Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Montpelier Renovations

Work crews in Orange County, Virginia, one hundred miles south of
Washington DC, have demolished part of the mansion that was once the home of
America's fourth president. But the idea was not to destroy the mansion,
but to restore it to the way James Madison would have remembered it. Sean
Tubbs reports.

(Stucco removal sound) – in clear for three seconds

If James Madison were to visit his home today, he would find it in a state of tremendous disarray. Workers are slowly deconstructing the house to return it to the way it looked almost two hundred years ago. Michael Quinn, president of the montpelier foundation,
shows me around the back of the partially demolished house. We’re standing outside on a tiled floor that used to be a servants’ passage.

“The work going on over here is the work of taking the stucco off, using an air-powered tool, same tool a sculptor”

The mansion’s size has been reduced from fifty-five to twenty-two rooms. When we get back to his office, Quinn says while the house became a massive mansion, it was originally a modest family affair.

“The core of the mansion was built by James Madison’s father and Madison was
9 years old when he moved in.”

And he would call the mansion home for the rest of his life. Quinn says the peaceful atmosphere at Montpelier helped Madison write our nation’s constitution.

“Madison literally came home to Montpelier, it was like a retreat for him, and he came here in the months before the Constitutional Convention to prepare himself for that meeting.”

As Madison’s family grew, the house grew. He added wings, and then floors on top of wings. Thomas Jefferson helped him design these renovations. After Madison died in 1836, Montpelier became the property of dolly madison, who left it in her son’s care.

“That did not work out. And eight years later, in 1844, she sold the entirety of Montpelier. From that point on, it went through a succession of six different owners, and each of the owners made changes which began to accumulate.”

The mansion faded into obscurity until 1901, when a prominent captain of industry purchased the house.

“When the house was bought in 1901, by William DuPont. He essentially tripled the square footage of the house and really turned it into one of the great country estates in the Virginia countryside.”

The house remained in the hands of the Duponts until 1984, when it was bequeathed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. One of the conditions of the handover was that the house would eventually be restored to the way it was in Madison’s day. Quinn says this took a lot of planning.

“We really had to unravel the construction history of the house. When the Montpelier Foundation took over management, there were still many mysteries, so we initiated a two-year study of the house that would really tell us what was DuPont and what was Madison, and what belonged to other eras.”

So, the restoration team cut holes in walls in a detective hunt to find original pieces. They found that the whole of James Madison’s montpelier still existed inside the Dupont renovations.

“In the house, it was so densely on top of each other that visitors really couldn’t sort it out. All of those factors came together to make us decide that the house should be restored to tell the story of that era completely and compelling connect with James Madison, with his ideas, his personality, his life.”

Of course, the restoration isn’t just about the house. Archaeologists digging around Montpelier’s perimeter are discovering new clues. A staff archaeologist shows Michael Quinn a new discovery.

(AMBIENT NOISE OF ARCHAEOLOGY) – fade up for about seven seconds

Matt Reeves is the director of archaeology at Montpelier. He’s in charge of the efforts to get the grounds back to how they looked in 1809.

“What we’re interested in doing is seeing how the level of the ground changed through time, where the paths were, where fences were, where outbuildings, trash piles, that sort of thing,
trying to reconstruct not only what the landscape looked like, but how the flow of life would have taken place. During Madison’s day, it wasn’t just the Madisons here, there were slaves, house slaves residing and working in the mansion yard.”

The $30-million dollar restoration should be complete by 2008. In the mean-time, the mansion will re-open to the public on July 3rd. In Charlottesville, Virginia, I'm Sean Tubbs.