- Good afternoon,
and welcome to Mount
Vernon's Facebook Live.
I'm Thomas Reinhart.
I'm the Director of Preservation
here at Mount Vernon,
and I'm delighted to welcome you
to this week's Mansion Monday.
I was asked to give this Mansion Monday
to talk a little bit about what we do
in the work of architectural history.
So before we start though,
I wanna cover a couple
of logistical things.
First of all, we might have
some technical difficulties.
It's very windy here today,
so we're gonna eventually
move in under the piazza,
so it's a little quieter,
and you can hear me better.
Also, we're outside,
so we're keeping our fingers crossed
that the wifi doesn't drop us off,
but just stay tuned,
we'll get back as soon as
we can if that happens.
I would also like to take a second
to wish you all well and
thank you for coming out.
I know you're all hunkered
down, just like we are.
This is the first time
I've been back on the
estate in a month, so it's,
we're all living in a
slightly different world.
So, I thank you for taking
time out of your workday,
maybe you're on your lunch break at home,
or maybe you're not working,
but you're taking up some hobbies,
bookbinding, butterfly collecting, sewing,
that's a good one, making
masks for people right.
Good old-fashioned American
pursuit sewing, follow that.
So, coming here to meet today with you,
I wanna make sure that you understand
that Mount Vernon is closed,
but we are still trying
to get our content out
and to meet our audience in
Facebook Lives like this,
and other presentations,
some of our lecture series,
and the like.
And because we are closed,
that of course means,
that we are not taking in
any revenue at this point.
So, I encourage any of you
who are able, of course,
to think about giving a donation.
It helps carry on, it helps us
carry on these video series,
and all the events we're
trying to host virtually.
And it does help with some
ongoing maintenance work
that we are in the process
of doing while we're closed.
So, we thank you in advance
if you're able to do that.
So, today, let's talk about
architectural history.
Architectural history falls
in the Department of Preservation,
I am an architectural historian, myself.
And we do have the full-time
architectural historian,
I think that some of you are
familiar with, Caroline Spurry.
And what we do with architectural history
is what I want to talk a little bit about.
Now, architectural history
is, as the name suggests,
it's history, we are historians.
And like almost all historians,
our primary focus is on documents.
We read the Washington Letters,
we look at visitor
accounts to Mount Vernon
in the 18th century,
and then, we also look at documents
that have been assembled
over the 160 plus years
of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association.
And we do that, because, of course,
people write down what is important.
Washington was extremely
meticulous in his record keeping,
so, we are really blessed here,
as you have probably heard me say
in earlier Facebook's that we've done.
We have a lot of records
from the Washington period,
so we know, we have a pretty good idea of
when, and who, and how
things went together.
But of course, historical documents
don't always capture all the details
that give you a good, well-rounded picture
of what actually happened.
There's always gaps,
there's always things
that need to be filled in.
Now, history of course,
is divided into a lot of
different subcategories.
There's military history,
political history,
maritime history, women's
history, African American history,
historians focus in
their own little niche.
And obviously, in architectural history,
we focus on buildings and
the built environment.
So, my job, as an architectural historian,
is to ask questions,
not only of the historical record,
about the buildings that
are here on Mount Vernon,
but, it's also then,
to use a whole 'nother set
of primary source documents,
and that's the buildings themselves.
We interact in a very careful
way with the buildings,
because there are clues
left behind by the builders,
by the people who
occupied those buildings,
by the people who altered those buildings,
over the entire lifespan
of the structures.
We can tease out those clues,
and they give us information
about these structures,
about how they were used,
and most importantly, about
the people that built them,
the people that lived in them,
and the people, here at Mount
Vernon, who visited them.
We find all sorts of evidence
from peoples' visits to Mount
Vernon, visitors like you.
So, using documents,
and using the buildings,
we are able to create
a fairly good picture
of what the history of
this built environment
at the plantation was.
And we also use science
to try and pull out some
of that information,
that's just not visible to your eye.
So, we're gonna talk
about all three pursuits,
and how architectural historians use them.
But, let's maybe take a stroll over,
and sit under the piazza.
So, we are looking at the river front,
the east side of the mansion.
Now, we had originally intended
to start on the west side,
but the wind drove us
up to shelter over here.
So, we have some models
that we're gonna show you
over the course of our chat,
about how the west side changed over time.
And we're gonna talk
about how we understand,
how we come to find out
about the earlier phases,
the earlier iterations of the mansion,
from Augustine Washington's time,
that's George's father,
to Lawrence Washington's time,
that's George's brother,
to George's early period
here, in the 1750s,
up to what have today,
which is the 1799 mansion.
So, the documents that
we have preserved here,
at Mount Vernon, as I said,
there are a lot of them,
and they're not just documents
that we own in our archive.
Because Washington was so
famous, even in his own lifetime,
on top of the fact that he
kept his records so carefully,
and he was a very prolific
writer of letters,
so, because he was famous,
people kept almost anything
that came from him.
So, we have a fairly robust
collection of correspondence,
that exists in various
institutions around the world,
including some here, at Mount Vernon.
We have the business records
of running the plantation,
as an agricultural enterprise.
So, we have account books,
that show Washington's personal accounts,
shows what he's spending his money on,
including payments to
tradesmen, and craftsmen,
people who would've come
here to do the work,
and that got paid, they were
more of the specialist line,
specialist plasterers, high
end jointers, and carpenters.
They would've come here,
and Washington paid them,
so we have records of their payment,
whether they were free
craftsmen, journeymen,
that were brought here under contract,
or whether they were indentured servants,
which Washington sometimes acquired,
who were specialists.
But of course, he was not paying
the majority of folks who
did the work here, right,
the enslaved labor that kept
the mansion going every day.
Some of that community
were trained craftsmen,
they were very skilled,
especially carpenters,
we have a very robust carpentry record,
and carpenter accounts.
And it records every day,
what Washington's enslaved carpenters
were doing on the estate,
whether they were fixing fences,
whether they were doing
work on or in the house.
