Removal of Keim Porch

Series of 50 digital photographs depicting the removal of the c. 1930s porch from the Keim House {q}. 1. {q} Image #47 is a panoramic view of the Keim farmstead, a c. 1930, photo taken by Amandus D. Moyer, and is used with the generous permission of the photographer's granddaughter Susan Harvin. Note the absence of a porch on the west gable wall. The two earliest Keim buildings, the 1753 farmhouse and its "ancillary" structure, and the Federal-era addition to the 1753 house formed an organic and architecturally distinguished farmstead which prospered during Keim family occupancy and administration for nearly sixteen decades. The surviving structures remain in remarkably well-preserved and substantially undisturbed condition, never having been substantially "improved" with interior plumbing, electrification, or other modern utilities, or structural or cosmetic "remodeling". The only significant exceptions include modification of the roof system and materials on the 1753 house and the early addition, and the construction and recent removal of the disintegrating 20th century porches on the south and west walls. 2. Fortunately, this unmolested status continued through the 65 years of Boyer family ownership which commenced c.1913 and ended with the Boyers' conveyance of the site and its structures to the Historic Preservation Trust of Berks County. The undisturbed condition continues under the stewardship of the Trust. Despite the passive preservation of the period buildings in their early condition throughout two and a half centuries, much of their distinctive architectural form, character, scale, and defining details were concealed and distorted for more than a century and a half by two successive porches joined to the south eaves walls. The 1930s porch extended the porch northward, appended to the west gable wall. During the first 258 years of its existence, the 1753 house displayed three projecting roofed structures, a pent roof and 2 floored porches, appended in the following sequence to the south eaves wall. The porches described in "B" and "C" also extended across most of the contiguous eaves wall of the Federal-era addition; "C" also abutted the west gable wall, forming a prodigious L-shaped "piazza, in modern terms." A.The first of these structures was a "pent"{a} roof, without above-grade flooring, probably un-ceiled{b}, integral with the original 1753 masonry wall construction, and carried on cantilevered "outlookers" which were cut off when the 19th-century floored porch described in "B" below was constructed. This early pent was structurally, dimensionally, and functionally equivalent to its counterpart, now reconstructed on its original outlookers on the north eaves wall of the 1753 house [Image #1, photo from record KHPH2--1002.01.009 and Image #11, photo 4300, 7/1/11]. {a} a contraction of "appentice," meaning an attached ["appended"] sheltering structure joined to a principal building [Lounsbury, Carl, An Illustrated Glosssary of Early Southern Architecture and Landscape, Univ. Press of VA, (1999), p. 267]. {b} This inference is based on the following considerations: 1) There is no framing evidence for a ceiling ["soffit"]; 2) There is no soffit sealing the underside of the northern pent roof; and no evidence of nailing to the bottom surface of the outlookers carrying it. 3) The walling between the outlookers and the rafter tops is laid flush with the plumb-lines of the exposed masonry and pointed identically to the wall ranges of all exposed elevations of the 1753 house. When an 18th-century pent roof was ceiled [earlier, "sealed"], such as at the George Douglass House, the wall segment concealed by the pent roof and its ceiling is typically laid in the "random rubble" method without regard for uniform coursing or wall-plane consistency [Image #2, photo #3842, 6/5/11]. Pent roofs and hoods [usually referring to a projecting structure, pedimented or in shed-form, above a single door or window] were distinguishing elements of 18th-century vernacular architecture in the region. They served the same function in Anglo-Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Germanic structures: protecting the woodwork and joints forming, framing, and securing wall openings, thereby reducing deterioration from saturation of mortar joints and foundation masonry . The original pent roof framing on the north [road-side] eaves wall furnishes an ideal template and dimensional basis for framing and detailing a restored pent structure on the south elevation. Accordingly, the authentic reconstruction of the southern Keim pent roof will create a structure which is not cieled or sided, but returns to the masonry wall with a half-hip based on the existing pent on the north eaves wall. This framing system will consist essentially of a series of half-trusses composed of rafters footed on a front plate, and joists mechanically fastened to the original outlookers, which had been cut-off at the wall plane to accommodate the 19th century porch. Lath strips will support the authentic roofing material, clay tiles, the same material used on the original roof of the house, based on photographic evidence [see Image #11]. The original pent roof was joined with the eaves wall tightly under the flashing course, which consisted of horizontally aligned stones ["flags"], which are flatter than those in the ambient un-coursed wall ranges of the early house block. This projecting band of stonework [Image #3, photo 5522, 8/20/11] was designed to shelter the joint between the pent roof and the wall masonry from moisture infiltration. The thin stones forming this flashing ["drip course"] had been masoned into the original structure by embedding them as cantilevers with fulcrums at the wall plane. This structural integration demonstrates unambiguously that the pent roof and flashing course were part of the original 1753 construction campaign and survived as a sheltering "overhang" for a more than a century. 