Crumbling Walls at Brandy Station

[Emmanuel Dabney]

01/03/2007
The plaster walls are cracking and crumbling
By: Hilary Lewis

A piece of Culpeper's rich history and one of the most extensive collections of Civil War artifacts discovered in recent decades may be in jeopardy.

According to the Brandy Station Foundation, the non-profit organization which protects the Brandy Station area of Culpeper County, the historic landmark, the Graffiti House is slowly crumbling to the ground.

The two-story house, located six miles north of Culpeper, was built in 1858 and served as a field hospital and office for Union and Confederate troops during the Civil War. Soldiers from both sides made drawings with charcoal from a central fireplace and inscribed their names and units on the walls.
The walls on the second floor of the house contain over 200 inscriptions, including the signature of J.E.B. Stuart and Lieutenant James Marshall of Fauquier. However, these Civil War treasures may soon be lost, as the walls of the house are cracking with age and fatigue, destroying the precious inscriptions.
Della Edrington, a volunteer coordinator for the Brandy Station Foundation, walks through the house daily and collects pieces of the broken walls. She has made it her mission to see that this important historical landmark is preserved.

"I just love this old house," she said. "Every name on the walls has a story behind it."

Recently, Edrington voiced her concerns about the landmark and the immediate actions which must be taken to preserve it to members of the Virginia House of Delegates at the Culpeper Chamber of Commerce breakfast. She said the Graffiti House will eventually collapse without proper funding from the state.

According to the Brandy Station Foundation, the Graffiti House is technically in sound condition, but the plastered walls which contain the graffiti, are covered in cracks running in all different directions. The only solution to fixing this problem seems to be patching over the cracks, thus covering the artwork, a risk the Foundation refuses to take.

Helen Geisler, a long time member of the Foundation's Board of Directors said, "There is just so much to do. We need so many things to maintain the house. We just can't lose those names on the walls or we won't have anything."

Geisler added that the cracked walls of the house suffer from a number of problems. They were constructed of an old fashioned wooden lath and covered with horse hair plaster. Diagonal cracks which run through the plaster are said to be caused by stress in the foundation. The horizontal cracks are caused by movement in the wooden lath.

The main issues the historic plaster walls face today are:

Age. The house was built nearly 150 years ago and has never received the attention that an old structure should in order to be preserved. The previous owner of the house tried to preserve the walls on the first floor of the house and consequently covered what was believed to be a large collection of the graffiti with drywall, losing it forever.

Changes in climate. The house currently has no central heating or cooling system so the temperature inside is constantly changing. The constant rise and fall to accommodate visitors causes the plaster to crumble. During the winter months, the house is warmed by gas heaters in each room only when someone is present. It is open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so the rest of the week the house must stay at whatever temperature it is outside.

Vibration. For the past 150 years, the house has sat within several yards of railroad tracks. Every time a train passes by the house, the vibrations cause the aging wood to crack and crumble even more. The vibrations have caused the walls to simply fall apart. In the course of one hour in the house, three trains passed by.

Another key issue to the preservation of the house is moisture control. Most artifacts of this caliber are preserved by a humidity control system. But the poorly insulted house allows cold air and moisture to pass freely through the walls.

The house also experienced water damage when a hurricane came through a few years ago and ripped off the roof.

"Water was pouring in and the house just cracked," recalls Geisler. "Rain was coming in and pouring out of the electrical sockets on the first floor."

The Foundation repaired the lost roof, but the damage to the graffiti artwork and walls could not be undone. They know that it would only take one big storm to destroy to house and its unstable structure completely.

With numbers of such problems mounting, the Brandy Station Foundation feels it's necessary to consult an historical architect, to produce an architectural conservation survey. The survey would determine the best way to undergo the restoration of the house while saving the graffiti on the walls.

Such surveys have been conducted on several other Civil war era houses in Virginia such as the Blenheim House in Fairfax, which also contains graffiti and suffered from the same problems. The Blenheim House has since undergone a meticulous restoration process and its graffiti preserved.

