Preservation Hall
23 June 2008

Newburgh town manager Cynthia Burger knew the building in which she worked needed help long before a team of structural engineers told her so. Burger had lined her office walls with black plastic to minimize her exposure to mold growing in the nooks and crevices of the makeshift municipal offices that occupied the second floor of the old Newburgh Town Hall. She knew the interior of the building was deteriorating — though not until later did she discover the toll that termites, water, and age had taken on the building since its construction in 1851.

But when the exterior south wall of the building, which sits atop a hill on State Street overlooking Newburgh’s downtown historic district, began to visibly bow out, alarming passersby, Burger and town officials knew the time had come to save the historic structure. The engineers they hired to assess the building’s condition came back with frightful news: The grand, old building, erected as a church and housing the bell that called the Home Guard to assembly during the Civil War, was on the brink of collapse. The walls, the roof, the bell tower, and the floors were so unstable that one strong storm that blew through could have sent the whole building tumbling down. “There’s no doubt it was in peril,” says architect David Wills, chairman of the Newburgh Historic Preservation Commission.

Now, after more than a year’s work, a major overhaul of the building has resulted in an inspiring example of a 21st century “adaptive re-use” of a 19th century landmark. Gone is much of the interior that was far beyond salvageable, including a termite-infested choir loft. But what remains are significant historic details, including much of the original window framing, many of the BUILDING Evansville Preservation Hall A 19th century landmark in peril undergoes a major overhaul to take it well into the 21st century BY MAUREEN HAYDEN second-floor stained glass windows, and the winding double staircase that leads visitors up to what was the sanctuary of the original occupant, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

The building, vacant since town officials moved into a new town hall in 2006, has been rechristened Preservation Hall. That name reflects both the small museum that will be housed on the first floor of the building and the open area on the second floor — the former sanctuary — now designed for public events and private receptions called “Ebenezer Hall,” the name of the first minister who presided over the congregation that met to worship there 155 years ago.

The transformation was not an easy one. The $1 million cost was offset by a variety of public and private funding sources. Half of it came in the form of a Community Focus Fund grant from the federal government; it’s money designated for long-term community development. Some additional funds came from the Indiana Historic Landmarks Foundation. Wills, a partner with Hafer Associates, oversaw the project, working closely with Danny Bateman, owner of ARC Construction Company, Inc., whose skilled craftsmen and laborers did much of the work.

Among the challenges was keeping true to the original design of a building that was suffering from major structural ills. An old wooden beam, for example, that initially appeared to be supporting the bell tower instead was found to be hanging from the rafters since the bottom portion of it had been eaten away by termites. The first floor had settled so significantly that there was a four-inch difference between the floor at the front-door entrance and an entryway just a few feet away. Out-of-town historic preservation experts who had urged Wills and Bateman to initially preserve much of the interior had a change of heart once they actually visited the building. As Wills recalls, one of the experts stepped into the building unprepared for the sagging first floor and took a nose dive. “She changed her mind about the floor after that,” he notes.

Wills went into the project with both an appreciation for preservation and an understanding of the costs involved in such a project. He and his colleagues at Hafer Associates were involved, for example, with restoring and designing an adaptive re-use for the Victory Theatre in Downtown Evansville. The theater, now used by the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra and other civic groups, was a 1920s vintage vaudeville theater, but the shape of the original performance hall wasn’t well proportioned for the kind of acoustics that an orchestra requires. Yet renovation of the Victory has produced a performance space that is both visually rich and acoustically superb, and the essence of the historic building remains intact. Hafer Associates was also involved in transforming the early 19th century Rapp Granary in New Harmony into a modern conference center.

Much of the work on Preservation Hall may not appear visually dazzling, but it’s dramatic nonetheless. The structural engineers who first assessed the building back in 2004 discovered, for example, that there was no connection between the wood roof framing and the exterior brick walls, meaning that only the weight of the roof itself kept it in place. Similarly, in the attic, the eight columns that appeared to hold up the bell tower were sitting on wood beams that were unstable. Those problems, and much more, have been addressed with major structural work — including steel reinforcements — that, as Wills says, “ties and holds the building together.”

Among the changes more easily seen by visitors are such things as the addition on the back of the structure that houses an elevator that makes the building handicapped- accessible for the first time in its existence. Stepping into the addition, a visitor can see the original brick on the exterior back wall, pockmarked with dents made by hammers in the hands of workmen who sometime in the decades past had covered the old town hall with stucco. And what appears to be the original barreled ceiling — more than 16 feet tall — on the upper level has been refinished after makeshift ceilings added through the years were torn out. The badly damaged original wood floor, though, has been covered with a cork flooring which has improved the acoustics in Ebenezer Hall. Window molding and stained glass that had been damaged through the years have been repaired or replaced with such skill that, as Wills notes, “you can’t tell the old from the new.”

Both the seen and unseen is pleasing to Burger, who describes the work done on Preservation Hall as impressive. “This is about more than saving an old building,” she says. “This is about honoring our past by saving a part of our history. Architecturally, this historic structure is of great importance to the charm of our community. But even more, it’s the history of the people and events associated with it that defines Newburgh and makes us unique.”