Furnishing Mount Vernon

With Mount Vernon unfettered of its residential role for the first time in its more than 130 years, the Vice Regents got to work furnishing what one account called an “abandoned home.” Nancy Wade Halsted, the second Vice Regent from New Jersey, emerged at the helm of the restoration efforts on the eve of the nation’s centennial. She devised a system to divvy up the responsibility of furnishing the 10,000-square-foot building, assigning Vice Regents individual rooms to outfit. She also arranged for the free delivery of goods from ports in New York and New Jersey to the Mount Vernon wharf and a donation of large relic cases from the Smithsonian for the MVLA’s growing collection of Washington-related relics.

Halsted and her fellow Vice Regents filled Mount Vernon with a combination of objects that had legitimate associations with the Washington family and others that were just old. They were not experts in the history of American decorative arts (an academic field then in its infancy) and had no budget with which to purchase antiques, yet they were dedicated to presenting a convincing vision of how the Mansion had looked during Washington’s lifetime. A handful of important early donations of well-known Washington-family items provided focal points for their historical scenes of domestic life. In 1859, Nelly Custis’s daughter-in-law had given the MVLA her double-manual harpsichord, and it became the center of the little parlor 20 years later. The bed in which Washington died, perhaps still the most revered relic in the Mansion, returned to Mount Vernon in 1876 and has rested in the General’s bedchamber ever since.

With the task of furnishing the Mansion delegated among the Vice Regents, a range of interpretations of 18th-century interiors emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. Some Vice Regents used an inventory of the house taken at Washington’s death to determine what was in the room under their charge, whereas others seemed unaware of the document and relied on their own intuition for how the General would have decorated his spaces. South Carolina Vice Regent Lucy Pickens, for example, chose a piece donated by George Washington Parke Custis’s daughter, Mary Custis Lee, to match the “mahogany sideboard” listed in the inventory (this piece is now in the New Room, as it was in Washington’s lifetime). Her colleague from Georgia, Vice Regent Philoclea Eve, decorated the room next door as “Martha Washington’s sitting room,” claiming that she had “no record of what furniture was used by Mrs. Washington” in the space (this room is now interpreted as a bedchamber, as it was listed on the inventory). Although an 1886 reporter for Harper’s Weekly praised the furnishing of the Mansion—“almost everything here is as it was”—he recognized “unmistakable modernness” in Eve’s presentation of her riverfront room.

Such uneven attention to historical evidence persisted into the 20th century. But once the study of American decorative arts had matured, and the MVLA was on a firmer financial footing, the Vice Regents were able to focus more intently on the authenticity of individual objects and the Mansion’s overall impression of 18th-century life. With scientific tools for paint analysis and robust academic research to rely on, today’s curators can make far more informed decisions than the early Vice Regents. Although the Mansion may look quite different, the early Vice Regents’ mission—to restore Mount Vernon to the home Washington knew—remains the same.