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After spending the better part of two years incorporating them into a replica of the fence that ringed the common in the 19th century, Cornish Boy Scout Patrick McGlone hopes that they stand firm into the 22nd.
“During one of the windstorms we had recently, a tree came down and broke the back of the bench that’s there,” McGlone said last week. “And a branch almost hit the fence. I was just out there in August with a paint brush, putting on the second coat of stain.”
That final touch in McGlone’s Eagle Scout project particularly cheered the trustees of the adjoining Cornish Meetinghouse, who in recent years have had their hands full restoring the 1804 building.
“The Scouts have done so many other projects in town,” trustee Caroline Storrs said last week. “The help they’ve given us over the years on the common, replacing a lot of the trees, is phenomenal. We never would have replaced the fence if they hadn’t done that project. It would just be one of those dreams you have.”
The trustees deferred the dream until a few years ago, when Storrs asked longtime Cornish Scoutmaster Leo Maslan whether one of his troop’s aspiring Eagle Scouts could reconstruct the original fence, using late 1800s photographs as a guide.
Maslan suggested it to one of his scouts who, he recalled, “looked at it and said, ‘Well, maybe too ambitious.’ ” Then he thought of McGlone, who had shown determination and attention to detail in the tree replanting project.
“He’s methodical and meticulous,” Maslan said. “He stays with a job until it’s all done. It was a good match, and he had the right stuff to stay with it.”
The trick was finding the hours to do the job, in a schedule that included commuting to Hartford High School and playing varsity soccer, ice hockey and lacrosse.
“Time management was very hard my first couple of years,” McGlone said. “I procrastinated a lot of my Eagle Scout work. Finally I realized, ‘It’s crunch time.’ ”
When he wasn’t conducting research in the library of the Cornish Historical Society, McGlone was asking neighbors and friends for help raising the $4,000 he estimated it would cost to do the project. He encountered generous donors at Town Meeting last year, then started shopping around for granite and for wood for the rails. Swenson Granite, in Concord, sold him 18 posts at a discount “because it was an Eagle Scout project.” After he decided to go with rails cut from Douglas fir instead of pressure-treated wood, the budget climbed closer to $5,000.
Then, after calculating where the posts should go, came the heavy lifting: With shovels and hammers, eight fellow scouts joined McGlone on site. While they were able to excavate some postholes with a motorized posthole digger, it kept stalling on rocks under the soil.
And in the course of realigning some of the existing posts, McGlone and his team found “the bottoms of some of the posts that were gone, that had just snapped off.” Eventually, they dug a series of 5-by-5-foot holes, secured each post and filled around each one with loam.
“We spent most of the summer of 2016 digging a lot of holes by hand,” McGlone said. “I had scouts who were up to their waists and chests in dirt. Luckily, my troop is really good about things like that. I remember helping a lot of Eagle Scouts with their projects over the years.”
Meanwhile, fellow Hartford High senior Ben Healy, an aspiring civil engineer, calculated how long the rails should be and how to arrange them where the stones curved inward to form a gate facing the meetinghouse.
“It was a really valuable experience, especially since I was doing it with a lot of friends,” McGlone said. “It showed me how collaboration can go a long way in accomplishing a goal. I would never have been able to get this done without them.”
That’s one of the big lessons McGlone will cite when he goes before the board that reviews his Eagle Scout application in December.
“I was quite the shy person before scouting got me to be more social,” he said. “I learned how to be comfortable with public speaking, with being a leader in various roles, like my sports teams.”
In addition to learning those skills, McGlone discovered his town.
“I talked with a person at (the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site) who told me about the history of Cornish, including how the fence was aligned with the common, which initially was used by soldiers in the American Revolution to practice marching.
“Some of these things I knew a little about, but it took me until later to realize how significant the area was.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.