by BENJAMIN HAAVIK Team Leader for Property Care
HIDDEN NECESSITIES
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Codman Estate undergoes major septic system upgrade nfrastructure. It may not be an exciting topic, but its importance cannot be overstated. Infrastructure is the foundation that allows for the necessities and amenities that visitors have come to expect at Historic New England’s properties. Electricity, water, toilets, and wireless service are among the vital systems and utilities that we may often take for granted in our own lives, but fitting them in at a historic property without disturbing the aesthetics of the site or damaging a historic structure can be tricky, as our recent project at the Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts, showed. Adapting a once-private, older property to accommodate public use is not undertaken lightly but that is a key part of Historic New England’s mission. Adaptive reuse requires making extremely
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Historic New England Winter 2020
tough choices about how to modernize the property with code-compliant infrastructure upgrades. Any modification to a historic property, however small, permanently changes it. Major projects such as infrastructure upgrades must be installed without jeopardizing the property’s value and historical character. At the Codman Estate, in order to provide for large-scale public use, we needed to install a very large septic system. While that may sound straightforward— dig a hole, bury the pipes, cover the hole—the reality is much more complicated. First, we needed to know what is happening below the grass. For a civil engineer designing a septic system, knowing the soil layers and how they allow water to percolate is critical to the project. Establishing multiple test pits around a
