you, which are so full of learning and light. read the ones we've discussed and. others, including thomas kidd, has a whole source book on religious liberty primary texts, then go to the national constitution center is interactive constitution. read documents from the founders library. listen to them. we the podcast and check out the amazing new constitution one on one horse that we've launched, khan academy, which brings america's greatest constitutional scholars, including several of them who are here to teach you about the constitution. the founders believe that we all have only a right but a duty to learn so that we can up our own minds to for ourselves and speak as we think. and that's exactly what we're doing together. thank you all jane calvert munoz kidd. thanks to all of our friends. goodnight and we'll

well, american history tv is on location at george washington since mount vernon. this is the mansion behind us. as you can see, it's being renovated. i want to introduce you to two producers at american history tv. this is delia rios and kate michael and why are we here? we're here because mount vernon, in a gift to the nation for the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence is stripping mount vernon down to the bounds. basically, they're preserving it, restoring it, presenting it back to the american public. get ready for these celebrations. and in the process, they are making all kinds of archeological discoveries, historic discoveries about how the house was built, how the washingtons and the enslaved people here lived. kate michael. you got to see the renovation.

we got to see the renovations literally from below ground up. this project started because we had heard that they had found a historic discovery dealing the saying of these cherry bottles of cherries in the cellar. and we wanted to find out more about that. and then whenever we got to go inside and see the rooms that you normally don't get to go into and see it from an architectural perspective, not just this home, but the architecture behind the house. it was it was really incredible to be in there. delia, what was the most amazing thing that you saw inside the house? well, i would have to say the private spaces. so we were able to go to george washington standard closet and kate, using a very small camera, was able to squeeze in. so that the director of preservation, thomas reinhart, could show us a space that visitors don't see. you know, usually when you come to mount vernon, you're behind a rope line. and in this case, the rope lines are down. we're able to walk into the

rooms, into the closet, as george washington would have. he went down every morning early, i think usually before the sun was up to shave, dressed for the day. and there we were in the room where he had his clothes laid out in spokes, from where he made his decision every morning, how he was going to do for the day. the most private space you could be in someone's home. and we were pretty privileged to be there. and the thing that's so special about it is that it's not been touched. you know, much of mount vernon in order to preserve it and restore it over the years has been repainted and reinterpreted with different kinds of furniture and wallpaper and carpeting and so forth. but this closet had not been touched at all. we were looking at the walls of george washington, looked at. kate, who gave you the tour? the tour was given by thomas reinhart, the director of preservation. and we didn't really discuss all of the things that we would see in advance. we just had him walk us through the house, and we followed him

as he walked us through the cellar, explained all the different rooms, and then took us up through the house into each different room. and you'll see in this tour we just walk through the house and he tells us what each of the different finds in each room and and what he's been excited to find and discover about each room. what was your most amazing moment? well, i would say, as delia said, to be in george washington's closet and then mr. reinhart closes the door. and i'm thinking i'm closed in george washington's closet. this is amazing. but in addition, when he would show us things along the baseboard and to be able to show, you know, underneath how how the home is not even attached sometimes because of all of the termites or whatever had eaten away. so we really get into never a little minutia of this house. just to be in the house was very nice. well, this is the tour that delia rios and kate michael shot. it's on next on american history

hello. i'm thomas reinhart. i mount vernon, director of preservation and we are standing here in front of george washington's home. and you're probably seeing it in a way that you've never seen it before, because mount vernon is in the midst of the largest historic preservation project it has undertaken in its 170 plus year existence. we are stabilizing the mount mansion's foundation and frame, and we are upgrading all of its modern systems to make to ensure that the mansion, which will be 300 years old in 2034, that it will be able to withstand the elements of nature and that it will be welcoming to all of our guests for we hope, for the next

250 years. and i say that as we close in on are the 250th birthday of america in 2026. so despite the fact that we are undertaking this massive project, the good news for all of you watching this is that mount vernon is open. we have you can visit the mansion while this work is going on and you'll get to see some interesting things when you do so. but don't forget as well, the mount vernon is more than just a mansion. we have all of our outbuildings. we have all of our interpretive programs still going on. so we invite you to come and see this once in a lifetime chance to to see the mansion. so sort of in a state of undress as we as we prepare her for the next 250 years. you're going to join me on a tour of the mansion in a way you've never seen it. our current project, mansion revitalization, is getting down to the very bones of the house. so you're going to we're going to today take a look at the cellar, which is undergoing a

massive restoration to a level that has never been undertaken. the goal to restore the mansion cellar of the focal point of service in the house to as it appeared in 1799. we will also be strengthening the masonry underpinnings, the foundations of the house as well as strengthening its 18th century wooden frame. so we're going to see all of that action right before your eyes on the course of this tour. we will also go through the the house, the upper floors of the house, which are normally open to the public and and furnished to interpret the life of washington's here in the 1700s. but today, everything's installed. so we're going to get to see the house and wander through the house in a way that you visitors don't normally get. so it's going to be an exciting walk through and i can't wait to get started.

