Bit by bit, restoring the Revolution for a new museum

While the noisy and very visible construction for the Museum of the American Revolution is underway at Third and Chestnut Streets, virtually every item in the museum's 3,000-object collection is quietly being conserved at locations all over the Philadelphia area.

From a recently acquired mug that reads "Success to ye city of Boston, Liberty For Ever" to a signed 1773 first edition of enslaved Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral to a linen summer coat worn by soldier Jacob Latch (who gave his name to Latches Lane in Merion) to the prized field tent used by Gen. George Washington for most of the war, artifacts are being analyzed and prepared for the museum's expected opening in spring 2017.

Though not every musket or book or ceramic plate will be on view, every object is being thoroughly examined, yielding a "condition report."

"We have a responsibility to care for and preserve the entire collection," said R. Scott Stephenson, the museum's director of collections and interpretation. "Some items were not in stable condition. . . . If it's stable, it might need conservation but you don't have to do it right away. Most require a light cleaning, and maybe a light coating of wax."

Protection is the key, with important and unstable works receiving priority. "We have to take the long view of our stewardship," Stephenson said.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the care being lavished on Washington's tent, now being conserved in a Philadelphia-area facility by the exceedingly fastidious textile conservator Virginia Whelan.

"I'm stabilizing the tent," she said during a recent visit, needle in hand. "As you can see, it's made of linen. Hand-stitched. It's in great shape but there are these losses, and what I'm doing is stabilizing so we don't lose original material."

Yes, Whelan is using a needle and thread on what museum officials like to think of as Washington's mobile home, his Oval Office before there was an Oval Office. She is carefully inserting the extremely fine needle, with thread thinner than a human hair, between the fibers of the tent's weave. There is no damage.

The "losses" Whelan refers to are actually small holes that could fray. To stabilize, she uses virtually invisible netting to sandwich the holes, fixing original tent fibers in front and back.

"I think I counted over 360 losses on the roof and 200 on the wall," she said.

The tent has certainly yellowed and darkened over the centuries. Made in Reading while Washington was camped at Valley Forge, it was used constantly up to and through the Yorktown siege. Eventually acquired by Martha Washington's grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, it was stored at his Virginia estate, Arlington House.

Custis' daughter Mary Anna, wife of Gen. Robert E. Lee, kept the tent, only to have it seized by federal troops at the end of the Civil War. It remained in federal storage for nearly 50 years before it was returned to the Lee family.

In 1909, the Rev. W. Herbert Burk, an ardent student of Valley Forge and Washington, acquired the tent to be a central relic in his dreamed-of Valley Forge Museum of American History. He also founded the Valley Forge Historical Society, which eventually became custodian of his collection, now the core holding of the Museum of the American Revolution. (Inquirer publisher H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest is a major financial supporter of the museum.)

Whelan, a patient woman, said she estimated it would take about 560 hours to complete stabilizing and in some cases filling the holes in the tent.

"You won't be able to see" the work, she said. "That's the curse of conservation - you want it to be invisible. You're not deceiving. You're not creating a false impression. You're stabilizing. This is preventing threads around the loss from becoming detached and gone forever."

At virtually the same time Whelan was painstakingly separating tent fibers, 50 miles away Johanna Pinney, a University of Delaware conservation student, dabbed bits of gray fill onto a massive painting of Washington and his troops at Valley Forge.

The late-19th-century mural-like canvas, which measures at least 10 feet across, is the work of Harrington Fitzgerald, a Philadelphia newspaper editor and writer who took up painting and reportedly studied with Thomas Eakins. The museum has a similarly sized Fitzgerald canvas depicting Washington crossing the Delaware that awaits treatment next summer.

Both canvases have seen better days. According to the museum's Stephenson, they most likely were stored in an unheated building on the grounds of Burk's Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge, and it shows.

"What we found was a very, very degraded and darkened natural resin varnish [on the painting surface], which would have been typical of the 19th century, a lot of surface grime," said Brian Baade, assistant professor of conservation at the University of Delaware who worked up a treatment plan for the painting with his wife, conservator Kristin deGhetaldi.

"If you look around, you can see small areas of loss. The painting had been flaking - it has stability issues, so that was really the first thing we had to deal with."

Chipping paint was stabilized, then the old varnish removed. Bleak bare canvas was exposed amid Valley Forge snow.

After cleaning, a new protective layer of varnish was laid over the surface to separate all conservation work from the original painting. The barrier also makes the conservation treatment easier to remove - a key ethic in modern preservation.

"We will fill in those areas of loss," Baade said. "We'll then use a reversible paint to fill in just where it's lost."

As Baade spoke, Pinney meticulously dabbed bits of fill into tiny parts of canvas, building the area of lost paint up to the same surface level as undamaged parts of the canvas.

"I'm going into all the little spots," Pinney said. "Anywhere you see this canvas, it's going to be filled with this gray color. I've done the rest of the bottom. All this gray area was canvas at one point."

After the in-filling, a water-soluble paint will be applied to the smooth surface to bring the color of repair into line with its immediate surroundings.

By the end of August, Baade and conservation students will complete work on Valley Forge Winter, the Return of the Foraging Party. Next summer, they'll take up Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Many items await work (and funding for it). Stephenson, rummaging through boxes in storage, recently uncovered a set of Patrick Henry's law books. The boards are loose and need reattachment. But no one knew the books were even in the collection.

"The exciting thing about this is it demonstrates the depth of the collection and the longevity of it," said Philip Mead, museum curator. "What kind of object would better represent Patrick Henry than his law books? It was his books that gave him dramatic power.

"Everyone at the time said he was the most remarkable speaker because after he was finished, no one had any idea what it was he had said, but you knew you wanted to join whatever cause he had advocated. I guess that's what he learned from law."

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