|
This story was published by the StarNews online on Mar 29, 2018 and in the print version on March 30, 2018.
By Joy Allen Your Voice Correspondent
Crews are restoring rooms to how they looked in 1770, when John Burgwin first crossed the threshold of his new town home.
WILMINGTON -- The Burgwin-Wright House is undergoing a large scale restoration, the likes of which it has not seen in nearly 70 years. Crews are restoring the dining room, parlor, bedrooms, library and study, returning them to how they looked in 1770, when John Burgwin first crossed the threshold of his newly built town home.
That includes painting the walls and trim with the original colors chosen by Burgwin. Local architectural historian Ed Turberg performed a paint analysis to identify the first generation of color for each room by carefully scraping away layer after layer of paint. The results differ dramatically from the most recent applications of paint, even though those hues came from an appropriate colonial palette.
Apparently, Burgwin fancied the color green. Turberg uncovered several different shades of green on the walls and woodwork, ranging from a light sage to a brilliant teal.
Prior to painting, Ken Earp and his group of craftsmen are repairing cracks and other defects in the plaster. They will complete the restoration by removing decades of wax from the old growth, heart pine floors and refinishing them.
Funding for the current restoration was made possible by a generous gift from Lillian Bellamy Boney, a longtime member of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of North Carolina, the nonprofit that saved the Burgwin-Wright House from demolition.
Boney joined the Society in 1946, when the membership was still in the process of raising money for the original restoration of the house, which began in 1949. Boney has remained a devoted steward of the Burgwin-Wright House ever since. She and her husband, architect Leslie N. Boney Jr. -- also an ardent preservationist -- received Preservation North Carolina’s prestigious Ruth Coltrane Cannon Award in 2002.
The Burgwin-Wright House is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday with guided tours offered on the hour. The museum house also hosts a variety of programs and special events, including Fourth Friday Gallery Nights and a monthly night tour. Each year every fourth-grade class in the New Hanover County school system makes a field trip to the Burgwin-Wright free of charge, a tradition dating back to 1952.
Joy Allen is executive director of the The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of North Carolina.
|
