A Passion for Preservation

The following article was originally published in the Bucks County Courier Times on Wednesday, July 11, 2001. It is used here with permission.

A passion for preservation
Mike Hart Jr.'s fascination with antique buildings leads him down the paths of history and into warehouses full of architectural treasures.

By GWEN SHRIFT
Courier Times

	Mike Hart, rescuer of historic buildings. He's involved with recent Fallsington log house find. Photo at his Montgomery Co. home. (Photos: Jay Crawford/Courier Times)

Mike Hart lovingly strokes the end of a chestnut log somebody cut down centuries ago and used to build a house.

"These don't look 200 years old," he said, pointing out that American chestnut ages well - a good thing since the tree is extinct.

"It's like opening a time capsule," he said. "There's no one alive that remembers this cabin in [its original] condition."

Hart, of Lower Salford in Montgomery County, is fighting extinction of another species - old houses and barns being demolished to make way for pricey new suburban tract homes.

The chestnut log home, one of several similar dwellings he owns, has been partly reconstructed near a warehouse he owns not far from his home.

Hart's preservation work drew his attention to an old log house in Fallsington, which is believed to date to the late 17th century.

He recently contemplated moving it to Montgomery County until concluding that its historic value would be best preserved locally. Falls and county officials are trying to come up with money to buy and restore the old home.

Such adventures are all in many centuries' work for Hart, a 39-year-old longtime collector of antiquities who makes his living running a chain of concession stands in home improvement stores.

Since he was a kid, he's gathered every old thing he could find, from antique kerosene lamps dug out of farm dumps to whole buildings that lie dismantled in storage, boards and bricks carefully numbered for the day they'll be reconstructed.

This is solid stone house near Harleysville, built 1805.

It's Hart's dream to establish a heritage park, where old structures are rebuilt amid the green, rolling acres of rural eastern Montgomery County. Over the years, he has learned from historians and other authorities how to scope out ancient bones under modern surfaces. He checks out details such as proportions, rooflines and a building's orientation to north and south.

"There are just some jewels out there under tons and tons of [modern] siding," he explained.

His eye for old structures has served him well. Hart has a tavern, he has a grain mill and he has barns by the ton - all stored in warehouses near his home. He has log cabins, carriage barns and pieces of buildings - old wooden spiral staircases, window jambs, huge 18th-century oak lintels carved from trees that likely were saplings when Columbus hit the beach in America.

He has buckets of hand-forged nails and even some crumbling chunks of plaster put aside so he can recreate the mixture some day.

If he could put all this in one building, "I could stock it like a Home Depot of the 18th century," he said.

All Hart needs is some land for the park - and he's working on that. He's looking for sites and exploring options under open space preservation programs.

Last year, he turned his longtime passion for old stuff into the Foundation for Historic Building Rescue, a nonprofit organization he hopes will convince developers and others that there's a tax advantage to donating antique structures to the foundation. Information about it can be found on the group's Web site, www.historicbuildingrescue.org.

Hart and his workers plan to preserve the buildings in place or move them to the heritage park to save them from demolition. He's also selling some structures that aren't rare or architecturally unique enough to qualify for the park. It sounds Utopian, but it's far from unique, according to preservationists who said they respect Hart's can-do attitude.

"That is an American trend. There's perhaps a dozen museum villages in the United States that were formed the same way," said Patrick Foltz, executive director of Preservation Pennsylvania, a statewide nonprofit agency dedicated to protecting historic structures.

	His eye for old structures has served him well. Hart has a tavern, he has a grain mill and he has barns by the ton - all stored in warehouses near his home. (Photos: Jay Crawford/Courier Times)

"He sounds like a real preservationist as opposed to somebody who makes a buck out of buildings being torn down. ... That's the dark side of this. There are people who take the high side of the road, and he sounds like one of those," Foltz said.

Lyle Rosenberger, an archaeologist who founded the historic preservation program at Bucks County Community College, said keeping a building on its original site is the best option.

"There is a place for this, however," he said of Hart's mission. "The record of preservation is filled with how buildings have been moved. ... I think he's a respectable scholar and restorationist in the field. He has saved a lot of buildings."

The work is its own reward, according to Hart, who recently bought an 1805 stone house to keep a developer from razing it. The house is being dismantled, its parts numbered for future restoration.

Hart and his workers have found an abundance of little messages from the past - charred beams from a 1905 fire, once-lively stenciled patterns on walls, initials scratched into stone and dated 1832. On a recent blazing hot afternoon, Hart wove his way through an old chicken house where antique buildings share space with his collection of vintage cars. He pointed to parts of an old structure.

"Forty-six trees is a lot to drop, just for a set of rafters - and then start to make 'em square. We recognize the hard work involved [by the original builders]. Our work isn't that hard because we have lifting and power tools," he said.

"My eyes see everything ... the hard work and craftsmanship that went into [old buildings.] That's why I hate to see them lost."

Mike Hart supervises the dismantling of 200 year old house near Harleysville, Montgomery Co. House will be moved piece by piece and reconstructed.