3. Demolition of the pent roof in the 19th century, removing its cantilevered outlookers, and construction of a porch roof meeting the wall a foot below the projecting stonework rendered the flashing course conspicuously redundant. This anomaly was the least intrusive effect of the porches, as discussed below. B. The first floored porch, with its roof carried on turned support posts, was erected during the second half of the 19th century in replacement of the original pent roof. [Image #4, Photo 2 from KHPH9--1002.01.044]. This 19th-century porch{c}, a structural and functional expansion of the first-period pent roof, survived all Keim family members who had occupied the farmstead through 1913. {c} This date attribution is based on the scale and profiles of the turned support posts (see photographic images in Archive record KHPH9--1002.01.044). This structure is probably the "back porch" which Betsy Keim, the last surviving Keim to reside at her ancestral farmstead, was sitting on when her photo [Image #5] was taken "in the "early 1900's" for the Reading Eagle newspaper [see the halftone reproduction of this photo on page 27 of "American Folklife," in the issue entitled "Oley Valley, American Cultural Island," Vol. 1, No. 7, published by the American Folklife Society in 1973, and the essay "The Keim Family of Lobachsville" by John E. Eshelman, published in The Historical Review of Berks County, October, 1955]. The photo was also published in the Reading Eagle on Sunday, November 5, 1911, within a few weeks after Betsy's death. An uncropped print of this photograph (showing Betsy bare-footed) was reproduced on page 15 of "The Oley Valley, A Photographic Journey," published in 2010 by The Oley Valley Heritage Association. The caption cites a probable date of "c.1910." The pent roof and its "outlooker" supports were removed and replaced by the 19th century porch roof which was set at a lower level than the sloped plane of the early pent, and displayed the first floor deck raised above the exterior grade on stone piers, creating a sheltered outdoor extension of the interior living space. This was the first significant exterior modification of the original house after the Federal extension of the dwelling space more than a half-century earlier. This 19th-century porch was laid out along the south eaves wall of the 1753 masonry block and a portion of the Federal-era addition, terminating at both ends and appended solely to the southern eaves wall. It sheltered wall openings and their woodwork, as had the early pent on the 1753 house block. It also provided cover for the exterior doorways into the kitchen of the original house and the Federal addition, and formed a canopy for outdoor communication between them. As shown in Image #4, a J. Winslow Fegley photo taken c.1915-1925; see Farming Always Farming, p. 85], the first porch roof joined the masonry wall approximately one foot below the flashing course delineating the meeting of the original pent roof tiles and the eaves wall masonry. This vertical separation between the top of the 19th century porch and the flashing course confirms that the replacement structure was not the original roofed projection on the south eaves wall. The original "pent" structure would have fit snugly under the projecting "flag-stones" forming the sheltering "flashing" course, which would have provided negligible precipitation-shelter to a roof/wall joint a foot below it. The 19th-century porch structure was undoubtedly removed preparatory to construction of the 1930s L-form porch discussed in "C" below. C. The c.1930-1940 porch extended along the full extent on the south eaves wall of the 1753 house and the Federal addition, turning 90 degrees northward at the southwest corner of the early house and extending along the west gable wall [see Images ##6, 12, 13, and 31]. Its roof was of a different pitch and less vertical separation from the flashing course than the 19th-century porch roof [Image #4]. This later and dramatically larger porch roof was supported on posts of a bolder profile than the earlier porch [see "B" above]. The floor on the south eaves wall consisted of joisted tongued-and-grooved boards carried on massive stone piers butted against the foundation wall and "flashed" with a crude band of concrete at porch-deck level [Image #6, photo 3680, 5/23/11 and #7, 4284, 7/1/11 ]. The floor on the western gable-end wall was a thick poured concrete "slab," mixed, typically for the period between the two 20th-century world wars, with a dense "aggregate" [Image #22, photo 4394]. It buried and concealed two cellar openings in the west gable-end foundation, a ducted