As Glensheen Mansion prepares for another busy tourist season, conservators and staff are putting the finishing touches on the premises, which operates as a museum. The aim is to return additional parts of the former Congdon estate to an original condition.
On the third floor of the home, Kristy Jeffcoat, a senior painting conservator, worked with two colleagues from the Minneapolis-based Midwest Art Conservation Center to reveal wall coverings that have remained hidden under under a bland coat of white latex paint for about 40 years.
Wearing respirators, the trio applied a solvent that was specially formulated to remove the latex paint but not harm the hand-stenciled canvas wall panels they hoped to find underneath.
Dan Hartman, Glensheen’s director, said the $37,000 project was a bit of a leap of faith, based on photos of the room featured in the pages of a 1910 edition of Western Architect magazine. Those images showed what the original wall coverings had looked like, but Hartman admitted: “We honestly didn’t know what kind of shape they were going to be in.”
The results came as a pleasant surprise for Hartman.
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“It’s in remarkably better shape than we expected,” he said.
While there has been a bit of fading and some minor water damage in the corners of the room, Hartman said the wall coverings are in such good condition overall that a few first-time viewers have questioned whether they’re indeed authentic to the original home, constructed between 1905 and 1908.
Jeffcoat said the job has been going “spectacularly well.”
“It’s so much fun when you can reveal something like this that has been hidden for decades. It makes the work really fun,” she said.
Jeffcoat and her team have been working on a bedroom that was once home to Alfred Bannister, an orphaned nephew who Chester and Clara Congdon raised as one of their own sons, although the couple never officially adopted him.
Hartman said the original wall paintings were painted over by the University of Minnesota Duluth when they fell out of vogue. He noted that from about the 1950s to the 1970s, stenciling was widely viewed as sort of “the shag carpet of that era.” UMD acquired the property in the late ’70s and opened the museum in 1979.
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“The downside is that now it’s incredibly prized, and it’s a major part of the original design of the home,” Hartman said, explaining the drive to reclaim the stenciled walls with the help of professional conservators.
Hartman said the original stenciling ties the whole room together.
“When this is finished, you’re going to have a completely different feeling walking into the room,” he said.
“This was done at the turn of the century by some of the best craftsmen who existed in the state of Minnesota. This was as high-end as it gets,” Hartman said.
Red carpeting on the bottom floor of the mansion also was removed over the winter, allowing for the original oak flooring to be refinished as part of another $42,000 project.
Based on past experience, Hartman expects the improvements at Glensheen will boost ticket sales.
“For Glensheen, this will be our big reveal of the year. The last time we did something similar, two years ago, our attendance went up 15 percent almost immediately,” Hartman said, referring to work that was done to restore the room of Robert Congdon, the youngest child of Chester and Clara.
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