Over the course of 13 years and dozens of successfully completed restorations, the Maine Steeples Fund has come to adopt, and also to shy away from, certain materials, applications and methods.  This “Best Practices” section is a work in progress where we will share some of the rules of thumb upon which we often rely.  We offer this largely as guidance for applicants and their subcontractors; and we welcome discussion about how to most effectively approach ongoing steeple restoration projects.

We regard the US Department of Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties as the central resource for guidance in our projects, regardless of whether the structure being restored is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.  They are common sense historic preservation principles in non-technical language. They promote historic preservation best practices that will help to protect our nation’s irreplaceable cultural resources, and we encourage adherence to these standards whenever feasible.

Even though we rely on these standards wherever practical, we do not require that they be applied with absolute rigidity.  Even the Department  of Interior’s Guidelines acknowledge the need for some flexibility: “The Standards will be applied taking into account the economic and technical feasibility of each project.”   We feel that this relates with particular relevance to the restoration of historic steeples for the following reasons:

1.    They are often in the hands of small congregations and custodial organizations with particularly limited resources; and

2.    Perhaps more than any other architectural element, steeples face unique challenges from the ravages of weather and gravity.  

It is the primary objective of Maine Steeples Fund to help keep these steeples in place and structurally sound. We will continue to try to find the most effective balance between abiding by the Federal Standards for historic preservation and the practical realities of assuring that threatened Maine steeples get ultimately saved even when judicious compromises are necessary.

The intention here is to outline the approach that applicants might take in the assessment and restoration; to point out certain issues which we frequently face.  These are not necessarily required techniques, and use of them will require MSF approval; but we offer them to illustrate the approaches we sometimes approve for effective restoration and funding. It is our intention to keep supplementing this section with newly learned lessons.