and grilled vent and a partially closed-up window [Image #8, photo 4266 and Image #9 photo 5854], both of which have now been partially unearthed and shielded from ground runoff by dry-laid stone "wells" seen in the photos cited. In Image #10, photo #4339, 7/5/11, the broken red horizontal streaks on the wall [paint from the 20th-century metal porch roof] about 4-6 inches below the flashing course delineate the top of the porch removed in the 2011 project. The 20th-century porch had not been built before 1912 [Image #11, the 1912 photo published in archive record KHPH13--1002.01.057. Also absent from the c. 1930 Amandus Moyer photo (Image #47), the removed porch was quite obviously constructed after 1929 and prior to 1941, when a HABS photo (Image #12, also in archive record KHPH8--1002.01.027) was taken, showing the L-form range porch surviving until its removal in 2011. Thus the 20th century porch was never a "Keim Family" addition to the living space, and there could not have been any association between the Boyer-era porch removed in 2011 and any Keim family member residing on the farm during the porch's life-span. The last Keim to reside on the farmstead was Elizabeth ("Betsy") Keim [Image #5], who died in 1911. Since the latest porch does not appear in its two-wall configuration in the Moyer photo, (no porch appears on the west gable end of the 1753 house), it clearly was built after c. 1929 [and prior to 1941, when a HABS photo, Image #12, also in record KHPH8--1002.01.027], was taken, showing the two-range porch removed in 2011. Thus the 1930s-era porch was never a "Keim Family" extension of the living space and there could not have been any association between the Boyer-era porch removed in 2011 and any Keim family member living while the porch was appended to the house. The construction date-range [c.1930-1940] for the modern porch falls a century or more after the conclusion of the "Period of Significance" for the Jacob Keim Farmstead. A structure as late and architecturally intrusive as the massive 20th-century Boyer "piazza" warrants removal from such an important vernacular architectural landmark, regardless of how pleasant an ambience it might have manifested during the interval of private ownership between the Keim family's tenure and the present and ongoing stewardship undertaken by the Historic Preservation Trust of Berks County. PRESERVATION GUIDELINES Transfer of the site and its surviving buildings to the Historic Preservation Trust of Berks County, Pennsylvania by Mr. and Mrs. Richard Boyer in 1978 imposed a set of custodial responsibilities that are fundamentally different from the essential attributes and relatively unconstrained rights of private ownership. One of the primary obligations inherent in any preservation mission is to maintain and interpret architecturally and historically significant buildings in their documented historical context (the "Period of Significance") for the benefit and education of the organization's membership, its regional constituency, and the broader historic preservation community. Performance of this core mission is guided by a complex and evolving (and sometimes controversial) code of principles and standards correlated to the importance, condition, extent, and architectural distinction of the surviving elements of the historic structures in the organization's custody. A fundamental axiom implicit in these guidelines requires the stabilization, preservation, and interpretation of as much of the original architectural "fabric" as survives reasonably intact, particularly those characteristic elements surviving from the historically appropriate early "periods." Conversely, though equally compelling, non-period accretions must be removed if they are not compatible with [or, as in this case, aggressively interfere with] the essential attributes and architectonic composition and interpretation of the important early structures. A further corollary of this preservation mandate provides that intrusive or obstructive alterations must be removed, regardless of how beneficial, attractive, or appropriate they might seem in a non-historic or less architecturally significant context. When such non-period appended structures are in a deteriorated, unsafe, and architecturally intrusive condition, neither restoration nor reconstruction is an authentic or acceptable preservation option. The National Register of Historic Places specifies 1750-1799{e} as the "Period of Significance" for the Jacob Keim Farmstead. A more recent [2007-8] Pennsylvania Historic Resource Survey Form prepared by Philip Pendleton suggests a period of significance spanning the years 1753-1830, the period during which 1753 house, the contemporary wood-turner's workshop building, the c.1800 addition to the 1753 farmhouse, and the root [also "cave" or "ground"] cellar{f} had all been constructed and functioning for over three generation of Keims as a prosperous family farm and industrial craft-enterprise. {e} more precisely, 1753-1799, since 1752 or 1753 was the year in which the land was conveyed to Jacob Keim by his father-in-law Hoch, and 1753 is the documented year of construction of the early farmhouse. {f} the surviving root cellar was originally the cellar of the small gabled and embanked stone structure described as a "bake