So that helps us figure out
some of those early
activities that were happening
during Washington's lifetime, as well.
As I said, visitor accounts
are very helpful to us,
because people came and they wanted
to describe to their friends in letters,
or even in published accounts,
to a broader audience,
what Washington's home life was like.
And they were impressed by the mansion,
some people were impressed
that it was large,
it looked like it was made out of stone,
even though it wasn't.
Some people were impressed
that it was maybe a little,
we might kindly say organic,
but maybe a little ramshackle,
because it wasn't designed
in it's 1799 form.
It started out as a small
house and grew overtime.
And so, some people,
there was one very famous English visitor,
I don't remember exactly who it was,
we can probably get that up online,
that once said that
Washington probably should've
just started over with the house.
He was so unimpressed
with the architecture
of Mount Vernon itself.
So, we have Washington's words,
we have words of visitors,
and then, of course,
we have the maintenance records
from the early generations of Washingtons,
that owned the estate in
the early 19th century.
And then, of course,
we have lots of records
about the condition of the buildings
when the Ladies purchased the estate,
and opened up as a museum, around 1860.
And then, also the work
that they did right around that time.
We have information about
what they thought was important
about these buildings,
we have information
about who did the work,
so, we have a really good
documented history of these structures.
Now, what we today, when
we're gonna start a project,
like any of the projects that we did,
so if you followed us last year,
and in fact, a year ago this month,
we were having our weekly Facebook lives
for preservation month,
and we had just kicked
off the restoration work
that we did on the West
Front of the mansion.
And so, every week, we would talk about
what was going on with the work,
and the various aspects of
the preservation mission.
But, last year, we completed
that restoration of the West Front.
And in order to kick
that off, what we did,
is we did an entire search
through every documentary record
that we could get our hands on,
and then, compiled a
chronology of all references
to the outside siding of the
house, this rusticated siding.
There was something in the neighborhood
of about 610 references,
from Washington's time,
all the way up to 2018.
So, that's a lot of work to
go through those documents,
and it's Caroline Spurry, and her team,
are the ones tasked to do that.
They're extremely skillful in doing so,
the more projects you work on,
and the more familiar you
get with the record groups,
the more skilled you get
at getting the information
out of these documents.
Once we start to work, as we discussed,
we're following a plan of
what we're going to do.
And the first step of that plan
is to physically document the building,
to know exactly what condition it was in,
before we do any work on it whatsoever.
And that gives us information,
kinda gives us a snapshot of
what the building looked like,
the West Front looked like in 2019.
And then, we're able to,
by examining that documentation
that we're creating,
we can tie it back to repair campaigns
that are in those written records
from the Mount Vernon Ladies Association,
or even from Washington's own records,
to say that, "Oh, this
windowsill was replaced",
well, we know that this was done in 1932,
by Colonel Dodge, and
here's the documentation
that tells us that.
So, what we try to do,
is to know what every single piece
of the building that we're working on,
we wanna know the date
of every single piece,
because that informs how
we're gonna treat that.
You can imagine that if a windowsill
was replaced in 2015, say,
and there was a problem with it,
we wouldn't necessarily try
to go to the same lengths
to preserve that 2015 windowsill,
as we would if it was a 1776 windowsill.
That's something that we're gonna
expend a lot of effort
preserving in place,
and making sure that it's
in the best shape possible,
and that it lasts for generations to come.
So, we do that initial
assessment and analysis
of the existing building,
tying everything back
to the documentation,
once we start to remove the
more recent layers of the paint,
and once we start opening up
spaces, that if you recall,
following our work in
the Front Parlor, say,
where we were conserving
all of that 18th century wooden paneling.
Some of those panels had to come out
in order to be conserved,
in order to be treated so
that they could be returned
to a healthy state, a healthy condition.
We would then, when we
open up those spaces,
we're seeing windows into the
bones of the house, basically,
places that might not have
been seen in 50 years,
might not have been seen in 250 years.
So, we take that opportunity
to carefully report
everything we see, to carefully analyze
every piece of building
fabric that we see,
whether it's plaster,
whether it's wooden lath,
whether it's wooden framing members,
whether it's painted trim,
because we found all those
things behind that paneling.
And our analysis of those materials,
then turn us into that third category
of scientific investigation
of those materials,
to get more information out of them.
But, the materials in place,
even just a visual
assessment of those materials
can tell us what kind of tools
were used to create those materials,
were they sawed?
What kind of saw was used,
was it a rip saw, a one-handed rip saw,
like a carpenter would use?
Or was it a two-handed pit saw,
that two men have to use, to
cut large, long timbers out?
That gives us information
about the building process,
how big were these timbers
when they were initially
cut out of a tree?
And then, how were they altered
in order to make the pieces of the house?
And then, how they were joined together
to make the frame of the house.
We will look at, we will look for
marks of the ads,
and also axes, to see
what parts of the wood
were actually the initial squaring up,
out of the tree and what's preserved.
And you can actually start to see
how larger pieces are cut out,
I'm sorry, smaller pieces
are cut out of larger pieces,
and you can actually start
to kinda put back together,
and get an idea of how big the trees were.
All of this White Oak, that
they used to build the house,
that was harvested right here,
on the estate, in the 18th century.
So, if we can figure out
how big the initial timbers,
the pieces that were
cut out of the tree are,
that gives us a rough idea of actually,
how big the trees were.
So, there's a lot of initial
information that we can get,
by understanding the building process,
understanding the
preparations of materials,
and that does go hand in hand
with our documentary research.
We will see that, we know
that George Washington
ran trials to see how
good his sawyers were.
The sawyers are the people
that run that two-handed,
two-man saw, the pit saw.
And he wanted to know how many planks,
how many board feet of
plank could be sawed
by his two-man pit saw crew
in an hour, or in a day.
And he timed them,
to see how long it took
them to do the work.
