Two historic St. Albert homes got new cement shoes Monday morning thanks to some hard-working contractors and bars of soap.
Contractors used heavy machinery to move the Cunningham and Hogan houses onto their new foundations in St. Albert’s Grain Elevator Park Monday. The move is part of a $3 million project to restore and preserve the homes, both of which date back to the early 1900s.
Merlin Rosser, heritage sites manager for the Arts & Heritage Foundation of St. Albert, says the homes are significant due to their links to the Cunningham and Hogan families, both of which have lived in this region for over a century.
“The Cunningham family goes right back to the very early years of St. Albert,” he notes – beyond, actually, as John Cunningham was here trapping for the Hudson’s Bay Company before the parish was even founded.
The Cunningham house is a two-storey square home with glass aggregate stucco on its sides. The Hogan home is taller and wood-sided, and has a veranda and add-on kitchen. Both are square-sided farmhouses typical of the early 1900s.
Alfred Cunningham built the Cunningham house on this precise spot just across from the grain elevators in around 1910, Rosser says. Edward Hogan built the Hogan home on his farm near the current site of St. Albert Centre around 1900. The home moved to Riverlot 12 in 1937, and Albert Belcourt hauled it next to the Cunningham residence in 1955. The two homes have been here ever since.
The foundations of both homes were in rough shape and needed to be replaced, says site superintendent Gord Capar. The Cunningham house was just sitting on the ground and rotting away, while a cinderblock wall under the Hogan home had bowed eight inches inward, putting the house at risk of collapse.
Crews moved the homes off their old bases in early July to dig new foundations for them, Rosser says. Both homes will now have cement crawlspaces that will hold their heating and security systems.
Moving the Hogan house meant using a jackhammer to chip it off its cinderblock base and slipping steel beams underneath it, says Jason McConnell of McConnell Building Movers. They also added an extra beam to support its brick chimney.
Hydraulic jacks then lifted the home so they could slide a second set of beams perpendicular to the first underneath. A bulldozer then pulled the home along the beams to move it aside. On Monday, crews reversed this process to set the home on its new foundation.
Crews had to lubricate the beams beforehand by rubbing bars of soap on them, McConnell says.
It has to be Ivory soap, he adds, as it’s the only product they’ve found with the necessary characteristics – he had about 50 bars of it in his truck.
“We’ve tried using other soaps when we couldn’t find Ivory, and you might as well use sandpaper.”
Moving the Cunningham home took a different process, as it didn’t have a basement.
Crews dug two feet underneath the house to install the jacks and cut out the rotten wood, McConnell says. They then used rollers and a bulldozer to move the house aside to build its new basement.
Workers will now bolt the homes to their new foundations before starting work on weatherproofing their exteriors, Capar said. They’ll also have to restore the veranda and kitchen on the Hogan home and re-shingle the roofs on both homes.
While crews are working to preserve as much of the homes’ historic character as possible, some modernizations – such as a wheelchair ramp for the Hogan home – are unavoidable, Capar said.
The renovations should be complete by 2017, Rosser says.