"There are just too many unknowns for us right now to even begin to speculate what has to happen, that's why we need to have a report made, so that we know where we need to go in the future," said Edrington.

The Brandy Station Foundation has applied for a grant for historic preservation funds from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for $11,675 to cover costs of developing an architectural report, but the funds are yet to be received.

"I know somehow we will get this done through the generosity of others," said Geisler. "Our foundation operates on a lot of faith."

The Brandy Station Foundation hopes that the unstable Graffiti House and its century old Civil War artifacts can be preserved, with answers found in the architectural survey. They know something must be done soon, before the graffiti-covered walls collapse and are lost forever.

You may contact Hilary Lewis at 825-9882 or e-mail hlewis@timespapers.com

Online at: http://www.timescommunity.com/site/i...d=576934&rfi=8

[TheRegularsDrummerCo.H]

Re: Crumbling Walls at Brandy Station

I hope they get enough money to restore the house and hopefully they dont have to cover up J.E.B Stuarts signature

Adam Ward
Regular Infantry

Please note that one of the rules of this forum is a complete (first and last name) signature to every post. The simplest way to adhere to this rule is to edit your signature line in the User CP located at the top of the Authentic-Campaigner window.-Emmanuel Dabney, Forum Moderator

[FDTaylor]

Re: Crumbling Walls at Brandy Station

My favorite quote from the Graffiti House, presumably from one of Stuart's cavalrymen: “Yanks caught hell.”

Hopefully, something fruitful will come out of the consult with the historical architect, and these walls can be preserved.

There's a similar graffiti room at the "Riddick's Folly" home (http://www.riddicksfolly.org/index.html) in Suffolk, Virginia. During the Siege of Suffolk and Union occupation, Union soldiers were said to have written their names and units in one of the upstairs rooms of the house. Many of the names you can still read, and they've been able to document some of the military service records of these men. As far as protection for the walls go, they have the walls covered/sealed with plexi-glass to protect from the outside elements and human touch, but I'm not sure of what the long term affect of cracking, like what's going on at Brandy Station, will do at the Riddick home.

-Fred

[Dignann]

Re: Crumbling Walls at Brandy Station

Foundation needs money for matching grants

By Haley Huie

Fauquier Times-Democrat [Warrenton, Va.]
June 20, 2007

The plaster is chipping off the walls of Graffiti House in Brandy Station.

And with it, signatures of Civil War soldiers dating back to the Battle of Brandy Station are disappearing. Also vanishing are nearby parcels of Brandy Station Battlefield that are being sold by independent landowners.

But both will be preserved if all goes according to plan, according to Brandy Station Foundation coordinators.

A boon in the development of residential, commercial and industrial sites around the battlefield, and the continued interest of the developers, pose a threat to keeping the land intact, they say.

To stem the developmental tide, a fundraising drive is underway to raise approximately $3 million to purchase the Fleetwood Hill battlefield land and restore the Graffiti House ― and the BSF is relying on donations for the majority of the total.

Della Edrington, the volunteer coordinator, explained that the initial appropriations for Graffiti House would pay for an assessment to evaluate the current conditions and recommendations for how to repair the structure.

As she led the way through Graffiti House's shaded rooms, she pointed to the signatures and drawings scrawled across the walls graffiti that serves to illustrate the historical significance of the house.

Although many of the markings remain legible, other drawings and signatures have been fractured by cracks in the wall. Edrington said the crumbling plaster gets worse each year, and she fears that some will be lost if steps to preserving the walls aren't taken.

The graffiti is the work of Confederate Civil War soldiers who were either patients in the house when it was used as a field hospital following the Battle of Brandy Station in June 1863, or Union soldiers who used the facility as an administrative base later that winter.

This is a national treasure that was almost lost," Edrington said. "Although the house appears to be structurally stable, the plaster on the walls appears to be deteriorating."

The money allocated to Graffiti House will match funding from a state matching grant for the house's assessment, but will also help establish the estimated cost for repairs and revitalization, she explained.

Brandy Station Foundation President Bob Luddy said the organization has already raised approximately $10,000 of the required $15,000 for the grant matching, and said it was important to preserve the structure because of the educational uses of the graffiti and exhibits.

