The Georgia Dining Room revisited - Winterthur - Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2002 by Tara L. Gleason

The Georgia Dining Room opened its doors at Winterthur in 1972 (see Pls. II, V) as a memorial to Henry Francis du Pont (see p. 154, Pl. I) and his legacy of perfection and scholarship. The museum had acquired the architectural elements for the room two years earlier, from the Rockwell mansion, an 1830s house in Milledgeville, Georgia (Pl. III), thus completing du Pont's intention of including architecture at Winterthur from each of the original thirteen colonies. In keeping with his goal of "doing the house archeologically and correctly...even to the epoch of the fringes," (1) Winterthur's staff created a late 1830s dining room based on physical evidence, documentation, and scholarship. (2) The installation combined the history and material culture of 1830s Georgia with the beauty of a Winterthur period room. Twenty-six years later, in 1998, Winterthur's curators, conservatars, educators, and scientists revisited the 1972 installation and began the process of reinstalling the room to reflect the changes and add itions that new scholarship had brought to the understanding of Georgia interiors.

The Rockwell mansion, or Beauvoir, as it has been called, was commissioned around 1832 by Oliver Hill-house Prince and his wife, Mary Ross Norman Prince (Pls. I, IV). Earlier that year, Prince, who had been a practicing attorney in Macon, Georgia, purchased the Milledgeville Georgia Journal and moved his family to the then state capital. Three years later, Prince sold the newspaper and the newly built house to Samuel (d. 1841) and William Spencer Rockwell (1809-1870) and moved his family yet again--to Athens, Georgia. Samuel Rockwell's family occupied the house until 1843, but because of their inability to complete payments on the property, the estate of Oliver Prince repossessed it in that year. In 1844 Herschel Vespasian Johnson (1812-1880), a United States senator and later governor of Georgia, purchased the house and used it as a summer residence for the next ten years. (3)

The Rockwell mansion was built in a style known today as Greek revival, which was popular in America during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The front hall and double parlors have elaborate architectural details, befitting their position as the most public entertaining spaces in the house. The carved anthemions and Greek key designs over the doors in these rooms appear to have been derived from Asher Benjamin's Practice of Architecture (1833). (4) The remaining rooms in the house have quite simple door and window surrounds that vary in articulation from room to room. Although houses from this period tend to have a hierarchy of architecture, ranging from elaborate public rooms to simpler private spaces, historians have wondered whether the difference in the quality and design of the Rockwell mansion's interior architecture could be due to the succession of owners during its early years. Historians have postulated that Oliver Prince may have completed the installation of the elaborate woodwork in the front hail and parlors, but that Samuel Rockwell or another successive owner may have finished the remaining rooms. (5)

Winterthur's purchase of the elaborate woodwork and mantel from the rear parlor provided the twentieth-century owners of the Rockwell mansion with the funds necessary to repair extensive damage incurred during a fire. Prior to moving the woodwork and mantel to Delaware, Winterthur's curators searched the rear parlor for evidence of the room's original paint scheme and wail treatment. This examination revealed gray-green paint on the woodwork and evidence of wallpaper on the plaster wails, both of which were reproduced for the Georgia Dining Room. The museum's staff chose to install the room as a dining room at Winterthur based on its traditional use in the Rockwell mansion. (6)

In 1997 Winterthur began a major project of installing a lighting system in its 175 period rooms, with the goal of bringing greater visual accessibility to the rooms while maintaining the domestic atmosphere of the spaces H. F. du Pont had created. Because the system included a recessed track component controlled by a computer dimming system, significant construction was necessary to accommodate the lighting hardware and wiring in each room. The museum took advantage of this construction opportunity to rotate the architectural elements within the Georgia Dining Room by ninety degrees, (7) which allowed museum guests to enter the room through the double pocket doors that had led to the front parlor of the Rockwell mansion, rather than through the single door that in Georgia had led to the hack hall (see Pl. V). This made a visitor's perspective similar to that of a guest entering the room during the 1830s.

While reorienting the room in 1998, Winterthur's staff decided to reassess both the architecture (the dimensions and wall treatment) and the furnishing plan, so that new physical evidence and scholarship could be incorporated in the reinstallation. Page Talbott, an independent scholar and consultant who has done extensive work on the decorative arts of Georgia, was hired to create a furnishing plan that took into account the history of the Rockwell mansion as well as the more general furnishing practices of 1830s Georgia. (8)