Restoration Shows That History Is Set in Stone at White House

Outside the second-floor sunburst-shaped window that tumbles light into Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s White House living room, electric saws and pneumatic drills cut crumbling sandstone from 200-year-old walls.

The chatter and buzz of stonecutting has been background noise for three presidents now, a constant daytime racket halted only by the visits of kings and prime ministers and the very worst weather.

So far, this historic restoration has taken more than twice the time it took craftsmen in the 1790s to build the White House in the first place.

These are the walls George Washington saw rising as he rode horseback through the new federal city. President John Adams and his wife, Abigail, were the first presidential couple to live behind them, moving into the still-unfinished house in November 1799.

Sometime this summer, the last new stone should be in place and the work finished after 16 years. This fall the west wall will be painted and the White House will be entirely white once more.

But for now, while President Clinton is master of the house inside the walls, the walls themselves are in the hands of a gray-bearded, perpetually white-capped Englishman of Irish descent named Patrick Plunkett.

At 62, Plunkett is a master stonemason who worked on the old stone of English abbeys and country houses and the cathedrals at Salisbury and Chichester.

Plunkett came to the White House in 1989 after years cutting and placing the stones and carving the gargoyles that completed Washington’s National Cathedral.

The White House is not all that different.

“It’s very similar to the work we were doing on the English cathedrals, even though that stone is 700 years old,” Plunkett said, sitting at a table with his crew of four American stonemasons and cutters looking on.

“We’re basically looking for badly eroded stone with no integrity anymore, stone so badly cracked you can knock lumps off with your hand,” he said.

“You have to cut back to sound stone, take measurements and prepare templates, reproduce that stone exactly as it was, drill holes for stainless steel pins and set the stone back in place and secure it with liquid mortar.”

Some of the replacement stones are tiny, a few square inches. Some are 40 inches long and 18 inches deep.

“When it’s finished, you can’t tell what is original and what’s not,” Plunkett said.

And if there have been years of work, and tons of cracked and broken stones to remove and replace, Plunkett says none of the fault can be placed on the original master builders.

Plunkett and his team follow in direct line from the band of Scottish stonemasons, recruited in Edinburgh in the early 1790s, who cut and shaped this stone and used it to build the White House, block by sandstone block, all of it from a defunct quarry in Aquia Creek, Va.

“The professionals marvel at the stonework and the setting of the stone,” said Gary Walters, the manager who runs the White House from behind the scenes, a job that carries with it the 19th-century title of chief usher.

“The stone is so well set, so tight, it really is a miracle,” Walters said.

So it wasn’t their work at fault. Rather, it’s the soft and porous character of the sandstone they carved and the effects of two centuries of ice, heat, bruising storms and patchwork repairs that did more harm than good.

The warning signs appeared in 1976 when paint applied to the White House for the bicentennial celebration peeled away in sheets. There were so many layers of paint underneath that a new coat would no longer adhere.

“We found up to 39 identifiable layers of paint,” said Walters. “The Bureau of Standards said we had the entire history of American paint on the walls of the White House, from the original lime-based whitewash to lead-based to latex.”

The paint was stripped, wall by wall, uncovering both the evidence of history and serious structural problems.

The history showed in the black scorch and smoke marks around many doors and windows, testimony in stone of the devastating fire set by British soldiers in August 1814, which gutted the interior of the White House.

“It’s odd to be working on a place that one of my ancestors may have helped burn,” stonemason Plunkett said.

The stone was repaired in stages after 1980, first on the east wall, then on the north and south with their familiar porticoes.

Congress has appropriated $4.7 million for the job over the years along with a unique resource that has given the restoration an unexpected authenticity.

Plunkett and his crew were given free access to the piles of old stone removed from the U.S. Capitol building when the East Front was extended in the 1950s. It’s from the same quarry as the White House stone, was cut the same time and was worked by many of the same Scottish masons as the White House stone it is replacing.

Those original White House masons left their mark on the stones they cut and carved, and their successors are following suit.

But it would take an earthquake, or a future repair job, to expose to light their personal link to history.

William Seale, author of “The President’s House,” a two-volume history of the White House, explained the tradition: “If the mason was being paid by the job, he identified his work by cutting his mark with a chisel into the back or end of the last stone he set. Stonemasons’ trademarks or ‘banker marks’ appear in great number in the stone walls of the White House.”

“I like to keep the old traditions of the trade, and this is one way to do it,” Plunkett said.