The house provides a multi-faceted tool ― it allows people to essentially touch the lives of people who lived 150 years ago," Luddy said.

When giving, Luddy said donors could designate their money for use on the Graffiti House, a general fund to be used at the BSF's discretion or to the pool of money for the battlefield's purchase.

The acquisition of the land would preserve a part of the battlefield that isn't protected under the Civil War Preservation Trust.

BSF exhibits point to the available battlefield land as being strategically important to a battle that played an important part in Civil War history.

"At one particular point in time, an awful lot of people gave their lives in a conflict on that stretch of ground," Luddy said. "We think it's important we recognize the contribution of our ancestors that have gone before us."

http://www.timescommunity.com/site/tab2.cfm?newsid=18500893&BRD=2553&PAG=461&dept_id=506066&rfi=6

Eric

[VaTrooper]

Re: Crumbling Walls at Brandy Station

All of the proceeds from the Brandy Station 08' event will be donated to the Brandy Station Foundation. It's very heartbreaking to see the condition of the Graffiti House decline between each visit.

[Dignann]

Re: Crumbling Walls at Brandy Station

Graffiti House Good Soldiers, Bad Artists New Scribblings Revealed

Graffiti House still has mysteries to reveal

By DONNIE JOHNSTON

The Free Lance-Star [Fredericksburg, Va.]
July 23, 2007

They may have been good soldiers, but they couldn't draw worth a hoot.

While removing paint from the walls of Brandy Station's Graffiti House in Culpeper County this weekend, conservation technician Kirsten Travers uncovered a horse with a neck that would seem more appropriate attached to a brontosaurus.

The 31-year-old Travers, an art school graduate, had to laugh.

"This is funny," she said.

Travers is working under a $15,000 Virginia Department of Human Resources grant the Brandy Station Foundation received earlier this month.

The matching grant, according to Della Edrington of the BSF, will allow the foundation to bring in experts such as Travers to determine what restoration works need to be done to save both the Graffiti House and the dozens of charcoal and graphite scribblings on its inside walls.

That graffiti, which includes the names, military units and hometowns of a number of the soldiers who were housed there when the structure was used as a field hospital, is a part of Civil War and Culpeper County history that the BSF desperately wants to preserve.

"I'm lucky to be working on projects like these where soldiers stood and wrote," said Travers.

She turned and looked out the window.

"And except for that highway, I am looking at almost exactly the same sights that those soldiers did."

With a plastic squirt bottle of water and a single-edged razor blade, Travers is slowly peeling back layers of paint.

Friday she even uncovered the bust of a derby-clad man with a striking resemblance to W.C. Fields who has a dialogue bubble above his head that reads: "I smell a rebel."

Perhaps not so coincidentally, another soldier has drawn the rear end of a horse (or mule/jackass) that is almost in the man's face. The soldiers who convalesced here after the Battle of Brandy Station in the summer of 1863 may have lost limbs, but their sense of humor was apparently still intact.

Travers is working only with paint--her specialty--and is taking special care to leave the plaster (on which the graffiti is actually written) to be studied by a specialist in that field.

"There are cracks in some of the plaster and I don't want to do anything to cause it to crumble," she said.

She is quick to admit, however, that she would love to return and assist whoever restores the plaster.

In a few places, there are three layers of paint over the graffitied plaster.

Since buildings with Civil War graffiti are extremely rare, so are technicians like Travers.

"I've checked around and I can't find anyone else in the United States that does what I do," she said.

Graffiti houses are so rare, in fact, that this is only the second one Travers has worked on during her 11-year career. The other was in Fairfax, and that's where Edrington discovered her.

"We planned to have her come down here as soon as the grant officially came through," said Edrington.

Although graffiti houses like the one in Brandy Station thoroughly excite Travers, she obviously can't make a living from such occasional jobs.

In the past several years she has worked on a number of other different but highly specialized projects, including restoring a Saturn 5 rocket for NASA in Houston. This fall she will be part of a similar Saturn 5 restoration project at NASA's Huntsville, Ala., facility.

