Church almost ready to move

How do you move a 120-ton church?

With 12 tons of steel beams, hydraulic house jacks that can lift 300 tons, and a crew of very patient men.

Converting the church into a Montessori junior high school will take a different kind of power - money, mental fortitude and wise design.

On a sunny Thursday morning this week, a couple dozen fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade students from the Willow Glen Montessori School in Kalispell were on hand to witness the 90-foot-long St. Catherine's Catholic Church in Bigfork being hoisted off its foundation.

It's the building that Jeff and Stephanie Pernell bought for their future Flathead Valley Montessori Academy, a seventh- and eighth-grade junior high they will pilot this fall - along with a full-bore Montessori preschool expansion taught by Sally Welder.

It will open full-force in fall 2007.

But their building site is a few miles to the northwest, on North Somers Road.

Thus, a move of sizable proportions was in order.

As chance would have it, logistics for house-mover Steve Kinniburgh and his crew didn't quite mesh with the students' time schedule, so they missed the actual lift.

It turned out to be no loss, as teachers Terry Welder and David Cummings turned the event into a multiple-day lesson on how simple machines - levers, pulleys, inclines and the like - are used in real life.

And on Wednesday, they learned a bit about hydraulics as one of Kinniburgh's house jacks lifted three of the students to a truck flatbed with ease.

The house-mover became the instructor Thursday as students and teachers crowded around Kinniburgh, listening to his description of the move and quizzing him on nearly every facet:

-The holes cut in the 1958-vintage church's foundation made way for steel beams salvaged from an old bridge, which provided support for the building.

-Sixty tires will go under the rig as the church moves down the road.

-Traveling in mid- to late-March over Montana 82 across the Flathead River, the five-foot-high platform of beams and church floor will just clear the 4 1/2-foot-high bridge railings.

nState regulations allow travel only during the day and only Monday through Friday.

"Have you ever moved a brick house?" Cummings asked.

"Yeah," Kinniburgh replied. "I move those in dump trucks!"

Architect Bryan Schutt is well along in design for the new school, which will incorporate two factory-built additions, a backyard commons facing the mountains west of U.S. 93 and, in Phase 2, a student-built greenhouse and possibly a basketball court. Students also will have access to wetlands just below the new site.

For now, the church will sit on its old site until the way is cleared for the big move by the end of March.

Then students will be back on the scene, eagerly watching as their future rolls down the highway.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com.