With its floor stripped bare, dust coating its 20-foot windows and scaffolding climbing 30 feet to the ceiling, the second-floor courtroom of the Parker County Courthouse seems like a place with nothing to hide.
But to Brent Hull, this is a space with stories to tell, and he can look beyond the chaos of restoration to see the old place’s secrets.
Hull makes his living re-creating the past, conjuring up new versions of lost architectural details using plain materials — wood, putty and well-sharpened tools. When he looks at an old home or a decaying courthouse, he sees records of an architect’s vision realized and sometimes betrayed. Decades of history come to life as he studies door frames, windows and stair rails. Hull has a knack for knowing what a designer envisioned 50 or 100 years ago, and a talent for putting things right.
This talent has helped Hull turn what began 10 years ago as a handyman business run out of his brother’s Fort Worth garage into Hull Historical Millwork, one of the most respected restoration companies in Texas. Along the way, he has amassed a profound knowledge of late-19th and mid-20th Century architectural style — enough to fill a book. His recently published “Historic Millwork” (John Wiley and Sons, $70), serves as a guide for other craftsmen and restorers.
Hull learned the basics of restoration at Boston’s North Bennet Street School, a unique training ground for craftsmen. Afterward he moved to Fort Worth and took any work that came his way.
“I was painting and doing handyman stuff,” Hull says. “I would do anything for money.”
His first restoration job, an $8,000 contract to replace the doors in suburban Grapevine’s historic train depot, offered scant indication of the success that would follow.
“I’m not sure why they even let me on that job,” he says, smiling a little.
The architect ordered new doors of yellow pine. But, as Hull would learn, he should have used longleaf yellow pine, which the originals were made of. It was a crucial detail. The wood contorted, the doors warped, and Hull wound up replacing them at his own expense.
He counted it as a lesson learned and kept on working.
“God blessed me with some jobs I probably shouldn’t have gotten, and it kept me going,” he says.
In Parker County, where Hull’s crew is participating in a $4.2-million restoration of the mid-1880s courthouse, nail holes, discolored plaster and broken bits of tile provide clues to the building’s tale. You just have to know how to read them.
In the decades since the courthouse’s completion in 1886, the county had carved up the cathedral-like courtroom on the second floor, obliterating the design. Part of the job for Hull and his crew is to re-imagine it as it began.
Nail holes that once secured benches to the courtroom floor reveal that curious audiences faced north as they watched circuit judges sentence outlaws to the gallows. A discolored strip of plaster that runs at an angle along the east wall bears evidence of a staircase that once offered access to a balcony. And broken bits of tile floor show where some renovator planted a bathroom almost in the middle of the grand space.
Once they piece together the story, Hull’s crews set to work re-creating the details. They will carve scores of balusters, replicas of those that have supported the stair rails for more than a century. They will re-create door frames and a carved balcony to match those that have survived the years. And after dismantling a dropped ceiling added in the ’60s or ’70s and peeling off a 1920s covering of tin tiles, they have begun restoring the beam ceiling.
For Hull, making the new pieces is only part of the draw. He finds the detective work most intriguing.
“That kind of stuff is fun,” he says. “It’s just like finding out all these secrets about these buildings.”
Parker County is one of about 20 Texas courthouses where Hull’s millwork — windows, doors, moldings and trim — can be found. He has also worked on the Women’s Museum building at Fair Park in Dallas, Fire Station No. 5 on Evans Avenue in south Fort Worth, historic railroad depots including Grapevine’s and Gainesville’s, and residences in the Fort Worth neighborhoods of Berkeley Place, Ryan Place and Mistletoe Heights, among others.
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Stan Graves, director of the architecture division of the Texas Historical Commission, which oversees courthouse restoration in Texas, says Hull plays an important role in the state’s restoration efforts. “I think he fills a very vital niche in the present craftsman marketplace,” Graves said.
Brad Patterson, a consultant with the state commission, says Hull’s firm is one of four or five in Texas doing this particular custom work.
In Hull’s office, a narrow room in the old National Biscuit Co. warehouse on downtown Fort Worth’s southern edge, architectural sketches hang beside a yellowed 1924 newspaper ad for a new subdivision that promises “Nothing less than Ryan Place will do. Nothing better can be found.” Pictures of Hull’s family share a bulletin board with a plaque detailing the history of nails in America. Foot-tall volumes with such titles as “How To Know Architecture” and “Historic Homes of New England” crowd the bookshelves that stretch halfway to the 20-foot ceiling. Doorknobs, carved bits of wood and a handsaw tacked to the wall complete the decor.
In writing his guide to millwork, Hull pored through more than 80 catalogs that detail the doors, windows and cabinets typical of American homes between 1870 and 1940. And he enjoyed every one. Sitting in his office, he’ll hand you a 1920s catalog of home plans and interior design options as if he’s a kid sharing a new comic book.
“Isn’t that fun?” he asks.
The scent of sawdust floats in from the workshop, which occupies the back of the 1921 building. Glancing around at the piles of recycled wood, Hull quickly determines which boards are from virgin forests and which have been salvaged from old buildings. Even the virgin wood tells a story. Much of it was cut from cypress trees that foresters felled 100 or so years ago. Back then, they simply bound the trees together and floated them down the river to market. Those that sank to the river bottom remained there, waiting for decades until lumber salvagers dredged them up and brought them to Hull’s workshop today.
“It’s amazing stuff,” he says.
And Hull does amazing stuff with it. In Margaret and Dennis Johnson’s Berkeley Place home, Hull worked to give them the space and the look they wanted while maintaining the feel of their 1914 classical/Arts and Crafts design.