- Volunteers help renovate windows of the historic hangar at Bellanca Airfield, New Castle
13-year-old Rachel Obergh has been to Disney World. She didn’t like it.
So, this summer, she’s traveled 150 miles from her home on Long Island to spend a week of her vacation time scraping old paint and pulling an accumulation of 70 years of putty from the window panes of a dimly lit airplane hangar that lacks air conditioning and most other amenities of life in the 21st century.
Rachel is not only enjoying the work, she’s having a good time exploring the streets of old New Castle, soaking up the colonial environment and observing, somewhat in amazement, that “people are actually friendly here. They talk to each other.”
Rachel, her mother and her 15-year-old brother are part of a small work crew assembled through the Boulder, Colorado-based Adventures in Preservation, which arranges working vacations at historic sites in the United States and around the world. They’re in New Castle this week to work on the restoration of the historic Bellanca Airfield hangar on Frenchtown Road.
Beginnings of a Partnership to Restore Historic Hangar
Adventures in Preservation sponsored the project at the suggestion of Preservation Delaware Inc., a nonprofit in New Castle that employs education, public policy initiatives and technical assistance to help preserve the state’s architectural heritage and historic settings.
“We were sort of the marriage broker in this project,” said Terry C. Graham, Preservation Delaware executive director since January 2010. Soon after taking the job, Graham explained, she started exploring fresh approaches to preservation initiatives, found Adventures in Preservation’s website and invited Judith Broeker, the group’s program director, to Delaware last year for a scouting expedition.
They checked out sites in Lewes and Ocean View, as well as Brecknock, an 18th-century home in Camden, and a couple of locations in New Castle, Graham and Broeker said.
Then Graham got to talking with her neighbor, Sally Monigle, chairperson of New Castle’s Historic Area Commission and a founder and past president of Friends of Bellanca Airfield Inc. Monigle told Graham about the effort to preserve the historic hangar, built in 1935, and transform it into a museum honoring aviation pioneer Giuseppe Bellanca and inductees into the Delaware Aviation Hall of Fame.
Related story: Learn more about New Castle County’s preservation efforts here.
“I was very impressed with the structure itself, but more impressed with the people, so incredibly dedicated and caring, and wanting to see this become a successful museum,” Graham said. “I thought we could make this work.”
Working Vacationers Volunteer at Historic Sites of Their Interest
Just as Graham found Adventures in Preservation through an online search, so did Beth Obergh of Wantagh, N.Y. She was looking for a “volunteer vacation” for herself and her children, Rachel and Andrew, and when she saw the Bellanca project on the Adventures in Preservation website, she knew she had “the perfect fit.”
Obergh is coordinator of public programming at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, N.Y., not far away from where Bellanca began flying in 1912 and then taught many others to fly, including New York City’s legendary mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia. And, Obergh said, there’s a Bellanca aircraft among the displays at the museum.
Related story: Learn more about Giuseppe M. Bellanca here.
Getting some inside exposure to a historic aviation site is also fine with Obergh’s son, Andrew, 15, even if he’s not happy about having to get up before seven each morning while on vacation. “I got interested in planes when I was a lot younger. I’ve gone to a lot of air shows and museums,” adding that he also tagged along with his mother when she was a volunteer before getting a full-time job at the Cradle of Aviation Museum.
Another of the working vacationers, Ian Rediske of West Caldwell, N.J., found out about Bellanca when he was looking for a summer project to complement his studies in archaeology at the University of Akron in Ohio. “This will start my networking with people in the historic preservation field, and I’m learning some practical skills — like how to put up scaffolding,” he said.
Rediske’s observation illustrates the win-win nature of Adventures in Preservation projects. The organization partners only with nonprofits, which benefit from what amounts to free labor from the vacationers. Participants “pay their own expenses, plus a little more,” Broeker said, and get to indulge in a personal interest, whether it’s historic preservation, academic research or a desire to experience a destination in an intensely personal way.
Restoring the historic hangar at Bellanca Airfield
A look at the efforts of volunteers to bring the New Castle landmark back to life
Work Underway at the Bellanca Airfield
Elliott P. Smith, president of the Friends of Bellanca Airfield Inc., appreciates the help.
“The hangar was in very sad shape when Friends of Bellanca took it over, maybe 10 years ago, but a lot of work has been done,” Smith said.
Federal and state grants paid for a new roof and for the start of an addition that will eventually become an office and reception area Smith said. There is no real timeline for completing the project.
“We can pick up on relatively small projects right now,” Smith said, “but when is the economy going to improve?”
Related story: Learn more about visiting Bellanca Airfield Museum here.
The next significant need is fitting out the new office and reception area, partitioning it into several rooms and adding toilet facilities. “That would allow us to have other programs involving the public in the hangar. Right now we’re limited,” Smith said.
For this week’s project, the Friends of Bellanca brought in Duffy Hoffman of Elkins, W. Va., a third-generation master woodworker and a nationally known expert in window restoration, to supervise the working vacationers.
There are eight large sliding doors on the south side of the hangar. Above each door is an array of 32 window panes. Years ago, when the hangar was vacant, those panes became an attractive target for vandals, Smith said. Panes over three of the doors have been replaced. This week’s goal is to complete a fourth set of panes.
The work is tedious.
“First, we’re removing this really hard old glazing, then scraping coats of different paint off the outside. Then we prime it, install the glass, reglaze it, and paint. If we don’t get the inside done, at least we’ll get the finish coat on the outside done,” Hoffman said.
“Right now we’re on the hardest part – scraping putty,” he said, two days into the project. “Once we get past that, we’re on easy street.”
Smith isn’t sure whether all the glass panels will be replaced. New glass might let in too much natural light, and that wouldn’t be good for the exhibits on the west side of the hangar — much of it old paintings, posters and newspaper and magazine articles.
He is, however, pleased with the efforts of his visiting volunteers.
So too is Graham, who hopes the lessons learned from this effort will lead to productive partnerships with Adventures in Preservation in other parts of the state over the next few years. “This is,” she said, smoothly turning a phrase, “a pilot project.”