so if you visited mount vernon in the past and you've taken our our cellar tour, which was our national treasure tour, you walk through the cellar and you couldn't miss the fact that it was chock full of modern infrastructure, electrical fire suppression and but most especially massive ductwork that was put in in 1998 to try to regulate the conditions of inside the house through balance of heating and air conditioning. but we are now pulling all of that infrastructure out. so even for mount vernon preservation staff, this is the first time that we're actually getting to really get up close and personal with some areas of the cellar which we used to not be able to even see. so it allows us to assess and conserve and restore more places that we haven't been able to look at for over 25 years. and so that's a really important

thing for us because we were seeing, despite the the system that was caring for the upper stories of the house, the cellar was not conditioned and we were starting to see deterioration in both the brick and the stone, which create the foundations of the house. so if we look over here at these at this wall, we start to see where we've got deteriorating brick. this is 18th century brick. but because of of uncontrolled humidity in the house, the brick began to soften and small the soft bricks began to soften and small. so we're going to be taking care of that. we're going to be making sure that those foundations which hold up the house, which are incredibly important, will be in the best shape possible. in addition to getting at the fabric of the house itself to do conservation, we will be, as i said, upgrading our modern infrastructure. and we are going to get it

ultimate late as as out of sight as possible. so that does not visually distract visitors when they take a tour of the cellar. and to do that, what we're doing is we are digging trenches beneath the cellar floor and installing all our duct work, all our our electrical conduit, all our fire suppression, piping, everything. it will come into the house underground, under the feet of visitors, and then we'll secret up to the upper floors in places where they won't be so visible. and so that will improve visitor experience all around. now, from an architectural history standpoint, the story of the house itself, we've known for a long time that the house had a long series of changes over its life in the 18th century. the basically the time from when it was constructed in 1734 until george washington died in 1799. but we didn't quite understand what was happening down here in the cellar.

and we also didn't fully understand all of the changes that were happening up on the on the first and second floors before we undertook this work in the cellar. we did a massive study of the documents relating to the cellar. we identified 802 separate documents, documentary references to the cellar from the early 1750s, all the way up until 2016. and then we also did a massive fabric study and architect oral study of the cellar and we learned some amazing things. what what we have today in the cellar is the plan that george washington drew up in 1774 and in essence, on the south end of the house, beneath the study, which is above our heads right now, you've got a large room, which was a kitchen and servants hall to refer to as both in the 18th century documents and over here you can see well, from over

here you can see a large kitchen fireplace. so this would have been for cooking meals or heating meals and it had been encapsulated partly in concrete in the 1930s in order to help stabilize the chimney base. it's a massive chimney goes all the way up to the roof and it has fireplaces that serve the first, second and somewhat the third floor of the house. so we've been excavating that out of that concrete and we will be restabilize and yet not using just poured concrete but by using handmade brick and mortar as they would have in the 18th century. this kitchen was a big, wide open space and we will be restored. bring it to that now. previously, in order to allow to address many of the issues that were seen in the house over the 170 some years that that that it's been run as a museum.

there were issues that arose in the framing term it's rot. this is a problem that washington talks about and he makes repairs in the 18th century. but starting in the middle 19th century, we see a series of repairs and they're happening in little tranches here. they're in everywhere. and ultimately, they they they were each repair was made without real consideration as to how it affected the other repairs. so we end up having this sort of ad hoc hodgepodge series of repairs which ultimately weakened the frame of the house. the house was found to be structurally stable and safe to occupy, but where our concern arose was that that that slightly compromised state of the frame put it at risk to damage from massive weather events like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, all of which we get here in northern

virginia. so we were very concerned about that particular situation. so above my head are surviving for joyce, for the study in the south wing of the house as these date to 1775, when that addition was put on the house and in this part of the house, the floor framing survives almost entirely intact. as we move further north in the house where they caught less sun and it stayed damper for longer periods of time, the north side of the house we've we find less and less surviving from washington's lifetime. in fac under the new room, which was phase one of our project, and we'll go up and take a look at that in a moment. we had almost nothing surviving from the washington period. i am speaking specifically about first floor framing above of the floorboards of the first floor mount vernon is a new really

well preserved with surviving 18th century fabric in the neighborhood of about 90% for permanent, permanent parts of the house. by that i mean doors, windows, wall, frame, but not things like roof shingles, which are sacrificial. and they get there. there they've been changed out many, many times. so the house is really well preserved. but beneath the first floor, joyce for first floor boards, we get about 48% survive the rate of washing, ten era wooden framing members. so this project will conserve the surviving stuff and will repair what needs to be repaired. but it will also replace members that were removed in the course of conservation and preservation work for the last 150 years.

so when we are finished with this work that slightly compromised frame will be entire rebuilt as it initially was to function in the 18th century. and that's that's great. however, remember that this frame was initially constructed to act as a private home, serving probably a dozen people as a museum the mansion welcomes in 2019, we welcomed 1.1 million visitors. that's a lot of feet going through this house, creating a lot of gentle vibration during much of the day in order to make sure that the mansion withstands that, we are adding some reinforced men that would not have been there in the 18th century. so, for example, here, where our floor jars are, they come in to surviving large, surviving beams, which are called summer beams. they they hold up the floor.

joyce and the summer beams are kind of the pack horses of a four frame. they hold up the entire weight of the floor. and anything that happens to be in it, including people. so for down here where we have surviving summer beams, we're actually creating a a steel truss which will in well in and wrap those summer beams without actually touching them and they will hold them up and help them support the weight of all our all our visitors further on where we have surviving other surviving 18th century framing, we are occasionally going to be putting in some posts that will help support our early framing. but in the case of the new room, we had to do a lot more intervention and we'll take a look at that in just a moment. now a cellar might not be the most exciting part of a house, but au contraire, it is a very exciting part of the house, especially in the 18th century,

because the cellar functioned as the the focus of all service in an 18th century house and service here, of course, at mount vernon, as through much of america in the 18th century, means enslaved workers. so this servant's hall as washington referred to it, was set up not only as a kitchen, but as a place for enslaved workers to do their daily work and to await in the downtime that they might have had. the call to bring service up to the upper floors of the house. so this space of the kitchen is far more interesting than just that, where you see these white pillars in the background here. there was a wooden wall that went across there in the 18th century. we found evidence for it in the in the archeology that we did of the floor. we find evidence of it in the

