ON|‘Reverse carpenter’ taking building apart piece-by-piece

One piece of antique, aged pine at a time, a piece of Vicksburg’s history has begun coming down.

For decades an apartment complex, the building at Speed and Marshall streets that was built as a school appears headed for a proper burial — not from a wrecking ball but by a preservationist’s efforts to sell its thick, wooden floor supports and scuffed masonry.

“I’m a deconstruction guy,” said Will Branch, head of a Bogalusa, La.-based Will Branch Antique Lumber. “I’m like a reverse carpenter.”

The company, which specializes in retrieving rare wooden materials such as heart pine and cypress, is in charge of taking down the structure piece-by-piece over the next six months.

Bricks and wood filling its three stories will be treated or pressure-washed and sold to interested buyers, Branch said. That includes relics of the old Speed Street School still inside, such as writing surfaces on the old desks near what was once the school auditorium and now a flyway for pigeons.

“The windows are going to be used in a greenhouse,” Branch said.

A collection of stoves left from tenants who lived in the rent-assisted apartments inside former classrooms will be some of the items made available to locals in need of materials, said James Higgins, a resident of the neighborhood over which the building towered and something of a night watchman in the weeks leading up to its gradual demolition.

Local construction veterans such as Warren Guider who are assisting in the demolition note the fine details of what made the building so structurally sound when built in 1894 as South Vicksburg Public School No. 200. The most visible are the dozens of pine and cypress boards underneath the edge-grained wood floors.

“Those could easily be about 400 to 500 years old,” Guider said.

Marshall Street LLC purchased the structure last spring. Though its principals have chosen to remain anonymous, they did not immediately apply for public funds to continue the assisted-rent arrangement that had marked the building’s use since the school closed in 1940.

The building was completed in 1894. Since sold by the American Legion in 1968, it had been operated as rental units until the City of Vicksburg condemned the structure in September. City building inspection officials said the structure’s leaky ceilings and backed-up sewage made it unfit for human inhabitation.

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Contact Danny Barrett Jr. at dbarrett@vicksburgpost.com