Peanuts for Pinnacles: Historic Preservation Comm. still seeking funding

In one corner, weighing-in at 300 pounds, is the base of one of 10 pinnacles waiting to be put back up on Brady Chapel. In the other corner, well, is more of the same.

In several pieces, are the carved segments that will eventually make-up those pinnacles that will finally help the Pocatello Historic Preservation Commission hit a milestone with the daunting task of restoring and preserving the more than 100-year old chapel.

The only problem? There aren’t enough funds to get those segments out of storage and back up onto the building.

The Commission’s Terri Neu said it will cost about $10,000 to get those pinnacles back up. Through fundraisers, they hope to slowly get there.

“We don’t have it on our budget at all, so we are just accepting donations,” Neu said. “Right now, we only have about $2,200.”

She said the pinnacles started crumbling back in the mid-1970s, and today, only one of them remains, which acted as the model for how the new sandstone pinnacles should be carved in order to mirror the originals.

“As the cemetery saw they were falling, they went in and removed the rest so they wouldn’t start falling on people,” Neu added.

Classic Marble and Granite owner and master carver Blaine Thomas said this project was too large to take-on by himself.

“You have to have a lot of manpower to do a job that big,” Thomas said.

He enlisted the help of Idaho Travertine in Idaho Falls, who worked endless hours to carve-out the sandstone pillars.

He said, just the bottom piece of one of the pinnacles, alone, weighs roughly 300 pounds.

“We are trying to do this as inexpensively as we can because they (the Commission) just doesn’t have the budget,” he said.

In fact, Thomas put it best, “This is a champagne project on a beer budget.”

At roughly $25,000 the Commission spent on the carvings, Thomas said that’s not nearly enough to make a profit for any stone carving company.

But, Idaho Travertine took the project on, nevertheless.

Since Thomas has been helping the city with restoration projects for the past several decades, he said he will be there to help facilitate the project once they’re ready to put the pinnacles back up on the chapel.

On Wednesday night, the Historic Preservation Commission will meet to discuss the future of the chapel, and how to best raise money to make the restoration happen.

In the meantime, Neu said, there are still several of the original pews floating around, she hopes, still within the community.

The Commission has been trying to find those original pews to put them back into the chapel, but to no avail.

You can contact the Commission if you believe you might know where one could be, by visiting their website here: http://www.pocatello.us/255/Historic-Preservation-Commission