Week 10: Servant Spaces

             This week I spent most of my time consolidating all of the information I have discovered about Arthur Laws into a narrative. When Glen Foerd is prepared to introduce new information on tours, the narrative will allow the docents to easily learn about Laws and his role within the household to share with visitors. While writing the narrative, I referred to several “servant spaces” within the household, which will give visitors a visual of how the domestics interacted in the household and with the Foerderer and Tonner families. The significance of including servant spaces on tours has been emphasized by many historians—including Jennifer Pustz—offering advice on interpreting the lesser known, and often less pleasant, aspects of historic sites.

            At this point, several of the most obvious servant spaces are unavailable for visitors to view. The butler’s pantry is one of these unavailable spaces. When Robert Foerderer bought Glen Foerd, he renovated the entire house and added a large addition, including the portions of the house now used as the art gallery, dining room, kitchen, storage, and Glen Foerd staff offices. Foerderer kept detailed plans of the renovation, right down to the type of stain used on the cabinets in the butler’s pantry. These documents allowed me to discover what the house looked like when Arthur was employed there, especially the servant spaces which were not often found in photographs or referenced in inventories.

            The dining room and the art gallery remain as Foerderer designed them in 1903 (at least as far as we know and with what is left of the collection). The kitchen, however, was completely gutted and refinished during the period the Lutheran Church owned Glen Foerd. In redoing the kitchen, the wall that existed  separating the kitchen from the butler’s pantry was knocked down to expand the kitchen space. All that remains to display the location of the former butler’s pantry—where Arthur decanted wine and liquor, cared for the china, silver, and glassware, and prepared the daily dinner menus—is a change in the color of the linoleum floor tiles installed by the Lutheran Church. In Foerderer’s notes on the addition, he described the fixture in the butler’s pantry: “Furnish dresser from Butlers pantry out of chestnut, with closets and shelves above, and drawers and closets below.” There are four large (over six feet tall) cabinets that fit this description remaining at Glen Foerd, two in the basement and two in the carriage house. Perhaps someday the butler’s pantry can be restaged using these cabinets and any other furniture described by Foerderer in his plans.

            The kitchen itself would be completely unrecognizable to former residents and employees of the house, except the placement of windows. Behind the kitchen are several rooms with original wooden floors and a bathroom with tile that looks to be from the early twentieth century. Likely, one of these rooms was used as the servants’ dining hall. Another, perhaps, was the housekeeper’s room. Unfortunately, no plans have been discovered that prove what the rooms were used for during the Foerderer or Tonner eras. From Foerderer’s notes, we know there was once a servants’ porch as well, but no visible evidence of this remains.  The former servants’ quarters, including the narrow stairway up to them, is intact. Today the rooms are used as offices and collections storage, and until the offices are relocated, they could not be included on a tour. The servants’ bathroom also remains, with original floors, tile, and claw foot bathtub.

            The basement and third floors were also once servant spaces. On the third floor, the nurse and the governess each had their own room. The layout of the basement during the Foerderer years remains a mystery. We are sure one room was used as a laundry, but there are at least six other distinct spaces with questionable functions. I’ve been searching for architectural plans or inventories including the basement in hopes of learning the former layout with no luck. I still have five weeks left though, so I am holding out hope!

            The good news for interpreting servant spaces is that several very interesting spaces still exist and can be made easily accessible to visitors. These include call buttons, still visible in most rooms, a push button on the floor of the dining room that was used to signal the kitchen when the party was ready for the next course (which also helps tell the layout of the furniture in the room, as the lady of the house would have been seated where the button is located), and an original annunciator, which connected to the call buttons and pointed to which room rang for help, on the wall of a landing in the front servant stairwell. Each of these objects and spaces would add to a successful interpretation including the domestic workers of the house. Including them would offer a more complete history of the mansion, and those that once lived and worked within its walls.