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Old 10-06-2010, 06:18 PM
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lancer525 lancer525 is offline
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I've got the greatest job in the world...

Well, actually, I just have some interesting duties... :D

A few weeks ago, I was browsing this forum at work, (during lunch hour) when my boss came in and asked what I was looking at. I showed him a few pages of the forum, some pretty good builds, and he was instantly interested. He got that look, and asked me a question that I would have never believed I would ever get asked at work...

Many of you know that I'm a museum curator. Specifically, I'm the historian and curator of a house museum. Here's a photo of my mansion that was taken last February, the morning after a snowfall:



My boss asked me this question, and I was just about floored. He said, "Do you ever design any models?" and I replied that I had. I showed him some photos of the DIRECT Jupiter models I'd built, the Montana I am working on, and even my entry to FGMM. He then dropped the bomb:

"Could you design a paper model of the mansion?"

"Yes" I told him. "I probably could."

"Would you design a model, small enough that the biggest parts could fit on a single sheet of paper, and simple enough for a 12 year old kid to build?" :D

After my breathing started again, I told him I would. I've been working on this for a few weeks now, and just finished it this afternoon. Now that I know where all the hard parts are, I can go back and redesign them to be simplified for the average. 12-year-old kid to build.

So, here is the paper model that I designed and test built at while at work, at my boss' suggestion, and with his permission and approval:


Front (West) Elevation.


South Elevation.


Back (East) Elevation.


North Elevation.


And one to show the relative size of the model.

It worked out to be about 1/80th the size of the real thing.

This was a hurried test build, so the final version would of course be a little cleaner. I may do another full-up version and put it up at Chris Gutzmer's if he's okay with that.

This was a fun little project, since I hadn't built an architectural model in years, much less of a real building, and one that had so much detail.

If anyone's interested, I'll give a brief history of the building.

Oh, and ignore the dates on the pictures. I took them this afternoon. The date thingy in the camera hasn't been reset in a while...
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Old 10-06-2010, 06:44 PM
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Great story! Great opportunity! Great model.

Don
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Old 10-06-2010, 07:19 PM
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outersketcher outersketcher is offline
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yes, would love the history! Nice work.
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Old 10-06-2010, 07:45 PM
Zathros Zathros is offline
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I too would like to hear the mansion's history. The model is really geat. I am sure train buffs wold like HO, N, and other various gauge sizes. Have you considered having the museum sell kits to fund the museum? I bet every visitor would buy one. I can easily see you making a doll house with furniture, something well within your demonstrated ability. They'd sell like "hotcakes".
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Old 10-06-2010, 08:41 PM
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Nicely done! I'd be very interested in how you simplify and write the instructions for the model.
Yogi
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Old 10-06-2010, 09:06 PM
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Sure! I can put that up for sale if 100% of the profits go to the museum I do not take a 20% cut. Same I give to DGA (or anyone else that designs at not for profit)

If I might make a suggestion to help sales along.... since its already a bit more complex than desired go both ways - take the complexity up a notch or two and down a notch or two. Release two versions in one kit to appeal to a wider range. Just a thought of course
Chris
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Old 10-06-2010, 09:23 PM
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Very nice model, great work Lancer!
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Old 10-07-2010, 08:26 AM
shawnr5 shawnr5 is offline
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As suggested above, train buffs would love this. You might consider rescaling it to 1/87 so it is already HO scale and ready to go. Looks great.
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Old 10-07-2010, 12:56 PM
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10 points ( out of 10 ) for you Lancer :D does the museum have a website.?
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Old 10-07-2010, 03:50 PM
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lancer525 lancer525 is offline
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Gentlemen:

Thank you for your very kind praise. I know how many flaws are in this thing, partially because I simply didn’t take a lot of time with it. There are lots of places where things just flat don’t fit right, but that’s what the design process is all about.

Chris: Thank you for that very generous offer, and one I’ll gladly take you up on. Let me work out a few details, get the instructions written, and find a beta-builder to back up my work, and I’ll get with you in a couple of weeks or so to set things up.

If anyone is interested in beta-building this before release, please send me a PM!!

Shawn: I think it would be a simple matter of just printing it out at 92% to reduce it to HO scale, so I’m thinking I can leave that up to the builder.

Sorry, Billy… No website to speak of. :(

Now, for the history of the house... Pardon how much this rambles, but I’m not writing an academic thesis… Heh...

When I came to work here in 2007, I was struck by the incongruity of a Greek-Classical revival home, with the layout and interior of a Georgian Colonial. That set me to thinking, so I did some investigations. For nearly 50 years, everyone has been told that the mansion was built “between 1828 and1832” which is clearly in between the time periods for both of those styles of construction, by several years on either side. Either this guy 1) had a really eclectic view of what his home would look like, 2) he didn’t know what he was doing, or 3) those dates aren’t correct.

