Alicia Spence says she grew up in a family “that wasn’t especially handy.”

If that’s the case, she’s more than made up for it.

Spence, who lives in Florence, is an experienced timber framer who’s been leading the effort in the past few years, and especially over the last several months, to restore a barn at Historic Northampton that dates to the time of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency.

Last November, Spence enlisted dozens and dozens of community members to help pull the Shepherd Barn, believed to have been built in 1804-1805, off its original rough foundation so that a new one could be poured. Then she called that people power back last month to move the barn onto its new base, with the barn, mounted on large rollers, pulled by ropes along steel beams laid across the ground.

And just last weekend, she helped lead volunteers in raising timber frames she’d constructed for an addition to the barn, which is being turned into a cultural center for Historic Northampton, with storage for vintage artifacts and space for live music and other events.

For Spence, it was, in a sense, just another day at the office. She’s been involved in similar projects throughout the region, across the country, and even overseas. The common ingredient, she says, is collaboration — working with other builders, apprentices, students and volunteers to restore and build different structures that can benefit many people.

“I feel lucky and happy in my work because I have the opportunity to work on projects that are really built around community and cooperation,” she said.

Spence, who came to the Valley in the late 1990s, has worked on a wide variety of projects during her career, in part as a member of the international group Carpenters Without Borders: reconstructing a medieval-era synagogue in Poland; helping restore a house built by enslaved people in Louisiana in the early 1800s that’s now part of the National Trust; and constructing a community pavilion in Michigan.

She may go to France this summer to work on the continued restoration of Notre-Dame in Paris, the famous medieval cathedral heavily damaged in a 2019 fire. She’s already been part of a team that, in the U.S., reconstructed one of the trusses that once supported the cathedral roof — a project completed using Middle Age protocols for timber harvesting, fabricating, assembly, tools and raising techniques, and offered to France as a gift.

As interesting as all these projects have been from an engineering and historical perspective, Spence says the community service element is what appeals to her the most.

“That’s really what we’re doing here,” she said during a recent interview at Historic Northampton, where she was cutting timbers for an addition to the Shepherd Barn. “There’s that old-fashioned barn-raising feel to all this, bringing people together in a way that seems to have been lost in a lot of modern life.”

Laurie Sanders, co-director of Historic Northampton, couldn’t agree more — and she credits Spence with most of the creativity that’s gone into the barn project, including the idea of using volunteers, rather than heavy machinery, to move the aged structure from its original setting and then put it back in place.

“Alicia is simply amazing,” Sanders said. “She has a knack for coming up with ideas that really draw people in. She’s transformed what was going to be a basic restoration project and taken it to a whole other level.”

She says Spence had done previous work at Historic Northampton, including helping repair a roof on another building, so she was familiar with — and impressed by — Spence’s skills before the barn restoration began.

“But she’s brought even more ingenuity to this project,” Sanders said.

Preserving the past

Timber framing, broadly speaking, is a construction method that uses heavy timbers, sometimes from re-purposed wood, rather than pre-cut lumber pieces like two-by-fours. These timbers are also joined using methods such as mortise and tenons that in some cases go back to the medieval era.

The addition to the Shepherd Barn, for instance, has been put together with timber frames connected in part by long wooden pegs specially made for the project by a New Hampshire company.

Sanders says Spence took the initiative on this effort as well, visiting the company and describing the Northampton barn project. The company has donated all the pegs, and community members have since written messages or tributes on the pegs as a sort of time capsule — another of Spence’s ideas, Sanders said.

Timber frame restoration work involves preserving as much of an original structure as possible. At the Shepherd Barn, Spence pointed to a number of thick original posts that have been partly buttressed by new timbers, fitted together like puzzle pieces.

“You want to keep as much of the original footprint as you can,” she explained.

A New Jersey native, Spence got into timber framing through a somewhat oblique angle. She attended Warren Wilson College in western North Carolina, where she majored in environmental studies and also took “as many courses as I could” in forestry, including working in a campus sawmill and learning to cut down trees.

“It was the kind of program where they kind of threw you into the deep end,” Spence said. “You learned by doing.”

After graduation she spent several years doing trail work in national parks and forests — building backcountry bridges and other structures in places including the Smoky Mountains and Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska — as part of the Student Conservation Association and also with the U.S. Forest Service.

Then, says Spence, she came to a point where she had to think about whether she wanted to pursue a full career with the Forest Service “or do something else — and if that was the case, what would it be?”

In her case, “something else” led to her joining a small timber framing company in Washington state, about 90 miles north of Seattle. As in college, she says she learned on the job and soon grew to love the work; she especially enjoyed the camaraderie of working with others on new building projects and restorations.

“It was an apprenticeship, though not in a formal sense,” she said.

In the late 1990s, she says she “fell in love” and ended up moving to Florence and starting a family; she began finding new work in timber framing in Massachusetts and New England and then further afield.

Today she’s a member of the Timber Framers Guild, a nonprofit educational group based in New Hampshire that offers apprenticeships and sponsors community building projects and workshops; she’s led some of those projects herself.

Some of the work involves using only hand-held tools, though Spence jokes that she’s “not a purist. I like power equipment as much as the next girl, but hand tools can be a very efficient way to get to where you want to go … I like using the right technology for the moment.”

Spence also credits Sanders and Elizabeth Sharpe, Historic Northampton’s other co-director, with doing their “due diligence” in brainstorming ideas for what the crumbling Shepherd Barn could be used for.

The prospect of it being turned into a community and cultural center has made the project that much more appealing to her, Spence says, and helped spur her in turn to get residents involved in the project.

“Hopefully we can make it stand for another 200 years,” she said.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.

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