Greg Albert couldn’t believe his ears.

The man on the local TV news said something about the free use of tools. All you had to do was sign up, reserve what you needed, then come pick it up.

“He said the address and he said ‘free.’ I said, ‘I can afford that!’ I went down there to see what they had, thinking ‘What’s the catch?’

“Well, there ain’t been no catch.”

Albert soon tapped into Historic Macon Rehabs’ new tool library, and he has become one of its most prolific customers. The new program offers all kinds of yard and construction tools that folks can borrow — for free — for their projects.

In the last month, Albert’s initiative has shown that preservation and restoration involve far more than just lumber, hammers and nails. Now that he’s a regular customer, he’s spreading the word too. Not only is he using the tools to make his own yard look better, he’s going up and down Lilly Avenue, in the Unionville neighborhood, helping his neighbors, many of whom are older.

“Something about this fired me up,” he said. “It gave me inspiration.”

Greg Albert makes the neighborhood field look better.

Early one recent morning, he was across the street from his home starting to mow an open field — well over an acre — that kids in the neighborhood use to play ball. But he also had a blower that he walks up and down the street with, clearing off leaves, dirt, cigarette butts and whatever’s in his path.

Ivory Manning was grabbing a breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast on his front porch before heading off to a painting job. He said Albert mowed his yard recently.

“We watch out for one another over here,” the 65-year-old said. “I’m proud to be his neighbor.”

Arthur Hall, another friend, stopped to chat while driving by.

He said he was looking out a window at home one day and saw Albert blowing away debris near his home.

“He went to the end of the street. The next thing I know, he’s coming back around on the other side of the street. He gets out there like he’s a teenager.” (Albert will turn 70 on July 3.)

“If you find a better neighbor than him, it’s God sent,” Hall said. “That’s a good man.”

Added Tracey Jackson, another neighbor: “He does something just about every day. … I tell him to get out of the heat.”

‘PEOPLE LOVE IT’

Reed Purvis explains the new tool library to Channel 13’s Suzanne Lawler.

Reed Purvis, who oversees the program for Historic Macon Rehabs, said the word is slowly getting out about the new program, which is run through the MyTurn platform (https://bit.ly/35DFvSb). It began May 18.

For many, the concept is strange at first. As Historic Macon worked on the program, it connected with The Well CDC in Akron, Ohio, (https://thewellakron.com/) and picked up good tips for a successful program. Purvis also talked to representatives of the Asheville (N.C.) Tool Library to glean their best practices.

So far, Macon homeowners have signed up for 55 tool loans. Leaf blowers have been the most popular. (There are no gas-powered tools. They’re either corded or have batteries.)

“It’s going really well,” Purvis said. “I definitely expected more wood-working tools to be checked out. We could have spent more money on yard equipment.”

The program was able to stretch its buying dollars thanks to a generous discount on tools from Riverside Ace Hardware.

Judging by responses from those returning tools and comments he’s seen on social media, “People love it,” Purvis said. “I’ve only gotten positive feedback.”

A couple of people have said they wish the program offered a chain saw they could borrow. So that option may be coming in the near future.

It’s all part of an ambitious initiative to boost the trades presence in Macon. Historic Macon Rehabs hired three preservation carpentry apprentices for a 10-week program, training them for entry-level construction jobs. The nonprofit also has begun a series of Saturday workshops to equip homeowners with the knowledge to tackle basic projects on their own. A grant from the Watson-Brown Foundation funded the pilot programs.

The quality of tools in the tool library has impressed Albert.

Before he started taking advantage of the new program, he had to use “whatever I could find, whenever I could find it.” He had no equipment, and even if he did, he has no place to store tools. (“My house is too small.”)

And if you borrow from a friend, “if it breaks down on my shift, it’s my fault.”

Albert and his wife, Sheridan, moved from Oakland to Macon — where she grew up — in 2003, when she took a teaching job with the Seventh-day Adventist school system. He was born and raised in Oakland, and he’s a big Raiders fan.

He has a ready smile and friendly nature, and it was clear during a recent visit how much his neighbors like him and appreciate all the work he’s doing.

But Albert isn’t one to toot his own horn (“It’s just being neighborly.”)

He’s trying to make a small difference in his neighborhood in a way that he can.

And in doing so, he hopes he can inspire others to follow suit.

“People notice me with good-quality tools,” he said. “I try to introduce them to the tool library. I tell ’em, “You don’t have to wait for one. You can do it yourself. People see that it’s working.

“And it’s great for me,” he said. “It has me planning more projects.”

Bartholomew Duhart’s work always attracted attention.

He was just a builder, a general contractor. But he never was satisfied with the conventional. Whenever he could, he thought up unusual touches that set his work apart.

If you’ve ever driven down Pio Nono Avenue, near the Frank Johnson Recreation Center, you’ve seen one of his creations. Off the side of the road, in the 1600 block, sits a cemetery beside what is now the Jesus Mission of Love Holiness Church. You can’t miss the big arches at the entrance.

The cemetery arches on Pio Nono Avenue. (Photo by Oby Brown)

Duhart designed and built them, a tribute to his mother and father, who are buried there.

In fact, the arc of much of his life’s work stretches across the adjacent Unionville neighborhood. That’s where you’ll find much of his genius.

At least what’s still standing.

Cecilia Duhart Taylor and her husband, James. (Photo by Oby Brown)

Some artists have to sketch or paint. Others work in clay. Duhart was a gifted builder, driven to create in a way you’d never seen. He was fascinated with curves and circular shapes.

“He would always think out of the box,” said Cecilia Duhart Taylor, the oldest of his three daughters. “He loved doing unusual buildings and brickwork. He wanted to catch your eye and make you wonder what it was.

Photo by Wini McQueen, courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Sciences.

