Historic Landmark Receives Federal Funding
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 – Wethersfield’s Joseph Webb House received a $150,000 grant this week from a federal program aimed at preserving national treasures, according to museum officials.
The program, called Save America’s Treasures, awarded $14.5 million over all this week to help preserve historic sites across the nation, officials said.
“This is our third application to Save America’s Treasures and we are delighted to say we were successful this year,” said Jennifer Eifrig, director of the Webb-Dean-Stevens Museum where the property is located. She said they have sought funding since 2001, when engineers discovered the house’s frame has not sufficiently supported the three and a half story house since it was built in 1752.
“The house is under-framed, there’s not enough vertical support members in the original frame to hold up the weight of the three and a half stories,” Eifrig said. She described the house as large for its time period, saying “the weight of the upper floors and the roof have been pressing down on the interior center hallway walls, forcing them to become load-bearing, and they were never meant to be .”
She added: “The frame itself should be holding up the house, not the wall partitions.”
The walls, which show signs of buckling, contain some of the house’s most important historical artifacts, she said, including the original 1760 British wool-flocked wallpaper on the walls of the room George Washington stayed in in 1781, and murals created by Wallace Nutting, who owned the house from 1916 to 1919.
To make the house more stable, Eifrig said they plan to install supports, probably made of steel, in some open spaces around the chimney. She said these areas, which resemble closets, provide the engineers access to the weak parts of the frame and will hide the new supports from public view.
In addition, Eifrig said they want to refurbish exhibit spaces, most notably the Revolutionary War spaces, where George Washington stayed in May 1781 when he met with French General Rochambeau to plan for what would become the last military episode of the Revolutionary War, the Yorktown campaign.
“The Webb House, I think, is a perfect example of what this program is about, in the sense that these are really unglamorous needs,” said Kimber Craine, director of program initiatives for the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
The Save America’s Treasures program was created in 1998 as a public-private effort to protect America’s cultural treasures. It receives federal funding that is then matched by donations from the private sector. In its first year, the program was able to fund 35 historic properties and 25 collections of artifacts, documents and artistic works.
Its grants are selected by a partnership among the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services and administered by the National Park Service. A panel of experts determines who receives the competitive grants by first determining if the project meets the “national significance” requirement and then deciding how badly the project needs the money.
Craine said the agencies that work on the program contribute a large number of experts who can best decide how to execute the historical preservation projects.
Although the Save America’s Treasures grant will help, Eifrig said the museum will need approximately $750,000 total to get the Joseph Webb House up to its standards. “We are definitely hoping to use the federal grant to leverage private dollars,” she said, noting that the prospect of a private funding-match is a condition of the federal grant. To date, Eifrig said, the museum has raised $500,000, including private funds, out of a hoped-for $6 million for the entire museum complex, of which the Joseph Webb House is the focal point.
Wethersfield Town Manager Bonnie Therrien said the grant to fix the Joseph Webb House is important in extending the historic property’s longevity. “It certainly represents the historic nature of the town of Wethersfield, it’s one of the original homes and it brings a lot of tourism as well as history into the town,” she said.
