TFG Events & Workshops

TFG Conference 2022


Rudy Christian

Owner

Christian & Son, Inc.

Rudy Christian

Resurrecting the Detroit Central Farmers Market
The Detroit Farmers Market was built in downtown Detroit in 1860. Designed by an architect, it was an incredibly beautiful and elegant timber framed building. So special that when it was no longer wanted in a growing Detroit, it was deconstructed and re-erected on Belle Isle, an immense city park in the Detroit River. There it was kept in use by turning it into an enclosed riding academy, which went out of business in the late 1900s. Efforts to make it useful again failed and prior to its demolition in 2003 it was offered to the Henry Ford Museum. The museum hired Christian & Son, Inc., to document it, deconstruct it, and put it into storage on unused property in Greenfield Village. Over 2020 and 2021, Christian & Son teamed up with Fire Tower Engineered Timber to complete its restoration and reconstruction in Greenfield Village for generations of future visitors to enjoy. This is the story of that incredible project.

co-presented with Ben Brungraber

Rudy R. Christian is a founding member and past president of the Timber Framers Guild, founding member and past president of Friends of Ohio Barns, founding member and past Executive Director of the Preservation Trades Network, and a founding member of the Traditional Timberframe Research and Advisory Group and the International Trades Education Initiative. His experience includes national and international speaking engagements and instructing educational workshops as well as the publication of various articles about historic conservation. An article entitled “Conservation of Historic Building Trades: A Timber Framer’s View” was published in the APT Bulletin, vol. XXXIII, No1, and his collaborative work with author Allen Noble entitled The Barn: A Symbol of Ohio has been published online. In November 2000 the Preservation Trades Network awarded Rudy the Askins Achievement Award, for excellence in the field of historic preservation.

Rudy’s professional experience as President of Christian & Son, Inc. includes the reconstruction of the historic “Big Barn” at Malabar Farm State Park near Mansfield, Ohio, and relocation of the 19th-century Crawford Horse Barn in Newark, Ohio. These projects featured “hand raisings” which were open to the public and attracted a total of 130,000 interested spectators. He also led a crew of timber framers at the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival, Masters of the Building Arts program, in the recreation and raising of an 18th-century carriage house frame on the Mall in Washington, DC. Christian & Son’s other work includes working with a team of specialists to relocate Thomas Edison’s #11 laboratory building from the Henry Ford Museum to West Orange, New Jersey, where it was originally built, and the restoration of the Mansfield Blockhouse, a hewn log structure built by the U.S. military in 1812.

During the summer of 2006, Rudy, his son Carson, and his wife Laura were the lead instructors and conservation specialists for the Field School at Mt. Lebanon Shaker Village during which the 1838 timber frame granary was restored. Since May 2015, Rudy and Laura have been working as consultants to the World Monuments Fund in the restoration of the Golden Palace Monastery in Mandalay, Myanmar. In the summer of 2017, they reconstructed the historic timber frame belfry at Glendale Cemetery in Akron, Ohio, in collaboration with Stan Hywet Hall, and recently completed restoration of the timber frame roof system of the 1721 Jean Hasbrouck House on Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz, New York. Currently Christian & Son, Inc., just completed restoring the 1861 Detroit Farmers Market, which has been reconstructed in Greenfield Village at the Henry Ford Museum.

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