“He didn’t think of run-of-the-mill work. … A lot of people would ask him to build for them because they knew it was going to be unusual.

“It was truly his gift. … He was one of a kind.”

Duhart’s studies at Ballard-Hudson Senior High School, including masonry classes, helped stake the course of his career. Later, he took building-related classes at night — mechanical drawing, blueprint reading — through the Masonry Union to enhance his skills.

Duhart — friends called him “Bart” or “Sugar” — married the love of his life, Clara, when she was 19. Clara lives in the Atlanta area now with one of her daughters.

In a 1978 interview with fabric artist Wini McQueen, Duhart discussed one of his most memorable projects: a multilevel, 1,200-square-foot restaurant on the site of what was then called the Unionville Recreation Center. It had six circular windows, each of them 8 feet in diameter.

He explained it this way to McQueen: “Circular windows seemed special to me. I’d never seen another building with six (such) windows.”

“He was always putting something circular in almost everything he built,” Taylor said.

It stood for just 18 months, though, before Duhart sold the property to the city of Macon to build the rec center.

Two other projects still stand nearby, although they’ve seen better days.

They’re both off Columbus Road, just before its intersection with Mercer University Drive.

Duhart built one of them in the late ’80s, said James Taylor, Cecilia’s husband. An old photo that McQueen took shows him in front of the building with the sign In Spirit Saving Bank in the background. Its last use was a Chicken Wings & More restaurant. There are arches on top and whimsical touches all around the site now, including a stone rooster atop semicircular layers of red brick.

Behind it stands what must have been the talk of the neighborhood at the time: a prayer tower. It looks like a space-age treehouse. It sits on a huge metal pedestal. The prayer room itself is about 12 feet across and more than 8 feet off the ground. Many of its windows are shattered, though, and some of the copper shingles are long gone.

He “got sidetracked” on the tower and never finished it, James Taylor said. “He had a lot more work than he could ever do. He always wanted to do it all himself.”

But he made time for fun too.

Years ago, there used to be a Black heritage festival in and around Washington Park each spring. It included a parade. Taylor remembers her father building a miniature replica of a church — big enough for her and other children to stand inside — so they could wave out the windows to spectators along the parade route.

Duhart built homes — some for his five brothers and two sisters — and churches too (Two of them are on Log Cabin Road.) He and his brother James once ran Duhart Brothers & Builders.

Another brother, Harold, “the one who is a professional architect, says about my work: “It certainly cannot be put on paper,” Duhart said during McQueen’s interview. “And in fact much of what I do is too complicated to draw. ... He often says I am the one who should have been the architect.”

He once had the “wild idea” of becoming a professor. “But I simply told myself that if by any chance that plan failed, I’d settle for nothing less than being a professional.”

His projects were always on his mind. “I put an unlimited amount of planning into these structures,” he said. “How much? At night, in the morning, during my working hours. I kept my mind on these things.”

Said Taylor, “He knew it like breathing. He could think up something in his mind and draw it out.”

‘WE WERE INVISIBLE’

McQueen was one of the first people to take note of Duhart.

In the late ’70s, she set out to incorporate different aspects of Black life “into the history of white Macon.” She wanted to “find and document Black people as the builders of this material world that we live in in Macon.”

“We were invisible,” she said.

“I began my search without knowing a lot of people at all.” She was looking in particular for artists and workers in skilled trades.

Her daily travels often took her down Montpelier Avenue. Each time there she saw “a gigantic, arching sculpture, maybe 20 feet high” made of “slanted legs of brick” in front of a simple white house.

“That was the structure that attracted me to Duhart’s work,” she said. (It’s no longer standing.)

Notes from McQueen’s 1978 interview with Duhart.

Soon she had reached out to Duhart and scheduled an interview with him.

“He was such a self-contained, self-made person,” she said. “Very quiet, soft-spoken. He seemed to be very spiritual.”

His projects, she said, “attracted me because they were so African-like — round windows, … doors that were different.”

A collage of Duhart’s work was part of McQueen’s 1999 exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Sciences titled “Make Do: African American Crafts in Central Georgia.”

She worries that his story and his legacy, like that of so many other talented Black achievers, will be lost to time.

“You can’t find anything visual about him,” she said. “In the Black community, you don’t have … the leisure to create these records. So these stories, especially of Black Americans’ histories, get erased. It’s destruction of our history. Duhart is a perfect example.”

She added, “He was a visionary. If society had been more open to him, we would have had more to celebrate. … I want his memory to stay with us.”

Cecilia Taylor feels the same way.

She is proud of her dad. And it’s not just because of the things he built. His father was a minister, and Duhart, in 1980, answered the call to the ministry himself.

He died in 2006. He would have been 85 years old this year. Family members had been planning a 50th-anniversary wedding celebration for him and Clara right before he died.

All during his life, he looked for ways to give second chances to folks who needed a break, even if they’d just gotten out of prison.

“He tried to get them on the right track,” Taylor said. “He would make you feel like you had dignity. He really wanted to help our people, the downtrodden, the thrown away. He had a compassionate heart.”

She still runs into people today whose stories about her dad begin this way:

“Your father helped me become a brick mason.”

“I had no tools, and he gave me my start by loaning me some.”

She remembers the stories they told about him at his funeral, which lasted more than 3 ½ hours.

“They were mind-boggling. Just to hear all those things he had done. … I had no idea.

“Every big pastor in Macon was there,” she said. “All of ’em knew Daddy. I was so proud.”

Many days, when she’s out and about near one of his old work sites, Taylor thinks of her dad and feels a tug to stop, which she does sometimes.

“You can’t imagine that one person could build the way he did,” she said. “Now, I just want to touch the brick he touched.”

‘SOMETHING ABOUT THIS FIRED ME UP’

‘He knew it like breathing’

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