The Face Behind the Wall

Jonathan Brownell is the face behind the wall. Literally and figuratively. As owner of White Falcon Solutions, he and his team have spent almost a year rebuilding the Farm Barn exterior walls.

But Jonathan’s contributions to Shelburne Farms extend much further back. As he was growing up in Calais, Vermont in the early 1970s, his dad was legal counsel for the new nonprofit, Shelburne Farms Resources. When Jonathan foreswore college, his dad suggested he look into a job here. “I started out as an apprentice forester with Marshall (Webb),” he recalls. “He set me up with 160 cords of elm to split with a big hydraulic splitter!” he laughs.

Soon, Jonathan was a farm employee. With Marshall, they tackled “pretty much everything”: mechanical work, plowing roads, harvesting crops, repairing plumbing, even wrapping cheese.

When a friend suggested Jonathan start his own business, masonry was the trade that made the most sense. Shelburne Farms was his sole client. But that one client gradually became many.

And Jonathan loves “building stuff.”  “When my dad was building roads on the farm in Calais,” he recounts, “I helped build a headwall from surrounding stones, and I remember him standing back with his pipe going, ‘You've got a knack.’ I was six. I remember it clear as a bell.”

Over the years, White Falcon has done many projects for the nonprofit, including foundation and cobble work at the Breeding Barn, culvert work, and the recent Coach Barn rehabilitation. “We did all the digging for the foundation, new water lines and new septic,” explains Jonathan. His son, who joined the company seven years ago as part owner, focused on the digging and concrete work. (“We are partners in a pod,” Jonathan smiles, “I'm so delighted.”). Jonathan laid all the pavers in the courtyard. “The Coach Barn work was so fun,” he says. “It was a really great job.”
 

The Farm Barn wall project was next up. The walls had long deteriorated due to water infiltration, so his team dismantled them, poured new concrete footings, removed all the old mortar off each stone so they could be reused, then shouldered down for the long rebuild. “My mason, Will, just stands back, looks down the wall and says, ‘I know what I did this summer.’ We’re all pretty proud of the scope and size of it, because not many projects like this happen in a year.”  

Laying a capstones on one of the wing walls was a slow and careful process. (This video has been sped up!)

Despite the project’s scale, Jonathan calls it “not difficult masonry.” “Almost all the angles are 90 degrees, and you just fit the stones in,” he shrugs. “The gate pillars and wing walls posed the biggest challenges,” he goes on, “but not huge ones.”  (The pillars had to be plumb, square, and parallel; the wing walls curved and descended at the same time.)

Jonathan is primarily just appreciative of the opportunity. “It's so beautiful here in so many ways,” he explains. “The public stops and says “Great job,” and sometimes everything stops so we can set a little kid in the excavator seat, and it makes their day. That lightens everything. And that is important to me. I mean, this is commercial work, and commercial work can be stressful. But this? We can do this all day.”

 
Reflecting back, Jonathan says, “That was such a great time back when I was super young, and being part of this now has been fascinating. Marshall would have been so tickled with all this.” He finishes with, "It is just such a privilege and a pleasure. It’s an incredible bunch here. Everybody cares. About this place. About the kids, and the education and stewardship. It hits me every day. ‘Wow, pinch yourselves! We're not dreaming, guys. This is real.’”

This fall, White Falcon Solutions is reconstructing one of the stone retaining walls in the Farm Barn courtyard.