So, we're able to then,
tie back what we're seeing in the house,
back to that documentary record.
And then, in some cases, therefore,
we know who are the enslaved
carpenters or sawyers
who are doing the work,
we know what George was doing,
we know what Sambo was doing at the time
that these additions were
being put on the building.
So therefore, we can say,
if this is pit sawed,
this is the crew that was pit sawing,
this is the work of these two men.
So, it really ties a
voiceless part of history,
the enslaved population,
to the work that they did,
in order to make this house
come together in the way it did.
But we do, as I said,
use scientific analysis
to go a step further.
Let's take a quick look,
if we can put up the paint
analysis slide that we have?
It's up?
So, when we do a counter paint of surfaces
that have survived from the 18th century,
we will sample them.
And paint analysis takes a sample
from the outside of the paint layers,
all the way down to the substrate,
whether it's either on wood,
or plaster, or anything else.
And then, that gets cast
into a clear resin block,
it's then polished up to an optical grade,
and put under a microscope.
And what you're seeing on your screen
is the layer-cake effect
that every layer of paint that got put on,
from the first time
that the exterior siding
boards were painted,
until the most recent
surviving layers of paint.
So, one of the things
that we can see very clearly with that,
is that the paint color of
the house changed over time,
and this was a big point
of discussion last year,
with our 2019 West Front restoration.
White paint in the 18th century
isn't as white as white paint is today.
Because, the pigments that they had,
white pigment for paint was white lead,
it was an off-white, it
creates an off-white paint.
Whereas, the 19th century sync whites
make up a brighter white paint,
and then, titanium white,
which was introduced
in the nineteen-teen's,
makes an extremely bright white paint,
and that's the basis
of white paints today.
So, if you go to your paint store,
and you look at the 17 different kinds
of whites you can get,
they're all pretty much, a lot whiter,
than what George Washington
was able to produce,
or his painters were able to produce,
and mix in their paints.
So, if you look at that slide,
you'll see that at the very bottom,
the bottom layers of the layers of paint
are either almost an ochre,
with some yellow mixed in,
but then, the first layers above,
when Washington switches the paint colors
from kind of, a yellow to a true white,
in the 18th century sense,
he goes from a yellow to an off-white.
And as you follow,
your eye goes up through
those various layers,
as you get to the top,
and I think in that slide,
it even has an arrow that says,
these are the bright whites that come in.
That means that present in
those very bright white layers,
are 19th and 20th century pigments,
that didn't exist in
the time of Washington.
So, that gives us a point, a hard point
in that paint chronology,
that paint timeline,
that tells us what can be Washington,
and what can't be Washington.
And so then, by tying back then,
to those documentary records,
we look for evidence written down
of every time we know
that paint was applied
to the surface of that wooden object,
in this case, the outside
siding of the house.
And then, we can tie
those early layers in,
and we're able to say, this layer is 1758,
this is from the 1770s,
this is from the 1790s,
and pinpoint, to the best of our ability,
the exact layer of paint.
And as you know, Mount Vernon
did a lot of paint analysis,
and made some major paint
changes in the 1980s,
we talk about that a lot.
And when we do work, what we find now,
is that our ability to
see the layers of paint
has increased, due to improved technology.
So, the information that we had
available to us in the 1980s,
is different to the level of information,
and the level of detail we
have available to us in 2020.
So, when people say,
"The Front Parlor was blue in 1980,
"well, why is it now cream?",
well, they weren't able to count out,
they couldn't see all the
layers that we can see today,
and they weren't able
to tie them in place.
So, 1980 that was their
best state of knowledge,
to say that it was blue.
Today, our best state of
knowledge is to say that
it was the 5th or 6th
cream level in that space.
And maybe in time, in a
hundred years, or 50 years,
they might be able to
see that we were wrong,
and that there were seven
more layers in there,
and that they will be
able to pick out a layer
that they feel more confident,
because they have more
information than we do,
to say that, "No, this one here
is the exact layer", right.
So, that's why we're always
going back and re-investigating,
because we're always
getting new information.
Architectural history
is not a static field,
there's always new documents being found,
there's always new technologies
that we can apply to what we do,
to get further information.
And it's not just paint
analyses that we use,
we analyze our mortar,
to find what the ratios of sand to lime,
was it limestone, was the
lime coming from limestone?
And if you go to
Historic Preservation at
Mount Vernon's website,
Facebook page, we actually,
our new mason has been burning lime,
during his quarantine,
he's been burning lime,
and making his own lime at home.
And we have some photographs of that,
so go to the Historic Preservation
at Mount Vernon Facebook page,
and you can see that post,
where we have images,
and actually a video of him making lime.
So, we're able to look at
where that lime's coming from,
where the sand is coming from,
and how it changed, you know,
because different sand
has different color,
it changes the color of the mortar,
it changes the color of the paint,
the sand paint on the house.
So, that scientific
information is very important,
to know how the materials
were put together.
And then, another really
important scientific practice
that we do regularly
here is dendrochronology.
And dendrochronology is
looking at tree rings,
we all know trees grow in rings,
every year they put another ring,
so if you cut down a tree,
you can count back from this year's ring,
and go back, and see how old the tree was.
Well, dendrochronologists,
tree ring scientists,
have created master chronologies,
where they're overlapping the counts
that they've made from
different individual trees,
and it goes back five,
six, seven hundred years,
for the east coast of America.
So, when you cut down a tree,
that last year that it was alive
is gonna be the outside of the tree,
and when you make timbers out of it,
if we can get that very edge of the tree,
which we often get
in some of the framing
members in the house,
we can take core out of it,
and we can actually count back the rings.
And what we can also do,
the scientists can compare
our sequence of rings
to that 700 year master
sequence of White Oak,
and they can drop our core
right into it's place in that sequence.
So, when you know what
year a tree was cut down,
and that tells us what
year the work in the house
was actually executed.
