Utah Heritage Foundation

The Hunter House restoration has been taken over by a SWATC team.  High school students enrolled in the Southwest Applied Technology College (SWATC) building construction class are repairing plaster, restoring a fireplace, and stripping and refinishing wood trim as part of the second phase of work on the historic home.  Other contractors began the restoration with repair of the foundation and re-roofing after the house was moved to the Frontier Homestead State Park Museum (formerly Iron Mission State Park) in 2005 to prevent its demolition.  Utah Heritage Foundation was instrumental in the advocacy process that led to arrangements for saving it.

 “I’ve always liked doing remodels,” SWATC instructor Mike Liebhardt said, “but I got interested in preservation when I volunteered to help a friend with some rehab work on the Iolani Palace in Honolulu.”  Liebhardt was a stockbroker for Dean Witter in Honolulu when the market crashed in the mid-1980s, so he took up his trowel and tool belt again as a general contractor.  He did remodels in Hawaii for 5 years, and then returned to his home town of Cedar City, Utah, where he built new homes from 1993-96 before going back to remodeling.  In 2006 Liebhardt began teaching masonry at SWATC.  When the class was dropped last spring, he was invited to teach the construction class to save it from the same fate after its teacher left for another job.

The class used to build and sell a new house, returning profits to the program to buy materials for the next project.  With new home construction stalled and the Hunter House in need of a crew, Liebhardt signed his students on.  “There were no up-front costs,” he noted.  “The Hunter House restoration gives students hands-on experience in the building trades with unique chances for problem-solving not found in new construction.”

Bret Woodmancy (pictured at left), a senior in the program, took first place in the Skills USA bricklaying competition in Utah last year, and placed 15^th nationally.  He will continue his education at Snow College, working toward a B.S. degree in business management and building trades.  Woodmancy will also take courses in historic preservation from the Traditional Building Skills Institute (TBSI) while at Snow to prepare him for the restoration of more historic properties in the future.

 This project shows the power of creative partnerships and demonstrates how preservation can be sustainable for people as well as buildings.  Saving and restoring the Hunter House helped save a building construction class that, in turn, has given students an appreciation of the craftsmanship and ingenuity of their predecessors, the skills to carry on traditional crafts, and the training to make a living at it.