At Home - Bill Bryson [164]
“The piazza is a really ingenious way of keeping the house shaded and cool and keeping the frontage attractive,” Dennis Pogue, associate director for preservation at Mount Vernon, told me when I was there. “He was a much, much better architect than he is nearly always given credit for.”
Because he was continually adding to an existing structure, Washington had to make constant compromises. For structural reasons, he had to choose between redoing much of the interior or abandoning symmetry on the back end of the house—which is to say the side of the house that arriving visitors first saw. He chose to abandon symmetry. “That was quite a brave and unusual thing to do in that age, but Washington was always pragmatic,” says Pogue. “He preferred a sensible interior layout to an imposed symmetry without. He hoped people wouldn’t notice.” In Pogue’s experience about half the visitors don’t. It has to be said that the absence of symmetry is not particularly jarring, though for anyone who values balance it is hard not to notice that the cupola and pediment are a good foot and a half out of alignment.
Lacking building stone of any kind, Washington faced his house with planks of wood, carefully chamfered at the edges to look like blocks of cut stone and painted to disguise knots and grain. While the paint was still drying, sand was gently blown onto the planks to give them a gritty, stonelike texture. The deception was so successful that even now guides point out the real nature of the building to visitors by rapping on it with their knuckles.
Washington didn’t get to spend a lot of time enjoying Mount Vernon; even when he was at home, he didn’t get much peace. One of the conventions of the age was to feed and put up any respectable-looking person who presented himself at the door. Washington was plagued with guests—he had 677 of them in one year—and many of those stayed for more than one night.
Washington died in 1799, just two years after retiring, and Mount Vernon began a long decline. By the middle of the following century, it was virtually derelict. Washington’s heirs offered it to the nation at a reasonable price, but Congress didn’t believe that its role included managing the homes of ex-presidents and declined to provide funds. In 1853, a woman named Louisa Dalton Bird Cunningham, while cruising up the Potomac on a passenger steamer, was so appalled by its condition that she started a foundation, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, which bought the place and began its long and heroic restoration. The association still looks after the house with intelligence and affection. Even more miraculous in its way is the survival of the peerless view across the Potomac. In the 1950s, a plan was unveiled to build a massive oil refinery on the opposite shore. A congresswoman from Ohio, Frances Payne Bolton, successfully intervened and managed to save eighty square miles of Maryland foreshore for posterity, so that today the view remains as agreeable and satisfying as it was in Washington’s day.
Monticello suffered similarly after Jefferson’s death, though in fact it was already in a pretty decrepit state. A shocked visitor in 1815 recorded that nearly all the chairs were worn through and had pieces of stuffing sticking out of them. When Jefferson died on July 4, 1826—fifty years to the day after the issuing of the Declaration of Independence—he had debts of more than $100,000, a colossal sum, and Monticello was looking threadbare.
Unable to afford the considerable upkeep on the house, Jefferson’s daughter put it on the market for $70,000, but there were no takers. In the end it was sold for just $7,000 to a man named James