Friday, November 22, 2013

Stone Reproduction

View of the front façade of the Tryone blacksmith shop

There is a stunningly beautiful historic stone blacksmith shop in Tyrone Ontario. It is solid masonry squared fieldstone granite. It was built by a Mr Treneuth in 1854 conforming to a style typical of stonework introduced here in Ontario by masons who emigrated from Scotland nearly two hundred years ago. 

Having not seen it for some time I drove by the building again last week to check it out . It looks as impressive as ever.

About twenty years ago, back when I was doing traditional stone masonry predominately (not much dry stone walling back then)  a client of ours commissioned mason Glen Ward and I to build him an exact replica of the front of this building. He wanted to build an old looking garage to house his collection of antique cars.  
He provided us with many photos and exact measurements to go from. We visited the the old blacksmith shop and studied the original stonework very carefully and that summer we built this stone facade using local fieldstone from an old barn foundation, much of which still needed a lot of shaping and squaring. 

The other sides of the new building were framed and clad in board and batten,