Built by Nature, Crafted by Us. Here’s the Story Behind the New Timber Frame Pavilion at Friends Creek Conservation Area
For the past several months, there has been a project that we have kept quiet about while our staff worked hard to complete it. We sat down with Friends Creek Site Superintendent, Andy Murphy, to learn all the details about this newest structure at the Friends Creek Conservation Area group camp site.
What is this structure we are standing by called?
This is a King Post Pavilion. The top of the main bents are shaped to look like the king chess piece.
You mentioned the term “bents”, care to talk a little bit more about those?
Yeah, those are the three main support pieces on the ends and in the middle. Each one weighs about 1,800 pounds and they’re what hold all this up.
Wow! 1,800 pounds? How do you move something like that not only once but three times?
With a combination of a couple of big pieces of machinery and the help of the whole Operations department. I couldn’t have done this project without them. My site technician, Ethan (Spain) was my right-hand man during this whole project. He put in a lot of hours with me in the shop to get the pieces measured, cut, and treated.
That’s really impressive! Let’s talk a little about where you learned to do all this. There was a class you attended correct?
Yes, a few of us from our department went to a Timber Framing Class down in Nashville, Tennessee. We learned a lot from it. I also have been woodworking since I was in high school, so I’ve got about 26 years under my belt.
I know there is something special about the wood this pavilion is made from, let’s talk about that.
Yeah, all the wood except the pegs is from District property. There were some white pines at our Sand Creek Conservation Area that needed to be removed, but the wood was still good. The District has a new sawmill there at Sand Creek, so the trees were felled there and then milled on-site. Then, we hauled them out here to Friends Creek and started cutting and whittling them down here in our shop until all the pieces were ready to be put together. Everything but the metal roof and pegs was made in-house. We budgeted $4,000 for the entire project, and we were able to come in just under that, so being able to make almost all the materials in-house helped us make this a low-cost project.
That must have taken a long time!
It has, we started working on this back at the end of May and just finished up here in the third week of October.
It must be great to see this project finally finished.
It is, it’s not just a plan on paper anymore.
I have to ask about this impressive looking mallet that’s sitting over here, what is it?
This is something called a persuader, but we’ve name it “Thor’s Hammer”. We also created this in-house. It weighs about 20 pounds, and we used it to hit the bent posts and the beams into place when we were assembling the structure.
That’s remarkable! Is there anything you hope to gain from this new structure being put up here? Any final remarks?
We would love to see more people come out to utilize this group camp site more often now that they will have this pavilion here. My final thoughts would be to encourage people to come out to check our conservation area and look into booking the group camp. Or just come out to enjoy the trails and stop by the pavilion to see it in person.
We would like to commend Andy for planning this project from start to finish. It really is an amazing and impressive structure to see in person. In using natural resources that are from our sites, it helps us stay true to our mission. We look forward to more staff-led projects like this in the future!
The building plans for this project were from Timber Frame HQ. Check out their website if you’re looking to build a timber frame structure of your own!
