HEARTHSTONE YIELDS SURPRISES
Poplar Forest release, Fall 1998

Some 19th century recycling will help staff determine what the inside of Poplar Forest looked like during Jefferson’s time.

In fall 1998, Travis McDonald, the director of architectural restoration, uncovered a treasure trove of artifacts when he removed the 1846 hearthstone from the fireplace in the cube room as part of the interior structural restoration.

Sifting through the sand that formed the stone’s bed, McDonald found pieces of plaster, glass, burned wood, animal bone and sculpture from the frieze portion of the entablature thought to be from the cube room. These date to Jefferson’s time, before an 1845 fire damaged the roof, windows and interior of the house.

"These items are very important," says McDonald. "They include the only pieces of the original frieze we ever found. And the plaster bits are going to give us an idea about the colors inside the house."

The discovering is exciting, but the information it can provide is still locked away. Winterthur Museum’s state-of-the-art conservation laboratory in Delaware will analyze the entablature parts to help determine their inorganic and organic components.

Susan Buck, a consultant who specializes in architectural finishes, also is examining the artifacts.

It is hoped that the artifacts will answer questions about the thickness of the original plaster, its composition and whether it was left in its natural white coat state or finished with a color.

Buck says her initial analysis indicates that some of the lime washes on the wall plaster from parts of the house and privies show colors of yellow, tan, orange and blue-gray.

She relishes the detective work at Poplar Forest. One mystery involves the material used for the frieze. The artifacts look like terra cotta, but sculptor William Coffee, who made the frieze decorations, had written that it was made of "composition," which normally doesn’t look like a clay product.

There also seems to be paint on a piece of the frieze, as well as pigmented whitewashes on the plaster.

"People tend to think of whitewash as a lower class of covering, but when it’s pigmented it’s considered as good as paint," says McDonald.

The whitewash wasn’t a surprise since the restoration crew previously had found some original pigmented whitewash on the east stair pavilion wall.

McDonald believes the plaster and artifacts are from a trash debris pile because they were mixed in with carpenters’ shavings from the Hutter family rebuilding parts of the house after the 1845 fire. Burned animal bones, commonly thrown into fireplaces of the time, also help to identify the source as a trash pile.

The fire remains were a handy way to form a firm setting for the hearthstone. McDonald says that half of the sand bed was crushed plaster – reverting to its sand origin – and chunks of plaster.

"The theory is that the workmen went to the fire debris pile and smashed up Jefferson-period plaster that had been removed from the walls before throwing it on top of a wet bed of mortar," he says. The chunks that landed on top of the wet mortar now look like fossils embedded in sediment.

The other fireplaces have offered no such treasures, the stones having been bedded in red mud only.

The Hutter family, who owned Poplar Forest during much of the 19th century, noted in their farm journal of Nov. 9, 1846 that 63 loads of plaster and charred materials from the fire were spread over the wheat field.

McDonald believes that not all the debris became fertilizer.

"Somewhere there are big chunks of melted metal from the roof and pieces of broken stone," he says, but other remains such as what was found in the cube room probably ended up in the wheat field.