oven" in the essay cited in KTX10--1002.01.050 ["Keim Bakehouse Discovered" by the late (2021) Richard Shaner, who, with the Boyer family, must be credited as the good stewards of the Keim buildings in their undisturbed forms. Research has confirmed that subsidiary trades, crafts, and commerce were common in the local agrarian culture; see Pendleton, Philip E., Oley Valley Heritage-The Colonial Years…, Chapter 2, "The Economy," pp. 29 et seq. Three generations of Keims working as wood turners would exemplify this tradition. REMOVAL OF THE 20th-CENTURY PORCH The modern-era porch, c.1930-40, had undoubtedly provided the Boyer family [purchasers from the Keim estate], their farm hands and loggers, and numerous visitors to the site with many hours of enjoyment and relaxation in a beautiful and historic rural setting. As a social convenience the porch was a pleasant addition to the old farmhouse and a haven for the private owners and their guests. The roofed deck also served as a comfortable meeting place and sheltered social venue during the first 33 years of the tenure of the Historic Preservation Trust of Berks County. Nevertheless, in the context of the mission of the Trust the porch was substantially detrimental to the architectural and structural integrity of the 1753 dwelling and its Federal-period addition. Its horizontal and vertical projections and descending roof plane also destroyed the original function-based spatial relationship between the extended house and the early wood-turner's workshop nearby [with porch: Image #13, photo 3661, 5/23/11; after porch removed: Image #14, photo 5678, 8/26/11 and Image #49, photo 5529, 8/20/11]. After removal of the 1930s porch [accomplished in 2011] and reconstruction of the pent roof and balcony on the south eaves wall in 2012, the Keim House and its Federal addition now present the same iconic architectural expression as they displayed in the first period of the 1753 house and the second period included in the Period of Significance for the farmstead. This historically authentic appearance has been concealed or obscured for over half of the life of the structures by the 19th- and 20th-century porches. Their removal reestablishes the original articulation of form, function, detail, and spatial relationships of and between the period structures. Removal of the porch was also urgent as a safety measure, considering the deteriorated condition of much of its structural woodwork [see Images #15, 16, 17, & 18, photos #4174, #4175, #4178, and #4179, 6/24/11]. Dismantling the porch also became the appropriate and necessary [and only] means of rectifying the following unacceptable conditions: 1. The massive porch, its deck and structurally compromised stone piers [Images #19, 20, & 21, photos #4189, #4190, and #4192, 6/24/11], the concrete slab under the western segment along the gable-end [Image #8, photo #4266, 7/1/11 & Image #22, 4394, 7/6/11], and the applied ["rendered"] concrete band [Image #23, photo #4162, June, 2011] serving as a "baseboard" at porch-deck level were destabilizing the stone walls by trapping moisture in the masonry. This persistent upwardly migrating moisture ["rising damp"] aggressively dissolved the lime in the early mortar and caused expansion fractures and disintegration during freeze-thaw cycles, leaving substantial quantities of degraded [sometimes, in scientific and engineering usage, "incoherent" or "friable"] and minimally functioning mortar residue [see Image #23, photo #4162, Image #24, #4185, and Image #25, #4188, 6/24/11]. Once a historic structure enters the stewardship of an organization dedicated to meeting prevailing preservation standards, the introduction of such "foreign" and destabilizing materials (such as 20th-century concrete) is "verboten"{f}. A rational corollary of this principle requires that, if present at the inception of the preservation stewardship, such infringing and destabilizing materials must be removed and the structure restored to its historic period-of-significance composition. {f} The concrete forming the deck of the porch on the west gable end, the cellar steps, approaches, and retaining walls, amounted to approximately ten tons of extremely hard and dense aggregate, all 20th-century "improvements", which were broken up, with great difficulty, and removed from the site. Image # 26, Photo #4180, 6/24/11 shows rotted "bulkhead" cellar doors; the cellar entry stone walls and steps have been reconstructed [see Image #27, photo # 5382, 8/19/11]. Image #28, Photos #4184, 6/24/11 and Image #29, Photo #4421, 7/9/11 show the decayed concrete retaining walls, which had replaced the original "raking" stone-masonry flank walls in the early 20th century.{n} {n} By contrast with the massive concrete formations butted against the Keim buildings when the 1930s porch was installed, the stone "spillway" and retaining walls installed to protect and drain the west eaves wall of the DeTurk House a few miles south of the Keim site were not bonded to the early masonry, but were deliberately separated from the early walls by a pervious granular material. The stone units forming these structures function and are removable without damage or threat to the fabric of the 1767 DeTurk multi-use building. 