Kingston Frontenac Public Library

The site

A wall on an 1867 map, in the way of a bridge

The Pittsburgh branch of the Kingston Frontenac Public Library occupies a c1860 stone farmhouse with a heritage designation. Among the defining characteristics of the property is a dry stone wall that once separated livestock from an orchard — it appears on an 1867 map as a dotted line, which is the earliest record anyone has of it.

Gore Street was a dead end until the Waaban Crossing was built over the Gananoque River. Widening the street for the new bridge, between 2022 and 2024, ran the road through the line of the wall. The City’s plan was to take down about 16 metres from the south end, store the stone for the duration of the infrastructure work, and rebuild it on a new line running parallel to the widened road.

The City issued a call for proposal. Three masonry contractors responded, and two withdrew on learning that the wall was dry stone.

Phase 1

Recorded metre by metre, then taken apart

The wall was recorded before anything moved: overall layout, components and dimensions, bond patterns and their variations, and the repairs somebody had made to it at some point in its history. It was then divided into one-metre sections, and each metre recorded separately from the east and from the west.

Disassembly ran south to north a metre at a time, so that every cut face was a cross-section to be recorded before it was taken down — stone orientation, through stones, hearting. The southern cheekend was found dangerously unstable and had to be stabilised during recording, then dismantled carefully enough to read the interior engineering out of it. Once the full 16 metres were down, a temporary cheekend was built to hold the open end of the wall that stayed.

Each metre went into its own labelled pallet bag. Hearting and broken stone into separate bags, copings into four, coverbands into two, the large corner stones into one of their own. Every bag was banded shut and fastened to a hardwood pallet with a metal label nailed to it, an inventory inside and a second label in a sleeve outside — then moved to store, and mapped by location and contents in the Phase 1 report.

How the work was held

One trade inside somebody else’s contract

This is the only project on the roster where the co-operative was not the party holding the work. Craig Beattie of Edgewater Stonemasons won both phases; the site belonged to Kiewit, the general contractor on the bridge; and the whole of it ran under a City heritage permit with its own conditions attached.

In Phase 1 the co-operative did not exist as an operating business — it was still at a conceptual stage in 2022 — so John Scott was engaged as consulting subcontractor to Edgewater and did the recording and the report himself. By Phase 2 there was a co-operative to subcontract the dry stone work to, and Edgewater did.

Both phases came in on time and on budget, with one minor first-aid incident between them. What the job actually tested was whether a co-operative could plan and account for itself alongside a City’s heritage planners and engineers, a general contractor and a masonry contractor — which is a different question from whether its members can build a wall.

Crew

Who was on site

Four members rebuilt the wall in Phase 2. Phase 1 — the recording, the disassembly and the report — was John Scott alone, engaged as a consultant before there was a co-operative to engage.

John Scott

Lead

Scott Young

Waller

Renée Nadeau

Waller

Ken Davies

Waller