So, although we have really good documents
that tell us when building
projects happened here,
during George Washington's lifetime,
it's always great for us to
have that check in place,
to say, "Well, we have all
this building documentation
"that this part of the
house was built 1775",
we take tree ring samples,
and we test them,
and we find out that yes, indeed,
the majority of these
timbers were cut in 1775.
But, for example, on Garden
House, the North Garden House,
that we've been working on,
we didn't know when
that building was built,
we didn't have a record.
We had some references that
said, "the New Garden Houses",
but they weren't very
specific, how new was new?
Is it six months, is it
a year, is it two years?
So, when we did dendrochronology
on those buildings,
we found that both of them,
that the timbers had been cut
in the winter of 1784 and 1785,
but some of the rafters dated to 1786.
But, we knew from documentary records
that the buildings were moved in 1786
to their current locations.
So, what that discrepancy
in the dates tells us,
is that the buildings
were constructed in 1785,
but when they were moved, damage occurred.
Right, they lifted these buildings up,
and moved them across the estate,
and dropped them down,
where they are today.
And that not surprisingly,
caused some damage to the buildings.
And damaged enough, that roof
rafters had to be replaced,
because there's only one
or two that date to 1786.
So, that level of
information really gives us
a cross-check between the
documentary dates that we get.
And that's very helpful for us,
it makes a very strong
argument for what we know.
In the last 10 or 12 years,
we've really gotten a handle on the dating
of the early phases of the house.
And why that's important is because,
if you were, before 2006, say,
some scholars would argue
that the earliest part of the
house, the core of the house,
was built by Augustine
Washington, George's father.
And he was here in the
1730s, 1734, five, six,
seven, eight, in that range.
And then, other scholars argue
that George's older, half brother,
Lawrence, built the house,
and he was here in the 1740s.
So, there was a camp of people that said
it's a 1730s house, originally,
and a camp that said it was a 1740s house.
And even the big Historic
Structures Report,
that did an in-depth
investigation into the house,
wasn't really sure.
The physical evidence,
the house, suggested that,
inspired them to come up with
a kind of unlikely scenario
that there was a footprint of the house,
that was dug out in the 1730s,
but then, that the whole
house had been taken apart,
and rebuilt in the 1740s,
and made just two feet bigger.
And that didn't really sound
like a very likely scenario,
especially given the way
that the frame worked.
And so, when we did
dendrochronology in 2006,
we got some very interesting results.
And the results that we got
were that the center part of
the house all dated to 1734,
from the front to the
back, from end to end.
The entire thing dated to 1734,
which was a conclusive argument
that the house was built
for Augustine Washington and his family,
and they moved here shortly
after the house was constructed,
and stayed here for
about four to five years.
The other evidence that we got was,
we confirmed the construction sequence
in phase two of the house in 1758.
So, I'm gonna ask if we can put
the phase one image of the house.
We did a model a few years
back of the early house,
and this would be, is it up on screen now?
All right, so this is looking
at the west side of the house,
land side of the house,
it's looking at the house,
as it would've looked,
our best guess of what it
would've looked like in 1734.
And one of the key
contributions that we have made
in the current years,
since I've been here,
is that we have figured out
that, we think that the door,
which is off-center,
and it's always a big
question people have is,
"Why is that west door not
in the middle of the house?
"Why is it off-center?",
well, the door is off-center,
because that big 1758 stair rises up,
and the door has to get pushed
to one side of the central passage.
But what we've been able to figure out,
is that the evidence appears
to support the notion
that the stair was always there,
so that the 1734 stair is roughly,
in the same location as the
current stair, 1758 stair.
So, that would indicate that the door
was in the same location in 1734.
So, that means that the house always had
an off-center door, since
it was built, in the 1730s.
Now, I know when we think about
18th century architecture,
one of the watch points is
that these buildings were
made to be symmetrical,
they loved symmetry in
Georgian Architecture.
And that's true, they really
did strive to have symmetry,
but the thing is, there's
two things at work,
first of all, that's an over
emphasized characteristic.
There are lots of 18th century
houses that are asymmetrical,
a lot of 'em, it was not
the end all and be all.
For big important structures, sure.
And sometimes, you see
odd lengths being gone to,
like putting a stair across a window,
because you have to have
that window right there,
and to have balance in the outside facade,
you see that all the time.
But, it is not an end all and be all
to make a house symmetrical.
But, the second point, which
a lot of people don't get,
is that in the 1730s, when
the house was constructed,
the front of the house is this side,
the piazza side, the river side.
There is not a good system of roads
for people to come and visit
Augustine Washington and his family,
they're coming on the Potomac River,
and coming this way.
So, this east side is
the front of the house.
So, that west side wasn't as
important to get symmetry,
there was symmetry on the
east side of the house,
in the 1730s, as far as we can figure out.
But, on the west side, you
just don't have that symmetry.
In fact, the windows to the right of,
after we did this model,
and it shows you how
things change all the time,
this model was done, I think 2017 or 2018,
in 2019, as a result of
our work on the West Front,
one of the things we discovered
is that the two windows
into the dining room
are not original to the house.
They actually get put in, they get moved,
and it looks like there
was only one window there.
So, that model you're looking at,
which is only two, three years old,
it's going on three years
old, is already out of date,
because the work we did in 2019
changed our understanding
of where the windows were
in the early period of the house.
So, now we've gotta update that model.
So, some of the changes
that we wanted to put into that model,
we wanted to emphasize, is
that the classical elements
that you see on the house,
like this nice door surround,
or the door on the West Front,
which we'll see in just a second,
when we got to the 1758 model,
that classicism, those classical elements
were really not very
widely seen in America,
until a little bit after the 1730s,
you start to see it more toward
the middle of the century.
That's why George, in his 1758 work,
is putting these classical
elements in the house,
because that's what's
fashionable at that time.
But, in the 1730s, that door
that you see in that model,
that very plain door,
with just a trance of
light window above it,
that's a much more 1730s
Virginia arrangement,
than you would've seen, than
this, than this classical door.
