Historic Harmony taking further steps to renovate windows, other relics via grants
HARMONY — Rodney Gasch, President of the Harmony Museum, announced plans to replace 40 windows in the Harmony Museum’s historic building were still on track Monday night.
“This is Phase 2 of our window project,” he said. “We did 222 Mercer a couple years ago, where the village post office and the museum store is, so we are going to apply for a matching grant from the Pennsylvania Historical Museum.”
He also hopes, if Historic Harmony receives funding, to repair brickwork on the building and to repaint it, he said.
The grant, called a Matching Construction Grant, would double the sum of any funding Historic Harmony might raise on its own, if awarded. Applications for this grant will be due in late February, Gasch said.
The Allied Millwork in Lawrenceville would provide the newly manufactured wooden windows, and recycled glass will be salvaged from windows removed during earlier stages of the project, as well as from windows donated by museum members.
Historic Harmony should receive a decision about the grant by September, with construction scheduled from October 2023 to January 2024. If all goes as planned, the actual windows will finally be installed in spring of 2024.
According to a flyer from Historic Harmony the renovations will fix a 100-year-old mistake, after a 19th-Century repair effort replaced the original Harmonist colony windows with “modern” double-hung windows. These windows have deteriorated heavily over the years.
“People come to Harmony to learn about the original communal society ... learn about their accomplishments, see this amazing architecture that is preserved,” Gasch told the Eagle in October. “So these buildings are definitely important to preserve.”
“And they’re a crucial part of economic development for the area, because heritage tourism is big business,” he added.