Before that, however, there is the challenge of the Brandy Station job and a graffiti-house project in Edinburg.

"The new owners had just redone the whole house when a former resident showed up on their doorstep one day and asked, 'Hey! Do you know about all that Civil War graffiti on the walls?'" Travers said with a smile.

She is a woman who loves her work, and Edrington and the BSF are glad they found her.

"After she finishes we will have a better idea what we are dealing with," said Edrington. "When we have a full assessment of what is needed, then we can work on applying for actual restoration grants."

And, Edrington stresses, time is critical because of the age of the plaster and the fact that trains rumble through all day on the Norfolk Southern tracks about 30 yards from the house.

Travers, who uncovered about 20 square feet of wall on Friday alone, will complete her work on Tuesday.

Within the next month the BSF will be putting together engineering proposals in order to prepare a complex architectural report. That will be submitted to state and federal authorities so the preservation group can apply for restoration grants.

The Graffiti House, with only parts of its walls exposed, opened in 2002 and now serves as an information center for the Brandy Station battlefield.

http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2007/072007/07232007/302180

Eric

[Dignann]

Re: Crumbling Walls at Brandy Station

Writing on the walls

By Liz Mitchell

The Culpeper Star-Exponent [Culpeper, Va.]
July 29, 2007

As Kirsten Travers chipped away 19th-century whitewash paint in the Graffiti House’s “Ghost Room,” a date began to emerge: Aug. 7, 1863.

Della Edrington, of the Brandy Station Foundation, immediately went downstairs to retrieve a book of letters. The foundation collected them from Internet searches and family members who had ancestors stationed there during the Civil War.

She found a letter written by a soldier on that date.

As Travers uncovered the remaining words, Edrington read the letter:

“Dear mother, I thought as I am at leisure I would write you a few lines. Our brigade is camped at Culpeper Court House. …

We have had another fight on Thur 4 August near Brandy Station … The Yankees are still on this side of the river they are repairing the Rappahannock bridge. The supposition up here is that the Yankees are going to attempt to cross the Rappahannock at three different points so as to divide our army. But my opinion is they may cross at any point they want and Lee will whip them.”

Travers, a paint-removal specialist, worked at the Graffiti House for five days last week, unveiling new graffiti in all three upstairs rooms.

Of the new 60 square feet of graffiti, Edrington said finding that date was her highlight of Travers’ work because the history came to life.

“Just to sit there and read a letter from 150 years ago while uncovering the writings,” she said. “That room always seems to have the spirits in it.”

She doubts the letter’s author scribbled on the Graffiti House walls but says both authors were soldiers who probably shared many of the same experiences.

The “Ghost Room” got its name because some volunteers claim they were standing outside the house one day and saw a ghostly figure in the window.

Travers also uncovered a large piece of graffiti in the JEB Stuart room - where the Confederate Army General signed his name. The new image is a full-size figure of a man with a head resembling a pumpkin. On his torso is the phrase: “President J. Davis. Good on the boots.”

Neither Travers nor Edrington know what the phrase means but they suspect it is a sarcastic comment, perhaps about Davis’ efforts in providing adequate footwear to soldiers.

A project in three phases
Edrington heard about Travers from other graffiti houses in Virginia. Travers, 31, has been working in paint conservation for the past 11 years. Culpeper’s Graffiti House is her second such project in the state. She also is working on similar houses in Fairfax and Edinburg.

The house got its name from 12 second-story walls that contain soldiers’ names, dates of battles, drawings of women, soldiers and men resembling doctors or supervisors.
During the Civil War, the Graffiti House was used as a hospital for Confederate soldiers.

After the war, it was used as personal residences and went through about 12 owners. Paint and wallpaper covered the walls, concealing and protecting the graffiti that remained hidden until 1992.

Its previous owner was going to demolish the building. When he sent his son to obtain some of the wood paneling, the graffiti was discovered and a putty knife was used to remove some of the plaster, paint and wallpaper.

From that point on, the building was refurbished. In 2002, the Brandy Station Foundation bought the property and began working toward its continued preservation.

