In November 2019 we were asked to clean the bronze Mountaineer statue that stands outside WVU’s Mountainlair in Morgantown. It had not been washed since it was dedicated on 2 October 1971 — close to fifty years. We did it the day before Thanksgiving.
Why a landmark is not just a big house wash
The statue is a Donald De Lue bronze, and bronze develops a patina over decades that is part of the artwork rather than dirt sitting on top of it. The university was clear about that from the start: they wanted the grime off and the patina left alone. Nobody wanted it coming out looking like a new penny.
That rules out almost everything a pressure washer would normally reach for. Too much pressure and you take the patina with the dirt, and there is no putting it back. Too little and you are just wetting it down.
So we built the tool for the job — a custom spray nozzle system that gave us controlled volume without the pressure. Mitch had a patent pending on it at the time. As he put it to the Dominion Post about the off-the-shelf alternatives:
Those things you buy to hook up to your garden hose don’t give you enough pressure.
Why we bring it up
Because it is the clearest example of what we actually do. Most of our work is soft wash house washing and roof cleaning, and the principle is identical: work out what the surface will tolerate, then use chemistry and technique instead of force. Brick, painted wood, stucco, cedar shake, asphalt shingle and fifty-year-old bronze all fail in different ways when somebody points a turbo nozzle at them.
If a university will let you near an irreplaceable landmark on those terms, your siding is not going to be a problem.
The coverage
The Dominion Post wrote it up on 7 December 2019: Mountaineer statue gets first cleaning in nearly 50 years. You can find the rest of our local coverage on our in the news page.
We work Morgantown out of a Morgantown shop
Our Morgantown location is at 1896 Grafton Road, and we cover Monongalia and Preston counties from it — Star City, Westover, Granville, Suncrest, Cheat Lake, Sabraton and Kingwood. See our Morgantown pressure washing page, or get a quote in about two minutes.
