George Washington's Fredericksburg Foundation - Plaster Restoration at Kenmore

Plaster experts visiting Kenmore to preserve original decorative work, plus 1880s embellishments, on three grand ceilings

By LAURA MOYER
Published in The Free Lance-Star: 1/21/2005

The ornamental plasterwork on the ceilings of Kenmore
is being carefully restored to the way it was when
Betty Lewis, George Washington's sister,
lived there in the late 1700s.

Experts restore ornate ceilings, flourishes at Kenmore

The Kenmore mansion's famed ornamental plasterwork is getting a tender touch-up.

For the past two weeks, plaster specialists have been at the historic Fredericksburg home giving three ceilings their most comprehensive conservation work in about 120 years.

They're stabilizing, repairing and, in rare cases, replacing original plaster decorations from 1775 and embellishments added in the 1880s.

Chris Anderson of Tidewater Preservation in
Fredericksburg works on the woodwork in the
dining room of Kenmore. The plaster walls are being
stripped of paint and the plaster ceilings are be restored
to more faithfully represent the era when George
Washington's sister, Betty Lewis, lived there.

It's all part of an ongoing restoration project whose principal goal is to conserve the home as it was during the 1775-80 period of its original owners, Fielding and Betty Washington Lewis.

But the ceilings won't be entirely returned to their Lewis-era look.

The current effort preserves both the work done in the 1770s by an unknown "stucco man" and later embellishments by William Key Howard Jr., the son of an 1880s owner.

Howard was in his late teens or early 20s when his father purchased Kenmore, whose ornamented ceilings had been badly damaged during the Civil War. Instead of ripping down the old and putting up new, Howard persuaded his father to let him work on the ceilings in the downstairs chamber, dining room and drawing room.

He also worked on decorative plaster wall panels, including a dining-room scene depicting Aesop's fable about the fox and the crow.

Howard went beyond simply repairing what was there. He crafted and applied innumerable additional ornaments, a more-is-more approach reflective of his time.

Though modern critics don't consider Howard the equal of the unknown stucco man in craftsmanship or design, they nevertheless appreciate an intervention that saved one of Kenmore's most notable features.

The Howard additions and other 19th-century alterations are seen as worthy of preservation in their own right, as "representative of the history of the building and of the continuity of life at Kenmore," according to material on the mansion's Web site. Kenmore is owned by The George Washington Foundation, which also owns Ferry Farm, Washington's boyhood home in Stafford County.

One goal of the current work is to shed light on what might have influenced the 1770s stucco man, said Matt Webster, director of restoration.

It would be a coup to learn the identity of the artisan, who also worked on Washington's Mount Vernon, but the "how" is as important as the "who," Webster said.

"We want to understand what that person did in his lifetime. That's the story."

Such detective work is a big part of the ongoing Kenmore restoration, a constant quest to know more about the home's structure, materials and design, its history, its personalities and its quirks.

But there's also a lot of tedious and distinctly unglamorous work to be done.

Martyn Watchurst of Bristol, England, repairs
the ornamental plasterwork of Kenmore's drawing-room
ceiling, using a mixture of fine sand, lime and
horsehair. The green tape marks where a piece of
plasterwork needs to be reproduced and replaced.

Representatives of the Baltimore-based firm Hayles & Howe, which also has offices in Bristol, England, have been repairing cracks and crumbling pieces of plaster. They've created molds and poured dozens of pieces of replacement ornamentation.

They expect to finish up by the middle of next week with the reapplication of ornaments, said Hayles & Howe's visiting restoration manager, Martyn Watchurst of Bristol.

Just as the Howard additions are distinctive--they're done with gypsum, a much harder, whiter material than what the 18th-century stucco man used--the replacement ornaments will be detectable to future preservationists.

They're being made with a silver sand-and-horsehair material that's as similar as possible to the original plaster, but tinted to be distinguishable when paint is removed.

Once the conservation is done, the ceilings and panels will be laser-mapped for documentation and so a scaled-down, touchable copy can be made, Webster said.

Before the ceilings can be painted a uniform white comes another labor-intensive process. University of Mary Washington senior Emily Brackbill and other foundation interns are set to clean the ceilings, a delicate job to be done with a toothbrush and dental pick.

"This is where I started," Webster said sympathetically, "as an intern working on the ceilings."

To reach LAURA MOYER: 540/374-5417 lmoyer@freelancestar.com

Photos by Scott Neville / The Free Lance-Star