Maine restoration expert Jonathan Taggart was part of a team that restored a historic Hay and Peabody Seth Thomas Clock on Congress Street in Portland.
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From a midcoast farmhouse, restoration expert Jonathan Taggart works in a studio filled with benches of tools, materials and specialized chemicals. His work sits at the intersection of science and art. He must understand how materials react to outdoor environments while carefully replicating original details. One wall of his workshop is lined with intricate molded metal components waiting for installation.
Surrounded by art and history from childhood, Taggart discovered he had a natural affinity for material science. After spending time in Kansas City’s Nelson Atkins Museum of Art conservation lab and later working as a potter on the Oregon coast, he chose to pursue conservation as a career. He earned his master’s degree in art conservation along with a degree in museum studies from the University of Delaware in the Winterthur Art Conservation Program.
He opened Taggart Objects Conservation in 1990 and lived in Portland, Ore., while working as the public art conservator for the city. His contract work took him across the United States and he eventually moved from one Portland to another, landing in the midcoast town of Georgetown.
One of his favorite Maine projects is the restoration of the Lincoln Park Fountain in Portland. Commissioned by the Friends of Lincoln Park, Taggart was asked to reproduce the missing top tiers of the fountain using only a blurry historic photograph as a reference.
“As a copyist, what do you copy? You can come up with your own, but it did not seem right,” he says.
While searching for patterns to help guide his work, Taggart found an antiques dealer selling the exact castings that were missing from the fountain. They came from the same nineteenth century French foundry that produced the original pieces. The lucky discovery allowed him to restore the fountain accurately and at a more reasonable cost.
Clock restoration
Another recent achievement is the restoration of the Hay and Peabody Seth Thomas Clock, which was unveiled by the Francis Hotel in Portland during a public ceremony in October. Installed in 1925 to mark Hay and Peabody’s 25th anniversary, the cast-iron street clock stands 18 feet tall with four illuminated faces. It is believed to be one of only 80 street clocks ever produced by the Seth Thomas Clock Co., the same manufacturer that made the clock at Grand Central Terminal in New York City.
For the restoration, the entire structure had to be dismantled and transported to Taggart’s workshop. Years of weather exposure left it in rough condition. After stripping the rust down to white metal, Taggart applied an epoxy silane coating with a three-part zinc-based primer for durability. The Maine chapter of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors restored the internal mechanisms so the clock would be fully operational for its 100th anniversary.
For Taggart, preserving historic objects is a way to help society remember its past so the same mistakes are not repeated.
“Many of the monuments I work on are either Civil War or civil rights. I have even worked on Sacagawea,” he says. “They are all important historic figures in the sense that they tell us something about our past and hopefully teach us something about our present and our future.”
