For Johnston Masonry, renovating historic homes is a labor of love

By Jimmy Lovrien jlovrien@duluthnews.com

When driving his pickup truck through Duluth, Ken Johnston is proud to see the work he and his masonry company have completed on many of the city’s historic buildings.

“It’s amazing,” Johnston said. “You see these places for years, then you get a chance to work on them. It’s a real honor.”

From Congdon neighborhood mansions more than 100 years old to downtown’s historic buildings, there’s a good chance the Johnston Masonry crew has renovated or restored it.

“If it’s brick, we’ve probably touched it,” Johnston said.

Johnston Masonry is one of only a few masonry companies in the Northland, proof it’s a job that requires traditional skills and specialized training that few have.

Johnston, who learned the trade from his father in Washington, started building new cabins on Lake Vermillion in the 1990s, but quickly found demand for restoring the many historic brick and stone buildings in the Duluth area.

Standing outside a mansion at 314 N. Hawthorne Road in the Congdon neighborhood, Johnston and Pat Bruckelmyer, a project consultant for Johnston, described what it was like restoring the exterior’s stucco.

Now owned by Gene and Jane Shull, the house once belonged to Margaret and Marshall W. Alworth, whose name is on the

University of Minnesota Duluth’s planetarium and science buildings.

It’s one thing just to re-stucco a house, but it’s another to restore the details that give the mansion its character. Alworth, who joined his father’s Marshall H. Alworth mining and real estate business, incorporated Mediterranean style into the home and nearby carriage house.

Bruckelmyer pointed to the exterior trim along the roofline, which required careful layering to match the mansion’s original finish.

“It’s a lot more intricate,” Bruckelmyer said. “It takes a lot more time.”

Bruckelmyer and Johnston agreed it takes time get their employees up to that caliber of work, but have managed to do it through continual in-house training and sending employees to seminars led by industry experts.

To get the details right, and historically accurate, it helps when the owners have some primary sources to reference.

“I try to learn (a lot of) history on each place,” Bruckelmyer said. “In fact, a lot of these old places — they’ll even bring me out the old blueprints.”

While the white stucco exterior now looks as it did when the mansion was built, crews used a modern mix that is far more durable, Johnston said.

For projects with unique materials — historic bricks, sandstone, Terra cotta, specific grout material or color — crews often send samples to lab for analysis. From there, they can find a match or create a mix to match the material’s color.

“They use new technology … with old-world craftsmanship,” said Dennis Lamkin, an owner representative for people renovating historic structures. He’s worked with Johnston Masonry on 10 mansions throughout town.

Lamkin said that Johnston crews have a strong attention to detail, and use the latest technology like drones to document hard-toreach parts of homes and high-tech adhesives to make their work last.

And there’s no shortage of work.

Lamkin said that many of Duluth’s iconic buildings and homes built in the early 20th century are all due for some work so they can last another 100-plus years.

“All of that was built in that time frame, so they’re all at the age now … when they need tuckpointing in order to preserve them, and those projects are now being all done,” Lamkin said.

One drive through the Congdon neighborhood, past blocks upon blocks of brick mansions built in the early 20th century, and you’ll see what he means.

“There’s an unending demand for it,” Lamkin said. u