TOP: 



Ken Wenberg fits gable end bracket. 



BOTTOM: 



Architectural detail comes to life on the west end. 



ARCHITECTURAL 

 QUESTIONS 



The 1 874 building has been moved several times — as its 

 original location would now be about 1 ,800 feet into the ocean waters. 

 The building is now about three-quarters of a mile south and 2,900 

 feet west of the original site, with its grand doors offering quick access 

 to the sea. 



Many of the more ornate aspects had been removed and 

 destroyed. The eave supports were protected when a shed was added 

 in 1889. "Nobody had looked above the shed ceiling since 1889," 

 Ken Wenberg says. 



Once the eave supports were found, Wenberg could see the 

 original paint color. 'To a restorer, this is like Christmas," he says. 



Tracing the history of the station's design and construction has 

 been a challenge for Wenberg, who points to the eaves, which 

 originally had ornate trim that had been long forgotten. 



"This raised an entirely new set of questions: Who is the 

 architect and why is it so ornate?" he says. 



After more than 200 hours of research, Wenberg tracked down 

 the original plans for the building. They had been saved almost by 

 accident when a U.S. Coast Guard historian from Charleston pulled 

 them aside when files were being cleaned out. 



"These eight pages are the entire verbiage for the labor and 

 materials for this building," Wenberg says. 



"I can't believe they would throw these things away," Halminski 



adds. 



The architect, Frances W. Chandler, was a graduate of the Paris 

 Architectural Institute. He toured Europe, sketching favorite buildings 

 from gothic and renaissance styles. 



"What we feel he did was that he took what was in his heart — 

 the things that he had sketched in Europe — and put the composite 

 into a building," Wenberg says. 



After nearly 250 more hours, and with the assistance of 57 other 

 people, Wenberg tracked down Chandler's sketchbooks in the 

 personal library of E.I. DuPont. "People got excited. Here we have 

 something extremely unusual," he says. 



"This is the only one of the first 23 still intact," Wenberg says. 

 "When we get this done, it will be one of a kind." 



The same design was used for the original stations that dotted the 

 coast from Cross Island, Maine, to the Outer Banks, but most have 

 had remodeling and additions. 



In Chandler's sketchbooks, Wenberg found designs repeated in 

 the Chicamacomico building, such as windows from a church in 

 northwest France that was built in the 1 500s. 



What really clinched it for Wenberg was the drawing of a 

 medieval building in Cannes, France, that was built in 1032. The 

 board-and-batten style with gothic windows was just the same. "Bang 

 — it jumps out at you," he says. 



Although other construction styles were available in the 1870s, 

 the building features a post-and-lintel style. "Everything is pegged 

 with wooden pegs — not a nail in the frame," Wenberg says. 



16 WINTER 2000 



