With the New Room’s floors removed, Mount Vernon’s Preservation team, with the assistance of Christman Mid-Atlantic Constructors, began the process of replacing much of the room’s underlying framing. This involved removing the room’s joists, undergirts, and the one in-situ summer beam, components that primarily date to the 19th and 20th centuries.
Over the more than two centuries of its existence, Washington’s 1776 framing in the New Room disappeared due to rot and insect damage. In December 1797, Washington warned, “More by accident than design it was (luckily) discovered in time that the great girder which supports the Sleepers in my new room was so much decayed that a company only moderately large would have sunk altogether into the Cellar—In short I have been surrounded with workmen of different descriptions ever since I came home and am not yet done with them…”
The Preservation team found evidence of these repairs in the north wall of the New Room, but all the Washington-era floor framing and repairs appear to have been replaced in 1838 during the guardianship of Jane Blackburn Washington. This is based on tree-ring dates obtained from several timbers.
A critical aspect of the Mansion Revitalization Project is to replace undersized framing members installed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with timbers matching the size of the originals.
