FAIRBURY, Neb. - A small city in Southeast Nebraska hosted a team of masons and architects from across the U.S., led by a longtime stonemason from England, for a hands-on lesson in the values of building, and rebuilding, historic structures using materials just like what they were built with originally. 

How do you make your own mortar and plaster? First toss in the essential elements, like lime and sand. Then just add water, and watch as a chemical reaction sizzles all the ingredients together at up to 220 degrees in a process called slaking. Later, more water is added and everything is smoothed out into a plaster, and it’s ready to apply to the gaps in a wall.  

That’s a process called repointing, and it’s what brought masons, architects, construction workers and conservators from across Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas to Fairbury’s historic limestone house for a two-day workshop teaching about the benefits of using traditional materials – like lime mortars – to maintain and preserve historic buildings like this one, which was built back in 1874. 

And leading the pack was Nigel Copsey of England, who’s been researching masonry history for decades and putting his findings into practice by working to restore historic buildings across the U.K. and the U.S., including when he first came to Fairbury as part of a team that worked to maintain the Jefferson County courthouse downtown almost exactly 20 years ago. 

“I’ve known this house 20 years,” Copsey said Tuesday. “I loved this place the first time I saw it. Being British, it looks like a British house in many ways. It could be anywhere in England – but it’s American, and that adds to its appeal.” 

This week’s workshop began with a Monday lecture in the Burkley Family Center inside Heartland Bank, one of the many historic buildings in Fairbury’s downtown square. Then on Tuesday, the group moved out north of town to check out the historic lime kiln, and put their knowledge into practice, concocting the lime mortar and using it to repair the joints in the wall of this limestone house.  

The house celebrated its 150th birthday last year, and by repairing it using materials similar to what it was originally built with, Copsey believes they can help the building stand for decades more, while maintaining the visual and structural quality of its initial incarnation.  

“This is the perfect place, because you can teach this sort of thing and you just do a bit of wall and at the end of the workshop the wall gets taken down. Here, they know they’re making a contribution to the building that will last, it’s not just going to be taken out again at the end of the day, it’s there, and they’ve made a contribution to it. And that, to me, enhances the learning experience.” 

Old buildings like this will of course eventually deteriorate over time, but Copsey’s research shows that efforts to maintain these historic structures through use of modern materials like cement do more harm than good, and can actually make the building break down faster. Cement is perfect for constructing buildings like skyscrapers that are fixtures of modern big-city American society, but when it comes to the edifices like these that used to dot this country’s landscape, Copsey's findings show that they are best maintained when modern builders match their materials with what was used to construct them in the first place. 

“We’ve had to rediscover lime work, in many ways, and we’ve made mistakes over the last 50 years in Europe and other places – but this material takes us closer than we’ve ever been to getting it right. Because we’re processing and using the same ingredients, the lime in exactly the same form that they, typically, used in the original construction, and we’re processing it in exactly the same way, and mixing it in an aggregate proportion that they did historically, and so hopefully that means what we do can be as successful as what they did was.” 

With the workshop’s participants beginning to apply the finishing touches to the walls after a full day in Fairbury, everyone involved can apply the lessons learned from working with this traditional material on a historic building to the work they do in the present, and for others to literally build upon in the future.