bottom of the floor. joyce above it, where we can see where other members timbers were put in to help frame that wall and on a plan that washington drew of the cellar. in 1774, he shows this kitchen and he shows three rooms along the west end to the kitchen. and that's the west end. so that wall was indeed constructed. and three rooms were created by that wall. so we had two walls coming out from the west wall meeting this wooden wall that separates the space from the kitchen. now in the center room, we found very clear evidence that a staircase went up to the first floor and to posited you in the room we call the west vestibule, which is right outside of the dining room door, makes a lot of sense. food being warmed or prepared down here. you take it right up to the dining room. but these other two spaces in the corners, we were a little unclear as to exactly what they were. that big survey that we did of

the cellar documentation, there were a number of of documents that had been read, sort of single locally. but when we pulled some of these documents together and made connections between them and read them as a whole, a story began to emerge. documents talk about the fact that frank had a room in the cellar that's frankly the enslaved butler for the longest time, it was assumed that that was a butler's pantry or storeroom or closet down here, that frank had the keys to. and it was his purview for for doing his his work here. there was also another document that had always been misread. it had been misread a long ago. it had been pirated in a lot that that misreading had been parodied in a lot of secondary sources. and it had been read as lucy, who was the enslaved cook, had a room above the kitchen.

but when we went back and looked at the original document, it actually said, lucy had a room in the kitchen. the connection that we were able to make between frank's room and lucy having a room in the kitchen, is that frank and lucy were married. and there's another document in which washington says that the children of the enslaved community have have no reason to be near the house. it's kind of his his angry old man. keep those kids off my lawn. moment. but he actually gives an exemption to the children of frank and lucy lee. why would he do that? it's because his father has a room in a cell cellar. his mother has a room in the cellar. and it means that the family was living here in quarters proper in these two rooms in the corner when we did archeology in this far room, we actually found pits underneath the paving that were that were hidden by the placement of the floor, pavers on top of them.

these are what archeologists call subfloor pits. they are they are the the telltale sign of an enslaved quarter. when you lit, the enslaved were often housed in communal settings. so what little you had that was yours. you didn't want anyone touching it, stealing it. so it's very frequent to dig a pit in the floor and lay out a board and that becomes your bed. and so your valuables are kept under the floor and it appears that the leaves did the same thing in their quarters. now, placing the leaves here in the cellar is actually a really important discovery. mount vernon had a slave community of about 317 individuals at the time. washington died, and they were spread out all over the 8000 acres at the five farms into which those acres were were organized. but here on mansion house farm, there were 60 some individuals working daily and living here on

the farm, including the lees. most of those individuals lived in a brick slave quarter down on the north lane, but by placing that elise here, this is the first time we were able to place an enslaved family living in the mansion under the same roof as the washingtons. and it shows the closeness, the close quarters between the enslaving class and the enslaved class and the washingtons and the lees shared the very home in which they lived. and it's an important discovery for us and it's going to be a very important central point of our interpretation here in the cellar when we reopen at the end in 2026, moving from the cellar kitchen and servants space, we are faced with a long hallway which runs all the way up to the north door of the to the cellar, which goes right outside.

there was and it survives a door here that we took out. but there's a big heavy wooden door that locked up this passageway from the kitchen and servants hall. the reason why is because beyond this point, the function of the cellar as the storage area for the washingtons property begins. so we go through this locked wooden door and we're in the cellar and then on either side on the west and on the east were a series of rooms and everything's kind of blown open right now. there was a wall here in the 18th century, and that wall will be restored. but we're looking into one of these storage rooms and you can see how currently we've got a lot of modern infrastructure in here, posts holding things up, steel beams to keep everything stable while we're doing our work. and one of the things that we're doing is removing later masonry work. you can see here some concrete

and some hard 1930s brick and that is over top of this here, which is the original 1734 chimney stack. so the house begins as a a large one storey house built for washington's father in 1734. and it didn't have a cellar that's one of the important discoveries we made when we started our work here. so the chimney stack, all this kind of rough looking 18th century brick and mortar here only runs to about here. and below this would have been subsoil, so they would have dug dug a trench, built this chimney. and then so this would have been the lowest point of the cellar at that time. and as the cellar was created in the 1740s and fifties, they dug out rooms that had about a seven foot depth. and so when all of that soil got taken away, they had to underpin

this. and when in then, in 1930s, they dug away a lot of that soil and replaced it with brick and concrete. and so that has caused some challenges for preservation of the original material. and so some of it we're pulling out in order to help give the 18th century fabric a better chance at long term survival. so along the west were a series of four rooms. each of those rooms had a doorway with a locked door as well. so not only do you have to get through that first door into the passageway, you then got to get through a second locked door. and this is the place where on the west, the washington's restoring dry goods, storing furniture, storing tools, things like that. and so, you know, as as the owner of this estate and by that, of course, we have to include those enslaved here. they wanted to make sure that their property was not misused,

mistreated or taken. so everything got locked up, very common in an 18th century house like that. but this this is part of the cellar. this room here was actually dug out as part of the. 1758 expanse of the house. so we go from that one storey house that that washington's father had built. then the house passed to lawrence, washington, george's brother. he didn't make too many overall changes to the house. but what he did do is he dug out the center part of the cellar, and he does that. and in 1758, so the very center of the cellar gets dug out. then. in 1758, george raises the roof of the house and creates a two story house and then he also expands the cellar. and this is the part of the cellar that gets dug out in 1758. and it's while our archeologists