Likewise, if you look at the chimneys,
you see white bands around the chimneys,
that's a very classic,
1730s plaster necking around the chimneys.
They didn't survive,
those chimneys disappeared
during the later work,
those bands disappeared,
we don't know for sure, whether
they would've been there.
But, surviving houses from that period,
most of, very many of
'em have that feature,
so we incorporated it into our model,
to show that the house, the
little details of the house,
the fashionable details
were there in the 1730s.
And that they eventually,
get updated in every subsequent remodeling
that George and Martha do,
in the later part of the 18th century.
So, can we go to the
second phase of the house?
In 1758, we see that
George raised the roof,
we all talk about that all the time.
But, he did, you see,
put that classical surround that survives
on the exterior of the house.
We think that dates back to
the 1758 period, as well.
Notice also, that where
there was just plain siding
in that 1734 model, I meant to mention,
now you see that the rusticated
siding has appeared, right.
It's that classicizing style
and architecture coming in.
And we know for a fact,
that George used that rusticated siding
to make it look like wooden blocks,
I'm sorry, stone blocks,
he starts doing that in the 1758 period.
So, that's another change that we believe
happened between the '34
house and the '58 house.
But, here we're missing some major things,
like, there's no big pediment
with the outside window,
with that oval window in it yet,
that comes in the later
periods of the 1770s.
So, we have been able to identify changes
that were made inside the house,
that happened before the 1750s work,
which are interesting,
and they seem to date to the
time of Lawrence Washington.
And we were unable, prior to this,
there wasn't a lot of evidence
that Lawrence Washington
had done a lot to the house,
but what we know of his character,
that he was very much, a societal climber.
He marries into the Fairfax
family, he really seems to
wanna work his way up in Virginia society.
We think that he put the paneling
in the downstairs bedchamber,
we think that he, perhaps,
created the central passage in the 1740s,
and that would've been a
very fashionable change
to a slightly out of date house plan,
that was in place in the 1734 house.
When we get to what we see today,
in the 1799 house, we can
go to that next slide.
The full blown, house as we see it today.
It expands, it doubles in size,
by adding that study
wing on the south side,
on the right hand side of that west end.
And then, adding the New Room Wing
to the north side of
that west side, as well,
the north end of the house.
And those changes allow some more
classical elements to come in,
so the palladium window on the north end.
George also has the big pediment put on,
he puts the cupola on,
which is a really monumental
feature for a house,
there weren't a lot of houses
that had cupolas like that.
Later, in the 19th
century, you see it a lot,
but they sort of, point
back to our cupola,
which was really sort of,
a fashion forward choice
by the Washington's.
So, we've been able to
dendro date and confirm
that the South Wing was
done in 1774, it was framed,
that the New Room Wing was framed in 1776,
that the pediment and the
cupola were both done in 1778.
There's actually, they have to beef up
the framing of the roof,
they have to put rafters
that are double in size,
in order to support the
weight of the cupola in 1778,
and we have a dendro date
for those big rafters
that were put in.
So, all of this comes together,
the documentary evidence,
the physical evidence,
and the scientific
evidence all come together
to refine our understanding
of the growth and evolution of this place.
So, I think that we're probably
ready to have some questions.
If you folks have questions,
please type them in,
we may already have a
running list of questions.
- [Camera Man] Yup, so Tom, we
have a question for Cynthia,
"To what extent was George Washington
"constrained or emboldened
by the original structure
"when he started modifying the estate?"
- That's a great question, Cynthia.
And it was in what ways
was George either sort of,
limited in when he started work,
making additions to the house,
or in what ways was he emboldened?
Well, I think certainly,
we would all agree,
that he was emboldened
to take risks, right.
That's sort of his character
in his military life,
and certainly, here at Mount Vernon,
it was his character, as well.
He took some pretty big
risks, fashion wise,
by putting on the pediment,
by putting on the cupola.
He took a risk in 1758, by
putting the second story
on a house that he didn't even own yet,
it was still owned by his sister in law,
but yet, he makes this
huge investment of money
into a house that he doesn't own.
So, that's pretty bold, right?
Now, how he was constrained,
one of the interesting things
that we discovered in our
work in the Front Parlor,
and on the West Front,
was that the 1734 house had
a lot of structural issues
that were identified and
corrected in the 1758 work.
In fact, it looks like the
front wall of the house
actually leaned in quite
significantly, at that time.
And Washington's carpenters kind of
thickened the front wall
up and straightened it up,
by what we call sistering,
pairing another set of timbers
with the existing timbers,
to plum up or straighten up
the front wall of the house.
Some of the things that we see, we think,
"Why didn't you just tear it down?",
or at least, you know,
some parts of the wall,
tear it down and rebuild it.
But they didn't, they kept the structure,
and they altered it and repaired it.
So, that definitely constrained them.
Behind the paneling in the Front Parlor,
there's a chair rail still
in place on the south wall,
the wall along the central passage,
and that chair rail goes
like this, it's bent!
It's like an arc,
because the house had
sagged and settled so much
in the first 20 years of it's existence.
And that's why the Front Parlor ends up
getting the wooden paneling that it had.
Prior to that, it had a really high-end,
really nice, expensive plaster paneling.
But all that plaster paneling had cracked,
and because of the settling of the house,
and so, what they do is they basically,
build a slightly smaller
room, with the paneling,
inside the bigger, original room,
and square it all up,
so that all the wooden paneling from 1758
is nice and plum, and true,
and square, and looks great.
But behind it, there's plaster paneling
that was probably falling apart in 1758,
and probably inspired the
redo of that Front Parlor.
So, constraints are that he really was
working within the footprint of a house,
that was maybe not of the
best quality in it's bones,
because it had really, it
had really sagged a lot,
in that first 20 years.
I think some of the problem
is that their rooms were big,
and they undersized some
of the floor framing,
and so, you start to see
ceilings sagging from the second floor.
