Happy Birthday Linda!

[L Verge]

The story of the Yankee Red Surratt House is this: We are fortunate in that the house was lived in consistently from 1852 until 1968, and so was fairly well taken care of until its last few years. Much of the weatherboarding was original, so a preservation paint analysis was done to determine the original color. This was done on the exterior as well as the interior. Some of the interior rooms had as many as fourteen layers of paint (and even if painted the same color over and over, layers of dirt will distinguish one paint job from another when a slice of plaster is removed for study).

In the case of the exterior, the last layer of paint against the raw wood was what is termed red oxide. It was typical barn primer paint in the earlier centuries. Later in the summer of 1865, a newspaper reporter rode out from D.C. to write about a church camp meeting at what is now Camp Springs, Maryland, (home to Joint Base Andrews and the Presidential fleet). He knew that he was close to Surrattsville, so he rode about three more miles south to see the infamous Surratt House. He described seeing a big, red barn in the distance, but as he came closer, he realized that it was the house itself.

Mr. Surratt had the house built and lived in it until his death in 1862; but because of his poor management of finances, he never finished paying the Calverts for the land or the carpenter (Jeremiah Townshend, who had also built the Huntt house) for all his labors. He also owed debts to Andrew Kaldenbach, who had built other outbuildings on the farm, as well as various merchants in D.C. We can only speculate that there wasn't enough money to go around, so the house never got finishing coats of paint.

By the 1870s, however, it became traditional Southern Maryland white with dark (usually green) shutters. It also had a long front porch added to replace the small stoop at the front door. When restoration began, the porch was torn away -- and the oldtimers of the town had a heart attack! When we painted it Yankee Red, they rose up yelling and screaming that we had destroyed their landmark. The 1865 newspaper article helped as did the 1867 sketch of the house that appeared in Leslie's during the trial of John, Jr.

About 25 years ago, we gave them another scare. We have a hard time keeping paint on the house, especially the front, which faces west and gets all the afternoon sun as well as car exhausts from the nearby road and intersection. We called upon a consultant with Benjamin Moore Paints, and it was decided that at some point in its life, the old house had been painted with a cheap paint - probably containing lime, like whitewash.

This time, the house got a chemical wash and then a very strong primer paint. That primer was Pepto Bismol pink! It is a big house, and that made for a big blob of pink stuck at the intersection of two heavily-traveled roads for all to see. One person accosted me in the grocery store and demanded to know if we were going to leave it that color. By that time, I was used to explaining and said cheerfully, "Yes, we painted it to match the plastic flamingos we are going to add to the front lawn." Luckily, they laughed.