HOUSES WITH A PAST
By Michael Pillagalli
One of the three original stipulations for a house to be included in the line up for a Chester County Day House Tour was that it be an early structure furnished with antiques. The other two factors in consideration were that it be an historic house either by use or by association, and /or a newer structure with significant architectural features or collections. These guidelines have carried forth through all the years of the tour. The list of houses would number in the thousands if we were to go back and count every house, barn, and structure which has been open for The Day over the past eighty-one years and each of those chosen has met these criteria. One gets to see the properties at their best. They are polished, waxed, cleaned, painted, primped, and fretted over awaiting the arrival of hundreds of anxious ticket holders. Many of the house have gone through years of neglect at some time or other and the restoration, remodeling, and renovations are the stories we love to hear about when the earlier conditions and photos of before and after are revealed on tour. In the quarantine of the past year or so, I have been reading and researching information on two of the probably three most famous houses in the United States. The first being the White House, the second being Monticello, and the third is Mount Vernon. The White House history could be a book in itself as it already is in many cases, and I have spent more time with the latter two, as I have had the honor of visiting both. I would like to share some of the before stories of those two properties with and for you.
Image courtesy of monticello.org
I have considered Thomas Jefferson as one of my most important patriots from the 18th Century. I walked through Monticello with awe and marveled at its interiors, its furnishings, and its landscape. It is truly a place of wonder. With some research though, I have come to find out that what we experience today on a visit is not what Jefferson realized or knew. After fifty years of hard work and dedication to his property, he died in debt, basically due to Monticello and his spending, and he never actually saw the completion of his beloved hilltop property.
Thomas Jefferson had not traveled any further from Charlottesville, Virginia, as a young man except to go to William and Mary College, when he inherited the property. His new piece of land of five thousand acres was basically inherited from his father at his passing when Thomas was all of twenty-six years old. Thomas had imagined the house placement on a mountain top which was 850 feet high. The front of the house was to face the New World to the west and back up to the old world on the east side. The height continued to be an issue for him as the materials for construction all had to be pulled up the steep incline and the wells for the house and outside facilities had to be dug even deeper than usual. He was working on the architectural styles of the architect Andrea Palladio, and it seems as if he favored Palladio’s property of Villa Capra enough to use it as a basis for the design of his new house which he started in 1772. That was a grand style from Northern Italy and remember Jefferson had never been past the area of Williamsburg. But he had the design books in his library to follow the plans for a smaller version. The building material of choice was brick which he had made on site. In total Jefferson recorded that his help made over 650,000 bricks for the house as many were unusable after firing due to temperature fluctuation of the kiln. His outbuildings also included an iron shop which produced all the nails for the structure and the trim work inside. Nails were a serious commodity as most were, at that time, still imported from England, in short supply and expensive to import. The farm had been planted with most of the acreage in tobacco in his father’s time, but Jefferson diversified his plantings in a one-thousand-foot terraced garden to include enough fresh fruits and vegetables to sustain him, his family, and the workers of the property.
In designing the house, he had some new and interesting features that before this time had not been placed in any homes in America. One of the first things that he incorporated into the plans was a dumbwaiter to bring the food prepared in the kitchen below up to the dining room and he placed this next to the fireplace flue to keep the food warm on its journey through the floors. With his interest in planting and crops, he was a foodie of his day. Thirteen skylights were also incorporated into the roof lines, and he created two very narrow staircases as he wanted to waste as little floor space as possible. These stair wells were so narrow that a valise would be able to be carried up the stairs to a bedroom, but a large suitcase or trunk would have to have been hoisted up from the outside and brought in through the window of the designated bedroom. These stairs were also windowless and thus dark even with the thirteen skylight that he had installed on the roof. One of the dramatic features of the house from the outside was its dome or Sky Room as he called it. Even though it was beautifully designed it was unusable most of the time as it was hard to enter and without the advantage of a fireplace it was not used for anything other than storage most of the year. At that point of time besides the bricks and nails which were made on site, he had to import all the glass for the windows and all the wrought iron for any iron pieces in the house. That would have included all the door hinges and handles and locks, along with window hardware and fireplace cranes, and tools. Wallpaper and dinnerware and china, porcelains, and fine silks for windows and furniture were on the list of imported items for Monticello. This all took his money and time for the “order” to be placed, gotten to England, and shipped back over to the colonies and then transported to the building site. He also is claimed to have had the first three indoor toilet facilities with outside venting in the colonies. While he was in the White House as President, he was said to have installed the first three flushable toilets in the United States.
