James Madison’s Montpelier

Not Just Paper and Glue

When was the last time you tackled a home improvement project? Painting seems quick and easy. Why, you could paint every room in the house on Saturday morning and have time for flag football and grilling in the afternoon.

Then you actually dig into the project. Moving furniture, taping doorframes, laying drop cloths, and dusting. The project could be hours old before the brush even touches the wall. A whole house in one morning, flag football and grilling in the afternoon? You’ll be lucky to finish three rooms in time for Sunday’s 4:00 p.m. NFL kickoff and takeout.

The lesson: home improvement takes time. The Dining Room wallpaper installer, Patrick Shields, arrived at Montpelier last week. We expect the whole process to take approximately ten days. Patrick will hang the wallpaper almost the same way an installer would have during the Madisons’ time.

Anyone who has worked on their own walls knows it’s much easier to paint than wallpaper. But as complicated as wallpapering is now, it took even more time and skill two centuries ago. Continue Reading…

It’s FINALLY Here!

Have you ever had to wait for a package? The excitement starts when you order the latest and greatest widget– the iPhone 4 for example. You rush home from school or work each day just hoping it’s on your doorstep. Finally, there is a brown box on the doorstep waiting just for you. You scoop the precious cargo off the steps and muscle your way through the front door, leaving a disaster in your wake. Keys, unopened mail, the newspaper, your coat, and briefcase or purse are scattered in a haphazard trail from the door to the living room while you scrounge for scissors to liberate your treasure from its cardboard dungeon. Retail therapy, indeed.

That urgent sense of waiting for an important package has captivated the Montpelier staff recently. By now, you have probably read all about our curatorial team’s efforts to carefully choose the most appropriate wallpaper for the Madisons’ Dining Room. Curators spent months consulting leading historic wallpaper experts and examining period samples that were known to exist during the time the Madisons would have originally purchased their wallpaper.

Courtesy Adelphi Paper Hangings, LLC

Once the curatorial team settled on a pattern, they placed the order with Adelphi Paper Hangings, which specializes in historic reproduction wallpaper. Fulfillment of the order was anything but simple. The technicians at Adelphi used carved wooden blocks to hand-stamp the paper layer by layer, to create the finished product you can see in our previous posts. Continue Reading…

What’s on the Wall III

You have read our initial wallpaper post, the comments on Facebook, and our answers to your questions. Now the moment of truth: what paper did our team of researchers and experts choose for the Dining Room?

Before we tell you, we want to provide some context for the choice. Remember that, as we mentioned in the last post on this topic, tastes in interior décor were different in the early 19th century. Period aesthetics showed a preference for strong colors, often combined in way foreign to twenty-first-century eyes. Patterns were popular, and there was little hesitation in using a different design for the carpet, wallpaper, curtains, and upholstery in the same room.

We know that when President Madison died in 1836 there were 36 engravings on the Dining Room walls. Today we would be loathe to hang so many prints on a highly patterned wallpaper. Not so in the early nineteenth century. Our team of experts believe that showing that aesthetic is important in creating the visual feel of this period room. They chose the circa 1815 paper with the green and buff pattern imitating draped fabric and originally made by the Philadelphia firm of Virchaux.

Another factor in the paper’s selection was its French-inspired design. The many ads for “Paper Hangings” in the National Intelligencer reveal that the local market followed the period predilection for fashionable French wallpaper patterns. Drapery papers frequently appear in the ads. Among the most popular papers available in the Washington region were those imported from France or produced by Philadelphia paper makers adapting French designs. A number of these paper makers were French émigrés like Henri Virchaux. Continue Reading…

What’s that on the wall?

If you come to Montpelier today and take a house tour, you might be surprised when you enter the Dining Room. Strips of reproduction woodblock wallpaper hang on the Dining Room walls. Each has a very busy pattern. Some of the patterns are accompanied by the border papers frequently seen in early-19th-century wallpapers. So what’s going on?

We couldn’t find any evidence of paint or white wash on the walls. This means the Dining Room, like the Drawing Room, was probably papered. Visitor accounts tell us Dolley Madison served a variety of sumptuous meals there. They also say the Dining and Drawing Room walls boasted a variety of art. Incredibly, none of these accounts tells us anything about the walls under the art!
Continue Reading…

Update – 4/2/2009

I want to share with you some of our plans for upcoming exhibits within the newly restored Madison mansion. Over the spring and summer we plan to move furniture and exhibit components into the mansion along with text panels which will help explain our process.

Our first major focus will be the Dining Room (M105). As of this week, we have removed the exhibit case that featured archaeology fragments of ceramics and glassware and installed two pieces of furniture. There is a dining table (a period piece with no Madison provenance) and a sideboard with purported Madison provenance, both on furniture lifts. It was a challenge to fit the furniture and lifts in the room and still leave room for a group of 20 people, but we managed to come up with arrangement that should work.

Even though this particular set of tables does not have a Madison family provenance, the form matches the “3 folding leaf Mahogany tables” that were listed in the 1836 Inventory of the Dining Room.^[1] The end sections are obviously from the same table, with the center section having been substituted at a later time. All three tables are period and similar to what the Madisons might have owned.

“in the center of the room a square mahogany table…”  -George Shattuck, Jr., 1835

“a large long and wide well polished mahogany table…” -Mary Cutts, Recollections, ca. 1850

According to the 1836 Inventory of the Madison Dining Room “2 Mahogany sideboards” (1 “old” / 1 “new”) were listed. Curatorial staff are currently conducting research on multiple sideboards with purported Madison provenance.

This particular sideboard was donated to The National Trust for Historic Preservation (Montpelier) in 1986 with a strong family history of purchase at an early Montpelier sale. At this time we do not have any record or advertisements of sales taking place at Montpelier during Madison ownership of the property, or in the post-Madison period until 1881.

A large sale took place at Montpelier in April, 1881, in which the “valuable personal property” of the recently deceased Frank Carson, occupant and brother of Montpelier’s owner, was auctioned off. A broadside advertising the sale included “a large quantity of HOUSEHOLD AND KITCHEN FURNITURE/ some very superior, Mirrors, Paintings,…a handsome portrait of President Madison, and other relicts of President Madison, one grand piano…”^[2] While the broadside is unclear as to which, if any, furniture was owned by James Madison, it seems likely that the association of the sideboard with Montpelier could have easily been linked to the Madisons.

The Madisons had two sideboards in their Dining Room; the date of this sideboard places it potentially in the category of “new” sideboard. We will place photographs of the other sideboards that we are researching in the room and ask the question “which one of these do you believe may be the Madisons’ ‘old’ sideboard?”

“…on one side of the door was an old sideboard.” -George C. Shattuck, Jr. 1835

-Montpelier Curatorial Staff

1 “List of articles in Dining Room at Montpellier” and “Engravings in dining room,” July 1, 1836, box 1, folder 1831–1839, Papers of Dolley Madison, MS 18940, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
2 Madison, James. Letters and Documents at the Library of Virginia. Miscellaneous reel 4276. “Broadside announcing an auction at Montpelier in Orange County, Virginia on April 13, 1881.”