08/31/2016
By DEBORAH GERTZ HUSAR
Herald-Whig Staff Writer
NAUVOO, Ill.
John Allen couldn't bear to see vintage wood and nails from Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church just thrown away during a renovation project.
So he combined his love of woodworking and metalwork to turn the salvaged items into crosses -- mementos of both the church and the faith of the people who built it more than a century ago.
Aging shingles and rotting dormers prompted repair work on the Sts. Peter and Paul Church steeple in March. Workers replaced the shingles with interlocking aluminum pieces and removed the original pine in the dormers, replacing it with aluminum to seal the steeple top to bottom and protect it for the next generation.
The wood and its square-headed nails ended up in the Dumpster.
"I had to dive in there and take it all out," said Allen, a church member who does maintenance for the Hotel Nauvoo and Grandpa John's Cafe, owned and operated by wife Debbie's family. "If I wouldn't have been there that day and looked into the Dumpster, none of this probably ever would have happened."
Allen pulled all the nails and decided to turn them into crosses.
"Dad cut the heads off them, and I started welding them together," Allen said. "I've seen crosses with the circle behind them, so I decided to do some of that, which expanded the project a little bit, and then one thing led to another."
Salvaged copper was cut into strips and stamped with "INRI" to decorate the crosses. The old wood from the dormer louvers was fashioned into crosses, sometimes decorated with a cross made of nails or some of the "spindly nails" salvaged from the church.
"I kept everything because I figured this was a once-in-a-lifetime. We're not going to pull anything out of that church again," Allen said. "It just kept getting bigger and bigger."
A selection of the crosses sold Sunday at the church's annual God's Portion Day auction.
"We wanted to make some money, but the bigger it got, the more it came about letting people take home something from their church," Allen said.
Allen fashioned the simple crosses without a pattern, working on the wooden ones until he thought the dimensions were right.
"I started with the small one, got the dimensions the way I wanted, then just doubled it," he said.
He removed the paint from the wood, then cut it into strips.
"You take the upright and the cross piece and cut exactly half of each one out so they fit together and then glue them," he said. "I normally put some clear stain on before I varnish it, and the color just exploded. ...
"When you see the color and how neat it's going to be, it's very gratifying. I do feel very blessed I get to do stuff like this. You can see the fruits of your labor, and I'm hoping that these will be around for a while."
As a child, Allen watched his father, John C., a machinist, work with metal and do woodworking projects. The interest rubbed off, along with some basic maintenance skills.
"Dad never called a repairman," he said. "He always had us kids helping, and even though we probably didn't want to do it, we were learning as we grew up."
A maintenance job at the Nauvoo Cheese Factory introduced Allen to welding, and after the plant closed, he bought his own welder for his "sanctuary," the workshop he created at his home in Nauvoo for when he's not busy at work.
"I usually do a little work in the morning and at night until Debbie demands that I come in. Most of the time I spend out here is on Saturday," Allen said.
And he plans to keep working to salvage pieces of the past.
"When I was younger, I didn't think too much about it, but the older I get, the more I like to see history saved," Allen said. "It just tickles me taking something somebody threw away and making it live again."
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