Historical buildings require specialized skills to repair and maintain. Pros to do that work are in short supply.

For Wendy Ney Manley and Tim Manley, fixing up their centuries-old Pottstown farmhouse has taken over two decades and counting. “People who restore old homes are a rare breed,” Wendy said.

The house may date back to the late 1700s. When they bought it, some sections were “down to the studs” from earlier renovations, Wendy said.

The work it needed was complex enough that just getting started was tough. After several false starts, a hiatus of several years, and a lucky word-of-mouth tip, the Manleys found West Chester-based R&B Restoration Carpentry.

So far R&B partners James Breen and Matthew Roberson, along with their crew members, have spent over 300 hours restoring 40-some decaying original windows on the Manley’s home. And “we’re not done yet,” Breen said.

Their work included, for example, rebuilding original details from over 200 years ago, and to do that with care takes time.

“Part of it is knowing where the suppliers are,” said Roberson, who was a planning consultant before he became a carpenter.

Since Breen and Roberson joined forces in 2018, the company’s projects have included restorations of a log house in Elverson, Chester County; the cupola of the town hall in Old New Castle, Del.; cornice and dormer repairs at a historical home in Bryn Mawr designed by architect Horace Trumbauer; and restoration work at the Wilmington Friends Meeting House.

Their team doesn’t just make cosmetic fixes to the properties they work on, instead they aim “to find the cause of the problem,” Breen said.

“It will just rot again if the cause isn’t identified and corrected,” Breen explained. “We don’t want to get a call to repair something we installed.”

For companies like R&B, the demand for work is high, and the supply of contractors that can do it right is low.

Of an estimated 96 million buildings in the United States, just over 40% are more than 50 years old, according to a 2022 workforce report commissioned by the Campaign for Historic Trades, an organization that aims to raise the profile of the historic trades.

Meanwhile, restoration proposals for properties like this have gotten more inventive.

Megan McNish, eastern region community preservation coordinator for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, said commercial spaces were in greater demand about five years ago, but lately residential projects have increased. Those kinds of projects include The Battery, a vacant power station in Fishtown that’s becoming apartments.

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Repurposing religious properties is also an increasingly popular undertaking. Perhaps the best-known is the conversion of the Zion Baptist Church annex in North Philadelphia, vacant since the early 2000s, to the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan Community Impact Center.

“Each year over the next decade, there will be more than 10,000 job openings in the historic trades,” a Campaign for Historic Trades report states. “This deficiency of an appropriately trained workforce puts the built heritage of the United States at risk.”

Breen, 45, has seen that firsthand. He said it’s a challenge to find crew members who can pick up the needed skills quickly — not many younger people are going into restoration work, he said. He expressed particular concern about the retirement of traditional tradespeople such as plasterers and blacksmiths.

The Campaign for Historic Trades, launched in Maryland in 2019, seeks to highlight solutions to skilled workforce shortages.

Natalie Henshaw, director of historic trades, said that the agency is working on curriculum development and that within about a year, it hopes to have a formal apprenticeship program registered with the U.S. Department of Labor. Shoring up the preservation workforce serves a larger purpose, she says.

“Historic structures are much more emblematic of people and place than modern construction,” Henshaw said. “They’re built to be sustainable. They tell more of a story.”

By 2030, as many as 462,000 buildings will be added to the National Register of Historic Places, the Campaign’s 2022 report said.

It identified 10 specific job categories and the shortages of appropriately skilled craftspeople in each, ranging from a shortfall of 1,620 glaziers to a deficit of 36,000 plumbers and electricians.

“The causes of worker shortage are multiple,” the report states, including “a disinclination of young people to enter the field” and the small size of most firms specializing in it. Insurance challenges are also a factor, Manley noted.

One upside, the report stated, is how workers who get training in historic preservation can usually make more money than craftspeople without that skill set.

“There are a lot of pathways for people to get trained,” Henshaw said. While her organization is looking to establish an apprenticeship program, some opportunities already exist.

R&B, for its part, has instituted its own apprenticeship program to help fill the talent gap.

And at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, the Preservation Trades Center, working with building trade unions, has offered apprenticeship programs in masonry and carpentry. Through this program, which looks to connect with aspiring tradespeople in underrepresented communities, apprentices learn through their work on the penitentiary structure, built in 1829.

Bucks County Community College also offers a two-year associate degree program in historic preservation.

Andrew Staples, 35, got his start in working on older buildings through his father’s plumbing and heating business in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and now he’s a restoration carpenter for the Fairmount Park Conservancy.

He hasn’t seen many other young people going into the trades, he said. But the work is plentiful.

The conservancy‘s five-person conservation staff concentrates on carpentry, masonry, and plastering. Most recently, Staples has been restoring original windows on the Sweetbriar Mansion, a Federal-style structure built in 1797.

The conservancy’s other restoration projects have included FDR Park’s welcome center, stables, a guard house from 1916, and decorative urns. They have also helped restore a trolley bridge.

One of the more unusual projects was replacing a door on the Chamounix Mansion after the 1802 structure was hit by a car.

Tara Rasheed, the group’s senior director of capital projects, said this work “has become a bit of a boutique trade” requiring knowledge of traditional building methods.

While budding apprenticeship programs are aiming to pull more young people into restoration, Rasheed also notes that restoration craftspeople often enter the niche by way of a different field. R&B Restoration Carpentry’s Roberson, as a former planning consultant, is one example.

“A lot of our people are artists,” she said, drawn to the opportunity to help beautiful old structures find new life, using the methods that worked for generations.

“This is the way we used to build things,” she said. “The Pantheon, the pyramids.”