He showed Paris some love — and some specialty carpentry skills.
Jackson DuBois, a 49-year-old from Cooperstown, NY, spent three months in France last year working to rebuild the 850-year-old Notre Dame Cathedral, which was severely damaged by a fire in April 2019.
After an estimated $767 million in repairs by skilled craftspeople from around the world, it is set to reopen to the public Dec. 8.
“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” DuBois told The Post of being part of the restoration.
DuBois specializes in timber framing — a traditional building technique that was popular before the 20th century and involves using heavy pieces of timber, not slender wooden two-by-fours or steel beams, for construction.
He’s restored historic barns and other agricultural buildings in Upstate New York for both private clients and museums and worked on landmarks in Estonia, Denmark, Poland and the United Kingdom. His timber-framing skills are relatively rare. The Timber Framers’ Guild, for which he serves as Executive Director, only has around 2,000 members.
The Notre Dame job came to DuBois in a roundabout manner.
In the summer of 2021, he joined a 40-strong team of other American carpenters in Washington, DC, on the Handshouse Truss project. The group worked off of original drawings to hand-build an identical replica of one of Notre-Dame’s giant trusses to raise awareness for the cathedral’s plight and show solidarity with their French counterparts.
Their efforts caught the eye of Notre Dame’s lead architect, Phillippe Villeneuve, who invited some of the Americans to come work on the cathedral.
DuBois was the perfect man for the job. Not only is he skilled in historical carpentry techniques, he also has French heritage dating back to the Huguenots who fled France to settle in New York state in the 17th century. His last name even means “of wood” in French.
But, he admitted his language skills aren’t amazing.
“My French is quite poor. In France they seem quite disgusted by the way I even pronounce my name,” he said. “Sometimes, they would just call me ‘New York’ instead … Luckily, we all spoke the universal language of carpentry.”
DuBois was one of a handful of Americans to work on Notre Dame. He and Michael Burrey, a Boston-based builder who also worked on the Handshouse Truss project, were both part of a team based in Thouars in the Loire valley — about 200 miles from Paris.
They were tasked with rebuilding the base of the Notre Dame spire and adding profiles on all of the gothic tracery around the windows, including the trefoils, quadrafoils and balustrades.
The work was quite challenging.
“In the States, timber framers would rarely be required to reproduce ornate gothic carving and I had some pretty deep anxiety about the prospect of being asked to do it,” DuBois said.
To honor the original builders, the team relied heavily on centuries-old tools like twin-headed chisels; an array of old rasps, axes and gouges; and bisaiguës or twybils, a simple hand tool designed for carving and chopping green wood.
“For the most part we used traditional methods just as they did originally, but the occasional power tool may have been involved,” he joked.
Tools and work clothes were all provided for workers, but the 6-foot-9 DuBois couldn’t fit in the standard uniform. He was initially told they would make him a custom outfit, but, he said “that didn’t come to fruition.”
For the three months he was there, DuBois was paid the standard rate for experienced French carpenters, roughly 27 euros an hour.
“[It] covered my bills but [it was] nothing that would make me wealthy,” said DuBois, whose wife remained in New York while he was abroad. “[But] It was worth it to write ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ on my time card.”
A French-Tunisian woman Delilah provided room and board.
“She became a great friend,” he said.
He spent his downtime riding his bike in the countryside, visiting local markets and canoeing on the Loire River. But, it was no vacation.
“I still had to do my laundry,” he joked.
It was, however, an experience he’ll never forget.
“It’s a sobering realization knowing you’ve just done the coolest thing you will ever do,” he said. “Where do you go from here?”
DuBois isn’t the only New Yorker who has lent a hand with the efforts to rebuild Notre Dame.
The French Heritage Society, based on the Upper East Side, launched a Notre-Dame Fire Restoration Fund and raised $2.6 million.
“When I first saw the images of the fire, I felt a combination of shock and sadness but that quickly turned into a sense of responsibility to do something,” Jennifer Herlein, the organization’s Executive Director, told The Post.
On November 8, the cathedral’s bells rang out for the first time since the fire, ahead of the opening next month.
DuBois hasn’t seen the rebuilt Notre Dame but hopes to visit soon.
“It’s incredible to think that all these people can come together, from all over the world, to put this place back together,” he said. “It’s a beautiful celebration of humanity – and the world needs that.”
