History, Protocol Find a Home at State ‘Castle’

It served as home to three California governors, but also housed a Catholic orphanage. It glowed in Gilded Age opulence in the 19th century but fell into disrepair in the last half of the 20th.

Now, like a regal old lady fresh from a makeover, the elderly but august Stanford Mansion is ready to sashay anew.

A $22-million renovation project that stretched over more than a decade is complete. Sparkling with new paint and gilding, filled with antique furniture and historic art, the 19,000-square-foot Victorian that served as Sacramento home of Leland Stanford -- railroad baron, former governor and founder of Stanford University -- is set to throw open its doors today to the public.

After the ribbon is cut and the speeches drift into the September sky, the public will be invited into an opulent four-story home that will serve two main functions.

As part of the state parks system, it will be a living museum of an age gone by in California. As an arm of the governor’s office, the house will be the official portal for California’s diplomatic affairs, playing host to events and housing the office of protocol. On any given day, a flock of schoolchildren on a field trip might clear out just before a diplomat from Dubai heads up the curving front stairway.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called it California’s own castle. On Thursday, workers were buzzing around the grounds, laying sod, installing the black iron exterior fence, stocking up the visitors center, and polishing brass and furniture.

“It’s been a long birthing process,” acknowledged Susan Peters, who has been there since the restoration effort’s conception in 1991. Her late husband, Peter McCuen, served as first chairman of the Leland Stanford Mansion Foundation, a post that Peters now fills. Peters said she was “totally thrilled by the results.”

A twisting history has led to this day.

After a stint on Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaign, Stanford bought the home in 1861, during his quest to become California governor.

It was smaller then, a two-story house totaling 4,000 square feet. On inauguration day a flood swamped the first floor, so Stanford returned home in a rowboat he docked at a second-floor window.

Two subsequent governors used the mansion as their seat of power. In 1871, Stanford returned to undertake a vast expansion of the mansion, fueled by his newfound wealth as one of the “Big Four” barons of the transcontinental railroad. The original two-story house was jacked up onto a new first floor, a fourth floor was added and new quarters stretched off the back.

A grand opening party in 1872 attracted 700. In 1880, Stanford hosted President Hayes at the mansion during the first presidential visit to the Golden State. But by the turn of the century, Stanford was dead; his widow donated the house to the Catholic Church for use as an orphanage.

The nuns in charge preserved much of the original character, storing chandeliers and ornate furniture. And the children had a surprising respect for the ornate property, said Mindy Orosco, supervisor of the mansion’s staff of guides and docents. Two of the current docents grew up at the orphanage.

The state purchased the property in 1978 but, worn by years of use, the house faced an uncertain future. At the urging of former Gov. Pete Wilson’s wife, Gayle, a private foundation formed in 1991 to restore the mansion and finally provide California with a formal place for protocol and government fetes.

Most of the first decade was spent fundraising (about half of the restoration funds came from private donors, among them those with such historic names as Bechtel, Hewlett and Packard). Planning consumed much of the rest of the time. Work began in earnest about three years ago. And it has been painstaking.

Photographs commissioned in Stanford’s day helped steer the interior restoration. Much of the original Renaissance Revival furniture was hunted down or replicated, then arranged as in Stanford’s day. Ornate lace draperies and opulent carpets were re-created to match artifacts of life a century ago.

Glass panels in the mansion’s grand front doors had to be re-created. One parlor’s intricate crown molding, laced like a grapevine, required delicate repairs. A colorful glass skylight was gone, but shards of colored glass found in the carpet guided artisans who fashioned a replacement.

The bedroom where Jane Stanford gave birth to Leland Jr. in 1868 has been restored, a dramatic web of white netting stretching in a canopy above the ornate bed. Next door, a tiny room holds the boy’s old toys, on loan from Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center.

Several pieces of furniture are originals, including a polished china cabinet on the main floor. Across the room, a restored walnut sideboard resembles the front end of a train.

To meet the needs of an Internet age, the vast network of contemporary power cables and communication lines was snaked through the floors to avoid destroying the plaster walls. Wolfgang Puck, Hollywood restaurateur and Schwarzenegger friend, provided advice for two executive kitchens, replete with multi-burner Wolf stoves, that crowd the former servant quarters.

The mansion’s unveiling coincides with a weekend of activity to celebrate the 155th anniversary of the state’s admission into the union along with the grand opening of interpretive displays at the popular California State Railroad Museum here.

This weekend the mansion will be open free to the public. The entry fee for guided tours will rise to $8 for an adult and $3 for children 6 to 17.