# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1884_S35
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Fourth Delegate Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. 1884.   35

It was further said that no one would complain if the building had
come to stand 10 percent higher; but the building sum actually spent
exceeded it by as much as 33⅓ percent, or about $15,000.

Prompted by the accusation raised against him, the architect
submitted the following statement to the Synod:

"I had made my first calculations not for the sum of $85,000, but
for the sum of $93,500; I had, however, assumed that, in letting out
the contracts, the building could be produced for $85,000, if the
lowest possible bids were accepted. That this did not in the end happen
has its reason in the rise in the prices of material and wages; further, in
the fact that various items of work, particularly with a view to
ornamentation, were added during construction; and further because
the excavation work, which could not be determined beforehand, turned
out to be more extensive. As for the estimates, these were made either
by me, or else by contractors generally recognized here as competent,
and recalculated by me, except as regards work that architects
themselves do not calculate. It was chiefly in these latter calculations
that the estimate fell furthest short of the actual execution. I accepted
these bids and relied on them. Signed, Chas. F. May."

However strongly it was, on the one hand, censured that the
building committee had let the sum of $100,000 approved by the Synod
for all the buildings it had been commissioned to carry out grow to
$140,000 or perhaps more, on the other hand — though no one was in
the least inclined to approve of the building committee's conduct in
exceeding the sum approved by the Synod — a good deal was also urged
that could serve, to some extent, as an excuse for the building
committee on this occasion. Wholly filled with the thought of achieving,
to the fullest degree, what the Synod had wished to see accomplished —
namely a handsome, solid building, equipped with the best possible
facilities for health and comfort — it set to work without a moment's
doubt that it could manage well with the sum approved by the Synod. It
placed the direction of the building in the hands of a man who had the
reputation of being a highly capable master builder. As soon as the
committee realized that everything was turning out, under the
architect's hands, more handsome and more solid than the approved
sum allowed for, it was already no longer in its power to call a halt to
the matter. Besides the rise in the cost of building material and wages,
other unfortunate circumstances also arose. For example, at the laying
of the foundation a deep sinkhole was struck that had to be filled in;
this alone was a piece of work that swallowed up several thousand
dollars. — One could, to be sure, hardly expect our congregations, who
had no insight

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