Preservation League, Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon Host Tour and Reception

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A guided tour of the 1824 Mount Lebanon Meetinghouse, now used as the Heyniger Memorial Library at Darrow School, will be offered at 5:00 p.m.

ALBANY, NY (09/10/2013)(readMedia)-- The Preservation League of New York State recently disbursed a loan from its Endangered Properties Intervention Program (EPIP) to the Shaker Museum?Mount Lebanon to assist with cash flow for a series of preservation projects currently underway at the North Family Site in New Lebanon, New York.

On Wednesday, September 25, the League and Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon will co-host a tour and reception featuring a behind-the-scenes look at ongoing preservation work.

The event will begin at 5:00 p.m. with an optional guided tour of the 1824 Mount Lebanon Meetinghouse now used as the Heyniger Memorial Library at Darrow School, including access to the fifth-floor attic with unusual bent-beam construction. A wine and cheese reception with tours of other buildings at the complex will take place from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. Casual dress and sturdy shoes are recommended as this is an active work site.

There is no cost for the reception, but space is limited and reservations are required. Please email slaclair@preservenys.org or call 518-462-5658 x 13.

A number of members of the restoration team, which included Peter Smith of David E. Lanoue Engineers Architects Builders of Stockbridge; Don Carpentier of Eastfield Village; timberframe builder and author Jack Sobon; and interns from the North Bennett Street School in Boston who completed several projects at the site, will be present for the reception and tour.

The League's Endangered Properties Intervention Program helps individuals, not-for-profit organizations, companies and municipalities return endangered historic properties to active use. EPIP was established with state funds to foster the revitalization and protection of historic resources and neighborhoods throughout New York.

The mission of the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon is to engage and inspire local, national, and global audiences by telling the story of the American Shakers. For 160 years, from 1787 to 1947, the Shakers at Mount Lebanon led the largest and most successful utopian communal society in America. From this central community developed the Shakers' ideals of equality of labor, gender, and race, as well as communal property, freedom and pacifism. From Mount Lebanon also grew the now famous Shaker aesthetic of simplicity, expressed in their objects, furniture, buildings and village planning.

The North Family site today consists of 10 buildings on 30 acres. The iconic North Family Great Stone Barn – measuring 50' wide, four stories high, and nearly 200' long, was totally gutted by a catastrophic fire, leaving only its four massive masonry walls standing until this day. This summer, the Museum embarked on a $2.1 million Phase I Masonry Stabilization project including targeted wall rebuilding, repointing, injection grouting and structural steel. Exterior restoration of the 1829 Brethren's Workshop is also underway.

"One of the great legacies of the Shakers is their enduring architecture," said Jay DiLorenzo, President of the Preservation League of New York State. "These buildings, deceptively simply in design, have an innate utility and functionality that make them worthy of our preservation efforts today. We are confident that under the stewardship of the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, a new generation of craftsmen will learn and apply the old-world skills needed to maintain these resources for public use."

According to David Stocks, President of Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, "The Shakers, in creating their village at Mount Lebanon, were building a communal, pure, and utopian Heaven on Earth. Their beliefs had direct, practical implications on how they planned and built their villages, often with approaches that led to buildings – though plainly presented – as daring, innovative, and outside the mainstream as their beliefs were. They were, in many ways, America's first Modernists."

Previous EPIP Loans have included: the Woman's Club of Albany, for cash flow assistance against $1.3 million in renovations to the 1895 building; the 1816 Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse Museum in Wayne County to preserve and restore a site with ties to the anti-slavery and women's suffrage movements of the 19th century; and Cider Mill Friends of Open Space and Historic Preservation, Inc. to help support the purchase of the Kimlin Cider Mill and 1.8 acres of surrounding buffer land in the town of Poughkeepsie.

For more information on the Preservation League of New York State, please call 518-462-5658 or visit the League's website at www.preservenys.org.