were doing work in this room that they made a really exciting discovery. so while doing the excavation that we needed to do, because we were going to be disturbing around by putting all our duct work and infrastructure underground, our archeologists moved from north to south through the house, through the cellar, excavating each room. and when they got to this room, the 1758 addition to the cellar underneath the. 1770s brick pavers, they found something interesting. they found a series of holes dug into the ground. and as they opened, as they began to remove the fill in those holes, they started to find the very famous fruit bottles. the first two were found with cherries in them, and then the subsequent ones were a mix of cherries and other berries. they were placed into pits that

were dug into this clay, this hard clay subsoil. and you can see how many pits there are. they all sort of run together. but here you can see that there was one pit and a second pit and a third pit, and a fourth pit. and then in the middle, they were they were as they were removing bottles, they were disturbing those pits. this the the placing of those bottles in these pits was to get them at a very cool, stable temperature. so underground kept it sort of in the in the forties fahrenheit and then they would they would cover them back over what we found were some pits where the bottles had clearly been taken out and only a few remained. but then we found two pits that were untouched, meaning that they had about 13 in one, 14 and another of these bottles holding this this fruit. and we think what happened was that in the 1750s and sixties,

this was really the spot where they were burying and retrieving these bottles. but in the 17, early 1770s, the last deposit was made probably in the spring of 1775. and that's just the year that washington goes off to philadelphia, because there there are war clouds in the sky. and he is he is appointed commander in chief of the continental army. so he goes off to boston and very shortly thereafter, mrs. washington follows. but while that's happening, there's a lot of work happening in the cellar. that kitchen's being built, the walls that made the various rooms of this part of the cellar are being reconfigured. and then this room gets paved and in the absence of mr. or mrs. washington. so what happens is that those pits get covered over and forgotten and they were awaiting our archeologists to discover them. and it really was one of the

most exciting things that we found. we also found something maybe didn't appeal to the popular media very much, but for us, it was pretty interesting. you see behind me what looks like a well, that's only about three feet deep. it's a sump and it is part of a larger drainage system that washington had installed in this new cellar, probably in the 1780s. and so we found trenches dug into the soil, lined with brick, and they all ran out to a major trunk drain that then exited the house to the south and went down to the dung repository. so it was draining any rainwater or any groundwater that got into the cellar. and we've had a lot of water here this week. and if you look here, you can see that this is where that drain was. it is still full of water because we've been getting rain and groundwater coming in because of all the rain.

so these drains still want to function nearly a hundred of sorry, 250 years, maybe 240 years after they were constructed. so that says a lot about the ability of washington to engineer something and his enslaved workers to actually carry out that vision for engineering and do so in a way that has worked for over two and a half centuries. so as we go further along to the north, along this long passage way again, dry storage here on the west, but on the east side and it's the east side of the house that has that big two story porch, the piazza. there are a series of three vaulted spaces, and these actually go outside the house and are underneath the the paving of the piazza. so these vaulted spaces would have kept a more con stant temperature. they have no connection with the outside at all, whereas the west

rooms had windows to try and keep things dry and ventilated. these would have replaced the pits that they dug in the 17 5060s and early seventies. these were the wet storage room, the cool storage rooms. so they would have had big doors in here as well. they would probably have been lined with shelves so that you could do that. you could stack your bottles full of cherries or what your your wine and your alcohol, which we definitely know from the inventory that was taken at washington's death that these rooms did store so dry storage on one side, wet storage on the other. and as we are doing our work, our foremost concern is to protect our surviving 18th century structure. so if you look into this vaulted space, you can see that we have reinforced our 18th century brick vaults with this this

underpinning or the shoring to keep it stable while we're doing work on the piazza to keep the vibrations down and to make sure that everything's survives in the best condition possible. now, putting aside all of our framing work, the other critical element in the conservation restoration of the cellar is brick and stone. and in this case, this stone. here we are. washington had constructed a big stone wall which created these rooms on the west side of the cellar. they were made out of blocks of acquire sandstone, which is of wrap can be hard as a hard stone, but also is somewhat of a friable and soft stone depending on what part of the the big vein of it that runs through virginia. you get unfortunately the mount vernon vein was not particularly least strong and over time

because of the damp conditions of the cellar, this is the last bit that you're going to see. it began to turn back into sand. so if you look down and here you can see that there actually holes right through the wall. and we were very concerned about this condition because we didn't want anything to collapse. of course. so we have begun conservation of the surviving stone up here. this whitewashed stone that is the original from the 18th century as is the lowest course. but in this central belt here, this was in really, really bad shape. so we have kind of a three step approach or conserving the blocks which are in good enough condition to support weight. we are a veneer in those that that have have eroded. i have but are still strong and we're putting a veneer on top of them. and then as a last last case, what we're doing is replacing them outright.

if we have so the center section is again a sandstone that we're replacing the original sandstone that that just didn't survive or isn't up to the task of holding up helping to hold up the house. now we're as far north in the cellar as we can go. so we're in the 1776 north edition of the house. above our heads is, the new room, that big green entertaining room at the north end of the house. so as i mentioned earlier, the north part of the house framing really had problems with rot and termites in the 1930s active termite colonies that we have photographs of them holding timbers that were basically crumbling in their hands. so much of the 18th century fabric was lost through campaign after campaign of trying to combat this deterioration. and so what we have done or have had to do is remove sort of that ad hoc framing campaigns.

