One Brick at a time

The old building needs a careful surgeon's touch. The bricks are falling apart; the mortar is beginning to crumble away.

Standing on top of his lift with his buckets of mortar and instruments, a master craftsman cautiously scrapes old mortar out and puts new mortar in, reversing a century's worth of water damage.

John McCormick uses a combination of water, limestone, mortar and years of experience to bring the downtown Hillsdale building back to life.

He points to some bricks on his current project, Trevathan's Sweep and Sew Shoppe's building. He's been repairing bricks all day. Some bricks have the original mortar surrounding it; some don't. Most are soft-bricks, and that means trouble. "The moisture comes out of the face of the brick rather than the joint, as it should," McCormick said.

For five years McCormick has saved most of downtown Hillsdale's historical buildings from rot and decay. From the Will Carleton Poor House and Keefer Hotel, to David's Dolce Vita and Trevathan's, McCormick has repaired them all, and without advertising. McCormick, on his own, reconstructed the Will Carleton Poor House, a historical building named after a former Hillsdale College student, Will Carleton, who won national praise in 1872 with his poem entitled, "Over the Hill to the Poor House." Before McCormick, the building was fading away.

Barbie Keiser, a worker at Dow Leadership Center and a member of Hillsdale's Historical Society, said the south wall had a hole in the upper corner of the building, big enough for birds to make a nest. They did just that.

In addition, weather was eating away at the east and south faces of the building, and the rocks and mortar were beginning to fall away. The window sills needed to be replaced, too.

McCormick said he first approached the Historical Society during winter expressing interest in the building. By summer, he was repairing it.

He spent three months during the summer repairing the historical building, replacing mortar, rocks, building up sills with his own material to repair them and patching the hole on the south wall, but not until the baby birds could fly away.

McCormick paid great attention to detail, even going as far as to dye the new mortar to blend in with the old.

Carol Lachie, who also works with the Hillsdale Historical Society, asked McCormick to work on her building, located just south of the Dawn Theatre. He replaced the window sills and put a half-brick front on it.

"He kind of adopts these buildings," Lachie said. "Once he works on them, they're kind of his."

In Trevathan's, he's repaired the usual mortar, bricks and sills, but has also replaced a rotting wooden column with his own brick column. Inside, he points to two massive garage doors he bricked up a few days earlier. Evidence, he says, of a Nash dealership long departed.

Outside, McCormick returns to his lift and buckets and instruments. Mixing his own mortar, he carefully begins to operate on Hillsdale's face again.

Even he doesn't know how many buildings he's operated on.

"I couldn't even tell you," McCormick said. "I would have think about that quite a bit, and I don't want to think about it."