The archiform of the house (the physical dimensions, style, construction techniques and materials used) shows clearly that it is an early 19th Century Georgian Colonial. I knew it was monolithic masonry construction, but it wasn’t until I started a formal architectural evaluation that I discovered that the exterior perimeter walls are seven flemished wythes of brick thick. 26” in thickness total. And that the interior partition walls are three flemished wythes of brick thick. 17” in thickness overall. This mansion is solid brick. There is not one stick of wooden structure anywhere in the building. Furthermore, the first-floor floor joists are pocket-monocoque. That means they are one-piece joists that run through slots in the interior walls, and into pockets in the outer walls. Cut from single trees. 4” x 16” by over 50 feet long. The floor joists on the second floor are the same thing, except they run front to back. The ceiling joists that are part of the truss system also run front to back, and are also one piece.

The amount of brick used to build this thing is immense, which suggested European ballast brick. Ballast brick, is that brick that was manufactured for one reason, to be loaded into the holds of empty ships (to keep them upright) headed to America, so they could be offloaded on the wharfs and the ships could be loaded fully with trade goods. This source of bricks was readily available for the taking by simply showing up with an empty wagon at the docks, and loading it up. Problem is, most ballast brick sources dried up by around 1820 or so, when the coastal municipalities discovered they had a huge source of revenue available, and stopped letting people take them for nothing. They started selling them, and in many cases, using these bricks themselves, which is why many coastal port cities over 160 years old have brick or cobblestone streets. Anyhow, this house could not have been built after 1820, simply because it is monolithic masonry. There would have been no sources for bricks in these amounts, that wouldn’t have cost the literal fortune.

Back to the interior layout of the home. I mentioned that it is clearly a Georgian Colonial. Most of those stopped being built around 1820-1825, because they were out of fashion. But the interior layout of the rooms is clearly that of a foursquare home. Georgian Foursquare is nothing more than a big rectangle, with a central hall down the middle, with two rooms on either side of it, like this:



They call it "Foursquare" because it is four rooms surrounding a central hallway that is the residential equivalent of a "town square", a sort of combination central gathering place, foyer, hallway, and stairwell. Just so you know, the stairwell occupies the right-center portion of the hallway in this diagram...

My mansion has exactly this layout. Therefore, it most certainly is a true Georgian Colonial, and had to be built before 1820. My instincts said early 18-teens, but I was afraid to say it to anyone else in the museum or the parent agency without any documentary proof. And there is none. So, I kept looking at the building for more evidence. Monolithic masonry construction, pocket-monocoque joists, and a specific archiform all led me to crawl into the pediment-gable of the west side, and there I found oak shake shingles. Hundreds of them. The gables had been built right over the original roof! These were some clear pieces of evidence, because they showed an early 18-teens date range all by themselves. That led me into the ceiling of the attic, where I looked at how the roof trusses were built. Yet another shock awaited me. They were all dovetailed mortise and tenon joints, and pegged with 1” diameter oak pegs, 12” long. The beams of the roof trusses are 8” x 10”. This mansion was clearly built to last. Overbuilt, in fact. This technique for truss assembly stopped being used in this part of the country around 1815, because it simply was too time-consuming and difficult to do.

Then, out of the blue, a colleague of mine, (one who had no idea what I was doing) ran across a document he wanted placed in our files. This document showed that the father of the owner of the mansion had established residency in this county in December of 1811. That was my smoking gun document! It meant that my early 18-teens date was spot on, and more importantly, that the mansion could not have been built before 1812. So, I went public with my findings, and have pretty much convinced everyone of significance in the parent organization that the earlier dates of the house (1828-1832) could not be correct.

In its heyday, in the 1850s, it sat in the middle of 8,896 acres of land, or 13.9 square miles of land. For our European readers, that's 3,610 hectares, or just over 36 square kilometers. The family who lived here effectively abandoned the home around 1890-1895. It sat vacant, occupied only by squatters, until the early 1930s, when the land around this area was eminent-domain overtaken by the Federal Government. The Civilian Conservation Corps came in under the supervision of the Forestry Commission, and built an experimental forestry station on 70,000 acres of surrounding land throughout the late 1930s. In 1941, a local civic organization tried to acquire the mansion from the Federal Government, only to be rebuffed, because the ladies of this organization were all married to local elected officials. It was only after much debate and discussion that a compromise was brought forth: A buyer, not connected to this county in any way, would be permitted to trade 40 acres of land he owned nearby, along with a sum of cash, and acquire the house and 40+ acres of land around it. This guy spent the next 16 years of his own time (and his own money) repairing the house. It was open for the occasional tour in the very late 1950s, and was turned over to my parent organization in 1960. For almost 50 years, this place sat here, and not one person knew what it actually was.
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