75% . . .

…of what? Here’s the story.

When the Minnesota Masonic Heritage Center was built, a portion of it was designated as secure, climate-controlled storage for the museum collection. Over the next few years, the collection was moved from the “old” space in the Masonic Home (beneath the administrative offices in the Assisted Living building), to the “new” space in the Heritage Center. As a result, some shelving was left behind: heavy-duty steel units. Because of the dark olive-green paint, we speculate that it may have been post-World War II Army surplus…but that’s up for debate.

As you may recall, adjacent to the Col. James B. Ladd Museum is the Charles W. Nelson Library. Its beginnings were in the late 1860s, as the library of the Grand Lodge of Minnesota. Over time, the library was moved from its long-time home in Saint Paul to the present site of the Grand Lodge on the campus of the Minnesota Masonic Home in Bloomington. What you see in Nelson is only a fraction of the complete library. Accordingly, the rest is in the storage stacks, where a great deal of shelving is needed.

The subject of our endeavors.

With the former museum space (and shelving) vacated and the green steel units available, the idea arose to repurpose them for use in the library stacks to replace some of the lightweight shelves there. The only question was: How? Each section was approximately five feet wide, and eight and a half feet tall, for a total of 20 linear feet of shelving. Very cumbersome; very heavy.

Assisted by Brother Adam Bornholdt, Past Master of Lebanon Lodge No. 346, we solved the “how.” We tipped shelving units onto their sides, and rolled them on moving dollies to an elevator, destination: the Alfred E. Ames Lodge Room. While the next stop may seem strange, Ames was the perfect staging area. The large, open space afforded us a wide expanse to lay the units flat on their backs in order to disassemble them. Again, this may seem odd…but the next steps (15, to be precise) were those of the Winding Staircase to the balcony in the Lodge Room. The weight of fully assembled shelves and narrow winding stairs made moving the assembled shelves impossible. Countless trips up and down the staircase were required to take the disassembled shelving, piece by piece, to the storage room on the balcony level, where they were reassembled.

Mark Campbell, Past Master of Cataract Lodge No. 2, helped me with reassembly. In the process of doing so, we discovered several sizes and types of screws and nuts holding the shelves together. We found that once armed with new, non-rusted and uniform fasteners, assembly was much easier. Because of the great height and heft of the units, we felt it was important to mount brackets connecting the “new” bookcases to the wall to lessen the chances of a unit tipping over.

The final result.

(click on each photo for a full image)

The various photos accompanying this piece show where the shelving units came from, progress of reassembly in the library stacks, and some of the tools used in the project. By comparison, you can see the grey shelves are quite a bit shorter than the replacement units.

About that 75%… of the 20 linear feet of available shelving, the units successfully moved total only 15 feet. Five more feet (or 25%) to go!

—Mark A. Anderson, KYCH, OPC, 33º
Library and Museum Coordinator