Bob Hedges Finds His Calling in Preserving Historic Structures

When Bob Hedges faced what he described as a mid-life crisis, he didn’t buy a sports car. Instead, he devoted himself to preserving historic early structures using locally found materials. For Hedges, it was a decision that felt both eco-friendly and purposeful.

That choice set Hedges, a Pine Plains native, on a decades-long path to become an expert in the structural fabric of barns and houses built before 1810.

Born and raised in Pine Plains, Hedges was drafted during the Vietnam War, where he served as a radio operator and bosun on a heavy boat. As a non-commissioned officer, his job was to supervise the deck crew and maintain the ship’s rigging, hull, and equipment.

Though he never left the United States, the meticulous nature of the work left its mark. The discipline and precision required to keep a vessel seaworthy translated, years later, into the exacting carpentry of traditional timber framing.

“I built my own house to begin with,” Hedges recalled. Over the years, he “worked with great cabinet makers” before turning to restoration full time. Today, he and his son, Nathaniel, focus almost exclusively on early timber frame structures.

“We are traditional timber framers,” Hedges said. “We get to work on some of the greatest stuff. We’ve built a reproduction Dutch barn. We’ve worked on some of the earliest houses in the area for six months to a year, so we really get to know the structure.”

Hedges has become an authority on dating and restoring early buildings, particularly by examining the nails and joinery that held them together.

“Before the Revolution, there was no way to determine the age of a building because the same techniques and hand-forged nails were used,” he explained. “After the revolution, nails were manufactured, and it became possible to date a building based on that.”

The post-Revolution building boom, he added, demanded speed. “After 1810 housing structures became industrial assembly line productions. Squaring replaced scribing. Before that, structures were created by scribing the joints.”

Scribing involved shaping irregular surfaces so one piece of wood fit precisely against another, producing a seamless joint. Squaring, by contrast, standardized construction into straight, 90-degree angles—faster, but less personal.

Hedges has long been immersed in both local history and the finer points of preservation. Until recently, he served on the board of the Little Nine Partners Historical Society, and in the early 1990s he connected with the Traditional Timber Framers Research and Advisory Group. There, he met Don McTernan, the longtime curator at the Roosevelt Estate in Hyde Park. Together they studied early Palatine buildings.

The Palatines — German immigrants who began arriving in the Hudson Valley in 1710 —were the largest immigrant group of the colonial era. Their building practices, closely related to those of the Dutch, helped define the landscape.

“The Dutch and the Palatines built in a similar fashion,” Hedges explained. “The French, the English and the Dutch had different techniques for building barns.” The Rhinebeck and Red Hook area became the epicenter of Dutch barns in the United States, he added, after “35 or 40 Palatine families moved from Germantown to settle Rhinebeck.”

Hedges deepened his knowledge abroad, spending two weeks in the Netherlands with the Society to Preserve Hay Barracks.

“There were hay barracks on every farm,” he said. “Wherever they settled the Dutch built hay barracks, which keeps the combustible hay stored away from animals. After the first generation they were not used. In this country they started storing hay in barns.”

Remnants of those structures still exist, he noted, “across the Ro Jan in Gallatin and in Rhinebeck.”

Alongside barns and houses, Hedges and his son have also repaired 18th-century clock tower bases. Each project brings with it the delicate question of how much to alter and how much to preserve.

“As far as preservation—anything that’s done to an artifact becomes part of it and becomes part of its history,” Hedges said. “Most historical societies are bad at that. They tend to erase the histories to return to a certain point in history.”

He makes an exception for the work of his own town. “Little Nine Partners has done a terrific job,” he said, citing the restoration of the Graham Brush House, a project in which he himself played a role.

Now in the later chapters of his career, Hedges remains animated when speaking about old beams and hand-forged nails, about the Dutch barns and hay barracks that once dotted the Hudson Valley. What began as a “mid-life crisis” has become a vocation, a way to keep history standing, beam by beam.

“There are always new things to learn,” he said.