Wallpaper in the death room

[Laurie Verge]

Doing wallpaper and paint analysis is fascinating - and tedious. When restoration began on Surratt House in the early-1970s, we were fortunate to have the original plaster on the walls. However, since early forms of plaster used pig's hair and horsehair for consistency, ours had to be removed for fire safety purposes.

This gave us the opportunity to do a full analysis on each room. Like the Petersen House, some rooms of the Surratt House had eight or nine layers of paint or wallpaper (mainly paint) dating back to 1852. Each layer can be identified separately because each has a layer of dirt separating it from previous and next layers. We discovered that some of the owners of Surratt House over the years (six total, starting with the Surratts) had really bad tastes in colors!

Several weeks ago, I received a phone call from a lady who is working on the restoration of the Clara Barton office/home that was "discovered" a few years back in D.C. That building dates to approximately the same time period as Surratt House, and she was interested in determining appropriate paint colors for that period. I had Lindsey copy our report pages and send them to her.