SUMMERHILL 

One of the original buildings on Queen’s campus, Summerhill has long been an iconic building on the Kingston landscape. In 2018 Edgewater secured the contract to rebuild two sections of a rear garden wall.

Our team faced unique challenges from the outset. The wall had been numbered and dismantled the previous fall by another contractor. The stones were stored over the winter, but not protected from the elements. By spring, the numbers on each stone had almost all disappeared, masking their location in the wall. In addition, there was no stone replacement list created to document which stones had been damaged or disposed of during dismantle.

We went through each pallet of stone, piece by piece, and identified each stone by using historical photographs of the wall. We then worked backwards to determine which stones were missing. Because there were no measurements recorded for these stones we brought in large pieces of Kingston Limestone and cut individual pieces as needed when we arrived at their location in the wall.

The rebuild included fabrication of new quoins, the introduction of through-stones into the wall, and the refinishing and installation of a cast iron gate.