Five-year study sets up Clermont preservation
Posted: July 2, 2013
By Val Van Meter
The Winchester Star
BERRYVILLE — A five-year investigation of Clermont, an 18th century farmhouse, shows it began as a timber-framed house and expanded to enclose five separate buildings.
The main house at Clermont is comprised of two sets of buildings that were joined in 1971 by the white addition in left center. The original house of 1756 is on the right end, with three dormers (view from south/back). The new black cypress shingle roof was applied in the traditional 18th century manner in 2012. To the far left is the remaining slave quarters, built in 1822-23. (Photo by Scott Mason/The Winchester Star 6-27-13)
“It’s a house of aspirations,” said Robert Stieg Jr., CEO of the nonprofit Clermont Foundation, which funds and manages the 361-acre farmstead at 801 E. Main St.
The Foundation administers the property under the terms of the gift from the late Elizabeth Rust Williams, who donated Clermont to the state at her death in 2004, making it the only historic property owned by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
The recently completed Historic Structure Report will help guide preservation efforts at Clermont and point out areas for future investigations, Stieg said. It also has documented the history of the farm and its buildings.
“It has added enormously to local history,” he said.
The research, conducted by a team led by architectural historian Maral Kalbian of Berryville, answered many questions about Clermont and brought to light many more.
When the Shenandoah Valley was a colonial frontier, the land was part of the holdings of Thomas, Lord Fairfax.
In October 1750, a young surveyor named George Washington laid out Clermont’s boundaries; his handwritten notes of the survey are in the Library of Congress.
There are no written records detailing when the first house was built at Clermont, but dendrochronology (the study of tree rings) provides a date of 1754-1755 for the earliest part of the existing house, which is the east section.
It had been thought that Edward Snickers built the house, but at that time the property was owned by Thomas Wadlington, who ran a store, possibly on the ShenandoahRiver. Wadlington was a friend of Edward Snickers, who bought Clermont in 1770.
An examination of the additions to the house hints at the changes in fortune of the inhabitants.
In 1783, the housepassed from Snickers to his son, William, who married Frances Washington in 1793.
Clermont started out with a German-Scots-Irish house plan, according to Stieg.
But Snickers’ new bride came from the Washington family and an English house plan was perhaps more to her taste, Stieg said.
That may be why Snickers began an extensive remodeling of the house in 1794, including the creation of a center hall, building a new partition wall and moving a doorway.
With this style house, visitors could be received in the hall and then directed to the room where they would be entertained, Stieg said. That could be the parlor with the family, a business room or “right out the back door.”
Clermont owner Ellen Jett McCormick, widow of Maj. Edward McCormick, CSA, sold part of her husband’s holdings to African Americans led by Josephine Williams, formerly enslaved at Clermont, enabling the founding of Josephine City, now Josephine Street. McCormick is shown at Clermont, surrounded by her grandchildren, in July 1898. The little boy on left, Lynde Dupuy McCormick, became the first Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic for NATO in 1952-54. The second boy from right is Lloyd William Williams, who commanded the 51st Company of the 5th Marine Regiment at Belleau Wood, in France, in June 1918 during World War I, where he was killed. Ordered to retreat, Williams said, “Retreat, Hell! We just got here!”, words inscribed on the MarineCorpsMuseum.
An unusual fact about the house, Stieg added, was the number of years the owners kept a separate dining room that could only be reached by going outside.
A kitchen structure was built in 1776-77. A dining room, added to the original house in 1788, was still separate from the kitchen building.
A stone building, also used as a dining room, was put up between the main house section and the kitchen building in 1835-36, but this, too, was separate from both buildings. It wasn’t until 1970, Stieg said, that connecting structures made it possible to reach the dining room through the home’s interior.
Bob Stieg Jr., CEO of the Clermont Foundation, points out a summer beam from a 1784 stable at Clermont that was reused along with other logs from the structure to build what in the 20th century became a garage. (Photo by Scott Mason/The Winchester Star)
The study also used the chronology of coats of paint, inside and outside, to piece together Clermont’s history.
According to Stieg, George Washington had a dining room at Mount Vernon, painted in verdigris green, which was a very expensive paint color in the 1790s.
At the same time, Clermont’s entire exterior was painted that color. “It’s hard to imagine someone on the frontier spending that much money on the outside,” Stieg said.
But the color choice certainly showed the wealth of the Snickers family.
The study recommends a number of areas for further investigation.
One of the first, Stieg said, will be the slave quarters building.
The structure — the only surviving one of three that used to be at Clermont — needs immediate work to repair its foundation and its crumbling walls.
He added that this may be the only frame slave quarters still left in the area, just as Clermont is the oldest timber-frame house in ClarkeCounty.
But before repair work can begin, an archaeological examination must be conducted.
JamesMadisonUniversity professors and students could undertake the “dig” as early as next spring, Stieg said.
He noted that the slave quarters shows how things were “reused” around the farm. A banister from the house, perhaps removed in the 1788 renovation, was later used to chink the west wall of the 1823 slave quarters.
Architectural historian Maral Kalbian (left) and Ken Livingston, VP Main Street Architecture, look over the side of former slaves’ quarters at Clermont where parts of a porch handrail from the original house were found re-used as chinking in the logs. (Photo by Scott Mason/The Winchester Star)
Another board, found in the roof of the second addition, began life as part of a decorative chair molding inside the house and is now the only evidence, linked by paint analysis, of that part of the original interior in 1756.
For more information about Clermont, visit clermontfarm.org.
— Contact Val Van Meter at
[Picture captions altered/expanded for this reprint of article – RWS 7-3-13]
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