By YachatsNews
YACHATS – It was a delicate procedure for a construction crew – how to access and then lift a corroding, 90-year-old bronze bell Thursday from the roof of the Little Log Church Museum in a driving rain and windstorm without the whole thing crashing down on the street below.
But workers from Top to Bottom Construction of Newport pulled off the operation without a hitch and then proudly posed with the bell once it was safely in the back of a trailer.
While crews have been working inside the church for a week to peel back Sheetrock to expose rotting walls and take off window trim, removing the bell Thursday was its first delicate outside work.
Crews first had to cut away sides of the bell tower that sits above the church’s entrance, then move a forklift into position and slide the bell and secure it onto a special pallet.
“This is the opening salvo of a lot of work to finally come on the church,” said Karl Christianson, a Friends of Little Log Church Museum foundation board member.
Top to Bottom Construction, which just finished remodeling Lincoln County’s winter shelter in Newport, was awarded a $370,000 contract to renovate the crumbling church and museum buildings, which have been closed for more than three years because of safety issues.
The restoration involves suspending the roof while removing and rebuilding the outer walls while also redoing concrete footings, then re-attaching the roof and the building to the footings. The new siding is a concrete-like material that will look like logs but stand up better to the weather.
The Little Log Church was built with donated labor and materials in 1927 and was officially dedicated in the early 1930s. The logs were floated down the Yachats River and hauled to what is now the corner of West Third and Pontiac streets in downtown Yachats by teams of horses.
The Lincoln County Historical Society says the building started as an Evangelical Church and operated as a Presbyterian Church from 1950 until 1968, when the congregation moved to its new building on West Seventh Street and the historical society acquired it to operate as a museum. The society gave it to the city of Yachats in 1986 and with the help of volunteers and a nonprofit board operated it as a museum, wedding venue and for music performances.
In 1992 Lincoln County ordered the church closed because it was unsafe. It took two years for volunteers to fix the problems, reinforcing part of the wood foundation, replacing some log siding and re-doing parts of the interior.
The city has wrestled with what to do with the property since 2018, regularly putting aside money for potential repairs in its budget – accompanied by lots of debate and starts and stops to plans.
The Friends of Little Log Church Museum are paying to have the bell hauled to a bronze foundry in Eugene to have it repaired and refurbished. When that’s done and the church finished, it will return to a new entrance bell tower – but encased in glass to protect it from the elements for another 90 years, said Christianson.
