Originally created 12/17/04

Renovations boost understanding of landmark sites

By Associated Press

MIDDLETOWN, Va. - Like gardeners everywhere, Elizabeth McClung does a lot of digging. Hers, however, is more along the lines of unearthing obscure facts, weeding information from old ledger books, cultivating ideas from faded sketches.

Photos

McClung is in the preservation and restoration business. She and a small cadre of like-minded professionals spend most of their workdays "undoing." That involves carefully peeling back the decades of remodeling that may have made historic properties more comfortable, but in the process, altered their character. It transformed them, layer by layer, into something unintended by their original builders. And it's historical correctness that restorers seek, the window into pioneer personalities.

For the past eight years, McClung has been executive director of Belle Grove Plantation. The manor house was completed in 1797 and became the centerpiece for what would grow into a 7,500-acre grain and livestock operation. Belle Grove may be better known as the setting for an important Civil War engagement, the Battle of Cedar Creek, in October of 1864. But it isn't the battleground legacy for which Belle Grove is so carefully tended. The plantation is being restored to reflect the vision of its planter owner when it was a thriving agricultural outpost on the Colonial frontier.

"The period we interpret runs from 1783 to 1836," McClung says. "Isaac Hite lived here then."

Maj. Isaac Hite was married to the former Nelly Conway Madison, the sister of James Madison, who would become the nation's fourth president. Thomas Jefferson, presidential predecessor to Madison, fellow Virginia planter and family friend, designed the manor house around limestone quarried from the property.

One historian described it as " a most spacious and elegant building west of the Blue Ridge. In point of taste and beauty of symmetry, it is certainly not exceeded by any country building the author has ever seen."

Attractive though it was, it wasn't meant to be a fancy town house, McClung says. "It was a farm. We try to keep the backcountry nature of the Valley in mind (in its restoration)." Although the plantation was Jeffersonian in design, the woodwork and landscaping carried an English touch, meaning a clean mix between house and grounds. "We recently removed the ornamental plantings and brought grass up to the foundations," she says. "We replanted to match the English fashion of those times."

Along with refurbishing and restoring the manor house interior, the grounds are receiving a great deal of attention. That includes re-establishing walkways and fence lines, gardens, orchards and farm fields. "We can't replicate a full formal yard. We just don't have the staff for it. But we can do a demonstration garden."

And so they have. With design help from the Garden Club of Virginia, along with some energetic nurturing by Master Gardeners and volunteers, a rectangular plot behind the house has been divided into a half-dozen colorful beds. They feature an assortment of fruits and cutting flowers, dye plants, medicinal, culinary and aromatic herbs. The fence and finials surrounding the garden are based on some discovered in an 1837 drawing of Belle Grove.

A heritage apple grove was planted a few years back near an old slave graveyard.

"We planted the apple trees as they were in the early 19th century," McClung says. "There's enough room between the trees for horses and wagons loaded with apple barrels to turn around in."

All historic properties have something unique about them, says Will Rieley, a landscape consultant from Charlottesville who taught at the University of Virginia for 20 years. He also is landscape architect to The Garden Club of Virginia. Belle Grove's uniqueness is centered around a sophisticated house set in a pastoral valley, he says. There are few from that period.

"We're trying to restore the landscape so it's true to its history and true to its architectural theme," Rieley says. "You try to verify what was there with what you're working toward. One of the things you have to worry about is overdoing it not putting everything you can imagine on display."

---