News Articles
Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice
July 17, 2007
Historic Forty Fort Meeting House restoration begins
by Heidi Ruckno

FORTY FORT — Restoration of the Forty Fort Meeting House began Monday as crews began digging out the foundation.

Preliminary site work began Friday, and Monday a crew from Wolfe House and Building Movers in Bernville, Berks County , began stabilizing the 200-year-old building’s foundation.

Built in 1807, the Forty Fort Meeting House is the oldest house of worship in Northeastern Pennsylvania . It started as a Puritan church, but it has also housed Methodist and Presbyterian congregations. The building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.

The Wolfe crew will dig out 30 percent of the dirt around the stones and use hydraulic jacks to hoist up the old church, project manager Jamin Buckingham said. His crew will replace the stone supports with a new concrete foundation.

Locally, this is the second historic building on which Wolfe has worked. A year ago, Buckingham was the project manager at the First Welsh Presbyterian Church in Edwardsville. The 100-year-old church had to be moved a half block to make room for a Lowe’s home improvement store.

Buckingham’s crew doesn’t have to move the meeting house. It just needs to support the building while the foundation is built.

Day one of the dig went exactly as planned, Buckingham said. The excavation didn’t turn up anything unexpected — or spooky.

The meeting house is situated in the middle of historic Forty Fort Cemetery , where many of Wyoming Valley ’s earliest settlers are buried. Several of its graves were washed away in the 1972 Agnes flood.

Despite the disturbances, cemetery manager Lydia Hirner said all graves are accounted for. She doesn’t expect the crew to unearth anything more than a few dead critters.

“They wouldn’t have built on top of graves,” Hirner said.

Archaeologist Vance Packard, a member of the meeting house preservation committee, is fairly confident no one is buried underneath the meeting house. He would not be surprised, however, if a few Native American artifacts were unearthed.

Although they didn’t see anything too unusual, workers noticed a lot of tunnels underneath the building. Hirner and Packard blame groundhogs. They hope the concrete foundation will provide some pest control in addition to support.

The crew from Wolfe is also doing some minor interior work.

Packard is having the chimneys reinforced so they stay in place when the building is moved.

Buckingham expects the foundation work to be finished in a week and a half.

“I’d say by the middle of next week we’ll be done with our part,” he said.

©The Citizens' Voice 2007


George Peck
Memorial
founder of
Wyoming Seminary

 

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Forty Fort Meeting House Bicentennial Committee
20 River Street  Forty Fort, Pennsylvania 18704