Home > Featured Articles > Fall 1999 Feature

Our Crew is Too Busy to Write Home!

by Shawn Barrett

Our crew has been traveling all over the United States in recent months. June holds the assembly record with three projects in one month.

Echo Meadows Church of God, in Oregon, Ohio is a 70'x88' rectangle which uses a laminated beam superstructure.

At the beginning of June, our road crew headed for Tennessee and Mississippi. Their first stop was Memphis’ Greater St. John Missionary Baptist Church, where they constructed an 80' geodesic dome. We have been working with this church and Pastor Lewis for 12 years. Our hearts went out to Pastor as Mrs. Lewis passed away shortly before our assembly crew arrived. The church’s general contractor, Mr. Fred Fields of Economy Remodeling and Construction, helped to keep the project moving along. We will soon be working with Mr. Fields on an octagon for Holy Temple House of Deliverance.

After Pastor Lewis’ project, the crew headed straight to Concord, Mississippi (only an hour away), to build a 90' dome for the Concord Missionary Baptist Church. This was our second project with the father and daughter team of C & C General Construction. We worked with them in November on a 120' octagon for Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church of Byhalia, Mississippi.

On June 19, our crew arrived home for a short breather because the schedule had them in Westland, Michigan, on the 22nd. The 120' geodesic dome for Sts. Simon and Jude Catholic Church was a great challenge for them to end the month with.

Father Bechard, of Sts. Simon and Jude, had visited St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church (90' geodesic dome), during it’s building process, and felt this style of building would fulfill his church’s needs. The building committee of Sts. Simon and Jude decided to hire the same general contractor, Bernie Cativera of Bernco, Inc. Father is proud to have the largest geodesic dome church in Michigan. Their dedication is scheduled for October 28, 1999, which also happens to be Sts. Simon and Jude’s Feast Day.

June was over and we could not have been prouder. Our crew put in a lot of hard work.

On August 9, we began assembling a 100' octagon for Revival Fellowship Church in New Castle, Delaware. We enjoyed working with J. Deramo Contractors and hope to work with them again. This is the second octagon we have built with the cupola option. We are sure that many of our church families will be requesting this feature in the future. We have been friends with Monnie Dorsey and her father, Pastor Koonce, of Revival Fellowship over three years. We only have one piece of advice for Monnie: "take your vacation now, you have worked hard for it."

Labor Day came and went and we were off to Oregon, Ohio to work with ADECO, Inc., on our fourth project together. We have built three geodesic domes with ADECO (Elkhart, IN, Cambridge, OH, and Clayton, OH), however, Echo Meadows Church of Christ had something different in mind. Our crew assembled a 70'x88' rectangle that will tie into their existing structure. We hope ADECO will be adding more UCS laminated arch buildings to their portfolio.

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