At Madison’s Montpelier, a search through time

By Tasha Kates

Published: July 5, 2008

Second in a three-part series.

MONTPELIER STATION — James and Dolley Madison’s Montpelier is swarming with people adding final touches to the mansion.

They are repairing and cleaning the floors, priming and painting the walls and adding topsoil to the landscape. All these finishing touches are being done to restore the home to reflect what the Madisons saw when they walked its grounds and through its halls.

The $24 million, multi-year restoration finally is coming to a close this year.

Although the exterior of the historic home will be completed, Montpelier staffers have another big job ahead of them — finding the furniture, objects, wallpaper and paintings that were once inside the Madison homestead.

At this point, Montpelier’s staff has not identified how much money it will take to restore the interior of the home. Montpelier’s curatorial staff is hoping to furnish four rooms in the mansion in three years — the drawing room, dining room, Mother Madison’s Best Room and James Madison’s study.

“Beyond 2011, much of the interiors’ work will be dependent on what objects come to light and again how much funding we have to put toward this effort,” said Allison Deeds, acting curator. “The mansion restoration has been done so authentically that we will maintain that bar of excellence for the research and installation of furnishings and decorative arts for the mansion’s interiors.”

Inside the walls

Clues to the Madisons’ lifestyle still exist despite the passage of many years. Bits of wallpaper and painted plaster found in rats’ nests and visitors’ accounts of the home are just some of the evidence that experts are using to discern what the inside of Montpelier looked like.

Mark Wenger, an architectural historian who started working on the project in 2001, said recreating Montpelier’s interior involves careful interpretation.

“Montpelier is a historical document like any document,” Wenger said. “This is a source of facts about James and Dolley Madison that is not knowable in any other way. It’s kind of an unedited statement of who James Madison was and how he wanted to live.”

Some of that information was hidden beneath layers of paint and plaster. Gardiner Hallock, Montpelier’s director of architectural research, said the staff recorded the placement of all of the nail holes through 1880. As they worked through the walls, the staff took pictures to document each layer of the Madison mansion.

Visitor accounts chronicled where the paintings were located, and some of them mentioned the subject and painter of the works. The nail holes indicated where and how certain paintings were held, but they didn’t stay there forever.

“We think they moved paintings, especially after Mother Madison died,” Hallock said, referring to the president’s mother.

Multiple samples of paint and wallpaper were found in rats’ nests and on the doors themselves. The paint, which contained linseed oil, probably has become darker over time, Hallock said. The new paint on Montpelier’s walls will be made the same way as it was made in Madison’s time, leaving the same streaks as it is brushed onto the walls.

The wallpaper won’t be as easy to recreate.

“It was all handmade and hand blocked on rag paper,” Hallock said. “The pieces were 36-by-48 inches, not like the rolls we use today.”

Montpelier will have to wait before installing the wallpaper. The interior work on the home isn’t covered by the restoration price tag, so another round of fundraising will be needed before the wallpaper is purchased. Hallock estimates it will cost $30,000 to $60,000 per room just for the paper.

Another barrier to wallpaper is the walls themselves. The limestone and horsehair plaster that was applied during the later stages of the restoration will need a year to neutralize, Hallock said, because it contains an acid that would eat through the paper. He estimated it would take until 2010 to finish the walls of the dining room and drawing room.

Filling in empty spaces

When visitors walk into Montpelier during the Sept. 17 restoration celebration, they will find a few pieces of furniture in the rooms. However, the sparse spaces likely will remain as the house’s heating and cooling system stabilizes, Deeds said.

“We do plan to eventually install original Madison objects back into the mansion when temperature and humidity levels have been stabilized,” Deeds said. “Antiques, especially pieces of wooden furniture, can be irreparably damaged when subjected to fluctuations in temperature and humidity.”

In 2000, the curatorial staff sent surveys to museums and Madison descendents to see if they knew where any of the pieces had gone.

Deeds said the staff has found about 400 objects that people believe the Madisons once owned, including furniture, silver, ceramics, textiles, jewelry, paintings and maps.

Deeds said the staff is performing extensive research on their ownership, using documents such as wills, tax lists and inventories.

Three families once cared for most of the documented Madison objects. Over the years, the items were sold at auction, displayed in museums or kept safe at home. In Madison’s time, each region of the country had its own style of furniture, which should make it easier to determine which styles the former president displayed in his mansion.

Secrets of an estate

Although Montpelier’s staff has discovered many details of the original home, mysteries remain.

Hallock said a few pieces of wallpaper that turned up in a rat’s nest may or may not be from Madison’s time. The wall treatments in Madison’s dining room and the room behind it also are unknown.

A religious painting that once hung in the drawing room still eludes Montpelier. The whereabouts of the 11-by-7-foot “Supper at Emmaus” is unknown, Hallock said, but researchers know Dolley Madison’s son sold it in 1851.

One outdoor feature of Montpelier remains uncertain. Wenger said the grading in front of the home appeared in one painting as higher in front of the home, in part because of the way a servant in the distance was painted.

“We’re wondering if it was to make the servant quarters more hidden, or if it was just happenstance,” Wenger said.

A few surprises popped up during the renovation process. Wenger said a newel post — part of a staircase — was found cut up and embedded in Montpelier’s portico. The dimension of the post revealed that it was once part of a neoclassical stair.

“Once we know that, there is a whole constellation of facts that come with that,” Wenger said. “That was a complete surprise. We had never been able to collate those [visitor] accounts with the building, but now we’re able to peel back each part of the building and make sense of those accounts.”

Researchers made use of drawings from James Dinsmore, a master builder who did work on Montpelier. The drawings revealed a window stool in Madison’s room, Wenger said, something the staff wouldn’t have known just by looking at it. The staff also discovered that some of the once-painted-shut windows in the front of the house could slide down into the wall.

“Here, you have to look at the house like a crime scene,” Wenger said. “Evidence is easily erased, and you can destroy things about the house without even knowing it.”

The new old Montpelier

The former home of the Madison family looks much different after the restoration than it did just a few years ago.

Today, Montpelier has 23,739 fewer square feet of living space and 56,000 new hand-molded bricks. The interior of the home has been refreshed, and the landscaping has changed based on evidence from paintings and archaeological digs.

These changes will modify the experience of visiting the home.

Montpelier spokeswoman Jennifer Gullette said the staff is trying to figure out how to interpret each room in the house and translate it into new information for the tour guides to share with visitors.

On Sept. 17, Constitution Day, Montpelier will celebrate its restoration publicly.

Visitors will be admitted for free to enjoy tours of the house, music, food and a “living flag” made up of 3,000 local children. PBS’s Jim Lehrer will be the master of ceremonies, and the event will include speakers such as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

For visitors who haven’t seen Montpelier since before the restoration, they can get a feel for what was found in one room set up with partially exposed walls.

They will be able to experience a piece of Madison, who is not as well known as other presidents despite his weighty contributions to the United States, Gullette said.

“It’s more or less a national monument to him,” Gullette said. “This [restoration] is considered significant, not because of the authenticity, but because this is the last of the Founding Fathers’ homes to be restored.”

Restoration celebration

When: Sept. 17, Constitution Day

Events: Tours, music, food and a “living flag” made up of local schoolchildren

Speakers: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

Master of Ceremonies: PBS’s Jim Lehrer

Renovation, by the numbers

l $24 million spent on the restoration

l 377,600 hours of labor put into the homestead

l 56,000 bricks specially made to replace damaged ones

l 23,739 square feet of living space stripped from the mansion

l 1,921 tons of masonry rubble removed from the home

Source: Montpelier