and we have put in we've restored the original framing system. so above our heads we have big white oak timbers and they come in to a series of summer beams which are the real strong beams that hold up the floor. as you can see, we have opted to replace our wooden summer beams with steel. we have used steel very sparingly in this because of course, you know, when push comes to shove, steel is stronger than wood. and if the house is ever under any stress, the the wood's going to give before the steel. that's not a situation we want to have happen. but we did want to keep this space open. so we opted to put two steel beams in that run from the outer foundation to the chimney breast. and so that allows allows us to have a free and clear span here. the the the white oak that you see above you is from two so sources. first we have used wherever we

can, white oak from trees that we harvested right here on the estate. so these are mount vernon oaks. they are in effect, the great, great, great grandchildren of the original trees that were chopped down in the 7030s and the 1750s and the 1770s that built this house. so that was a really nice opportunity for us to incorporate basically the same family of trees back into the house in our in our work. but in some places where where we couldn't use green timber. and what i mean by that is since we're cutting down these trees and and chewing them up and basically squaring them into timber while they're still wet from being cut down because it's easier to work the wood that way. and that's the way they did it in the 18th century. but we're dealing with a house that has stood here for over 250

years. it's framed work is really dry now. and so in places where we couldn't have any shrinkage in the wood, we have opted to use salvaged timbers, which we've gotten from buildings principally from suppliers. in ohio. so these would probably have been 19th century barns that had been taken down decades ago. and we match the moisture content with those those dry timbers with our existing mount vernon timbers in the house so that we didn't get any shrinkage because we didn't want anything moving in the superstructure above us. now in order to do all this work, we had to do something of of what i think of as an engineering miracle. and we'll go outside and take a look at that. now. so one of the things that they did in order to fight termites was they took out what are the the sills of the building.

so when a wall comes down and sits on a foundation, there's a big horizontal timber at the bottom of each of the four walls. and that timber holds up the walls, but it also ties in the floor frame as well. and that's what makes the box of a box frame look like a box. termites got into those cells and they and they got removed at various periods of time. so in order to get new cells back in. so we could tie the floor and the walls back together. we had to we had to basically hold the house in air. and what we had to do, as you can see over here, we took off our famous rusticated siding from a point from just below the windows down to the foundation. and so right behind these plywood boards are the actual 18th century framing members. and we can see them on the other side of the house a little bit later and then. we bolted in a large seating

panel. each one of these bolts goes into one of our 18 century framing members. and then there are large levers steel beams that are bolted to the sea channel and you can follow them out. and this giant beam goes out and it's basically a lever and a lever and fulcrum system. here's our fulcrum. and then that big yellow beam is the weight on the x on the on the far end of the lever. so the house is cantilevered that weight equals the weight of the of this wall of the house and it balances on this balance point right here. so this short ring is not lifting the house, it's just holding it in place so that we can get at the space we need to get at. because when they pulled those wooden sills out in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they basically filled up the gap by

raising that, putting a few extra courses of brick on the foundation. and we're going to take those courses a brick out. and so for a time period, the house is the bottom of the walls of the house are about a foot from the foundation. and it's this shoring on all four sides is what actually holds the house in the air. while we do that work and we put in ourselves from the outside that the walls of the house will be connected back into the new cell. the floors of the house will be connected back into the new cell. and then we can take away all the shoring and the house is back on its foundation. so the house starting in the 7050s, when george raises the roof to make it a two story house, we have surviving siding boards from that period that are trapped in various places and we see that from that period on the house had rusticated siding. and what i mean by that is that the wooden siding boards that

make up the outside of the house are notched and beveled top and bottom so that it makes it look like it's a series of stone blocks so that is called rustic nation. now, washington went on further to full his audience into believing that his house was made out of stone by doing a process known as sand painting. so he sent very specific instructions in the 1790s about how he wanted this house painted and what it was, is you paint it once with a coat of white paint. that white paint is an off white paint. it's very clear in our paint analysis lead white is a nice warm color white not a bright white like a modern white. and that's why the house is off white. but you paint it with a coat of of white paint and then you throw sand at it until the sand won't stick anymore.

so you get this crust or coating of sand on the outside of the wooden siding boards. and to make it seem even more realistic, washington had a test done. he took sand from a beach down by norfolk point comfort of sand that he described as being very white and then he also you sand that he got from pounded freestone what i mean by that is he took that same acquired stone that we saw the cellar took blocks of that and had the enslaved workers pound it back into sand and then sieve it out. so it was nice and fine and then he tested that against that white sand from the beach and he liked the free stone better because of course, it made the house look like it's made out of the local building. stone, which is a quiet sandstone, which is the same sandstone that they're using to build the us capitol and the white house at about the same time in the 1790s, washington

loved this stone as president, he the us government purchased the quarry for this stone because it was our local dmv, the building stone. and so he wanted his houses to look the same and he was quite proud of that fact. so let's take a tour of the mansion, as you probably never seen it if you visited here. and what i mean by as you have never seen it, is that it's a construction zone. and ironically, that is the way that poor martha washington experienced it through much of her marriage to george washington. because the entire time that they lived here, the last 40 years of the 18th century, the house was almost always under construction, either adding wings to the house or redoing the interiors over and over again.

