Still Standing

Heroic intervention ensures an historic home's survival.

By Charles E. Reineke

In the summer of 1816, at the end of a weeks-long journey from his former home in Bourbon County, Kentucky, a wagon-weary Thomas Hickman rolled to a stop on a patch of hilly grassland two miles above the Missouri River town of Franklin. He had come to build a better life and more lucrative livelihood for himself, his wife, Sarah, and a family that would eventually include six children, part of a wave of inland immigrants intent on realizing what would later be described as America's "manifest destiny to overspread the continent."

Few friendly faces would have been there to mark Hickman's arrival. The area now referred to as the Missouri River Hills was then mostly wilderness, a vast swath of tall-grass prairie and densely wooded creek bottoms. The Missouri, a tribe related to the Southern Sioux peoples, had been the area's most recent permanent inhabitants. But by the time the Hickmans settled in, all but a remnant had been annihilated, victims of the twin scourges of smallpox and warfare with competing indigenous peoples, most notably the Sauk and Fox.

These latter-day Native Americans, many of whom had been sympathetic to the British in the recently concluded War of 1812, were, for obvious reasons, less than well-disposed toward land-hungry immigrants. Hickman, undaunted but nevertheless prudent, thus arranged to live in the protective shadow of a stockade named for David McClain, the Baptist clergyman from whom he had acquired the land.

Once settled in, Hickman, a slaveholder, spent the next two-and-half years amassing profits from the labor of his bondsmen and his partnership in a Franklin-based hardware and dry goods store. By the time, in 1819, that he sent for his family and began constructing a new home, the Kentucky transplant was well on the way to being an important player in his rapidly growing community.

Hickman's 1,800-square-foot house, completed later that year, would have reflected his elevated status. The structure, an unadorned version of the Georgian-cottage style popular back in Kentucky, boasted an eight-foot wide, walnut-floored central hallway opening to a dining room and two of the home's three bedrooms. A curved staircase near its back door provided easy access to a large attic, while a "summer kitchen"— a separate wood-framed structure with a cooking fireplace and larder -- would have provided a place for a domestic slave, probably working alongside Sarah Hickman, to prepare meals and preserve foods.

For the Hickmans, move-in day would have represented a big step-up from the cramped cabin accommodations they were likely to have shared since their arrival.

The hilltop residence would have also been meaningful for travelers headed west along the Boonslick Trail. To this next wave of settlers, Hickman's house would have stood as a beacon of progress on the prairie, its whitewashed walls a gleaming symbol of pioneer energy, ambition and staying power.

And so it will remain, thanks to the tireless efforts of a dedicated cadre of caretakers, preservationists, and restoration-construction experts who are bringing the house back to its early 19th-century luster.

The $1.3-million Hickman house preservation effort is scheduled to be completed this fall, says project leader Gene Garrett, a professor of forestry and the superintendent of MU's Horticulture and Agroforestry Research Center. The restored building, along with a reconstructed summer kitchen, will house period furnishings as well as displays of local archeological, geological and items of historical interest. Gardens and botanical collections will focus on the natural heritage of the Boonslick region, while other exhibits will introduce visitors to the latest in agroforestry research. Future projects will likely include restoring the recently discovered family burial ground, as well as locating and reconstructing the property's slave quarters.

"It isn't cheap, it hasn't been easy, but I think it's been well worth it," says Garrett, who spent almost a decade raising funds for the project. "When it's all done we will have saved a part of history that my kids and your kids and their kids can come out here and appreciate."

Not that there aren't already many features to appreciate, Garrett says during a recent visit to the site. Among the more striking, he points out, are the expertly laid courses of hand-made exterior brick, many of them arranged in an intricate Flemish Bond design. "You certainly won't see this kind of work today," he says.

Aesthetic considerations aside, preserving these bricks and reinforcing the hand-mixed mortar that has kept them standing is key to helping the structure survive another 200 years, says Angie Gaebler, associate at the Kansas City architectural firm of Susan Richards Johnson and lead architect on the Hickman house project.

"I think the biggest challenge we've had out here involves the masonry work," Gaebler says. "The mortar used to construct this house is a lime-putty mixture, a material used before Portland cement came into production. A lot of people trying to restore these types of houses use a Portland cement mortar like we would use today. But it dries too hard for these bricks."

Gaebler gestures toward a nearby wooden pallet. The bricks piled on top of it lie heavy, not quite uniform in shape and color, and bear only a passing resemblance to their contemporary counterparts. Most are a chalky red-brown, with some shading toward sienna and ocher. Others, so-called clinker bricks, exhibit a darker, vitrified hue, their gunmetal gray and slate-colored surfaces stained with patches of shiny glass, this the result of their proximity to the kiln fire.

Workers from MTS Contracting, Inc., a Kansas City-based company specializing in masonry and brickwork restoration, have already completed removal of the lime whitewash that once coated the house's brick walls. They've also reconstructed its stone foundation, repaired the home's four fireplaces and rebuilt its chimneys. Repointing the exterior brickwork -- the laborious process by which cracked and loose mortar is chiseled out of joints and replaced with new material -- is the next task. For this the MTS masons will use a lime putty blended by a Chicago firm that analyzed and recreated the home's original mortar.

"The bricks here are very soft, hand made, probably local," Gaebler says. "The mortar, a sand and lime putty mixture, was also hand-made, also produced locally. Together they formed a system. If you start messing with that system, bad things can happen."

Lime putty mortar is one of the oldest building materials in the world; its three-parts sand to one-part lime putty ratio dates back at least as far as the Roman architect Vitruvius. Portland cement, and the harder brick that suits it, didn't become widely used in America until the 1880s. "I think a big part of the reason this building is still standing is that nobody has ever tried to do anything to it," Gaebler says. "It's kind of preservation by neglect."

This is mostly a good thing, she adds, and not just when considering the brickwork. It means that much of the original foundation stone, locally quarried limestone and sandstone, remains on the site. The floor joists, massive trunks of local oak and hickory, still bear patches of the 190-year-old bark that clung to the timber when it was fitted in place. Much of the walnut flooring, along with the cabinets, sills, interior molding and chair rails, would have been in place during the Hickmans' tenure in the home.

Gaebler, a Kansas native who studied historic architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, says that in almost a decade of working on old houses she's seldom encountered a structure of similar age with so much potential.

"What's really interesting about this house is that there has been very little change; there is a lot of original fabric," Gaebler says. "Most of these houses that were continually lived in for two hundred years have seen a lot of renovations and updates: new plumbing, new electrical, new floors. You don't see that here."

Like many of those working with her, Gaebler admits she is sometimes amazed the place is still standing. "It's kind of a miracle, truthfully."

Changes that have been made -- the house was occupied by descendents of the Hickmans until well into the 1900s -- are being reversed. This has meant installing a more period-appropriate roof, bricking up added-on exterior doors and returning windows to their original dimensions.

Bringing back authentic door and window placement was particularly important, explains Ray Glendening, farm manager at the agroforestry center and an authority on the house's history. All of the house's openings would have been designed to maximize the efficiency of fireplace heat in the winter and cooling breezes in summer.

"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."