1

Hammarlund nails in the last temporary cross brace after the volunteers raised the 85-foot wall.

2

Timber framer Alicia Hammarlund of Florence, lower left with orange hard hat, briefs volunteers moments before they join about 50 others in raising an 85-foot hemlock and locust wall for a canopy at the entrance to the River Valley Market food cooperative in Northampton.

3

Hammarlund checks for daylight between a straight edge and the inner surface of a tenon after she purposely cut a shallow "belly" into it to counteract the natural swelling of the green wood.

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Months before the timber raising, David Lashway, right, owner of Highland Community Lumber in Williamsburg, helps Hammarlund with her purchase of black locust timbers which she'll use for the posts on the timber frame canopy.

5

Alicia Hammarlund uses a Japanese pull saw to neatly finish a scarf joint cut into a top plate started by assistant Micah Whitman (background) using an electric saw. The scarf joint on this timber will be "married" to another, like the one at left, to create a longer continuous beam.

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Hammarlund takes a sharp edge, as well as some sapwood, off the corner of a post that will be used in the canopy.

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Hammarlund fine tunes the fit of a brace and post a week before the raising.

Standing balanced atop a sawhorse, timber framer Alicia Hammarlund commands the attention of 50 or so volunteers gathered outside the River Valley Market under construction on North King Street in Northampton. It's early December and with the temperature stalled at the freezing mark, she briefly thanks everyone for showing up. The group is about to provide the muscle to raise three open timber frame walls along the facade of the new building. The resulting canopy will be a testament not only to community effort, but also to nearing the completion date next spring of this food cooperative, which has been in the works for more than a decade.

Earlier this year, Hammarlund, 43, heard from co-op members that they wanted to build a porch on the front of the building with green wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. The FSC, a nonprofit organization devoted to encouraging the responsible management of forests, certifies wood if it meets 10 principles, including having been harvested with low environmental impact and from woodlands where species diversity is preserved.

Hammarlund proposed that the raising be a community event and, relying on her relationship with miller David Lashway of Williamsburg, told them she could even craft the frame from FSC timbers grown and milled here in Hampshire County. In the bitter cold of last January she had framed Lashway's new mill, Highland Community Lumber.

Lashway knew right where to find the required trees by way of the Massachusetts Woodlands Cooperative, a group of landowners who abide by FSC requirements: rot-resistant black locust for the posts would come from Bill Obear's farm in Whately and hemlock for the beams from property in Huntington owned by the Hilltown Land Trust.

Hammarlund personally selected the timbers at the mill and began trimming them in her unheated 1860s post-and-beam barn in Florence just before Thanksgiving. She is no stranger to the elements, having built bridges in designated wilderness areas out West - without power tools or generators - before landing her first timber framing job in Washington. Over the next two weeks, with the help of fellow timber framers Micah Whitman and Adrienne Walker, Hammarlund used both power and hand tools to sculpt the wood into a centuries-old joinery system of mortise and tenon.

The day of the raising progresses smoothly as visitors take turns pounding and trimming the pegs that draw the frame tightly together. Finally, the last section - by far the longest at 85 feet - is ready to be raised. Two-thirds of the volunteers stand shoulder to shoulder to hoist the wall from underneath. A second row, set back from the first, keeps tension on the ropes and pulleys used to steady it. Hammarlund gives the OK and the wall rises in a steady arc with nary a groan. A collective cheer goes up as it stabilizes and Hammarlund, Whitman and Walker scurry along the top plate to nail in the temporary supports. Hammarlund, the only one without a scaffold, smiles broadly as she stretches out across the span, farther than seems possible, to hammer in the last brace.

Later, Hammarlund expressed satisfaction with the joint effort. "Already I've had a 5-year-old and a 30-something-year-old that were there Sunday both tell me the same thing: ‘It's going to mean something different to me to walk into the store every time.' I think people that were there must have a little bit more sense of ownership – just that little bit more."