by Thaddeus Flint
“I have explained it to everybody,” said New Lebanon Highway Superintendent Jeff Winestock, “One of these days we are going to lose Shaker Road.” And last Sunday night Winestock’s dark prediction came true. After a heavy rainfall, which combined with snow-melt runoff, a portion of Shaker Road below the Brethren’s Workshop building at the Mt. Lebanon Shaker Museum was severely damaged, forcing the road to be closed and repaired.
While road washouts are as much a sign of spring for residents of upstate New York as is mud and robin sightings, that the damage to this portion of Shaker Road was so foreseen with certainty by the Highway Superintendent is no hocus-pocus. Its problems date back to the flood of 2009. After that inundation, debris carried down from the hillside above the road clogged one of the original Shaker stone aqueducts. Only a small flow of water could travel through the aqueduct underneath Shaker Road. The blockage has remained in the aqueduct ever since. After the heavy rainfall Sunday, the run-off flowed into a drainage ditch on the north side of the road. The ditch, not designed to handle large and continuous amounts of water, eroded and overflowed, damaging the road surface and bed. At a meeting of the New Lebanon Town Board on Monday, Highway Superintendent Winestock explained the situation to the Board. “Shaker Museum was neglecting and basically doing nothing about their problem,” he said.
Well, not exactly nothing. The Museum did excavate a portion of the aqueduct on the north side of the road last summer in an attempt to locate the blockage, but the project was never completed. According to New Lebanon Council Member Doug Clark at the March 14 Board meeting, “They dug a hole, and, rather than finish the job and unplug it, they put a fence around it, and there it sat for a year.” The hole and the fence are still there. Neither is particularly Shaker looking. It’s certainly not beautiful. This is especially pointed when one considers the Shaker design philosophy of “Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.” Perhaps the Shakers had better funding back then?
After the initial excavation, the Museum realized that the scope of the problem was much larger than they had first thought, and in turn, much more expensive. David Stocks, President of the Shaker Museum and Library said in September of 2010 that he had begun to look for funding to not only complete the repairs, but to help restore the historic Brethren’s Workshop. By October he had received two grants which could be used to continue the repairs. The first for $300,000 was from the New York State Environmental Protection Fund. And the second for $2,750 was from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
So why, if the Shaker Museum now had the funds to continue the work, were the repairs never completed? According to Stocks, in a telephone conversation on March 16, when you receive grants from State and Federal agencies “it’s not just a check deposited into the bank.” The Museum is obligated to coordinate its work with the contributing administrations. This takes time. And the Museum has as much interest as the Town, perhaps even more so, to repair the damage as soon as they can. Flood waters which can no longer travel through the aqueduct have even found their way into the basement of the Brethren’s Workshop. Luckily the recent damage to the building was not severe.
However, for the Town of New Lebanon, it would appear that too much time has already passed. A resolution was passed at the Town Board meeting stating that the Town Attorney will contact the Shaker Museum with the intention of coming to an understanding as to the liability of the Museum for the repairs made, and still to be made, to the road. Stocks could not immediately comment on the resolution as he had not yet been informed of it by New Lebanon. “We are in contact with the Town about the road,” he said. Highway Superintendent Winestock has estimated that the repair costs could eventually reach roughly $70,000. “I don’t feel that the taxpayers should have to pay for this,” he said.