There's all sorts of
structural issues that then,
we see repairs due.
I'll say one funny thing,
is that our carpenter, Dave Weir,
when he saw the sagging
of the second floor joys,
meant that when they did
the Front Parlor ceiling,
they wanted to make it level,
so how they fixed that,
because the framing was sagging,
they sent the carpenters in to basically,
like cut them level in place,
and that meant adzing above their heads,
which is really hellish work.
And Dave always says,
"I think George just
hated his carpenters",
I mean, to make them do that work, right.
But, it was part of the constraint,
it was part of the only way
that they could get the house to perform,
and look as the Washingtons
wanted it to look,
and it was hard work.
It was hard work for the hired carpenters,
and it was certainly, very hard, hard work
for the enslaved carpenters.
And they did an amazing job,
the house is still standing,
and in great shape, and
it still looks good.
Another question?
- [Camera Man] So yeah,
Tom, a question from Dave,
"Every time the roof
was raised or expanded,
"wouldn't the house have
been empty to deal with the,
"and how did they deal
with the exposure elements
"with a lack of covering?"
- Dave, that's a great, a great question.
There is, in the letters
that are associated
with the raising of the roof in 1758.
There's a great series of letters
from the overseer of
the project, Patterson,
and he's writing to Washington,
and he makes very clear
that what they did,
so we see what they did.
The top of the wall of the
1734 house was left in place,
those walls were left in place,
then, they kept the second floor joist
in place from 1734,
they dropped another
wall plate on top of it,
so they put two horizontal
members together,
and then, they built the
framing of the second story wall
on top of those paired plates.
And what they did, is
they built the walls,
the exterior walls first,
they framed the roof,
at the very tall roof,
it's a two story roof,
and then, while they
were doing all that work,
they left the 1734 roof in tact.
And it wasn't until they
roofed the 1758 second story
that they then, disassembled the '34 roof,
basically inside the house.
So, that's how they kept the first floor
from getting flooded by rain,
or any of the finishes getting damaged.
So, having those letters
is extremely helpful to us,
and really interesting to see
how the building process
unfolded in the 18th century.
Like, they don't have cranes,
they don't have pneumatic lifts,
they're doing all of this work by hand.
These carpenters, you
know, were the inheritors
of generations of knowledge passed down
from carpenters in England,
coming across the Atlantic,
and carpenters that had been working here
for a hundred years, or 150 years almost,
by the time we got to 1758.
- [Camera Man] And Tom,
a question from Michele,
"What would be the architectural
style for Mount Vernon?
"Federal, Colonial, Pre-Colonial,
Classical Style, Grecian?"
- Okay.
So,
what it would've been
called in the 18th century
is probably, it would've
been called Palladian.
In England, in the late 17th
and earliest 18th century,
there were a series of
architects, like Indigo Jones,
is a very famous one,
William Chambers was the father
of English Neo-Palladianism,
as we call him today.
But, these were guys that were taking
Renaissance architecture
and bringing it to England,
hundreds of years after
people like Palladio,
Palladio wrote a treatise, in Italy,
in the 16th century about
Classical architecture.
But, the English Palladianism is
taking this Italian Palladianism,
which is a 16th century
reworking of Roman architecture,
the big temples, and
the big public buildings
that survived in Rome
into the Renaissance.
So, Palladio takes it,
then Jones and Chambers,
and their contemporaries,
they take it and they put
their own English spin on it.
But, what they're basically doing
is replicating the
proportions and the detailing
of Roman architecture at the time.
So, Mount Vernon is
considered a Palladian house,
because it is incorporating all
of these Classical elements,
like the Palladian
window, the big pediment,
also, they very fact that
it's a five part house.
We've got the big mansion itself,
we've got the colonnades,
those are another part,
and then, we have the flankers,
the servants' hall on one
side, the kitchen on the other.
So, that's one, two,
three, four, five parts.
That's sort of the
"perfect" Palladian house,
is to have a big five
part house like that.
So, that's how they
would've thought about it
in the 18th century.
Now, as I mentioned, an
Englishman coming over,
and looking at Mount Vernon,
might not think it was
particularly Palladian,
or particularly graceful
in it's execution,
but it was what we have,
and it is what Washington
chose to have constructed.
Today, we would certainly say
that it's not strictly Colonial,
because that is not an architectural style
for this time period, right,
when we were colonies,
America was colonial,
after the Revolution,
we were our own nation,
so we're no longer colonial.
But, we do see that,
while the overall structure
is Palladian, or "Georgian",
as it is sometimes called in architecture,
we see the elements of wanting
to get balance and symmetry
in the overall design of the house.
Very much so on the East Front,
a little less so on the West Front.
But, we also see that in the house itself,
the most fashionable finishes are used.
And we can kind of,
walk through the house,
Front Parlor and the central passage,
they are very fashionable for the 1760s,
when they were finished.
The downstairs bedroom is very fashionable
to probably, the 1740s, which
was Lawrence's time period.
The dining room was done in 1775,
and it's finish is extremely fashionable,
it was done by an extremely
talented plasterer,
and an extremely talented
jointer, and woodworker,
and that really fits it's time,
as does the study, a good 1770s room.
But, the New Room itself,
if you follow Mount Vernon,
you know that the New Room
is far more fashion forward
than any other part of the house.
When it is completed,
it's interior is completed in the 1780s,
Washington chooses to use
the Neo-Classical style,
it really was still current,
and still very, very
fashionable in England,
and hadn't really hit in America,
there's only a handful of buildings
that even can vie with Mount
Vernon, as to be considered
the first Neo-Classical
interior in America.
And we've got a really good one here,
it's something which is often overlooked,
people always associate Thomas Jefferson
with the Neo-Classical,
and not a lot of people associate
George Washington with it.
Because, our New Room was
just that, it's a room,
it's not a whole building like Monticello.
But, it really was
cutting edge architecture,
at the time it was completed in 1788.
That's a great question,
Michele, thank you.