2. The piers, roof, L-form floor deck, and superstructure of the porch, and the concrete bulkhead cellar-way concealed or visually distorted more than a dozen of the salient early elements of the 1753 house and the federal-era addition. The porch also obstructed the view of important early architectural details in the cellar foundation walls and the first floor ranges of the south elevation [Image #30, photo #3681, 5/23/11], and physically precluded reconstruction of the pent roof on the south eaves wall [Image #31, photo #3682, 5/23/11]. Any of these intrusions and obstructions warranted removal of the porch structure; all of them in combination produced an affirmative, mission-based duty to remove it. The architectonic and spatial contrast with and without the porch is stunning: (With porch: Image #13, photo #3661, 5/23/11; after removal of porch: Image #32, photo #5867, 9/3/11). The details concealed or optically distorted by the porch elements included: window frames and sash detail; brick relieving arches spanning window and cellar-vent openings [Image #33, photo #4533, 7/13/11]; original cellar doorways [or "openways" if lacking a door through the foundation wall but protected by a "cellar cap"], including the early stone-arched opening in the 1753 foundation wall [Image #34, photo #4571, 7/15/11] and a timber-linteled doorway in the federal-period addition [Image #35, photo #4378, 7/6/11]; early wrought iron grilled vent [Image #36, photo #4629, 7/16/11]; and masonry walls with early pointing [Image #25, photo #4188, 6/24/11]. 3. Removal of the out-of-period and deteriorated porch was necessary to restore the organic integrity of the original house, revealing all of its elements, its architectonic scale and detail, its expressive and rationally asymmetric{g} Germanic composition, and the function-oriented relationship between the domestic and craft-industry structures. {g} An example of this conscious departure from exterior symmetry in the disposition of fenestration elements is the northward shift of the windows off the central vertical axis of the west gable-end wall. The geometrically normal view is curious in this respect, unless one considers that the windows are centered on the early interior walls rather than on the central vertical axis of the exterior elevation. This anomaly inferentially derives either from interior partitioning and relative dimension of the "stube" compared to the smaller "kammer" in the three-space Germanic first floor plan of the 1753 house, or from the choice of window placement to achieve optimum interior lighting for domestic activities. 4. The construction of the 19th- and 20th-century porches forced the removal of the kitchen-doorway steps from the house wall, resulting in a horizontal separation of approximately eight feet. This re-alignment and the opaque elements of the porch superstructure transformed the original adjacent relationship between entry porch and house, displacing the steps outward to the southern edge of the porch and producing radically altered perspective views of the protracted elevation and its wall-plane openings [compare Image #6, photo # 3680, 5/23/11 to Image #37, a drawing from record KHDWG1--1002.01.070, a conceptually restored view showing a possible approach to reconstructing the steps and entry landing in their original location rising from grade to the threshold at the kitchen floor level]. 5. The deteriorated support piers impeded access to foundation stonework that was in urgent need of stabilization. This phase of the restoration program consisted of resetting dislodged stones in a plumb and stable alignment, replacement of degraded mortar, and repointing. 6. The porch roof made it impossible to re-create the 1753 pent roof in its original position immediately under the stone flashing course designed to protect it. As the photographs demonstrate, the upper roof-line of both the 20th-century porch and the smaller porch it replaced met the eaves wall 6 to 12 inches below the projecting flashing course, rendering the protection it was meant to provide nearly useless. In clear and compelling contrast, the original pent roof was positioned tightly under the overhanging stone cantilevers to ensure optimum shelter for the clay tiles and wooden framing and support elements forming the pent structure. Several original oak outlookers that supported the original pent roof survive in eroded (though structurally sound) condition on both eaves walls. Interior framing evidence confirms that they were anchored through the wall as part of the original 1753 construction. They will be preserved and re-used in their original bearing functions for the "pent." 7. The porch roof and rafters interfered with preservation and reconstruction of the balcony that was carried on outlookers projecting at second floor joist level [Images #38 & 50, photos #3679, 5/23/11 and #4845, 7/26/11] outside the second story "chevron" door. The surviving elements will be carefully inspected, documented, and engineered to provide a mechanically sound and reasonably authentic basis for reconstruction. Image #37, a drawing from record KDWG1--1002.01.070 shows a conjectural but plausible form and scale, though not necessarily accurate in its rendition of the details of the board enclosure, as there is no surviving evidence or template for the balcony structure elsewhere in the building. 