A Surprise Discovery

When you dig a hole at an historic site you run the risk of destroying important archaeological features. Sometimes you have no choice, however, you have to dig. This was the case recently when Hoyt Roberts, Aaron James, and Nick Lawton of Richard Marks Restorations were digging up brick pavers in the courtyard in order to relay them. A dull thud alerted them to the fact that there was more under their shovels than sand. A few minutes of investigative digging uncovered a surprising find—what appears to be a capped off well.
The well measures about five feet in diameter. It is covered by a bluestone slab, which must weigh at least five hundred pounds. Wells were commonly found in the yards of nineteenth century Charleston homes, but the placement of this one is curiously close to the back staircase leading into the courtyard (i.e. about fifteen feet).
We hope to conduct an archaeological excavation in early January to determine the approximate age of the well, if it is indeed a well and not a cistern, and remove the bluestone cap. We will see if it is filled in with dirt or still open which will allow us to better plan a future investigation.
Stay tuned as we hope to have some answers soon and I'll let you know if we find the family silver…

It's not Fallingwater, but...

I just saw Kenneth Love’s film “Saving Fallingwater”. The film documents restoration efforts to stabilize the cantilevered sections of the Frank Lloyd Wright (insert your own superlative here) designed residence in Pennsylvania. It was perfect timing for me to see the film because it really put our piazza stabilization project at the Aiken-Rhett House in perspective. It’s hard to single out any one aspect of the Save America’s Treasures work as being more important than another, but the piazza stabilization has to be towards the top. The problem is that the arcade supporting the two story piazza is rotating away from the building. There have been previous attempts at stabilization, but the combination of a rather shallow footing under the arches and downward pressure from the weight has continued to the degree that it has become a high priority for stabilization.
In order to do this, the restoration team designed a series of metal tie-rods to secure the piazza floor joists to the building’s interior. Basically, flat iron rods were attached to the sides of the piazza floor joists, holes were mined through the masonry walls, the iron run into the building, another flat iron piece was secured to either interior floor joists or embedded into a load bearing masonry wall, and the two flat sections joined with threaded rod that incorporates a turnbuckle to tighten the two together. All the metal work was then white washed to blend in and the masonry repaired so you wouldn’t even know what happened.
Pretty simple in design, VERY messy to install, especially when you have visitors needing to be in the same area. This hasn’t been the most exciting part of the project, unless you consider the alternative, but like the folks at Fallingwater I’ve learned that you can minimize the aesthetic impact of a potentially intrusive restoration project if you plan well.

Next entry will discuss why faux finishes on a building’s exterior were so important to people like the Aikens in the 19th Century.

Did you say yellow?

“Yellow! Did you say yellow?”
“Well, not exactly yellow. It’s more of a brownish, subdued, goldish, kind of yellow,” I replied.
“But I like it just how it looks now,” she said, her disappointment clear on her face and in her voice.

This conversation was just one of many I have had regarding the work currently underway at the Aiken-Rhett House, funded by the Save America's Treasures grant. And I have to admit, I also love the current weathered patina of the house’s exterior. So when I first heard of the plans to limewash the building, I was not enthused about it. It’s perfectly fine for old buildings to look their age and the thought of putting a fresh coat of paint on such a Grand Dame didn’t set well with a lot of people, me included…at least not at first.

There were a couple of factors that changed my mind and eased my reservations. First, our architect Glenn Keyes and our contractor Moby Marks explained to me the finer points of limewashing. Limewash is not paint per se; it’s the very top coat of exterior stucco. Since it is lime based, it bonds to the masonry below it and helps create a protective yet permeable outer coating.

Prior to beginning the Aiken-Rhett House’s limewashing, Glenn took me around Charleston to look at limewashed buildings. I began to see the beauty of a historically correct limewash. Limewash colors maintain their vibrancy yet they have a depth to them you just can’t get from modern paints. A limewashed wall has a kind of a mottled look, which is the inescapable result of limewash’s water-like consistency. It has to be applied in multiple coats with a stiff bristle brush. And since you can add pigments to it, we get to debate things like “how yellow” the yellow is.

Enter historic paint specialist Susan Buck. Susan has been working on understanding the paint sequences at the Aiken-Rhett House for years. She took an X-acto knife and sliced a tiny bit of paint off the wall and examined it under a microscope. (If you’ve never seen a microscopic cross-section of a paint sample, picture a slice of eight-layer cake with red, green, white, brown, and yellow icing alternating between the layers.) With this sample, Susan was able to determine that the house was limewashed multiple times. Her identification of the correct yellow came as, admittedly, a bit of an aesthetic shock to me once I saw a color match sample put on the house’s wall.

But I was finally able to appreciate the aesthetic changes to the Aiken-Rhett House once I understood the building’s limewash and color history and the need to put the top coat on the stucco. It sounds oxymoronic, but a newly limewashed wall has an aged look. So, for those not happy with new/old color, you won’t have to wait another hundred years to see the patina we appreciate now.