In July, the foundation received a $15,000 grant from the General Assembly, which will pay for specialists to analyze the house and determine what needs to be done to unveil and protect hidden graffiti. The foundation must match the grant and is only $3,000 away from its goal.

“Areas of the wall in 1992 had been scraped, but when they did the scraping they only went down to the whitewash and not the original plaster,” Edrington said. “So for years, we believed there was no additional graffiti to be found.”

Travers is the first specialist to work in the house. Through mechanical and chemical processes she exposed graffiti at the walls’ edges. Now she can determine what the foundation will need to do to finish unveiling the graffiti and how much it will cost.

She said the project would take several months. Her report will be available in a few weeks.

The foundation is now advertising for an expert in plaster restoration to determine the walls’ condition and what needs to be done to save them. The third phase of the grant project will analyze the historic structure’s architecture.

Uncovering history
Travers found that while the rooms contain layers of paint, the original layer is a whitewash base in two of the rooms and a combination of whitewash and pigment in the third room. She can chip it away with water and razor blades.

“Here, the whitewash layer has really protected the graffiti because it hasn’t bonded in any way with the plaster wall,” Travers said. “So I can actually get it to pop off and the graffiti is really well preserved underneath, which is really lucky.

But the third room - the JEB Stuart room - requires a little more work.

In that room, she used denatured alcohol on a cotton swab to dissolve the paint and reveal the graffiti underneath.

Travers also conducted sound tests on the walls to determine their stability. The original horsehair plaster was applied to laths, or strips of wood. Constant vibrations from nearby trains have caused the plaster to separate from the wood in parts, creating a wavy appearance.

When Travers would place one hand on the wall and tap around it with two fingers, she could hear and feel a vibration, which tells her the wall is unstable. In other parts of the room, where drywall has replaced the original wall, the tapping sound is hollow and the wall is stable.

Travers said walls always can be preserved.

From easels to houses
Travers got her start in painting conservation after she graduated from Purchase College in Purchase, N.Y.

She’s apprentice-trained and first worked on restoring small easel paintings. As a freelancer, she expanded her expertise to murals, monuments, cemeteries and artifacts.

Now, she’s involved in graffiti house restoration across the state.

“I really like this job because it combines architectural conservation and large scale work but it’s still delicate paint removal,” she said.

Travers said working in a Graffiti House is exciting because what she exposes is only the first step in uncovering history.

“If I expose a name, then we get to research it and find out who that person is,” she said. “It opens up whole new stories.”

Geoffrey Hazzan, a Graffiti House volunteer, said he was most impressed with Travers’ technique and uncovering new images is fascinating.

“It’s a mystery, really,” he said.

Besides the date and the pumpkin head, Travers found another image of a horse standing in front of a man who had been revealed previously.

Edrington said the volunteers thought the man was a standalone image but now he is seen behind the horse and above him are the words, “He smells a rebel.”

Travers also found the words, “Baltimore,” and “Portsmouth.” All graffiti was done with charcoal or charcoal-based pencils, she said.

Civil War history was never a huge point of interest for Travers but her recent work has peaked her curiosity.

“It’s a really individual experience,” she said about her work and seeing its historic value. “It’s totally different from any other type of Civil War museum where they put the soldiers up on a pedestal, and you learn more about the generals and the colonels rather than the regular everyday guys who were just like us, who wrote on the walls. So that’s why I like these houses. It makes you want to know more about them.”

A nice slideshow of the exposed graffiti accompanies the article at:

http://www.starexponent.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=CSE/MGArticle/CSE_MGArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1173352181190

Eric

[Charles Heath]

Re: Crumbling Walls at Brandy Station

[B][SIZE="3"]Friday she even uncovered the bust of a derby-clad man with a striking resemblance to W.C. Fields who has a dialogue bubble above his head that reads: "I smell a rebel."

Unionist John Minor Botts fits that description in more ways than one.

[vamick]

Re: Crumbling Walls at Brandy Station

Unionist John Minor Botts fits that description in more ways than one.

and with his home nearby, used time and again by Stuart...well ya just gotta get that joke!:D