Conservation technician Kirsten Travers works with a bottle of water and razor to peel paint from the walls.

This horse with a strangely elongated neck is one of the pieces Travers has uncovered during her work.

Graffiti House still has mysteries to reveal

By DONNIE JOHNSTON

Date published: 7/23/2007

By DONNIE JOHNSTON

They may have been good soldiers, but they couldn't draw worth a hoot.

While removing paint from the walls of Brandy Station's Graffiti House in Culpeper County this weekend, conservation technician Kirsten Travers uncovered a horse with a neck that would seem more appropriate attached to a brontosaurus.

The 31-year-old Travers, an art school graduate, had to laugh.

"This is funny," she said.

Travers is working under a $15,000 Virginia Department of Human Resources grant the Brandy Station Foundation received earlier this month.

The matching grant, according to Della Edrington of the BSF, will allow the foundation to bring in experts such as Travers to determine what restoration works need to be done to save both the Graffiti House and the dozens of charcoal and graphite scribblings on its inside walls.

That graffiti, which includes the names, military units and hometowns of a number of the soldiers who were housed there when the structure was used as a field hospital, is a part of Civil War and Culpeper County history that the BSF desperately wants to preserve.

"I'm lucky to be working on projects like these where soldiers stood and wrote," said Travers.

She turned and looked out the window.

"And except for that highway, I am looking at almost exactly the same sights that those soldiers did."

With a plastic squirt bottle of water and a single-edged razor blade, Travers is slowly peeling back layers of paint.

Friday she even uncovered the bust of a derby-clad man with a striking resemblance to W.C. Fields who has a dialogue bubble above his head that reads: "I smell a rebel."

Perhaps not so coincidentally, another soldier has drawn the rear end of a horse (or mule/jackass) that is almost in the man's face. The soldiers who convalesced here after the Battle of Brandy Station in the summer of 1863 may have lost limbs, but their sense of humor was apparently still intact.

Travers is working only with paint--her specialty--and is taking special care to leave the plaster (on which the graffiti is actually written) to be studied by a specialist in that field.

"There are cracks in some of the plaster and I don't want to do anything to cause it to crumble," she said.

She is quick to admit, however, that she would love to return and assist whoever restores the plaster.

Date published: 7/23/2007