Aided by a timely discovery, an ambitious project to restore the Temple at James Madison’s Montpelier nears completion.

The Temple at Montpelier, which served both an aesthetic purpose and a practical one as a working icehouse, prior to the restoration.

Looking up into the Temple dome.
Jennifer Glass couldn’t believe the surprise she and her architecture and historic preservation team discovered as they sifted through 11 bags of garbage retrieved from the dome of the Temple—a garden folly built in the classical style atop an underground icehouse—at James Madison’s Montpelier. The bags were chock full of straw and other debris that woodpeckers had stored there over the years.
What Glass, who serves as director of architecture and historic preservation for the Montpelier Foundation, and her team found in September 2015 was a single Madison-era wooden shingle. “That told us a lot,” she says. “It told us what the wooden roof looked like.”
The important discovery was part of the Temple’s first phase of restoration, funded by a $500,000 gift in 2015 from Mars, Inc. heir Forrest Mars Jr. (Mars passed away last July). Driving the need for restoration, explains Glass, was the deteriorating condition of the shingles: “They were warped and frayed. We knew we had to put a new roof on the building so we wouldn’t get a lot of water damage.”

The Portland cement added to the Temple’s columns by the du Pont family will be replaced with a historically accurate lime-based stucco.
Madison, our fourth president and chief architect of the U.S. Constitution, had the Temple built in 1810. It was constructed by Thomas Jefferson’s master carpenter, James Dinsmore, an Irish joiner who had completed renovations to Montpelier in 1809 that took it from two conjoined houses to one large building. Today, the Temple is the only extant Madison-era architectural structure on the property, aside from the mansion itself. Madison’s lifelong Orange County home is owned and run by the Montpelier Foundation, established in 2000 to act as steward of this historic property.
Madison designed the Temple to pay homage to ancient Greek and Roman architecture withits classical porticos and columns. “The founding fathers believed that their new American experiment would harness the best aspects of ancient history in terms of the relationship between an individual and the government and the responsibility of citizenship,” says Elizabeth Chew, Montpelier’s vice president for museum programs. The Temple functioned “as it would have in the European garden tradition, as one picturesque aspect of a larger landscape design, along with its purely utilitarian role as an icehouse.”
The discovery of the single wooden shingle helped Glass and her team confirm the original material of the roof. An 1802 conceptual watercolor of the structure showed a metal roof. However, the roof that was on the building before the restoration was made of wood and had been for “at least 100 years
or so,” says Glass.
Another surprise the team uncovered: The roof was originally painted red. “We could see remnants of red paint on the shingle,” says Glass. She then called Susan Buck, an authority on paint conservation from the Norfolk area, who determined the red paint was “oil-based and not tar-based, as would have been more typical,” says Glass, adding that the shingle also confirmed her suspicion that the roof “was originally clad in wood.”
One of the first tasks of the Temple restoration, which began last March, was taking off the roof shingles, many of which were on the brink of failure. “They had some bug damage,” says Glass. “We had to repair some of the original material and put a new roof on.”
All of the new shingles—more than 6,000—were handmade by Richmond-based historic building restoration and preservation specialist Peter Post, who has worked on important historic homes across the U.S. and Canada. Looking at the Madison-era shingle, he made the serendipitous discovery that it had a beveled butt, something that was unique in those days.
Post made the new shingles using cypress. “Historically they would have been heart pine, but we are going with cypress because it will last longer and is a bit more durable,” says Glass. “Peter consulted with us and we designed a system where the shingles we are nailing to the dome are not harming any of the Madison-era material because that is so fragile. It had so many nail holes in it already. We were concerned about pressuring that.”

The Temple dome awaiting its new cypress shingles.

An aeriel view of the project.

The Temple dome during reconstruction.

Inside the Temple.
The work on the Temple follows in the tradition of Montpelier’s do-not-harm restoration philosophy. “We try to keep as much of the original material as possible,” explains Glass, who notes that a substructure put in place for the duration of the work uses only a few screws. “We didn’t have to add any new nails.”
Post’s work was finished in mid-August but the dome won’t be stained until early next year. “The stain we are using is the same as was used on the red roof at Mount Vernon,” says Glass. “We hope to unveil the stained roof in the spring.”
Work on the Temple’s classic columns is underway. “Our scope of work includes removal of the modern cement-based stucco from the columns supporting the roof,” says Tim Winther, senior project manager for Dominion Traditional Building Group LLC, which specializes in historical restorations. “We will be taking great care to avoid damaging any of the Madison-era brick that the columns are constructed of. Once this work is complete, we will use a lime-based stucco to reapply over the brick.”
Winther’s team also will square the column bases back to their original look. “The bases were rounded during the du Pont era,” he says.
The du Pont family, which owned the house from 1901 to 1984, added a concrete floor to the Temple and made other changes to the structure around 1905. (The family also famously made major alterations to the mansion that were undone in a large-scale restoration that took place from 2003-2009, in what is considered, says Glass, to be the largest historic restoration of its kind ever undertaken in the U.S.)
Among the du Pont’s changes to the Temple was the use of Portland cement in the columns. “That is holding in a lot of moisture,” Glass says, adding that the columns are solid brick. “We want to get the cement off and re-stucco over the brick with a lime-based product which is more historically accurate. That will allow the columns to breathe and not hold in moisture.”
Once the columns are finished, a wooden floor will be added and Winther and his crew will

The exposed brick of the icehouse.
return the grade of the building to its Madison-era elevation and repair the brick of the icehouse beneath. Other planned work includes re-opening the doorway on the downhill side of the Temple, which was bricked in when the structure ceased to be used as an icehouse.
The last step of the project will focus on pulling everything together—painting, white washing and adding interpretive signs. “We want to put a ladder back in and illuminate the ice house so you can look down and see what it looks like,” Glass says, noting that the icehouse is 25 feet deep and lined in brick. “The ice would have been brought up in the winter and stored in the spring and summer.”
Glass would eventually like to do a broader landscape restoration around the Temple. “But that is out of scope right now,” she says. “That restoration would include a row of pine trees on both sides of the pathway from the house to the Temple. That gives it a forced perspective, drawing the eye from the corner of the house to the Temple.”
During their research, archaeologists found wagon ruts in the road that leads from the icehouse to the pond, and Glass would like to eventually put that road back into the design as well.
Restoring the Temple is important to the team at Montpelier because it is so unique in its design and function. Says Glass: “I don’t think there is anything like it—a temple over an icehouse—in the U.S.” Montpelier.org
This article originally appeared in our December 2016 issue.