As one side of the 8-foot double door was removed from its hinges on Friday morning, four men positioned themselves so they could carry the arch-top fixture into the yard of the Pennsylvania National Guard Armory.

Fifteen minutes later, the other side of the three-ply planking was off its hinges and being carried, again by four men, to the back of a pickup truck.

“We want to preserve our military history, from the Civil War to the present day,” said Tom Gray, a 20-year Army veteran who wants to create a military museum in Blair County.

When Gray, founder and president of the Greater Pennsylvania Military Preservation Association, heard the Armory along Frankstown Road would be torn down, he contacted owner Sanjiv Patel of Bedford and asked for the building’s front doors and lettering.

Gray envisions using those items when re-creating the front of historic structure inside the future military museum. While a location for the museum is not yet firm, Gray said he can store the doors until then.

“Those door were built to be strong,” said John Wagner, another member of the military preservation association, looking over the multiple square-head pegs used in construction of the castle-like door. “They had to be because this building was built for defense.”

The 1938 structure was originally used as a horse cavalry, Ken Hollen of Altoona, a member of the Central Pennsylvania National Guard Veterans Association, said. But for most of its 77 years, the Armory was a site of military training and ceremonies.

“There was an indoor rifle range in there at one time,” Gray said. “When I was in high school, we had a group that came up here and trained with the guard. It was like the highlight of my life.”

Bob Airhart of Altoona remembers when his federation baseball team used the large training room for some fielding, pitching and catching practice.

“That was probably 1972, after Hurricane Agnes,” Airhart said. “We had so much rain that we couldn’t use our fields for practice. But our coach was a national guard member so he brought the team up here.”

Wagner, who grew up in the Garden Heights area, said the grounds of the Armory used to be the place for watching fireworks set off in Lakemont.

“The whole neighborhood used to come up here,” he said. “It was higher ground and we could see everything. That would have been in the 1960s and ’70s.”

While volunteers from a local rehabilitation facility assisted with Friday’s removal of the building’s heavy doors, Earthmovers Unlimited Inc. of Kylertown continued preparing the structure for demolition.

“We’ve had a lot of preliminary work to do, and some erosion and sediment control measures to set up,” Earthmovers owner John Niebauer Jr. said Friday. “We’re probably going to be ready by Monday or Tuesday to pull it down.”

Earthmovers employee Shawn Cuomo said he

doesn’t anticipate any issues with demolition.

“If there’s any difficulty, it will be the (a concrete) floor,” Cuomo said. “It could be a foot thick.”

Once demolition work is finished, Patel, who bought the property last year from the state for $2.1 million, will be in a position to move forward with plans for hotel on the site close to Interstate 99. Before the sale was completed, Logan Township approved a zoning change that allows the site to be available for business development.

In anticipation of the demolition, the state arranged for a recording of information relevant to the historic building, Howard Pollman, spokesman for the state Historical and Museum Commission, said Thursday.

That information, Pollman said, is on file at the state museum in Harrisburg.

Mirror Staff Writer Kay Stephens is at 946-7456.