and we're going to quickly run through some of the the discoveries we've made recently that tell us about the changes that have happened to the house, especially in the 18th century. so as a visitor to mount vernon, you come into the central passage and you're told this is the heart of the house. it's where the butler would sort out guests to go into the various rooms. we talk about that beautiful black walnut staircase behind me, which is very safely wrapped up in moving blankets to protect it during our work. but the interesting thing that we've learned in recent years is that this center passage, which is a typical mid to late 18th century house plan, this center passage didn't exist when the house was originally built. our work in the cellar and then work that we've done elsewhere on the upper floors of the house to confirm our initial findings in the cellar. tell us that originally there was a wall that ran across here

right under this big boxed beam, that there was a wall here so that the staircase was in a room of its own. and it wasn't this staircase. of course, this is built in 1758, but from 1734 there was a smaller staircase that ran up. we don't exactly know how it went, ran in the in the initial years of the house, but it was in a small room of its own. the other thing that we discovered, and this was really sort of mind blowing, was that this wall which separates the central passage from the little parlor which we'll look at in a second, that wall, wasn't there. so if you can follow me here. we had a wall here and no wall there, which meant that across the east side of the house there was this big, long space that was probably what was referred to in lawrence washington's inventory as the passage and parlor. it's a kind of a mysterious

name. we all know exactly what it was or why they called it that, but it seems compelling that there was this connection between these two spaces that we think of as very distinct. now, our investigations have suggested that this that these changes to the house, the creation of that center passage, would have been done in the 1740s when lawrence washington, george's older brother own the house and that george did all this paneling that we see but we actually have found behind the paneling exists earlier plaster finishes that probably would have dated to the initial construction of this center passage. and the reason why you would want to add a center passage in lawrence had studied in england. he saw what were the most up to date house plans in the uk. and then when he came back, virginia was experiencing a bit of a social change where a families of status wanted to sort of sort out who got to go

into what parts of their house. and you needed a holding space in the center passage became that holding space so he creates this created and this becomes kind of the sorting room whether you're going to go into the big fancy front parlor, whether you're going to go into the into one of the smaller rooms like, the dining room or the little parlor. so it really just reflects not only architectural fashion, but it also reflects a rapidly complicating american social system. so let's come on over here to the the little parlor. so the little parlor is was initially a bedroom in the early house. and it has a very complicated because there was a there was no door in this wall. and then there was a door in this wall. and then the door got closed up again, all sort of during the 1740s, fifties, 1740s to the

1780s. but as we interpret it today, it's in its 1799 appearance. it is a little family sitting room. if you were an intimate of the washington, say, a family member or a very close friend, you would spend time in them in here with them. this is where we we generally believe that the the famous harpsichord that washington buys for his his granddaughter, nellie custis, that it would have been in here, although we're going to see it in another room because it to get it out of the way. but what we've done in this space is already you can see we've pulled out the baseboards and exposed the framing. so all of this is the 18th century framing. we've got the corner of a down brace. you got a stud, you've got along the exterior as well. you can see just the very of the framing members. and if we look over here, we have a very clear view of this, of the basically the bones of

the house. so here the wall studs coming down. this is the threshold of that doorway that i told you about. so it had had a floorboard that ran through it and then it ended up getting closed in in the 1780s or late seventies. early eighties is what we believe sometimes our dating is not exactly precise. records really help us date things sometimes forensic investigation starts meaning we're looking at of age of the wood and things like that. sometimes that helps us, but not all the time either. so we sometimes at the ballpark our dates. so we're in the front parlor now, which was in the 1760s through the 1780s, was the fanciest room in the house.

and it's got all this beautiful wooden wainscoting or paneling. this gets all gets put in in the 1760s with these class cool door surrounds on both of the doors. this door goes into the new room and then there's also a door into the into the passageway, the windows, we know, get changed out when build the new room. in the 1780s. so there's again, a really complicated history to this house that in the past hasn't always been understood. and part of our project is to document all this stuff like crazy so that we can get all the evidence in line and analyze it all and get as close a as true a biography of this house as we can while we're while we've got it all cleaned out. this is the room that has really bright, shocking blue curtains and furniture, which is really great stuff. and it's stripped out a little

bit, but you get a chance to see the flooring, you can see the reproduction, harpsichord. they're covered over to keep the dust off of it. but we really do have our you know, we're we're in a state of undress at this point. i wanted to show you this because this is the first one of the first places where we noticed that we had a bit of a streaming framing anomaly. so you can see the bottom of all of these framing members for the wall. there should be a wood member that runs from the down brace to the studs all the way across here. and there's nothing except some pieces of slate and some brick, and then there's just a big void here because they took it out in order because they didn't want it to be a way for termites to get into the building. and i know i've talked a lot about termites and i know every one of you is saying in your living room, why are you using wood if you're worried about termites? because we now are able to treat

for termites. we can treat the wood to be termite resistant. it's not a big a deal today as it was in the 1930. so we are putting back the original structure because that's what works best with the rest of the house. we don't want to be throwing in a bunch of steel or a bunch of synthetic material that is not going to work well with the rest of the house as to what caused some of the problems that we've seen in more recent decades with the house, is that incorporation of non sympathetic materials like portland cement and really hard brick, they've really they really ultimately compromised the the the the condition of house so we're putting back as much of the original as possible or the same type as possible. but we're better prepared to deal with maintenance and to deal with protection than they were 100 or 150 years ago.

so we've now come into what's now being called the old chamber. it was probably early, one of the early bedrooms in the house. what i wanted to show you is how we have been taking apart parts of the house in order for us to take the house so we can make our repairs so you've got here laid out on this bench are some pretty interesting things. we've got some door architraves that's kind of the door frame around the door. and you're seeing the back side of this. and i just wanted to stop and show you that, you know, you can see here this now is bright and shiny, but it's it's a wire, nails perfectly round. this is a 20th century now or a 21st century now, perhaps. but when you start to get these flat tips like this, and especially here, where it's curled back on itself, these are

