Help wanted signs offering a plethora of enticing benefits are ubiquitous these days as companies large and small struggle to find enough workers, but a set of such signs posted along Route 1 in the Hancock County town of Orland offers a recruitment enticement you don’t see every day: Join the team at Freshwater Stone and help rehabilitate the Statue of Liberty.
Founded in the early 1970s, Freshwater Stone has made a name for itself as a supplier of granite and for its stone craftsmanship for projects ranging from landscaping to kitchen counters in homes and on yachts.
Increasingly, the company has gained attention for its historic restoration work. It’s done stonework for historic buildings such as the Cathedral of St. John Divine in New York City, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Dallas County Courthouse in Texas, and Fort Gorges in Casco Bay, among others. The reputation it’s built doing this sensitive work is why, a couple of years ago, staff got a call from Allegrone Masonry.
In 2022, the National Park Service awarded a $22 million construction contract to make repairs to Fort Wood and Lady Liberty’s pedestal.
Allegrone Masonry, which specializes in historic restoration, is the general and masonry contractor for the Statue of Liberty rehabilitation project. Freshwater Stone hadn’t worked with the Massachusetts-based company before, but “They’d heard of us,” said John Horton, Freshwater Stone’s architectural stone manager and head of the marine division.
At the time, Allegrone was working on rehabilitating the parapet walls of Fort Wood, the 11-pointed, star-shaped fort that supports Lady Liberty. Built between 1808 and 1811, Fort Wood originally served as part of New York City’s and New York Harbor’s defense network. The War Department used it as an army post until 1937. The statue’s pedestal was built between 1884 and 1886 within the fort’s courtyard.
In 2022, the National Park Service (NPS) awarded a $22 million construction contract to make repairs to Fort Wood and Lady Liberty’s pedestal. The funds are from the Great American Outdoors Act, a bipartisan infrastructure law that includes the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund, which provides the NPS with up to $1.3 billion per year for five years to address needed repairs and maintenance at national parks.
While the Statue of Liberty underwent an extensive restoration in the 1980s, 200-plus years of weather makes an impact on the fort’s infrastructure. Multiple phases of repair work are underway at the national monument and Freshwater Stone has been part of two of them so far.
The first project the Orland-based company participated in was the rehabilitation of the fort’s parapet walls, which had deteriorated over the centuries.
Freshwater Stone supplied Freshwater Pearl granite from its Mosquito Mountain quarry in Frankfort to replace deteriorating stone material that was jackhammered out of the layers in the walls. The light-gray, black-speckled granite from Maine “adds a lot of structure that won’t degrade over time,” Horton explains, and is similar in looks to what is already at the fort.
Because of the complicated geometry and “nightmare” drain boxes of the star-shaped walls, Freshwater Stone’s designers developed computer-generated drawings for each piece of granite they cut and shaped for the project.
The wall project, with 35,000 square feet of walls rehabilitated, ended in 2023, but Freshwater Stone was tapped again for another project, rehabilitating the fort’s terreplein, an area historically used for mounting guns, but used today as the national monument’s walking plaza.
After the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal was built into the middle of Fort Wood in the late 1880s, the area between the pedestal and the fort’s walls was filled in with earth to create a two-story-high walking plaza. The last time major work was done on the terreplein’s surface was during the statue’s restoration in the 1980s.
In the decades since, freeze-thaw cycles have displaced some of the pavers and rainwater has deteriorated some of their surfaces. Among the repairs to the terreplein is the replacement of those pavers, and that’s where Freshwater Stone comes in. The company is providing granite pavers for the approximately 50,000-square-foot walking surface of the terreplein, said Jerry Willis, a public affairs officer for the Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island.
Like the wall project, the $27.5 million terreplein project is funded through the Great American Outdoors Act’s National Parks and Public Land Restoration Fund. The project is about a third of the way through, expected to be completed in 2025, Willis said.
At this point, Freshwater Stone has delivered about 20,000 square feet of granite pavers to the site, said Horton. Each paver, made from Freshwater Pearl granite, is four feet square.
These projects for the Statue of Liberty have meant a “tremendous amount of work for us,” said Andy Odeen, Freshwater Stone’s president and owner, in terms of both the physical work on the stone and in the scope of the projects. The granite pieces for the walls were hand-distressed so the stone would fit in with the older materials of the fort, which takes a lot of effort, and the square footage of the projects is “the largest we’ve ever done,” he said.
In terms of the financials, while the Statue of Liberty is not the most lucrative project Freshwater Stone has worked on, the two jobs combined are worth more than a million dollars in work for the company, said Horton, “which is great for the local economy, because we employ about 60 people.”
An intangible benefit of the projects is the satisfaction employees feel working on this historic restoration project, Horton and Odeen said.
“The employees are really excited about it and proud to be part of history,” Odeen said. “In the community, people heard about what we’ve been doing and have been really excited and supportive.”
Odeen and Horton don’t know at this point if more Statue of Liberty work is coming after the paver project is completed, but it would be welcome. “It’s interesting, meaningful work,” Horton said.
Freshwater Stone is still recruiting employees—hence the signs on the side of the road. Potential employees don’t have to have previous stonework experience, said Odeen. In addition to benefits, including profit sharing, the company is offering a sign-on bonus of between $500 and $2,500.
Go to www.freshwaterstone.com to learn about career opportunities. Go to allegrone.com/our-work/rehabilitation-of-the-stone-walls-of-historic-fort-wood to see videos of the wall work done at the Statue of Liberty.
