Moving Back Into Montpelier

This was my first view of James Madison's Montpelier:



It was a rainy day, solidly unpleasant in the weather, and a large moving van blocked the front door (unloading A/V equipment for the day's Constitution Day festivities), but there was still something reassuring about it--the house felt like the kind of place that, after two terms as president, I'd like to retire. And this is, indeed, how Montpelier looked when Madison returned to it in 1817, after a presidency that saw the nation's capital burned in its first war as a sovereign nation.

What's remarkable is that Montpelier didn't look like this six years ago. While Mount Vernon stayed in the Washington family and was then passed onto the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, and Monticello had the good fortune to pass from Jefferson to a family who kept his house pretty much as it was, Montpelier was sold to settle debts and passed through a number of hands before ending up with the duPont family. When, in 1984, the heirs of Marian duPont Scott, following her wishes, donated the house to the National Trust, Montpelier had been added to until it was almost unrecognizable. In fact, when the Montpelier Foundation (who own the house now, having received it from the National Trust in 2000) began restoring it in 2003, their first order of business was to take off 24,000 square feet of house. Montpelier as it stands now is 12,000 square feet. Do the math; Madison's home was buried under something twice its size.



That project took the Montpelier Foundation five years. Now they've moved on to phase two of the restoration: bringing back the furniture. Imagine the impossibility of the situation; almost two hundred years after it was sold, re-sold, and handed down through heavens knows how many families, the Madisons' furniture is making its way back to their home piece by piece. And while in the 19th century, you could make an appeal based on patriotism or love of Washington or Jefferson, in 2009 those sentiments don't exactly run as strong as they used to.

And so a visit to Montpelier these days is to visit an empty house. Rather than teem with the stuff of Presidents past, Montpelier is an exercise in imagination. They're pretty sure they know which room the Madisons slept in, because the mantle of the fireplace is the most ornate. They think they've got the right color of paint on the walls, because they had to take twenty-something layers off to find the 1817 layer.

There are some aids to imagination, though, including a life-size statue (no short jokes, please) of the Madisons in the backyard, reading together. Cute and friendly, and not misleading like the statues of the Washingtons at Mount Vernon (which show Washington with his step-grandchildren; you have to know this to avoid assuming they're his kids and that GW didn't have any children of his own).



But the most interesting part of Montpelier for me was Madison's study, where he researched and wrote the Constitution. Despite the lack of furniture or historical guides, the tour guides at Montpelier know exactly where Madison's desk was, thanks to the ink splotches on the floor. I stood there, on a cold, rainy morning, alone in the room, looking down at blots on the floor, and felt the same frisson I'd felt at Yorktown Battlefield; here is one of the places where America, with all its flaws and beauties, its contradictions and its ideals, became possible.

It's a giving time of year, and while charities that help the living are of utmost importance, it's also important to remember that donations are down everywhere. If you've got a few extra bucks in your pocket after gift-giving, you might consider donating to the Montpelier Foundation. It's not every day you get to help bring a President's furniture home, or build a center to teach people about the Constitution, or just improve a house by taking away from it.