18th century nails and our team can tell the difference between an 18th century nail, a 19th century nail, a 20th century nail. so these are the sorts of forensic clues that that help us date the house when we have no written date for when work is happening. so over here, we just opened up just this morning. there's a i just saw this for the first time this morning. the actual 18th century floor of this fireplace had been taken out. at some point, you could see there's a big duct that comes up to feed heat into the house. we're going to be taking that out and we're still going to be feeding heat in through that opening. but we're going to need it up and make it a little smaller. but one of the things that we had to find out was, is this hearth original or not? and sure enough, it is. it's a big piece of a quiet sandstone. when we saw it from the back. but we also saw for the first time that the original last

course of 18th century brick was taken out. but then but the original mortar bid that it was set into is there. so we can actually see the impressions of the century brick. and now we know that this was originally laid in a herringbone pattern, not just a straight run as some of the other fireplace floors are. so it's these little clues that help us get as close as we can to the 18th century appearance of this house. and, you know, this the stuff that it makes the, you know, the most exciting part for the architectural historians on our staff is digging into the meat of the house, the bones of the house, and learning things that no one has ever learned before. it's always exciting when you open a space up and you know that you are the first person to see that space since the 18th century.

so we're now in the dining room that really blew right green room that everyone always comments when they visit. it was painted green in the 1780s and again in the 1790s. washington liked this for a dining room color. it was a very expensive pigment to use. it was a cop ground up copper pigment. so it was really expensive and kind of showed that was a he was a man of means above us is really one of the gems of this house which is a the 1775 early neoclassical ceiling which the design of which was selected by william bernard sears, the carver who did this, the fireplace that was executed by an unknown stucco worker who was indentured to washington's brother in law is a great space. unfortunately, you know, because we got to keep it. keep it all safe. but this is the beautiful carving work of william bernhardt here. so come back when this is open, which is going to be very soon.

this space, the house is still open and we're going to go into the part where we're working now and that will be open in by presidents day of 25. so right now we're working on the south edition specifically. we've got it shored as we saw outside and we're about to make the insertion of those steel trusses that i've talked about that are going to help support this space. and as part of the work we're going to be installing the or reworking the air conditioning duct. and that's what's going on over here. they're very carefully starting to pull up some of the later pavers that went in in this space. and like the old chamber, we're probably going to learn a lot about this fireplace by pulling out the 20th century work that covers the 18th century fabric behind it. one one of the one of the interesting things that happened when we began to take off the baseball boots here is that

behind one of the baseboards, we found a bit of molding that had been used as a shim, and they had just kind of gotten stuck in there to help hold baseboard steady while the carpenter nailed it in place in the 1770s. and when we pulled that baseboard out, that space had never been opened before. since that baseboard was installed and we found this completely untouched piece of molding. and it's just so exciting right? you have this this stuff has not been seen by humans, has not been touched by human hands since it was installed in the 1770s. so it's kind of a double edged sword for me as a preservation honest. we don't want to disturb this 18th century fabric, but we have to in order to make the repairs and do the conservation work that we have to. but we will be putting it all back in as carefully as possible and again, this room will be done like that. it will be open for presidents day in 2025.

and. welcome to the second floor above stairs, as they called it in the 18th century. so here in the main part of the house, these rooms are created in 1758 by george washington's carpenter. we are got a treat because we can walk into these spaces. now, normally they're filled with 18th century furniture and you're stopped at a barrier and the door and the door. but you get to kind of you can come in and and experiences as architecture as a room, right. like these this house was meant to be occupied by people and it was built in relationship, the human experience. so it is it's really great to be able to come in here. we've got it all set up to keep all the wallpaper as clean as possible. but you know, you can hear the

echo in this. these are the originally original. 1750s floorboards. you can see this dark stain here was where a fire suppression equipment was in place and what you can see that darkness is how they treated the floors in the late 19th century, in the early 20th centuries, they stained them, they varnished them. they did not do that in the 18th century. the finish you see here, the raw wood, that's how they would have been done in the 18th century. and you could see it's quite a difference from where we started to where we've come to today. and the lafayette room, it was one of the most important rooms up here because they put the marquis de lafayette in here. and so these windows, which look like it actually is kind of an overcast day today, but these from these windows, you get a view of the potomac on a beautiful day. but this is one of the larger rooms in initially had a window

in that in that wall before new room got constructed in 1776. and so we there's this weird reference to not weird but there's a to closets being built on the outside of the house which seems weird to us but what it meant were just small rooms and you could actually walk out onto the roof of the closet. so it was a door in the blue room where we just were. there was also a door in the chintz room where we're going to go right now. so we're in the room. this room got restored and i believe it opened to 2016. we've been working our way through the house. i here i've worked here since 2012 and we started on the new room when i when i got here. and we've been working through the entire house by the time i retire, god willing, we will have done all the major spaces in the house. and i can say that i have touched every part of this

house. so but the chintz room originally there was a door here from the 1750s when they built that closet. so you could walk through this. but in the 1770s, when they built the study wing, they turned, they kind of made this closet in here. and a closet might not be exciting, but it is exciting. this one, all this that you see, the plaster, the shelving with these great og curves down here, all of this is original to the 7070s. our closet, it's in some ways are our best preserved spaces because they haven't been on display. they haven't been used by people. so they end up being really the most exciting, at least from the geeky architectural history perspective. they're really kind of the most exciting parts because they're so pristine. the rest of our rooms have gotten restored and restored and restored. there's always more information

to learn about them, and we can always update them. but the closets, they haven't changed very much at all. the yellow room you can walk through when you come as a visitor. so this is not such a special moment. but coming back now to the south edition, through the back stair, just because cause we're doing an entire restoration of the framing of the mansion where we have to hold the mansion in air, that's not challenging enough for mount vernon. we are actually going to restore washington's bedroom while we're closed in 2026. the second floor will be closed and when you come and visit at the at, it will start 2025. when you come and visit at the end of 2025, this space will be newly restored. so that's a double reason to come at in 2025.

