The Jaffrey Public Library is getting a facelift this year, with $69,000 of work planned to restore the brownstone and mortar and rebuild the chimney.
“We’ve done a lot of work on the interior, but there’s been minimal work done on the library exterior,” Library Director Julie Perrin said in an interview Friday. “It was time and we needed to get this addressed and up to the historic standard of the building. It’s a stunning piece of architecture and it is important to preserve it.”
The library was built in 1896 in a Romanesque Revival style, and originally named for benefactor Susan B. Clay.
Library Trustees had to really turn a close eye to the exterior a few years ago, Perrin said, when the library chimney became in desperate need of repair, starting to tilt and lean precariously. An emergency repair was done a few years ago to prevent further damage, Perrin said, but it was always just a temporary fix, and the Trustees began to look at a more comprehensive plan to do updates to the library’s exterior.
“We knew this was coming, and we’ve been planning for several years,” Perrin said.
In addition to a more comprehensive and permanent rebuilding of the chimney, the library will also be undergoing some repairs to its brownstone exterior, and removing some of the white mortar that has been applied over the years and replacing it with more historically accurate red mortar and making repairs.
The library has also removed some of the landscaping and bushes at the library base, which Perrin said were causing more than one kind of problem. In addition to damaging the building itself, Perrin said, the bushes have also been an occasional dumping ground for everything from diapers to drug paraphernalia.
“You wouldn’t believe the things we’ve found in those bushes,” Perrin said.
The total cost of the work is estimated at $69,000, with the bulk of the cost coming from the Library trust fund, with some funds encumbered from last year’s library budget.
The work is currently underway, with no set end date, but the library will continue operations while it’s ongoing, Perrin said. When work is being done on the front entrance of the library, patrons will be required to enter the library through the side entrance, but will still be able to access all the same services and programs as usual..