Big changes, small budget
At 6’4″, Thomas Jefferson towered over his 5’4″ neighbor, confidante, Secretary of State, and successor to the White House, James Madison. Two hundred years later, Madison is still in Jefferson’s shadow.
Last year Montpelier sold about 65,000 tickets and had roughly 123,000 total visitors, as compared to Monticello’s roughly 500,000 visitors.
“Would we like to be a 250,000 person site? Yes,” said Christian Cotz, Montpelier’s director of education and visitor engagement. “But at the same time, we don’t have a quarter of a million people coming through here, and so it’s not a cattle drive, and it’s a better experience for visitors.”
At 1pm on a recent Friday, the parking lot was full, and large groups of elementary school kids teemed throughout the property. But at an annual cost of about $7 million to keep Montpelier open and growing each year, the number of visitors needs to grow, said Imhoff. Only about $1 million of the operating expense currently comes from visitors, and about $3 million comes from donations. The remainder comes mostly from endowments, retail sales, and special events.
“We are definitely beholden to generous donors,” said Imhoff.
Last month, Montpelier hosted the Dolley Madison Legacy Luncheon, which brought more than 230 people to the estate on the former First Lady’s 246th birthday. The group, mostly women, was formed to raise money to get the Madison-era belongings back in the mansion.
When the third floor had been taken off, the pink stucco removed, and the overall reconstruction of the mansion was complete, Montpelier’s staff took a step back and scratched their heads. The rooms and halls had been beautifully restored, but there was nothing in them.
“Monticello, Mount Vernon, and these other organizations have been working on these projects for almost a century and so we’re new,” said Meg Kennedy, Montpelier’s director of museum services. “Because we only really started collecting in the last 10 years, most Madison pieces are in other public or private collections.”
And so over the last nine years, the group of women named in honor of Dolley Madison has raised more than $500,000, which has gone largely to refurbish the old library that used to house more than 4,000 books in nearly a dozen languages, according to Imhoff.
Kennedy is Montpelier’s lead detective, tracking down paintings, dinnerware, books, and anything that smells even faintly of the Madisons. James and Dolley Madison nearly always traveled together, making letters between the two far and few between, so letters from visitors to the Madisons are key in helping Kennedy compile a database cataloging about 30,000 documents that relate to what was in the mansion.
“If we know they’re corroborated by documentary evidence, that’s the best case scenario,” said Kennedy of the artifacts they’re acquiring. “We track families over time, too, to see how they descend through wills, especially in the early 20th century.”
People also call Montpelier all the time thinking they have an heirloom that belonged to the Madisons, but only a small fraction of those actually turn out to be authentic. When it’s a good find, Montpelier’s staff sends art handlers to bring it back safely. One time, an assistant curator brought several small items back from Massachusetts in a Tupperware container, guarding it with his life on Amtrak.
“You don’t want to be the one who leaves to get a drink of water and then your bag’s gone,” said Kennedy, laughing.
The most frustrating thing for Imhoff is reckoning with the lack of visitors. It’s in Charlottesville and Albemarle’s backyard, and yet Montpelier gets a quarter of the people Monticello does. Imhoff is considering conducting a local focus group to see what more they can do to attract crowds.
“I would love to know what would bring people to Montpelier,” said Imhoff. “What are we missing that would be the reason that people would come out here? Do we need to be doing more outdoor activities? Do we need to have wine tastings paired with history? I want to convince people in Charlottesville that 23 miles is just not that far.”
Digging in
A big draw for Montpelier is the ongoing archaeological work, with sites that are open for public viewing and participation. The teams of JMU archaeological students working on the property are virtually indistinguishable from the half-dozen Montpelier archaeologists, all on their knees digging through dozens of square plots designated by low strings tied off at each corner.
“We try and have enough staff where we can get the public involved in our archaeology programs so they experience everything from the digging to the screening to going down to the lab and washing and processing the artifacts. Everything that we’re doing, we’re going to have you do,” said Reeves. “With visitors, we try to make the invisible visible…so they can see what’s involved in discovering the artifacts. How do you go from a pile of stones to a building?”
In addition to hosting a rotating team of archaeological students from JMU, Reeves heads up an ongoing set of hands-on classes throughout the year that draw people as young as 8 to as old as 80. For $700, visitors can stay at Montpelier at the nearby Arlington House, a modernized antebellum house rumored to be haunted, and pick through pig and cow teeth, shards of pottery, and 18th-century nails.
The coolest find in recent months, according to Reeves, was the 1821 Spanish Real coin they found in April, which was minted in Mexico City. “That just blew people away,” he said.
The latest discovery of a foundation in the front yard has Reeves in a state of torturous anticipation. He knows it’s the base of an 18th-century building that was taken down around 1808 when Madison added two wings to the mansion. But the part that most excites Reeves is that Madison would have seen that building when he was writing the Virginia Plan at Montpelier.
For Reeves, who has worked at Montpelier since its archaeological program really got underway 14 years ago, there is no greater pleasure than recreating what Madison’s Montpelier would have looked and felt like. A large portion of that is focused on showing visitors that slavery was a very real part of Montpelier’s evolution.