He had to take it home in pieces.
When Detroit, Mich., resident Dan Robar and his son, Jackson Robar, showed up at the Preservation Station on Valley Street Friday, March 25, they knew the colonnade and attached arch inside the building wouldn’t fit into their rented U-Haul.
So they started taking it apart, piece by piece. Heritage Trust President Ray Delmege and fellow volunteers were there to help.
“This is not the largest individual sale we’ve made, but it is the largest piece we’ve sold,” Delmege said.
Robar purchased the piece, which includes a cabinet with glass doors, for $7,800. He has renovated a couple of houses over the past couple of years and happened across the colonnade on Facebook. He's currently working on another house, built in 1930.
“It’s almost like it was made for it. The right dimensions and everything,” Robar said. “The glass on it is fantastic. That really sealed the deal.”
Like almost every item in the Preservation Station – which is filled with the best salvaged material from demolished houses in the area – the colonnade has a history to it.
“It came from Carl A. Nelson’s house,” Delmege said. “It’s not the one he grew up in. It was built in the 1940s, I believe. It had been vacant for several years, and the company wanted to use the lot it was on. They gave us the right to go in and salvage whatever we could take out of it, which we did. The fire department used the house as a training exercise to burn it.”
Heritage Trust, which runs the Preservation Station, is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the preservation and restoration of Burlington.
To acquire items, members of the Heritage Trust negotiate access to a house or building scheduled for demolition. They then show up wielding hammers and pry bars to salvage useful nonstructural building components prior to demolition, which are then resold at Preservation Station.
All of the proceeds are earmarked for grants and loans to help preserve and restore historic homes and buildings in the area.