Family Blueprint

By Don Boxmeyer, staff writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press

When John Thomas began a construction project last summer, it was like shaking hands with his grandfather, a gifted home builder who has been gone for more than half a century.
John is the chef concierge at the Saint Paul Hotel, a fresh white shirt and polished wing tip job if ever there was one. In fact john is the only Minnesota member of Les Clefs dor, an international association of hotel concierge.
But John also has this thing in him, this aspiration, this necessity, that makes him want to build homes. The grandfather he never knew built some of the finest and most durable homes in St. Paul and it a strange but beautiful quirk of fate last summer that allowed john to “meet “his father’s father on the job.
I knew his elation because my grandfathers were also builders. One was a carpenter and the other a stone mason. When I was a high school student, I had an opportunity to work with the mason, to use his tools and begin to learn how to lay brick and set stone, an artistic pursuit I could never get enough of. I still have his old steel wheeled mud buggy, an ancient wheelbarrow that I know he helped me push.
I was very young when my other grandfather died, but I have many of his carpenter tools in my woodworking shop. While modern power tools are more convenient for making furniture, I seize on any chance to the ancient wood mallet with my grandfathers initials carved on it, his chisels and beveled squares and the series of old Stanley block planes that were passed to me. I work with these tools even if I don’t have to because it gives me a chance to communicate with Christian Frederick Boxmeyer, the carpenter. His hand guides mine, I know they do.
So when John began telling me last summer, I knew there had to be a reunion between this modern builder and the late Franklin Holman Thomas.
John, 49 never knew his grandfather who died in 1943. But John was always fascinated with the life of Franklin Holman Thomas, a machinist by trade who also got a college education and became the first principal of the St. Paul Boys Vocational School at 14th and Jackson streets, the long gone predecessor of the St. Paul Technical College.
Grandpa was also a skilled carpenter, John says, and during the summer vacations he would lead a crew of students in the construction of homes primarily in the Macalester-Groveland area. He was so good that he sometimes built two or even three homes in a summer.
Between 1922 and 1930 Franklin built at least a dozen homes on Berkeley, Stanford, Wellesley, St. Clair , Randolph, Cleveland and Niles . Thomas’ trademarks of the homes were their “one drop” stone floors in the kitchen , fashioned from tile and marble from Drake Marble Co. in St. Paul.
John knew this because when he was very young he took an interest in architectural drafting and building, later becoming a home builder himself. He painstakingly researched the home his grandfather built , visiting many times and even duplicating the original plans for a few of them, including his favorite , a two story home on the 2100 block of Berkeley.
Last summer, John left the concierge business to go into sales and then construction, succumbing, he says, to the old “seven Year itch”. The Saint Paul Hotel called him back this December , but one of his first building jobs last summer was an assignment to build a three season porch on a home on Berkeley just off Cleveland Avenue.
How far off, John wanted to know. His boss told him.
Is that house blue? John asked and his surprised boss said, “Why yes. It is a blue house. “
One of his grandfathers houses, John thought. It was his favorite of all the houses his grandfather had built.
“It was very special to work on that house. “ John said. “Even though the work I did was on the far side of an addition built after my grandfather completed the original house, I could see there were certain trademark touches, such as some elaborate cornices that made his house really special”
This home has a delicately carved fascia decoration over the front entry that John is even duplicating on his own house. John’s grandfather used the carving, done by a vocational school instructor, sparingly but effectively elsewhere in the house; around the fireplace and framing the pillars of the front entry.
“We are fortunate there is such a good record of his building” says John, who is back to being a full time concierge at the Saint Paul Hotel. In his spare time he is rebuilding a 1970’s home he and his family live in on Juno Ave. in St. Paul.
Yes, he says, Franklin Holman Thomas is his inspiration. He is there when John needs him.

Here is a video I did on the addition of a second story to my house. During this work we lived in the house.  This part of the project took just over a year from July 1999 until December 2000, moving into the space by Christmas.