Tuckpointing and Brick Repair in Springfield, Ohio

Tuckpointing in Springfield runs $8 to $20 per square foot, brick replacement $20 to $40 per brick, chimney repointing $800 to $2,500, and stone sill work $300 to $1,200 each, on the same published scale as the rest of our service area, with about a 25-mile run northeast from Dayton on I-70. Springfield has more 1870-to-1910 brick per block than anywhere else we work, and two locally designated historic districts with their own review process and a written mortar recommendation. Send photos and we tell you what your wall needs and what the Landmarks Commission will want to see.

What Springfield is

Springfield was founded in 1801 when James Demint platted 95 lots on his land, became the Clark County seat when the county was formed in 1818, and took off when the National Road arrived in 1838. The Champion Machine Company, at its peak in the early 1880s the second-largest factory complex in the world, and International Harvester after 1902 made it an industrial city; population jumped from 46,921 in 1910 to 60,840 in 1920, and the city had 58,662 residents at the 2020 census. That industrial money built brick.

Springfield’s brick and stone

The city’s historic guidelines say it plainly: brick is the most common masonry material in Springfield, on buildings of every type and size. Before 1870 brick clays were hand-pressed and often unevenly fired; after that brick became more durable and uniform, and by the turn of the century it came glazed, colored, or wire-cut. Sandstone was favored for public buildings and the Richardsonian Romanesque houses, and the old City Building of 1890 is rock-faced sandstone. Concrete block turns up in foundations from 1900 on, molded to look like stone.

Two neighborhoods carry local designation under Chapter 1321 of the city code:

• South Fountain Preservation Area. Platted by the 1850s and developed most intensely from 1870 to about 1910, listed on the National Register in 1983. Both sides of South Fountain Avenue and the west side of South Limestone from above Mulberry south to West Perrin, plus side streets. Houses are frame or brick, two to two and a half stories, in Greek Revival, Italianate, French Second Empire, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and Craftsman.
• East High Street Historic District. Springfield’s industrialists built along East High from the late 1860s, five mansions in a cluster ending with the Asa Bushnell House in 1888, listed on the National Register in 1974. Styles run Italianate, Queen Anne, Renaissance Revival, and Richardsonian Romanesque, in brick and stone, from Spring Street east to Greenmount.

All of this brick was laid in lime mortar, and all of it is in Springfield’s freeze-thaw belt: the same roughly 110 air freeze-thaw cycles a year that the Federal Highway Administration counts for Ohio, on the same Miamian clay that runs through Clark County.

The rules, in plain terms

Springfield’s Historic Landmarks Commission has existed since 1984, has seven members, and meets the first Monday of each month at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, 76 East High Street. The Community Development Department serves as its staff and issues Certificates of Appropriateness. For masonry, the city’s 2010 guidelines sort work into three tracks:

• Review Process A, no certificate: inspection and ordinary maintenance.
• Review Process B, staff certificate: repointing joints where mortar is deteriorated or missing, spot-pointing rather than the whole building, with mortar matched in composition, color, texture, and tooling, on submission of a specification and a repointing sample; replacing a small number of spalled bricks with matching units, or turning them so the damaged face is inside; cleaning by the gentlest means with a test patch; replacing a missing stone sill or bracket with an exact match in the same material.
• Review Process C, full Commission: removing paint from masonry, painting unpainted masonry (not recommended), and replacing large areas such as a parapet or cornice.

Certificates expire one year from issue, and the Chief Building Official will not issue a building permit on a designated property until the certificate exists. Springfield’s Building Regulations office at 76 East High Street requires contractors working in the city to hold a license or registration and requires a permit for repair beyond basic cosmetic work. We fold the specification, the sample, and the timing into the quote.

What fails on Springfield houses

The same things as in Dayton’s historic districts, with the same fixes: chimneys with cracked mortar washes (chimney page), brick faces spalled by a hard Portland repointing job done decades ago (brick repair), lime-mortar joints washed out on the weather faces (tuckpointing), sandstone and limestone sills delaminating along their bedding (stone repair), and rubble or early block foundations letting the spring water table through (foundation repointing). The city’s own guideline mix of 12 sand : 4 hydrated lime : 1 Portland is a Type O by the NPS table, and it is close to what we would specify for most South Fountain brick without being asked.

Timing and quotes

Lime-based mortar wants wall temperatures between 40 and 95 degrees and cover while it carbonates, so the Springfield season is May through early October, with the Landmarks calendar built in. Send a wide shot of the elevation, a close-up of the worst joint with a coin for scale, and a photo of the chimney top. The number comes from the pricing page; the historic-rules questions are on the FAQ.