsound parts by using a “Dutchman,” a piece of wood that is spliced into place and secured with glue and bolts.

The restoration stonework was somewhat challenging and time-consuming, he continues, because the modern foundation was constructed of concrete with an 8-inch stone facade. Some of the original stones of the house were rather large and had to be cut to accommodate the facade width. This made laying the limestone with its horizontal bedding planes more laborious.

And although the original stone was used to re-form the cellar at the museum site, Wright says, it was too tedious to number all the stones, so the team simply mimicked the technique used by the original mason.

The stones of the central chimney, however, were laid back in their original locations. Working off graduated plumb lines set on all four corners of the chimney, workers laid the stones at the correct angle and at the correct elevation.

The project began in early 2002 with the documentation and dismantling, which took six weeks to complete. The cellar was completed in 2004 and the house was completely reassembled on museum grounds in fall 2006.

Wright says they were off schedule by about a year. “We had no idea how long it was going to take,” he says. It was hard to estimate the degree of restoration or preservation needed before reassembly could begin. Plus, the going was slow because it was an in-house job, and museum employees would be called on to do other things.

The approximate final cost of the project was close to half a million dollars.

Technical challenges
Probably the most frustrating part of the Bowman House restoration involved having to rebuild an 18th-century house to meet modern state code. “Modifications and compromises had to be made,” Wright says.

When the Kammer was plastered, the outside of the Seelenfenster was probably never covered or plugged. Neither a window nor a door, this peculiar hole cut between two logs on the back porch was believed to provide a way of escape for the soul of a dead person to leave the house

The integrated placement of this stone corbel suggests that the builders of the Bowman House planned on installing a heavy stove in the Schtuppe. The stone wall on the left forms the foundation for the back of the central fireplace.

In order to keep the ceiling of the first floor as pristine as possible from a restoration standpoint, he explains, they had to sacrifice the upstairs. “The second floor is closed to the public because in order to get the floors up to modern-day code we would have had to add a lot of extra material to support it.”

The roof’s original rafter system also didn’t meet modern-day code, so they had to add steel rafters. “But at least you can’t see them from below,” Wright says.

The team was able to look at architectural fragments to determine what some original components had been, even though they were no longer in place. “We found some porch posts in a junk pile that we were certain came from the house,” Wright says.

They also found some shingles that offered clues to help them determine the original roofing material. Somewhere in the late 19th or early 20th century, the building had been covered with a standing seam metal roof. But the original roof was covered with a long shingle, like those found on Germanic homes from southeastern Pennsylvania to the Shenandoah Valley. Made out of white oak, the shingles are 2 feet long, between 3 inches and 8 inches wide and about a half inch thick. “We used about 30 squares of them,” Wright says. “It’s a huge roof.”

The hardest items to replace, Wright says, were the windows. Luckily, consultant architectural conservator Richard Byrne of Staunton restored the surviving sashes and reproduced sashes that were missing or beyond repair.

As for the interior, a paint analysis has not yet been completed. “It will answer a lot of questions about the decor,” Wright says, adding that they’re looking for colors and paint types that were used in the 1820s.

George Bowman and his grandson were products of their respective times. While the elder Bowman built his house to honor cultural and social traditions that had been in place for generations, his grandson’s addition represented the new economic and nationalistic forces that were shaping a young nation. “The grandson attempted to Americanize the house,” Wright says. “If anything, the Bowman House encapsulated the immigrant story.”

TM