In 1968, Baptist Bible Seminary purchased the Maryknoll Junior Seminary property in Clarks Summit, PA, to accommodate their growing student body. BBS moved from their original location in Johnson City, NY, and some buildings that served as landmarks for the past 55 years were already part of the new campus. Previously owned by the Maryknoll Fathers, a Catholic foreign mission society, the property contained what we now know as Buckingham Hall, built in 1919, and Jackson Hall, built in 1921, with an additional wing added in 1929. Baptist Bible College and Seminary built most of the other buildings on campus during their first decade in Pennsylvania.
With two buildings that are more than a century old, restoration has been necessary. Recently, a project began to restore the windows in Jackson Hall.
People-Centered Preservation
Melanie Lytle is the director and professor of practice of historic preservation at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD. She oversees the Goucher’s Master of Arts Historic Preservation Program and has worked in cultural resources management and environmental review for the trust for architectural easement. She is the daughter of CSU President Dr. Jim Lytle and Diane Lytle, faculty development specialist and adjunct instructor. With connections to the historic building at CSU, Melanie Lytle wanted to give herself a new challenge.
“As the director of the grad program at Goucher, I was seeing these trends in historic preservation toward being people-centered,” said Lytle. “Meaning, it’s not about the building itself. It’s about the values that people hold. If you put people at the center of what you do, it changes your decisions about preservation.”
Lytle’s desire to understand the historic trades from a different perspective led her to pursue an opportunity to partner with the university on a unique project. Even though she had never been involved in the material side of preservation, she was about to roll up her sleeves and get her hands dirty.
Window Restoration
In 2022, Lytle got the green light to take out a few windows at CSU’s Jackson Hall and learn how to restore them herself. The university offered her a workshop space. Although it began as a personal project for Lytle, it grew into something bigger.
Halfway through the process, Dr. Jim Lytle suggested forming a crew of students to help.
Lytle was putting in her own volunteer hours to oversee the project. “In training a group of students, I could help them develop a very marketable skill that could be learned in a summer and continue the work beyond what I could do,” said Lytle. “I ended up with this fantastic group of young women—Hannah Knight, Leah Knight, Natasha Karp, Dr. Heather Fornes and Katherine Boykin. There has also been a lot of help from the maintenance crew on campus.”
Many of the challenges the team faced were due to the age and state of the windows.
“There was broken glass, a lot of failed putty, peeling paint, and a decent amount of wood rot. We had to take them down to bare wood, take out the broken glass and the putty, and assess the situation,” described Lytle. “When we take everything down to bare wood, we are salvaging as much as we can. Even the glass. Many of the panes are the old, 1920’s wavy glass. It’s beautiful and has a lot of character.”
Lytle partnered with Iconic Windows in Bucks County, PA, who agreed to do some of the major wood repairs on Jackson Hall’s large rotunda windows that the team couldn’t do themselves. The windows in the rotunda have a bowed sash, so they had to use a lift to get them out and reinstall them. Lytle and the window crew restored 16 office windows and the rotunda windows.
Dr. Jim Lytle said, “Jackson Hall is a beautiful, historic building, and it deserves great care. Everything ages and wears out—even the wood in our windows! It didn’t make sense to replace classic wooden windows that had already served 100 years with plastic windows that might only make it to 25 years. For a fraction of the replacement cost, Melanie and her team of students restored the beauty of the originals. Those young women also learned entrepreneurial skills and a viable trade that they could use to support themselves and others in a business-as-mission endeavor. I couldn’t be happier with the way the experiment and the windows turned out!”
Discoveries from the Past
As the crew worked on windows in Jackson Hall, they discovered messages from the past. Messages left behind on the inside of the weight doors of window jams were dated from 1959 to 1961. Many are written prayers signed by someone with the initials, ‘B.P.’
“The walls we have discovered are literally filled with prayers. As we have been putting the windows back in, we have been leaving messages of our own,” said Lytle. “They’ve been a mix of biblical verses, quotes or just ‘CSU window crew‘ and everybody signing our names.”
As the work on the windows continued, Lytle became curious about the history of CSU’s property. The Maryknoll society still exists in Ossining, New York and Lytle has made several visits to their archives to learn more about their history and connection to CSU’s property. She also researched the possibility of doing a historic register nomination. One of the benefits of such a nomination is that this would allow CSU to secure grants and resources to maintain and preserve their buildings. She plans to pursue the nomination in the future.
Growth through Preservation
As they worked on the windows in Jackson Hall, the team learned they were doing more than restoring windows; they were growing personally as they worked together.
“They have worked so diligently,” said Lytle. “The perseverance in this group is commendable. Perseverance has become our word. Because every time we come up against a problem, and there are always new problems and challenges, the attitude of this group is, ‘We’ll figure it out.’ There is major growth happening here. Growth in myself, growth in them, growth as a team…Windows is one thing, but the lives that are being changed through this is more important.”
CSU senior Hannah Knight has been working with the window crew since March 2023. Knight stripped back coats of paint and varnish to get the windows down to raw wood, a very labor-intensive process.
“I like the quiet of the work, and I like to think of all the history as I work on peeling back the layers,” said Knight. “I think of all the people who worked on these windows. I like the idea of getting down to the rawness of it.
“To put a spiritual analogy to it, it’s like getting through the messiness and getting down to the realness of something. God is so patient how He does that with us. He strips back all the grime. Even the tools I use have a purpose in scraping back what has been built up over the years. I think God uses different circumstances and people to show us what is underneath, in our hearts. This is so much more for me than just about windows. This window project has been about teamwork and about seeing our strengths, our weaknesses and how we can use those. It’s been very revealing.”
Dr. Heather Fornes, associate professor in CSU’s Counseling Department, worked with the crew through the summer. “For me, the window project was a chance to step outside the classroom and learn something new using my hands,” said Dr. Fornes. “In the shop I was a fellow learner, not the teacher. The students taught me much in a gracious and patient way. It was also a great excuse for discipleship. In the hours and days it takes to restore a window, there is lots of time for meaningful conversation.”
With more windows to restore and a historic nomination still left to secure, the work is far from over. But the preservation of the buildings and property at CSU supports something greater, the eternal work done in the lives of those who serve and learn as they walk these historic halls.
–by Julie Jeffery Manwarren
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