Baker Mansion Sees Many Renovations to Walls, Floors

Baker Mansion, home to The Blair County Historical Society, continues to undergo renovations with the help of artist Michael Allison. The professional artist has dabbled in different disciplines, including sculpture, murals and abstract, is working on restoring the various rooms of the museum to their original glory.

Allison has been an art advocate all of his adult life and has worked commercially in various art-related fields and has worked in the building trades. He said that because of his background, he was asked to consult with the Chairman of the Board of Baker Mansion Dr. Michael Farrow, several years ago about doing some artificial repairs to the second floor hallway.

"I worked on that with him," said Allison. "I started to submit proposals. None of the rooms had been restored at that point. They had damage to the walls from when they put on a new roof on the mansion."

He added that they had water leakage in several spots, which had weakened the plaster. The ceilings were badly cracked. A lot of the decorative moldings had some damage to them, also.

The renovations began in one small room. They reinstalled some of the materials for the room. They weeded it out a little bit because all of the rooms had been crammed full of stuff.

Back in the 1960s, the historical society decided to paint the entire mansion white because of peeling wall paper. It had not had a decent coat of paint in many years.

There had been research done on how the rooms had been decorated. So, after doing this one small room, they proceeded to get funding for the next one and they wrote a grant, which secured funding for the continued restoration of the rooms.

There were private individuals who funded the restoration of the double parlor, the biggest room in the mansion. The grant paid for much of the rest of the restoration.

Each room required a separate study done on it and had its own sort of unique problems. There are some general ones, such as badly damaged old plaster and plaster that was letting go from the wall supports. There are brick walls inside the mansion that have been directly plastered over. There are also sub-walls in the mansion that are wooden beams and lath over top, which had horse hair plaster applied to it. Almost all of the lath walls had bad cracking from expansion and contraction because there was a long period where there was no heat in the mansion. It was also from hanging pictures and pounding nails into the plaster.

Allison said, "A solution that we came up with for those problems were that things had to be priced out. We had to create a color scheme for the rooms. A lot of the mansion was wallpapered, but we didn't have that many samples of what the original wallpaper looked like."

He continued, saying that those wallpapers are very expensive to reproduce and they don't last particularly long, either, in a place that you have tour groups and small children coming through. The decision was made to consult a company that has produced historically correct palates for historical homes throughout America and Europe. One of them was Mt. Vernon. Allison said that they used their paint charts and their paints for a real long lasting deeply saturated paint that is manufactured in Europe.

"As we began the idea of restoring a room, we would create a color scheme," said Allison. "We would consult examples of colors and wallpapers we could find. Then, we tried to come up with something that was beautiful without being inappropriate to the period and was very attractive."

Allison said that now instead of plain flat white walls, you come into the mansion and see beautifully colored surfaces that attempt to reflect a time period, especially towards the end of Elias Baker's life when he would have had the mansion fully decorated.

Allison added that not only did they reproduce the wallpaper, they had done some stenciling. That has been done with a lot of acclaim and with a lot of success.

"Rather than putting wallpaper up, we stenciled the walls, which is kind of time consuming and tedious, but looks really nice," said Allison.

Farrow said that they had some tourists come through and he happened to mention that they didn't have any portraits of the Bakers and the gentleman on the tour asked, "How much does a portrait cost?" Farrow told him and he said, "I will donate two portraits."

He donated the portraits and other people donated three more. These portraits were taken from the tintypes from back in the 1850s. Allison painted the portraits. He put into each portrait something that could be identified with each individual. Elias and Hedy both liked reading and were very much interested in literature and poetry. So, they were each shown holding a book. Their oldest son David went to Princeton and became a surveyor. So, he was shown in his Princeton scholar cap, holding his hand to his chest showing that he is educated. He is holding his textbook.

Allison said the restoration is ongoing. Most of the rooms are stable on the first and second floors. There are some things that have been done that he would like to tweak a little bit. For the most part, those floors are done. Right now, they are doing a restoration in the basement that he is not involved with. It involves enlarging the lecture space. However, there is the kitchen in the basement, which he is involved with.

"I sort of started at the beginning of this season and I hope to continue with it when the other work is done in the basement," said Allison. "That would be the final room to restore."

Farrow explained that these renovations were important if the historical society wanted this facility to move into the 21st century.

He added, "In my years on the board, I wanted to leave the mansion to the succeeding generations in good shape. They don't have to worry about that expense for a number of years."