Restoration of the retaining wall at the Old Courthouse Museum will require more funds than initially anticipated.

Lawson Newman is the president of WFT Architects, the firm in charge of managing the restoration work. He spoke to The Post about the increase of needed funding and of the current state of the project.

“This is just a very complicated and unique project. We actually specialize in historic preservation work. And so we have dealt with some highly technical masonry restoration and repair projects similar to this one, although nothing quite like this one,” he said. “But that kind of work is just so unusual and detail-oriented and labor-intensive that it’s often difficult to estimate up front how much it’s going to cost to do.”

About a year ago, WFT Architects wrapped up a project in which they helped refurbish the Windsor Ruins about 10 miles southwest of Port Gibson, Mississippi.

The courthouse wall project has been ongoing for several years. Recently, bids came in for masonry work that were more than what was initially expected. The project originally had a budget of $1,010,000. The lowest bid came in at $1,850,000.

A major reason for the increase in price is the masonry work that needs to be done.

“That kind of masonry work, when you’re dealing with a wall like that, is very different from the way that we would design a retaining wall today,” Newman said. “Masons would not fill the head joints of a brick in a brick wall. Those are the vertical joints. So they would lay up a wall, and they would only put mortar in the horizontal beds as they were going up. They wouldn’t fill the vertical joints. And that appears to have been what was done in this wall.”

Newman said the damage to the walls was decades in the making.

“The way these things usually happen is that buildings and structures deteriorate slowly over a long period of time. If you imagine… a parabolic curve on a graph, so they’ll (deteriorate) slowly for a long period of time, and then over time, they gradually start to increase in the rate of deterioration,” Newman said. “And then you reach a point where things really start to become visible and the deterioration starts to increase exponentially. So we’re kind of at that point with the walls.”

Contractors working on the project found that a drainage system, possibly built when the structure was first erected, has completely collapsed, forcing water into the voids and crevices in the masonry work, which in turn contributed to the failure of the wall.

Newman added that the Warren County Board of Supervisors is currently discussing how they will fund the rest of the project.