- [Camera Man] And a question from Derek,
"Is there any indication
"that George Washington
relied on an architect,
"or who came up with the design changes?"
- Well, there is no evidence
that George Washington
ever relied on an architect
for work here, at Mount Vernon.
There weren't a lot of architects,
what we might consider true,
professional architects,
practicing in America in the 18th century.
How buildings were designed
was generally by a builder,
laying out what the house was gonna be,
based on the received knowledge
and the current fashions.
And received knowledge,
I mean that, you know,
that a beam this big can
only expand this long,
so therefore, you know, it has
to be supported with a wall,
and if it was, let's say, 20 feet,
and that's as big as your house can be,
or that's as big as a room can be.
So, you're limited by the materials,
and you're limited by
the received knowledge,
the practice of construction
of that carpenter,
or the builder that you
hired to build your building,
passed in his basically, in his mind,
in his toolbox, right.
But, when you get to finishes,
then you have a really
interesting thing happening,
with all this Neo-Palladianism,
a lot of these ideas, a lot
of these designs in England
are being put into books,
architectural pattern books,
and they're being sent over to America,
and they're available in America.
So, a really savvy builder
will own these books,
or will collect images, and
create his own scrapbook.
There's a great scrapbook in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
that a plasterer put
together in the 18th century,
clearly he's cutting out,
it's like a scrapbook,
and he's cutting out
designs from other sources,
and he's putting his own designs together.
And these books would then be brought
and shown to the owner of the house,
the person who was hiring you,
and they'd say,
"Oh, well, I want a window
that looks like this,
"I want a palladium window",
that's what Washington did on
the north end of the house.
Or, "I want this fireplace surround",
and there's a number of
places in Mount Vernon,
you can go to our architectural,
one of our architectural pages
has the source material
for a lot of the interiors,
some of the chimney
pieces, the door surrounds,
the palladium window,
all of these things can be
cited back to various sources.
Most heavily, Batty Langley,
who's an English architect,
who was working in the early 18th century.
And we can say, "This is
where the craftsperson
"that made this mantelpiece,
"this is where they got
the idea", so there's that.
But, what's also interesting
about Mount Vernon
is that what we have,
from about 1773 or '74,
is a lovely little sketch
that George Washington did,
of the West Front of the mansion.
And it shows, now, the mansion
hasn't been expanded yet,
there's no cupola, there's no pediment,
there's now New Room,
there's no Study Wing,
it's just the 1758 house, at this time,
and George draws up his vision
of what he wants the house to look like.
And it has a cupola, it has a pediment,
and it has these two wings on it.
So, the final form that we see today
was the brain child of George Washington,
it was his design, he drew it out,
and probably handed it
over to his builder,
and said, (clapping)
"This is what I want, make this happen",
and the builder made it happen,
by referencing architectural
details in these pattern books,
by applying the standard
construction techniques
and materials of the day,
and he made what Washington wanted.
As I said, I know when we
talk about early presidents,
and the founding fathers,
Jefferson gets all the
kudos for architecture,
and you know, he was a
very talented architect,
but Washington was very
active, architecturally.
And what's nice, is that
Mount Vernon represents
his architectural world surviving, right.
He built houses in Washington D.C.,
he had the Spec Houses built,
and they don't survive,
his house in Alexandria doesn't survive.
What survives is the house
that he put his heart and soul
into, which was this mansion.
- [Camera Man] And a question from Lily,
"Was there any additions to the house,
"made after Washington's death?"
- Yes, Lily, that's a great question.
There were changes made to the house
after Washington's death.
The immediate heir to the house,
after Martha dies in 1802,
was Bushrod Washington.
And Bushrod adds, we
believe, around 1818, 1820,
based on depictions of
the house in this period,
he builds, he puts a railing
on the top of the piazza roof,
that was there until the
1930s, when it was taken off,
when they were trying to restore the house
back to what it looked like
during Washington's day.
He also built a porch on
the end of the mansion,
on the south end, a big two story porch.
So, when he cut the windows
in the Washington bedroom into doors,
and he cut the windows
in the study into doors,
and there was this two level porch
that you could go out on the first floor,
go out on the second
floor, that gets rebuilt,
we believe, in the 1840s,
by John Augustine Washington III,
or his mother, Jane Washington.
And that stays on the house, again,
until the 1930s, when it's taken off,
and the South End is restored.
Now, inside the house though,
there were not a lot of changes.
One significant change, which is actually,
kind of helpful for the Mount
Vernon Ladies Association,
is that when you take our
tour, and you come upstairs,
and you're up at the top of the stairs,
where we talk about the bedrooms,
and then, you go through the Yellow Room,
and then, you pass through a doorway
into the back hall at
the Washington's bedroom.
That doorway that you pass through,
from the Yellow Room into the back hall,
that wasn't there during
the Washington's lifetime.
That was put in by John Augustine
Washington and his wife,
because they used that room,
they were sleeping in
the Washington Bedroom,
and they used the Yellow
Room as a nursery,
and they wanted to have
access to their children.
So, that door was never reversed,
it was never put back
to the George and Martha
Washington time period,
of not having a door there,
because that allows our
visitors to get through
from one part of the house,
to a completely secluded
part of the house,
in the Washington's lifetime,
which was their private
apartment on the second floor.
So, that got left so that we
could, when you come to visit,
you can make it from one side
of the house to the other,
without having to go back
down the stairs and outside.
- [Camera Man] And question from Cynthia,
"When George Washington was sending ideas
"to Mount Vernon for
modification, while away at war,
"did he send more or less
ideas, as a quantitative sense,
"or was he also specific dimensions,
"instructions, plans, et cetera?"
- Well, he didn't get involved in,
that we have surviving
in any documentation,
things like the dimensions and the like.
What he did do, is demand that he get,
what we call, bills of scantling,
meaning, when you've cut all the timbers,
you wanna know how many sills you have,
how many corner posts you have,
how many wall studs,
how many floor joists,
so he made sure that
his carpenters compiled
all that information, and gave it to him,
so he knew they had enough
stockpile to do the work.
