By Matt Smith/msmith@trcle.com
— After years of planning, the Lowell Smith Sr. History Center is about to become a reality.
The center will house a research library, a cooking demonstration kitchen, a classroom and an artifact storage facility.
The center and the adjacent Layland Museum will one day form a museum complex.
The 1914 building that will be the Smith History Center previously housed a grocery store and a car dealership.
Work to renovate the structure into a museum facility began in October.
Layland officials estimate the project should be completed in late April to early May.
Much of the building will be used to clean, repair and house museum artifacts and be off limits to the public.
A front-window display of classic automobiles, gas pumps and other items will pay homage to the building’s days as a dealership.
Museum officials stress the benefit of the facility for the Layland and the Cleburne community.
“It’s going to allow us to increase service to the public ... through the research library and better our ability to change out exhibits,” said Ben Hammons, Layland Museum curator of collections. “Our collection is really incredible. We have tons and tons of things, and we have so many ideas to have exhibits [at the Layland] and change them on a regular schedule, but we just can’t do it now.
“Everything’s kind of packed up in warehouses. But once we get everything into the Smith, we’ll be able to change exhibits on a rolling basis, which will keep us more vibrant and relevant.”
Layland Director Julie Baker agreed and cited other benefits.
“For us, access is going to be the bigger thing,” Baker said. “All museums of any size have a collection larger than their exhibit space. Of course, some items are duplicates. Others are not of exhibit quality but are of study, research quality.
“Once everything is on the shelves, Ben’s records on his database will tell him exactly where everything is if we need to pull an item to display, loan out, or just to study.”
Much of the museum’s collection is boxed up at various undisclosed locations, a situation Baker and Hammons call less than ideal.
Baker cited another benefit of the archive vault.
“If a museum is striving for accreditation, which is a major goal for us and the Smith Center is a really key to that, the American Association of Museums is looking that you have an environmentally controlled area for artifact storage.”
Many of the books and pictures housed at the Layland will move to the Smith Center’s research library, as will Hammons.
“Yes, I’m ready,” Hammons said. “I’ll get an office and a workroom.”
Hammons surveyed the cramped quarters where he has been cataloging items into a database for several months.
“As you can see, this is not the ideal work space,” Hammons said. “It’s going to maximize my work. Right now, all this stacked here, these are all recent donations, and we’re sharing tables, all kind of stepping over each other. If I’m working a collection on the table, at the end of the day I have to put it all up so other people can work.
“Over there, I’ll have a big rolling table, room to spread things out to process them and give them better care. I’ll get through them 10 times faster.
“And if Julie wants to change an exhibit, I’ll know exactly where to go to pull the items and get them ready, which is going to expedite the whole process tremendously.”
The Layland receives an average of about 75 collections a year, Hammons said.
“One collection may contain 1,000 items; another one may just be one item; but they continue to come in,” Hammons said.
In addition to the research library, Baker said the public should enjoy and benefit from the cooking classrooms.
“Cooking classes for children, adults from visiting and local chefs,” Baker said. “Now I will tell you that the average museum that deals with any kind of home life issues doesn’t really ever build a kitchen and teach cooking. This is a little bit of a stretch, but the idea came about from public requests.”
The cooking classes complement the Layland’s mission of celebrating life in Johnson County, said Julie Roberts, Smith History Center project chair.
“I’ve heard requests that people want to share their grandmother’s recipes or have classes on recipes from other cultures, so I think that fits well with our mission,” Roberts said.
Class schedules remain to be determined.
“I don’t know that we can do something weekly, but we need to work up to that,” Baker said. “We need to see what kind of response we get first, and we want to offer classes when people can come, so sometimes at night, sometimes weekends.”
Layland educator Bettye Cook also plans to hold other educational classes and events at the center, Baker said.
Striving for accuracy
The intent was to reuse as much of the Smith building’s original material as possible and to return it to its original form as much as possible.
This proved a challenge given that the staff was only able to track down a few historic pictures of the building and have so far been unable to find any interior pictures.
In one picture, taken from an airplane, the plane’s wing blocks a critical component of the building.
“Since then we’ve found, someone read the Times-Review article where we talked about how we had very few pictures,” Hammons said. “And a woman came in with a couple of pictures from, I think, the ’30s that showed the south side of the building so that helped a lot. Helped us to build the parapets back to their original state and confirmed the bricks up toward the top were darker in color.”
Thanks to the pictures, workers also replaced the large roll-up door, installed when the building became an auto dealership, with a smaller single door, which the building had when it was a grocery.
“We cleaned and replaced most of the original ceiling tiles,” Hammons said. “We saved as many as possible but had to fabricate some. We used a lot of the original bricks but used new bricks of the same era to replace the bad ones.”
Baker and Hammons praised the builders, Nedderman & Associates General Contractors and architects ArchiTexas for their input and for keeping the project on track.
“We do new and historic construction,” said Paul Fahrenbruch, Nedderman & Associates project manager. “I think the historic stuff is more rewarding, more challenging. You never know exactly what you’ve got until you tear stuff out and see what’s there. It’s not as cut and dried as constructing a new building.”
Fahrenbruch said the Smith Center project has been surprisingly smooth.
“We had some days when the weather didn’t cooperate with us,” Fahrenbruch said. “After we removed some of the metal ceiling tiles, we found the ceiling joist system needed a little more work than we thought, but you’re always going to have a few unforeseen opportunities arise. Overall though, everything’s gone pretty much as anticipated.”
Architect Jeff Cummings of ArchiTexas said his firm specializes in renovation of historic buildings. Among other projects, they’ve overseen the renovations of county courthouses in McKinney, Ellis, Hood and Denton counties.
“We haven’t run into too many big surprises, except some rain delays,” Cummings said. “Things always come up, but we did due diligence beforehand and selective demo work pulling ceiling tiles and digging down to see the foundation to know what we were up against. The sidewalk behind the building had been raised up over time, so we had to take that down, and we had a few movement and foundation problems, which we had anticipated and allocated for.”
