Take a look at the stately stone steps on the north side of the College of William and Mary’s Brafferton Building and you could easily be forgiven if you assumed they’d been there since this 1723 landmark was constructed.
But hidden inside the Pennsylvania bluestone installed during the restoration of the school’s historic campus not even 85 years ago lies a looming preservation problem.
Set into place with a modern cement mortar in the early 1930s, the treads and risers have started to delaminate because of moisture penetrating behind the stone, then freezing and thawing in repeated cycles.
Some treads have shifted in response, with their noses pushing up so far they drive still more water where it’s not wanted.
What’s resulted is a set of steps that has fallen into far worse condition than the surviving sections of early 1700s English sandstone that serve the entrance on the other side of building.
“We brought in one of the best preservation masons in the country to take a look at the problem and — when he opened it up — he found water standing in puddles,” Historic Campus Director Susan Kern said.
“So we know the Pennsylvania bluestone will need to be replaced — and it looks like it will be more cost-effective and historically accurate to do that by finding a source for the English stone and having it tooled in the original manner.”
Pivotal design
Designed to house William and Mary’s pioneering Indian school, the Brafferton was the first building erected by the nation’s second oldest college after it completed its historic Sir Christopher Wren Building about 1700.
Despite being overshadowed in modern times by the slightly larger and finer but nearly identical President’s House of 1733, it was considered a milestone structure in its time, with the same family who built the Governor’s Palace erecting the first example of the Georgian-style Virginia manor house that became an internationally recognized architectural icon.
“The Brafferton sets the precedent for the President’s House and all the other Williamsburg houses like it,” says Colonial Williamsburg architectural historian Carl Lounsbury, co-editor of “The Chesapeake House.”
“And because Williamsburg was the capital — and the place that drew all the colony’s planters and people of wealth — these new buildings set the standard for a new style of classical architecture, introducing hipped roofs, rubbed brick, a refined geometric symmetry and all these other Georgian elements to the building repertoire of Tidewater Virginia.”
Still, when philanthropist John D. Rockefeller agreed to restore the historic campus in the early 1930s, the Brafferton — which is the only one of the three structures never damaged by fire — was last on the list.
Like many early other projects in what was then a ground-breaking field, the completed work also left questions of design and material that are still puzzling preservationists today.
Probing the ground at the north entrance in 1931, archaeologists Prentiss Duell and Herbert S. Ragland found evidence of rectangular steps like those at the President’s House as well as those depicted on the 1740s Bodelian-plate engraving of the college’s buildings, Kern says.
But that relatively modest footprint was too small to provide the number of steps needed to reach the entrance door, possibly swaying the CW architects to model their design on a larger if later radial foundation that echoed the surviving steps on the south side of the building.
Hemmed in by the Depression, which closed every American quarry capable of providing a match for the original sandstone, they also substituted Pennsylvania bluestone for the rebuilding and repairs.
“We still don’t have a good explanation for exactly why they decided to do radial steps,” Kern said.
“But it’s pretty clear that they went with the bluestone because they couldn’t get the stone they wanted.”
Sifting clues
When restoration mason Ray Cannetti began examining both sets of steps this past spring, he recognized the original 1700s treads and risers as a kind of sandstone he’d seen several times during decades of work on historic Virginia houses.
Even after nearly 300 years, it appeared far more stable and long-lasting than the bluestone used in the 1930s.
“The bluestone has reached the end of its natural life — and something needs to be done,” he said.
“All the material there is in some phase of failure. But that gives us the opportunity to replace it with something that will not only be more authentic but also more durable and cost-effective in the long run.”
Still, Cannetti didn’t know the origin of the stone, prompting Kern to contact the head of the college’s geology department for assistance.
Examining a sample under a microscope, Christopher “Chuck” Bailey knew immediately that the surviving steps were cut from a “very fine, very uniform rock — just what you’d like to make flagstones,” he said.
He then boosted the magnification, enabling him to see a cluster of minerals that provided a signature.
“Sandstone is a very broad term. But geologists have very particular names for it depending on what the minerals are,” he said.
“This is what we call arkosic sandstone and — because we know it was quarried in the early 18th century — I was pretty sure it didn’t come from here.”
Working under the direction of architect Jeff Baker of Williamsburg-based Mesick Cohen Wilson Baker Architects, which is consulting on the project, architectural historian Mark Wenger has contacted an English stone firm in search of a match for the sandstone, which may have come from the southwest part of the country through the port of Bristol.
He’s also looking for a vendor who can mimic the 18th-century tooling more closely than the stylized work carried out in the 1930s.
Still to be puzzled out, however, is the shape of the new north steps, where Wenger is enlisting help from archaeologists as well as fellow historians in order to sift through the same evidence that thwarted CW’s first generation of preservationists some 85 years ago.
“Part of the problem is that there are almost no records of the work that was done here. We also have to make sure we’re reading the few that we do have correctly,” he said.
“Looking at the photos, the square footprint certainly appears to be earlier than the radial one but it’s also so small that it doesn’t leave you with enough room to get in all the risers you need. So we’re still looking at the evidence and trying to think our way through it.”
Erickson can be reached by phone at 757-247-4783.