Jefferson’s father left him forty-two books besides the acreage in his 1757 will. Jefferson’s library was very impressive for that time as books were a very expensive proposition. Jefferson bought about twelve books per month where William and Mary College was buying about twelve per year. He was not only an avid reader, but he kept seven notebooks of exactness of the comings and what was going on at Monticello. He spent his time listing over 250 types of plants grown in his gardens in one notebook and some of the others journaled the daily weather, the migration of birds, the colors[MP1] and dates of his blooming plants, both floral and vegetative. He also kept an inventory of every cent spent in the construction of Monticello. He should have seen that he was in going into debt, but the end product[MP2] was more important to him, and he never saw that end result – Monticello or being debt free. He kept a notebook, rather large I would suspect, of each of the eighteen thousand letters which he wrote and the five thousand that he sent. He listed every mansion and plantation worker that he had on site and what they possessed. What he did not inventory in a notebook though were the contents of Monticello nor the books in his final library. This leaves us with no factual knowledge of the furnishings especially what he purchased and had shipped from Europe. We know he was so in debt with construction and spending that he sold to the Library of Congress 6487 books from his library for $23,950. which at the time helped eliminate about half of his debt. Some of those books were gifts from George Wythe of Williamsburg. That payment would equate to around $500,000. today. It tells us how expensive books were and that as soon as the fifteen wagon loads carted the books away, he was already buying more.
Some of his debt was accrued from the shipments that he arranged to come from Europe to furnish his home. After living in France for five years he had a ship load of dry goods sent to his house which included five stoves, fifty-seven chairs, one hundred forty-five rolls of handmade wallpaper, china, porcelains, and even a horse drawn carriage. All the while Monticello was going without paint on its exterior trim and termites were gobbling up his wooden structures outside all costing him maintenance. His household expenses were due mostly to his purchases from France of fine wines and, of course, his beloved books. He is said to have spent the equivalent of $125,000 on wine while serving as president and his records calculate that he poured over twenty thousand bottles of wine between the time spent at the White House and Monticello while he served our country.
Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after penning the Declaration of Independence and his friend and fellow patriot, John Adams, died on the same day as he did. His loved mansion was still in the unfinished stages, and he was still indebted to the construction bills and contents costs. In today’s money he was $2,840,000 in debt! Thomas Jefferson’s daughter sold the property to James Barclay after her father’s death as it was at that point the mansion was in bad shape and the land was unused for farming for years. Barclay bought the five hundred fifty acres for use as a silkworm farm. With unsuccessful results he sold the plantation to Uriah Levy for $2500 in 1836. That is close to $60,00 in today’s money. Imagine paying $60,000 today for five hundred fifty acres today. Some recent house sellers of our area were offered that much over asking price just to make sure it could be purchased from the pool of prospective buyers!! Levy did some basic repairs to the house and left it to the People of the United States upon his death in 1862. His family broke the will and the house sat pretty much vacant and was used as a cow barn, grain storage area and a trash heap until Uriah’s nephew, Jefferson, began to clean up the mountain top and restore the house to livable conditions. He started to work on the property in 1889, with a new overseer and added three hundred acres to the parcels five hundred fifty. In 1914, he offered the property to the federal government, but no funds were available. Finally in 1923, 180 years after Thomas Jefferson’s birth, the property was sold to The Thomas Jefferson Foundation for $500,000. And, the rest, as they say, is history. The land holdings now encompass two thousand five hundred acres, and the house has never seen better splendor. In the early days of our Chester County Day House Tour, this property would not have met the criteria to open. Now on to our famous Mount Vernon.
