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Stephens built an addition to hold the organ he built. It produces music appropriate anywhere from a cathedral to a Broadway theater.
This was the basement before the foundation bricks were repointed and the support structure was re-engineered.
Technician Denise Symonds works on an organ component in the workshop, which is filled with organ pipes and parts.
The two-story addition to Burnt Chimneys was designed to hold the organ and massive set of pipes that produce orchestral sound.
Aside from the new porch on the front and the rear addition, Burnt Chimneys looks much as it did
Two upper rooms in the addition hold the pipes
Dennis Stephens put a kitchen in the main part of the original house. All work was done with respect for the structure's origins, which date back 213 years.
Once the basement's dirt floor had been dug a foot deeper and a concrete floor laid. Dennis Stephens created his Black Horse Tavern. |
BY RICHARD AMRHINE
When Dennis Stephens decided in 1998 to make his organ restoration business a full-time enterprise, restoring a centuries-old house wasn't on his agenda.
As a spare-time gig, rebuilding organs in his garage in Fredericksburg had been doable. But within a few years, with the organs and equipment he was collecting, he realized he needed more space.
"I looked around Fredericksburg, but it was going to be too expensive" to get the land and work space he needed, he said.
Soon he learned about a Northern Neck property, out in Northumberland County, with an old house sitting on a few acres.
In 2002, long story short, he decided to take on the challenge.
First off, the house, just off U.S. 360 in the village of Village, had not been used as a residence for years and would need work to become habitable. Lots of work.
ORIGINAL STRUCTURE
The foundation dates to 1796, when it was built by a U.S. naval captain, William Henderson, who had plied the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and the nearby Rappahannock River. He would use that experience in the young nation's defense when the British sailed up the Chesapeake during the War of 1812.
As Stephens has heard the story told, British seamen trailed Henderson back to his home and burned it down, leaving nothing but the brick foundation and the burned brick chimneys.
The property retains the name "Burnt Chimneys" today.
The house was rebuilt in 1815, using the existing foundation and chimneys. It would be a very simple two-story affair with several rooms and a shallow basement, and that's how Stephens found it.
To become what he wanted and needed it to be, the whole interior would have to be restored and a significant addition to hold a large pipe organ would have to be built. And he'd have to live somewhere else in the meantime.
So he first built a steel warehouse and workshop for his organ restoration business, the Rappahannock Pipe Organ Co. It was equipped with a kitchen and bathroom so he could live there as the house was restored.
He then turned his attention to the old house.
"We first had to make the first two floors livable," he said, and that meant an immediate need to shore up the floors--which bounced like a trampoline--from the basement below.
But the basement, too shallow to stand up in, needed to be dug out by a foot or so in order for it to serve as any usable space in the future. That was done, and a concrete floor was laid.
Structural engineers then installed steel supports and poles to stabilize the floors above. As it was, the basement ceiling was a series of exposed beams. In one area, they were the rough-hewn variety and in other areas split trees were used, flat side up, half-round side down. In one area not even the bark had been removed from the trees.
RESTORATION PROCEEDS
The basement supports allowed the upstairs restoration to proceed. Repairs were made to the walls and the original heart-pine floors were refinished. A modest plantation house up until the Civil War, the home was used as a Confederate hospital during the war, and blood stains on the floor are still there.
The trim, left somewhat rough as it had been found, was repainted. The dentil crown molding in the dining room was repaired and repainted.
Determined to respect the structure's past as much as possible, Stephens scraped through several coats of paint on the trim to discover the original to be dark green. That shade was then used for some of the trim.
Stephens also discovered that a side portion of the house was originally a "pull-away" kitchen. In the 1870s, he explained, as kitchens were made part of the house, they still couldn't be trusted to not catch fire and burn the rest of the house down.
"They made pull-away kitchens that could be yanked away from the house if they caught fire," he said. "We found the grappling hooks they would pull on."
Thanks to modern appliances and building practices, Stephens was able to put his kitchen inside the main portion of the house.
Upstairs, the 7-foot ceilings were raised in the bedrooms to help modernize the space.
THE FURNISHINGS
The house has been furnished throughout with period pieces from around 1800 to 1820 that fit with the time the house was rebuilt. Oil paintings from the same period grace the walls. A husband and wife are depicted in a pair of portraits from around 1810. Particularly appropriate is that the man happens to be a naval officer.
In the dugout basement, Stephens has transformed one room into his own "Black Horse Tavern," where the feel of an early 19th-century pub is unmistakable. The decor of the adjacent media room actually drops back a few centuries to medieval times.
The original brick foundation is evident in the basement. Stephens said he brought in brick experts from Williamsburg to repoint the brickwork, whose mortar would crumble with the touch of a finger.
Wondering about the purpose of a dirt-filled passageway in the basement, Stephens dug through and found a set of steps leading down from the pull-away kitchen. He believes they were used by servants moving between the large cooking fireplace in the basement and the kitchen above.
The stairwell was cleared and the stairs were rebuilt with new bricks. Work on the basement was completed last year.
THE ADDITION
The addition was built in 2004, and holds a hybrid pipe organ that is Stephens' pride and joy. It combines parts of three Wurlitzer organs and two church organs. Metal and wooden organ pipes cover the walls and fill two second-story rooms. The combination allows Stephens to produce sounds appropriate for a cathedral or a Broadway theater.
"The addition was designed for this from the beginning. That was the only way to do it right," he said. "The whole room is basically a sound board for the organ."
Turning his attention to the grounds around the house, Stephens discovered a brick pathway to the front door that had been completely covered in soil and grass over time. A 200-year-old sycamore stands proudly nearby. Stephens plans to use part of the land surrounding the house for a formal garden.
"The last place to finish is the outside," he said.
Richard Amrhine: 540/374-5406
Email: ramrhine@freelancestar.com
| Dennis Stephens has been a church organist for 33 years and has been working on organs and restoring them for the past 20.
Stephens and his three-member Rappahannock Pipe Organ Co. staff of organ building technicians, Denise Symonds, Mac Covington and David Brannan, build, restore, tune and maintain pipe and reed organs The company operates out of a 2,100-square-foot warehouse that's located at the corner of Gibeon and Lively Hope roads. (Stephens points out that Gibeon Road at that point is the boundary between Northumberland and Richmond counties.) The warehouse, which holds a showroom, workshop and offices, is just a stone's throw from Stephens' restored home, Burnt Chimneys. --Richard Amrhine |
