Illumination | Spring 2008

EXPERT ATTENTION: Logan Wilkin, a mason with the Kansas City-based restoration firm, MTS Contracting, repoints brickwork on an interior wall.

"Older folks who lived around here can remember their great-grandparents talking about visiting the house. There's even one story about how Sarah Hickman used to set up her rocking chair in the hallway to catch the breeze," Glendening says.

Unfortunately, by the time Gene Garrett began raising funds for the restoration ten years ago, the elements were doing more than just cooling the house. They were beginning the work of destroying it.

"This house was getting right on the verge of deteriorating pretty fast," says Glendening. "I could see signs over the last few years that the house was declining faster: cracks in the exterior, cracks in the hallway walls, cracks that had opened up that weren't there a few years ago. The chimneys were missing a lot of bricks. When you look at a place over 11 or 12 years you notice things like that."

Others noticed too. When prompted by Garrett, community members and their elected representatives recognized the threat to the house and rallied to save it. Among the Hickman house's most ardent supporters was Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond who, in 2005, secured a $500,000 federal appropriation for the project. "We should not let historical sites decay or fall victim to development," Bond said at the time. More recently, thanks to the efforts of civic leaders in the city of New Franklin, the project received a $250,000 Community Development Block Grant from the Missouri Department of Economic Development. The cash infusion, by bolstering funds already committed by the University and private donors, allowed work at the site to begin earlier this year.

Agroforestry Center staff such as Glendening, meanwhile, have also done their part, often in a hands-on way.

Much of the replacement brick and limestone foundation rock used in the project, for example, has been carefully excavated from the ruins of a nearby home built just a few years after the Hickman house. "We're digging this brick and stone from out of the Turner house site over in Davisdale, doing it to save funds," says Glendening. "When it's all said and done we'll have probably dug 10,000 or so brick out of that house."

And has the effort been worth it? There's no hesitation in Glendening's answer.

"We need to remember our past. That's why we need to preserve this history," he says. "These are the people we came from. If you tear down these old houses and build new places, our understanding of what they did here, of how they lived, is lost forever."

Published by the Office of Research.