In 1996, Joe McCarthy and Tony Zaya, along with two others, formed Lancaster County Timber Frames Inc. With a decade of timber framing experience under their belts and a contract for a large timber framed restaurant, they jumped into business together with a goal of creating excellent timber frame structures. After some exciting projects and many learning experiences, the company began to earn a great reputation for hand-crafted quality and excellent customer service with a personal touch. A few years later, Josh Coleman and Amy Good joined up with the company to fill leadership roles in the Design Department and Finance Administration, respectively. As the company grew, we took on new and unique projects that pushed us outside of our comfort zone, not only in design, carpentry, and installation, but also in finance management and dealing with the complicated paperwork for commercial projects. This adventurous spirit, and the lessons that we learned along the way, has allowed us to raise the bar in our craftsmanship, customer service, and overall project management. Today we have an exciting blend of culture, craftsmanship, and collaboration that makes our workday experience satisfying, fulfilling, and fun. While Timber Framing is still hard work and there are still tedious tasks, the satisfaction of crafting beautiful structures, such as our timber frames, is extremely rewarding.

In the three decades since the company started, we have cut and carved over 750? timber frames in our little shop on Prospect Rd. We have worked on extremely large and complicated frames requiring weeks of coordination as well as small front porches that can be set in a day. Each project receives the same attention to detail from the design process, through the cutting and carving, all the way to raising day. About half of our projects are commercial and the other half are residential and we work directly with homeowners, often with G.C’s, and occasionally with municipalities. In the early days, our frames were simple and strictly featured mortise & tenon joinery. As opportunities for new projects presented themselves, we have expanded into projects that require steel plates and glue-laminated timbers due to engineering requirements, and the complexity of the jobs we are able to take on is constantly expanding. We have repaired or replaced over fifteen covered bridges throughout the years, some of them complete re-builds though most were repaired in place. All of this is to say that we love pushing beyond the standard designs and growing in our expertise and capacity for new and different types of structures, all the while, prioritizing the core values of our traditional hand-crafted timber frames.

Over the years we have employed, taught, and mentored over one hundred craftsmen and draftsmen that have come alongside us for a time, learning along the way, and hopefully growing in skill and character. Each of them has also contributed their perspective and insight to our process, procedures, and traditions which has elevated the collective experience of working at LCTF. We now enjoy a community of young timber framers that are growing in skill and experience along with the rest of our team. Each of them work together to create beautifully crafted timber frames and grow in their craft, while earning a living to support their families. We look forward to the future full of many interesting projects, maintaining the stable and sustainable careers that our craftsmen enjoy, and continuing to improve in quality and integrity while promoting the historic craft of Timber Framing.