By Howard Greninger
The Tribune-Star
March 03, 2006 08:13 am
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Hulman & Co.’s Clabber Girl production and office facility in downtown Terre Haute will undergo an extensive 18-month exterior restoration project.
The project includes three buildings, one of which was built in the early 1890s.
“This will restore the building to its original condition and this building will be here 100 years from now for the next generation of Hulman and Company employees,” said Clabber Girl President Gary Morris.
“It will keep these buildings functional, buildings that are historical in this community. Clabber Girl is a functioning business and we’re continuing to invest in it and grow it and this is part of it,” Morris said.
The building’s resurgence will match that of the product, which has been outperforming its largest competitor, Calumet, for the past six years, based on All Commodity Volume, or ACV. The ACV is a percentage of store shelves a product sits on and includes the volume of sales from each shelf, said Tom Payne, Clabber Girl marketing manger.
None of the ACV figures include Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest food retailer. “We have 100 percent of the baking powder business at Wal-Mart today,” Payne said.
Last year, Clabber Girl’s buildings underwent a safety project to remove all loose stone from the exterior.
This year, about a dozen workers for Thompson Thrift, contractor on the project, will start work March 20 to restore the brick and sandstone exterior of the three buildings, with several sections of stone being completely replaced. Work will end in November, then start again in the spring of 2007, said John Thompson, co-partner of Thompson Thrift, a Terre Haute-based construction/development business.
Restoration plans for buildings No. 1, 2 and 3, each of which border Ninth Street, include cleaning a pigment coating off the exterior brick; retuck-pointing the brick; some brick replacement; and removing iron hinges originally placed to support window shutters.
“There are old iron hinges and as iron rusts, it expands and is popping the face off the bricks on the building. We are going to remove those hinges before they continue to expand and damage more and more brick,” Thompson said.
Exterior iron fire escape steps also may be removed. Those steps were not originally on the building, but appear in photographs of the building by the 1930s.
Arsee Engineers Inc. of Fishers is the consultant for the project and put together a restoration plan.
The building’s exterior sandstone will be restored to its original red color, removing a white, high-build acrylic coating, and pigment will be removed from exterior bricks added during a 1991 project.
“Every piece of stone has been detailed in a restoration plan and its size and shape has been drawn,” Thompson said. “Every stone will have one of five processes performed to it.”
First, if a stone is intact, the acrylic coating will be removed.
A second process is to “clean and reprofile the stone. There are beltways where the stone has a slight tilt away from the building, so as water comes down, it hits the top of the stone and the water has positive drainage and water runs off the face of the building,” Thompson said.
“Those beltways are not sharp anymore. Rather than replace the stone, we can simply strike a line and take grinder and grind off about one-quarter inch of that stone and increase that angle slightly and re-establish that line,” Thompson said.
The third procedure is called a “Dutch man.” As some stones are replaced, the original material can be cut from them and workers can fit that material tightly into the corner of a different stone. “It will basically be undetectable by the human eye at a distance of 15 feet, so we won’t see that patch,” Thompson said.
The fourth process will replace stone veneer. “Rather than pull a whole stone out, we will go back an inch or two beyond the brick veneer and cut the stone flush, back about an inch to two inches behind the brick veneer. Then there is a veneer cut that will be slid back in that cavity,” Thompson said.
Workers will use stainless steel rods, and drill and epoxy the rods into the original stone and then “sleeve the new stone over those rods and epoxy it in place,” Thompson said.
“That will keep us from having to go back in and support the brick above it,” he said.
Finally, if the stone is deteriorated, workers will make a complete stone replacement. “Some of the older stones and character will still be visible. It still will look like a 100-year-old building, but one that has been maintained and cared for properly, “ Thompson said.
Visual stone “bands” on top of buildings No. 1, which is the largest Hulman & Co. building at the corner of Wabash Avenue and Ninth Street, and No. 2 will be replastered and repainted, Thompson said.
The cornerstone of the historic Hulman & Co. building was laid on April 12, 1892 and it took 1,500 men working 12-hour days until the end of August 1893 to complete the building, according to records from Hulman & Co. The grand opening of the building was Sept. 28, 1893.
For the restoration, multiple stone samples were taken from several quarries. It took a year to find identical stone for the restoration project, Thompson said.
Sandstone is coming from the Northern Stone Co. quarry in Flat Rock, Ohio. It matches the exterior of the building so much that Thompson said it “potentially could be the quarry this stone came from when the building was originally built.”
Samuel Hannaford & Sons of Cincinnati, Ohio, were architects for the building and likely used the Northern Stone quarry, Thompson said. William Caldwell of Hamilton, Ohio was the main contractor for the foundation, masonry, brick and cut stone work.
Howard Greninger can be reached at (812) 231-4204 or howard.greninger@tribstar.com.
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