Email from Nov 1, 2005\r\n\r\nHi Boys & Girls,\r\n\r\nSince I last wrote things have improved here in BSL. There\'s another gas station and another bar opened up and on the way back from Pass Christian tonight I saw a restaurant open for business. I\'ve been busier than the proverbial one-armed paper hanger. I had arranged for a team to come in this week to assess buildings in the Ocean Springs/Pascagoula area. At the last minute it was decided that the team should go to Pass Christian at the other end of the coast. There was a last minute scramble but I found places for them to stay here in BSL and we\'ve been \"doing the Pass\" for two days. Two guys and from North Carolina and an engineer from Kentucky. I was afraid that after eight weeks of cleaning up they would not be impressed but the engineer who only arrived Monday was suitably awed when she saw the Pass this morning. She was literally slack jawed.\r\n\r\nSaturday I trucked a person from the World Monument Fund around. American Express has given them along with the Trust a small amount of money to do some sort of \"demonstration project\" here on the coast. We looked at a 1918 cottage which is the last standing building on the Shearwater property in Ocean Springs. It is the home of the Walter Anderson family, noted locally for their pottery, prints and paintings.\r\n It\'s four generations of artists who have been on this land since the early 20th century. They are cultural icons on the east end of the coast do the project has a lot of local appeal.\r\n\r\nAt the end of the day I was showing them around BSL and took them down to the beach and one of them (I also had a representative from the Preservation Trades Network) and we were looking at what was thought to be an 1885 house that we established is probably antebellum. One of the advantages of having buildings ripped open is you can see the details of their construction. Rudy Christian from the PTN is a timber framer and wanted to look under the building while the WMF guy and I were talking to the owner. Three minutes later he rushed into the house and said, \"Come out here. you have to see this!\" What he had discovered was that the little cottage next door (which had largely been trashed by a large tree falling on it) was much older than thought. It had been moved to the lot somewhere between 1900 and 1910 and then added onto. With two walls ripped away one could see the timber framing with mortise and tenon joints, etc. What excited him was that the method that had been used to lay out the framing had gone out of use in North America in about 1800! To our knowledge there are no 18th century structures left on the coast. It is not unlikely that the small original structure had been constructed in the late 17 hundreds. Rudy also claims that the carpenter who squared the beams with a framing axe was left-handed! I asked him the carpenter\'s name but he demurred at that point. In any event, it is a wonderful and important find if it proves out. Since then we have gotten the oral permission of the owner to disassemble the framework and store it for reassembly in a museum context at some time in the future. Many of the missing pieces are in the debris field inland from the building. It made my week.\r\n\r\nToday we were looking at a house in Pass Christian at the same time that an insurance adjuster was talking with the owner. I was talking to the adjuster I discovered he was from South Dakota where I grew up. I asked him where he grew up and he said Sioux Falls. I mentioned that my college room mate is a federal public defender in Sioux Falls. He asked the name and about fell over when I said Bill Delaney. Turns out he knew Bill in Deadwood. So, Bill, Scott DeJong says, \"Hey!\"\r\n\r\nToday\'s picture: On the right is Rudy Christian examining one of the beams from the 18th century (we hope) cottage. He\'s pointing out the fact that the axe used by the carpenter had a nick in the edge which left a small mark on the beam each time he made another cut hewing out the edge of the beam. I still want to know the carpenter\'s name.\r\n\r\n73\r\n\r\nL.