A Founder's house, reborn

Tomorrow, Montpelier, the house in rural Virginia where James Madison, the fourth president, spent much of his life (and where he lived with his beloved Dolley when they weren't in Washington), will be unveiled anew. Over the past five years, at a cost of some $24 million, craftsmen have been peeling away layers of a much larger mansion that had engulfed it -- layers added by two generations of DuPonts, who bought the structure in 1900 and turned it into a pink-stuccoed behemoth. The house has been restored, as close as preservation research will allow, to how it looked in 1812, after Madison had put his own finishing touches on it.

Marion Scott DuPont bequeathed the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation upon her death in 1983, but the house was from the start tough sell to tourists, given how obscure the physical links to Madison had become. The hope is that the restoration will turn it into the place for Americans to learn about Madison, who remains among the most obscure founding fathers, because his achievements (like the Federalist Papers) were mostly intellectual. (And because presiding over the burning of the White House is not exactly the stuff of nationalist legend.) Chief Justice John Roberts and PBS anchor Jim Lehrer are scheduled to be on hand for the official unveiling, which coincides with Constitution Day.

It's not fashionable these days to remove layers from later historic periods to get to a more "authentic" original structure, and there is some griping in preservation circles about the project, and its expense. But Madison was important enough to warrant an exception, the Trust decided. It didn't hurt that representatives of the estate of Andrew Paul Mellon had made it clear from the start that they'd fund the project, if it proved feasible.

(I wrote about the restoration in this month's Preservation, the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.)