He’s Making Sure Soldiers Won’t Be Forgotten

Francis Miller stood on a ladder taking pictures of the New Haven Green Memorial that honors fallen heroes of World War I — not just for fun, but as a first step in a preservation project. 

The Committee of the Proprietors of Common and Undivided Lands at New Haven, a self-perpetuating body that owns the Green, has hired Miller and his Group C Inc. to repair the monument and give it a new shine.

“The monument has undergone some past repairs that have actually been causing damage, so we’re going to reserve those treatments,” Miller said,on the ​“Word on the Street” segment of WNHH FM’s ​“LoveBabz LoveTalk” program. ​“And then overall, clean the stone. Remove failed repair materials and then we will pull out all of the iron stains and copper stains of the tuckahoe marble.”

The next step after will involve tedious work of injecting and filling all of the microcracks and large cracks of the stone. Miller has a hunch that the last repairs have not taken place since the late ​’70s or possibly the early ​’80s.

“We’re going to be out here on the New Haven Green probably for most of the summer,” Miller said. ​“The project is starting now and is due to go on until August.”

Miller, founder of Conserve ART LLC, has been on a mission for over 30 years to conserve historical monuments and architecture throughout the Elm City and other areas across the country. Miller is the one to thank for repairing the 1907 Bennett Memorial Fountain on the corner of the Green and for fixing up the ​“Defenders of New Haven” sculpture from 1910 that sits near the West Haven border. He also helped the city remove the Christopher Columbus statue from Wooster Square in June 2020, and helped install the William Lanson statue on the Farmington Canal Trail in September of that year.

For his latest work on the Green, the memorial’s large-grain Tuckahoe marble stone has plenty of cracks to fill.

“We’re going to clean them all out and inject them, and path them with little mortar fills that are color matched,” Miller said. ​“We’re going to get rid of this awful, caulking material that’s trapping material.” 

The bronze of the honor roll plaques that list the names of the fallen heroes from WWI will also be restored.

“They’re going to maintain an age quality to it, but you’ll be able to read the names again,” Miller said. ​“This is important, because it’s a central marker for the city of New Haven here on the Green.”

Miller said that before the memorial was built, there was a flagpole on the Green. That had gone under different design iterations. It was finally decided that the WWI monument would be built, and that became the focal point of the New Haven Green. 

“I assessed the monument two years ago, and we wrote up a very detailed report, and then I did sample treatments on the monument to see how the materials would behave,” Miller said. ​“We did stone cleaning tests.”

Another factor that comes into play: the fountain. Miller said that history is evolving and knows that a lot of people enjoy the monument because of the fountain.

“It creates a really beautiful atmosphere, but there is a lot of moisture that wicks up into the stone and that’s not really great for this historic monument,” Miller said. ​“But that’s one of the reasons why we’re going to remove the old repairs, because all of this caulking material traps water in the stone. We’re going to take all of that out and use mortar so that it breathes more, and whips out the moisture.”

Miller said that they’re going to take the step to allow the stone to breathe and continue to monitor it.

“If there are any long-term damages that look like they are occurring, then we’ll have to try and find a way to mitigate that,” Miller said. ​“But we’re taking such detailed photography that we’ll be able to monitor any new cracks in the stone.”

Those photographs shot by Miller document the conditions of the monument before treatment and will be used as a follow-up to monitor the progression of the aging of the stone.

“It’s important to document this now so that when we start cleaning it, we know where our ground zero point was,” Miller said. ​“We can now monitor any effects of the stone. Good or bad. Let’s say something happened that really wasn’t wanted — then we’ll be able to go back and look at the photographs, and see if those conditions existed beforehand.”

The next step involves removing all of the bronze and treating it at Miller’s studio at Conserve Art LLC to start the cleaning process.

Miller, who lives in Hamden, stumbled into conservation while working in Chicago during the 1990s. He moved to New Haven in 1995.

“My background is in sculpture. I have a strong interest in engineering and architecture,” Miller said. ​“Preservation blends all of those interests together. I feel blessed to be able to treat and preserve our history.”