In 1674, George Washington’s great grandfather, John Washington, purchased the ground where Mt. Vernon currently lies. He died in 1677, and the property went to his son Lawrence. Lawrence died in 1698, and the property passed to his daughter, Mildred. She leased the property to her brother Augustine in April 1726, and one month later, May of 1726, he purchased it outright from her for 180 Pounds or about $57,000. Lawrence Washington, George’s father, built a one and a half story house on the property in 1734. It was known as Little Hunting Creek Plantation. The name came from the fact that it was located next to Little Hunting Creek. George’s older half- brother Lawrence inherited the property from his father when he died and lived there from 1741 to 1752. He renamed the eight thousand acres to honor his commanding officer, Edward Vernon. When he passed away in 1752, his will stipulated that the property went to his widow, Anne, who had a life tenancy there and to George, his half-brother, who moved in to run the tobacco plantation. She married into the monied Lee family and moved out. This is when George takes up complete residency. Anne’s daughter dies and then finally Anne passes away and as executor for the will, George inherits the entire parcel. The property underwent many changes and additions as is evidenced by the off-center front door as one approaches the entrance. The house is also in a ‘loose’ Palladian Style as is Monticello. The original structure was a one-story dwelling with a garret over one half of the building. Some of the early foundation can still be detected in the current cellar.
It was at this point that George married Martha Custis, who happened to be one of the wealthiest widows in the colonies at the time. This was in vivid contrast to Jefferson who was struggling with debt. In the late 1750’s, George and Martha add a second floor and a third-floor garret or attic. Wings were added to the north and south ends, but those were torn down during the next major renovations of the 1770’s, just before the Revolution broke out. This second major expansion added two wings to replace the earlier ones torn down and a cupola and front porch or piazza were added. The piazza is the famous resting spot overlooking the Potomac River with a row of Windsor chairs facing the Potomac. At this point in time the mansion contained twenty-one rooms and encompassed over eleven thousand square feet inside.
With the mansion in full function and amply cared for, the next chapter of Mount Vernon is where our story changes. At the outbreak of the revolution both George and Martha were situated on the front lines and Mount Vernon sat empty and unoccupied for six years. The wooden mansion and many of the outbuildings suffered significantly from lack of maintenance issues and infestations. The exterior of the mansion was a wood siding which was painted with a sand infused into the paint to give it the appearance of stone. The wooden boards were actually beveled on the edges of the boards to further accentuate the look of cut stone. That surface treatment remains today. Being left untouched for six years did not help maintain the integrity of the outsides of the plantation buildings. At the end of the revolution, George and Martha return to their property and begin anew to bring the mansion, outbuildings, and grounds back to their crowning glory. It was in 1794 that George penned, “I have no objection to any sober or orderly person’s gratifying their curiosity in viewing the buildings, gardens, and such at Mount Vernon.” The perfect invite to a historic house tour. George and Martha lived there together until George’s death in 1799. Martha lived there with two of her grandchildren and two great grandchildren until her death in May of 1802. At that point it started to decline as revenues were insufficient to maintain it since various family members tried to continue the legacy. Keeping in mind that George and Martha had no children themselves to pass it onto, it went to Martha’s children and grandchildren from her first marriage.
While on the road traveling with the Revolutionary War soldiers, Mount Vernon would probably have been passed over as a candidate for our house tour, but after their return in the late 1770’s, Mount Vernon would have been on our list as one of the VIP stops! Then again after his and Martha’s death, the property would probably not have made the list.
We all have maintenance and upkeep issues with our properties and it takes time, money, knowledge, and hard work by ourselves and or someone else to accomplish these results, but when the finished product is realized, there is a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Like these two listed properties, the best of our homes is placed on display for the enjoyment of others and ourselves. Each of us thinks of our domicile as a Mount Vernon or Monticello and we feel the same pride in enjoying what we have done to make it a comfortable place for us and our families.