A commercial real estate developer who moved to town last spring is restoring a stone-sided house on the Chilkat River, partly as a tribute to Gil Smith, a noted oil painter who lived there and built the structure nearly 70 years ago.
“It’s warranted, because of who Gil was and because the masonry work and foundation are in excellent shape. It was well-built originally. If it had larger eaves and been properly drained, it would still be in good condition,” Andy Shaw said this week.
Shaw moved here from Michigan in May. Looking for a lot near town, he was struck by the house at 8 Mile Haines Highway, for its impressive construction and its 180-degree view setting at the corner of a mountainside. “Then I started finding out about Gil Smith, and hearing stories around town, and I knew it was the right spot for me.”
Smith was a 29-year-old art school graduate when he arrived in Haines in 1940, paddling a kayak from Skagway. A Fort Seward soldier who served in the Pribilofs during World War II, Smith worked as a surveyor and as a laborer for the territorial road commission, but he’s best known for his landscape paintings.
They’ve hung in the Smithsonian Institute, the Alaska governor’s mansion, and several Alaska museums, according to biographical information from the Sheldon Museum. A statewide traveling exhibit that included his work in 1990 described Smith as “one of the major Alaskan artists today.”
Some of Smith’s most popular paintings feature Mt. Emmerich, known locally as “Cathedral Peaks,” that he viewed out his front window.
Smith completed the first section of the 16-by-50 foot house around 1948. Walls of its continuous foundation were as much as eight feet high. Reportedly using rocks from blasts made to build the Haines Highway, he surrounded a frame building with a stone exterior 4-5 inches thick and also built a large stone fireplace and copper-topped mantle for the building’s “great room.”
The house featured a rear bedroom and bathroom, combined kitchen and living area,and a south-facing great room with bay windows in three directions. A gravity-fed line from a hillside stream brought water into the house and the fireplace and a wood cookstove provided heat.
Shaw, who said he has renovated dozens of buildings, said the biggest flaw with Smith’s construction was not taking into account the moisture that would come into the foundation from an adjoining hillside. That, over time, created rot in 80 percent of the building’s wooden skeleton.
“Sometimes you’ll see tar on a foundation, but back then they probably didn’t have good sealing agents. But it’s something we can correct that’s no big deal,” Shaw said.
Besides sealing the foundation and exterior stonework, he’ll excavate to keep the hill from sloping into the house, and add a drainage system.
Shaw said he was hoping that some sections of the house frame would still be sound, but that wasn’t the case. So he removed the floors, ceiling, roof and walls. Now he’s left building a house on the inside of its exterior stone skin, making the restoration tricky.
“It’s a challenge to keep the rock veneer and enough structure in place to build on to,” Shaw said. “But you decide to do a proper job and whatever you encounter, you encounter. You deal with it.”
He figures he’ll spend at least $150,000 on the project he’s doing with contractor Ira Henry. He plans to be done before winter.
The finished product will keep Smith’s room layout but remove the hearth and two chimneys that are showing fatal cracks. He’ll add in-floor heat and modern insulation and raise the roof three feet. He also has acquired two Smith paintings he plans to hang inside in a “gallery-esque”design. “My goal is to get as many Gil Smith paintings as I can,” he said.
The restoration is good news to people familiar with the house. Resident Terry Povey, who bought the house from Smith in 1994 and sold it to Shaw, said it’s fortunate for the place that he came along. Health problems kept Povey from staying at the house she calls the “Zimovia Point mansion.” She said she misses the taste of its hillside stream water, the view out the front windows, and the wild orchids out back that come up every spring.
“It’s an amazing spot. I figured the house was going to be burned around me in a Viking funeral. I didn’t want to leave. I had very mixed feelings about selling it,” Povey said.
Like Shaw, Povey also owns two Gil Smith artworks. “I’m sad it’s getting torn apart, but it’s necessary. I’m glad it’s being restored. That house was a labor of love.”