8. As emphatically demonstrated in the photos in this record, the modern porch superstructure and its stone and concrete supports were grossly out of scale with the original house, the Federal addition, and the c.1753 workshop building. Removal of the L-form "piazza" and its metal roof reveals the full two-and-a half story above-grade ranges of masonry walling, and re-expresses the proportions, massing, scale, and functional siting of the three structures. 9. The removed porch was misleadingly linear and modular, and consequently discordant with the eccentric but rational fenestration arrangement of the Germanic south and west elevations as originally composed in 1753. With the porch as a visual barrier presenting an exaggerated and "jetted" horizontal emphasis, there was no oblique vantage point for "reading" the fenestration{o} pattern of the three-story, five-bay wall or any opportunity to perceive the detail, scale, and pragmatically asymmetric disposition of the wall ranges and their penetrations{p}. {o} In its traditional European origins and in architectural usage through the 19th century, "fenestration" denoted the spacing, sizes, and proportions of windows in a building façade; now, by modern extension, the term is often applied to the arrangement of window and door openings. {p} For example, the windows in the west gable wall are not symmetrical from a normal exterior perspective, nor is the array geometrically centered in the polygonal elevation. However, they are centered or otherwise disposed in the interior walls to provide the optimum light and axial symmetry in their respective wall locations. 10.Approximately twenty-eight deep punctures had been cut into the masonry walls to bed the 20th-century porch roof rafters [Images #39, 40, 41, & 42, photos #4314, 7/5/11, #4802, 7/22/11, #4786 & #4787, 7/22/11], which were secured in the pockets with steel "S"-hooks embedded in the mortared ["mudded-in"] sockets. Unlike the structurally integrated joist-extension "outlookers" supporting the early pent roof, these intrusive "pockets" had severely degraded the wall masonry and diminished its monolithic structural integrity. The original wall-bonding had become perforated and potential entry portals for moisture. 11. The construction of the porch had been preceded by a radical change of grade along both walls appended by the porch, burying two cellar vents in the west gable wall [Image #8, photo #4266 from KH070111]. The western cellar window in the south eaves wall, originally exposed above the built-out plinth that extended down to the base-blocks ["groundwork"] of the foundation, was re-exposed by removal of the porch [Image #33, photo 4533]. This tapered foundation system, wider at its base than the above-grade walling for mechanically efficient distribution of loads on the clay sub-base, has traditionally been called a "spread" foundation. In modern terminology, the base blocks would be "footings". Careful excavation has reliably determined, by reference to soil striation, the early grade levels and below-grade depths ("inverts") of cellar openings. The exposed sub-grade also revealed the irregular plane, rough contour, and thicker section ["plinth"] of the supporting masonry. This coarse exterior facing indicates that the plinth was intended to be covered either by ground-fill [obviously not feasible without retaining walls] or, at the margins of the cellar doorway, a retaining wall joined to the projecting stones of the door jambs [see Image #29, photo #4421, 7/9/11]. See archive record KR11PH1--1002.01.087 for discussion and photos of the evidence for early retaining walls at the cellar entry and a concept plan for their reconstruction [concluded in the Fall of 2011]. The uneven and random exterior wythe of the foundation suggests that it was built from inside the cellar excavation ["cellar-hole"], much like the Michael Fulp House foundation enclosing the half-cellar of that modest 1783 house in Morlatton Village on the Schuylkill River. REMEDIATION The necessary intervention designed to achieve well-defined preservation objectives required that the deteriorated "L"-shaped 20th-century porch be carefully removed, and the gaping and invasive wall-voids which served as "pockets" for the porch rafters be skillfully re-woven structurally into the masonry fabric. [see: before re-masoning: Images 10, 39, 40, 41 & 42; after walling-in: Image #43, photo 5858, and (addition) Image #46, #4833, 7/26/11]. Both of these objectives were accomplished in this phase of the restoration campaign. Eliminating the porch and the mixed soil materials piled underneath it re-established the early grade, which was properly contoured to the historic levels below the cellar window and vent sills, and filling to the original elevation aligned to the top courses of the foundation plinth [Image #44, photo 4733, 7/19/11]. Sub-grade openings which were protected by stone or brick encased "wells" were temporarily restored with conjectural re-creations of these enclosures [Image #9, photo 5854, 9/3/11]. The wall ranges above the plinth, which were never intended to be concealed by a porch or other structure, were more carefully laid and aligned into an approximately plumb vertical plane. Submitted, 2012; updated November 27, 2016 and January, 2021. Laurence Ward