What he did, because
you're correct, in 1758,
when the house is getting
raised to the full second story,
they're asking him questions.
Patterson is sending
letters to Washington,
his friend Bryan Fairfax,
who is visiting here,
he's writing questions to Washington,
and he's having
conversations with Patterson,
and there's kind of,
this three way letter exchange going on.
And they're saying things like,
"Well, what do you want us to do
"with the floors on the second floor?",
and, "Here's what we can do for you.
"We can either do 'em all new,
"or we can refurbish them,
and they'll look great",
and they were expecting responses for him,
and they would get responses.
And he was concerned about the floors,
he thought that the floors
in the central passage on the
first floor were in bad shape,
and he wanted those replaced.
We think they were replaced,
they don't survive to us,
they got replaced again
in the early 20th century,
and we don't know what they looked like.
But, presumably, they got
replaced in the 1750s.
So, on one level, he's a
detail-oriented guy, right,
he's really into
management of information,
and giving his opinion on the
work that he's paying for.
So, he's definitely
getting into the weeds,
but he's not getting
into the weeds so much
that he's saying, "Well,
I want the corner posts
"eight by ten inches", right,
he's not getting down
that level of detail.
He's leaving that to
these skilled craftsmen,
both the enslaved and free,
he's leaving it to them
to make those calls,
because they're the
ones qualified to do so.
- [Camera Man] So Tom, probably time
for about two more questions.
- Okay.
- [Camera Man] And so, the
first one from Kimberly,
"What happens during a
typical day for you?"
- Well, right now, I get up,
and I go downstairs and make coffee,
and then, I get on the computer,
while I'm still wearing my pajamas,
and start answering emails.
So, a typical day for me, now,
is probably far more meetings
than I ever want to have,
but, I review a lot of the work
that gets done by the preservation team.
So, that's the archeology team,
they're planning for some
work to be done on the estate,
they're doing research,
I'm checking over that,
making sure that the
plan fits our mission,
that we all agree on what the
questions are to be asked,
and that all their research,
all the sources of documents
have been consulted,
and that we have a really
good idea of what we wanna do,
and how we're gonna do it.
For architecture, it's the same thing,
I work with the architectural
historian, Caroline,
and her team, she's doing
all that background research
in our archive, and in the letters.
She and I are discussing
how we're gonna frame
the work that we're gonna do,
what the questions, that the
research that we are doing,
what the questions are to be answered.
And then, also with our conservation team,
under Steve Stuckey,
and all our carpenters, and our mason.
I'm reviewing the proposed work,
does it meet preservation standards?
Is it an approach that we wanna use?
If there are new approaches
that we wanna try,
are we trying them in a responsible way?
I mean, and much like George Washington,
I don't have that much to worry about,
'cause I have really great
people working for me.
So, you know, I do review it,
'cause that's my job, and I, like George,
I wanna make sure that
I'm getting my two cents
in the work that's being done,
in the programs that I oversee.
But, I have really great archeologists,
architectural historians, conservators,
carpenters, I got a
great team working here,
and I don't really have
much to worry about,
so I can enjoy my cup of
coffee in the morning,
and not have to worry what's going on.
- [Camera Man] And Tom, last question,
"What's your favorite
document of all time,
"and your favorite
architectural 'oh wow'?"
- My favorite document of
all time, that's a tough one.
I'm gonna go to my
architectural "oh wow" first.
My favorite "oh wow" of Mount Vernon,
and I hope that we'll get to this,
and I'm looking at the man
holding the camera, Matt Briney,
I wanna do a series, so start writing in,
ask him, ask him for it, email them,
Secret Spaces of Mount Vernon.
Where I take you guys
into these great spaces,
that the public doesn't get to see,
but that there's really
cool stuff to be seen.
So, one of my favorite
spaces is above the New Room,
so the New Room is like, one
and three quarter stories tall,
but the whole addition
is two stories tall,
so there's a gap of about
three and a half to four feet
between the New Room
ceiling and the third floor,
the Garret floor, and it is really cool.
We've got 1758 siding
boards preserved in there,
we've got graffiti,
we've got graffiti that we think
were probably done by the
carpenters that built the space.
It is awesome, you can see the back
of the false windows on that addition.
Another really great "oh wow" space,
is the space behind the
book press in the Study,
which got closed off in the 1780s,
but it dates to the 1770s,
so there's a coat of paint
that's been on the walls since
the 1770s, never touched.
It's awesome.
But, the "oh wow" stuff,
I do really, sort of think
my favorite document is that one,
it's not even a George
Washington document,
it's the guy that sort of
makes the comment, the crack,
about how George should've really,
just torn Mount Vernon
down and started again.
And I like it because, you know,
it's sort of a, "Oh yeah, buddy?
"Well, it's still standing,
where's your house?"
Right, "Mr. English
man, where's your house?
"Is it still standing in England?"
Well, ours is still standing,
it's in great shape,
and people love it,
and we have great people
taking care of it,
and so, there, you didn't have to like it,
but it is famous world
wide, and your house isn't.
So, that's probably one
of my favorite documents.
So, all right, I'm given
the hook now from Matt.
It's really been great visiting with you,
and again, I will say that we hope
you're all well and healthy,
from the Mount Vernon staff,
and that you're surviving
this really unusual time.
And I will ask, again, and remind you,
that we're at a critical
time too, as an institution.
Without visitors coming in
to support our mission financially,
we, like a lot of institutions,
are facing some hard times.
So, if you can spare support
for Mount Vernon financially,
I would ask you to do so.
We know how much you guys
care about our mission,
and we really do appreciate
the feedback we get from you,
and we appreciate the financial
support that you give us.
So, thanks for spending
this afternoon with me,
don't forget to check our website,
there's a lot more
programming that's coming up.
Have a great day, and stay safe.
