FAIRBURY, Neb. - Fairbury and Jefferson County will play host next week to a workshop that will help to educate masons and architects on the values and benefits of working with traditional mortar – a product deeply connected to the history of this small Southeast Nebraska city.  

The two-day seminar, hosted next week (April 7-8) in Fairbury, is being facilitated by Lincoln-based Berggren Architects and will be chaired by Nigel Copsey, an English stoneworker and conservator who has executed projects across England and the U.K. and, increasingly over the last few decades, throughout the United States as well, including in Nebraska.  

Jerry Berggren, founder and principal of Berggren Architects, presented the plan for the workshop to the Jefferson County commissioners at one of their weekly meetings in late March. Berggren has been running the firm that bears his name since 1977, and has developed a deep understanding of how many of Nebraska’s edifices were constructed – including the Jefferson County courthouse that he helped renovate, and which now hosts the county board meetings every Tuesday. 

“Over the years, let’s go back to when this building was built, 1891 – the type of mortar that they used to assemble the building was heavy in lime, probably didn’t have any Portland cement in it,” Berggren began. “Over time, Portland cement became more readily available, and particularly, my personal theory is, during World War Two things had to be built fast – the more Portland cement you put in the mixture, the quicker it sets up. Lime is very slow to set up. After the war, everyone got used to building things fast, and we lost a lot of the formulas, basically, of those traditional mortars.” 

Born in Gloucester in 1958, Copsey has been working with walls since the ‘80s, with the principles of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings serving as his personal moral foundation. Copsey’s website biography reads: “We believe the skilled and informed use of traditional materials such as wood, stone, brick, lime and earth is not only good for the buildings of which they are a part, but good for the environment as a whole and for a healthy life in general.” 

So the goal of next week’s workshop is to instill the knowledge gleaned from those longstanding construction practices into a modern class of masons and architects. 

"Nigel has about 20 years of research and doing stone restoration and mortar analysis from England, where they had kept better records about the formulas that put the mix together,” Berggren said. “All that information has been lost to the U.S. It’s creeping back in now through people like Nigel who live on the East Coast where there are so many older buildings, but nobody comes to the Midwest.” 

Until now. Berggren’s Alexi Caines outlined the syllabus for next week’s workshop, which will bring up to 20 masons, contractors and architects from across this part of the Midwest to Jefferson County to learn more about traditional mortar. Monday will feature a full-day lecture in Fairbury itself, focusing on “understanding history, chemistry, and importance of using historic mortars as opposed to modern materials,” according to the Berggren website.  

On Tuesday, participants will get hands-on experience on a repointing project - the process of repairing a structure by removing old mortar from a joint in a brick wall and replacing it with new mortar – and working with buildings that were originally constructed with these materials: the historic lime kiln site and neighboring house, ten minutes north of Fairbury’s downtown, which Berggren called “a real magnet” and a big reason why Jefferson County was chosen as the host site for this workshop.  

“This is a big deal. We are just so glad you chose Fairbury and Jefferson County to come do this. We really appreciate that,” Jefferson County commissioner Mark Schoenrock said. “Our county is one of the top counties in the state with one of the highest number of buildings with historical significance, including that lime kiln.” 

This workshop in Fairbury will represent a nice full-circle moment for Berggren and Copsey, both of whom were key parts of a project to maintain and restore the county courthouse in late 2005, almost exactly 20 years ago.  

“We had a project to do masonry restoration here, I brought him to the courthouse, and his patches – and it was done in horrible conditions, it was a cold, wet November day – they're still holding sound,” Berggren said. “This was the starting point for Nigel and his educational efforts here in Nebraska.” 

And this endeavor will be the latest point for Nigel and everyone else involved in next week’s workshop that shares the hosts’ commitment to keeping Nebraska’s many old buildings upright, and keeping them looking how they always have.