so the washingtons bedroom is a great space. again, it has a great closet, fairly untouched from the 18th century. it's got this beautiful unrestored fireplace as well with the original iron fire back that washington had made with his his initials and the griffin from his family crest. and you can see the condition of the floor of this firebox. it's really rough because it got it had fires built on it for for decades and decades and decades. and that damages the brick. but we don't really want to pull that out because then we're taking away part of that original fabric. as long as we can interpret the fact that this is original, and that's why it's showing its age, that's that's what we really want our visitors to see is how house would have looked when the washingtons were here. this, of course, is the room where washington died on december 14th, just a couple of days passed. we're filming this on december

16, but it was where he died in 1799, in the bed. and then we have these two dressing rooms or closets with with reproduction, shelving based on the original shelving that we saw in the closet downstairs. but i also wanted you to see this so this is part of our old age fax system rises up in this closet. so it's out of view from visitors. we're trying hard to reduce a little bit the size and scale of these ducts, but it's a big house. it's 11,000 square feet. so it takes some ducts to keep it cool and keep it warm and you might ask why we keep it cool and we keep it warm. the house ideally exists in a certain range of temperature and especially relative humidity, but so do the collections inside

it. what we don't want is our hvac system to ever be attuned to the comfort of people. because when people comfortable historic objects and historic houses are very uncomfortable. so moving forward, when you visit vernon, it's always going to feel a little warmer than you want it to. in the summer and a little colder than you want it to in the winter, because we have to prioritize the care of this priceless, irreplaceable resource and, all the resources that it holds inside its four walls. okay, okay. passage right here. we're headed there. so off of washington study is a really special space. hang on one second. amy, can i borrow your flashlight. all right, so off of washington study is a really special space it's part it's partly his where

he dressed every day. so here we are and if you look all of this shelving, all this plaster, you can see the strokes of the whitewash that was applied when the plaster was put on in the 18th century. this base is amazing and it is in need of conservation, and that's part of what we're going to be doing now. this is not a space that we can open to the public because it's too tight. you have to walk through the study to get here. but it is this where washington kept all his clothing and he came down here every morning and dressed here and in the study. so it's a very intimate space. so you can almost feel, you know, that, you know, the general and president, you know, sort of looking through and picking out what going to, you know, what is going to wear for for that day, whether it's going to be as coat or as brown coat.

and then in this space here, just outside this study, but in between the study of the study and this study closet, we have this other space. so here here's the coat rack where washington hung all of his coats and again, this early plaster, no later paint on it. and this is the original 18th century paint. there's only two coats of paint on this woodwork. and you can see the back of the paneling that you normally see in study over here. and then finally, if we go behind this door. some really things to see. so a little bit of that, more of that original 18 century paint, but if we look back here into this space, this is behind the book press, which is in washington study. so the study is constructed in

1775. the book press added in 1786. so you see back here, you can even see the marks of the the scrub plane that the carpenters used to make the boards for this still intact these nice sawn studs. and then up here the original plaster except the cornice has been taken out. but the chair rail and baseboard have been left. so it's this little time capsule of of the 18 century has not been touched. and then this door has again, two coats of paint on it. you can see that it had been hung on hinges facing the other way. those hinge it then it got swapped around and the hinges were put on the other of the door. that's because it was originally in this door doorway where i am now between this encapsulated space and the the study closet

and the study. and so then when they built the book press, they moved that door forward and hung it in the opening of that's part of the new book press construction so it's really just this amazing early space that's just been because it's impossible for us to show it to our visitors on a regular basis. so it's it's really been it's been untouched and it's just absolutely my most favorite spot in the entire house. so the famous piazza, which is such a lovely space to sit and overlook maryland, which you cannot see all today, thanks to the fog it is torn up in preparation for working on the center section of the house.

we the work that we're doing is carried out in three phases. we did the north face in 2024. we're starting the the phase two in the south. that's going to be between january and february of 2025. and then for the for the bath following six months after that, we're going to be working in the center section of house. then the house reopens. but the which is really up, but you can see all the the the shoring that we're about to engage the house. you can actually see really very clearly. the the early framing of the house. so what we've got here again is a down brace. these are the diagonal braces that locking corners to keep the house square. you've got original 17 over here. we've got 70, 34 studs. the house was so had so much

between 1734 and the 1770s that they actually had to put these extra pieces on the outside to square up the exterior of the walls. and then interesting this way, wherever we find these white posts, these were put in in the 1930. so this replaces the original 1734 corner post, which was eaten up by termites. but then next to it is the 1775 corner post for the south edition, which didn't get eaten up by termites. so it's kind of hit or miss what survived, what didn't survive from that early period. but we will be engaging with all this and then they'll be tied into this big steel framework in order to carry the household weight of the house. as we clear off that brick on the foundations.

so here we are in the new room, the big entertaining space on the north of the house. this was added in 1776, but room's interior didn't get finished until the 7080s. and it is an extremely space in the history of american architecture because it's one of the first and earliest neoclassical spaces in america. so come out and see it and see it. you can because a month ago the new room looked like the rest of the house that we just toured. in fact, it didn't even have floorboards down, but all the work was completed in phase one in the newsroom. and everything's back together. so you can come and tour the new room and see it, with its holiday splendor, laid out on the table as you can every december. the rest of the house is going to be reopening soon. the the study opens february by presidents day of 2025 and then the center section of the house will open up by the by the fall of 2025 as well. but in meantime, new rooms here

soon to be the study and then, of course, there's the entire estate all of our outbuildings and all the interpreted activities that we do. come on out and visit us. and we're waiting to welcome you here to. george washington's mount vernon.