Montpelier Station train depot

Down VA-20 near the entrance to James Madison’s Montpelier is the now-decommissioned train depot that was built by William duPont, Sr. (owner of Montpelier from 1901 to 1928), to enable his travel to Delaware for work and to provide passenger and freight service to Montpelier. Like Montpelier, the depot has been restored to an earlier time—its 1910 original appearance.

Montpelier Station train depot.

Restoration to this period means the depot has segregated waiting rooms. To acknowledge and provide education on this time in U.S. history, the depot houses a permanent exhibit on segregation, including signs and posters explaining Jim Crow laws and providing information on how the laws affected the local African-American community. Under the ticket window on both the “white” and “colored” sides are three buttons for playing sound clips, which include excerpts from the 14th Amendment and speeches made when the restored depot was reopened in 2010.

Ticket window for coloreds, Montpelier Station train depot.

Ticket window for whites, Montpelier Station train depot.

The area for the employees of the depot contains a desk for telegraph equipment and operation and a freight room. The current Montpelier Station U.S. Post Office (zip code 22960) operates out of the freight room.

Montpelier Station train depot telegraph, telephone, ad typewriter.

Montpelier Station post office in old freight area.

The wood paneling inside the station has definitely seen many decades, displaying nicks, holes, and other signs of wear, but the restoration has brought out the luster in the aged wood. And because the station is still in use as a post office, it does not have a dusty museum smell. I could easily imagine someone popping in any minute to buy a ticket. My imagination was helped along by a train passing while my friend Loretta and I were in the station.

Train passing by Montpelier Station. Taken from inside the train depot.

One thing I wonder about is the color of the building exterior. It is the same yellow-gold color as the main entrance doors to Montpelier. While the Montpelier doors are supposed to be historically accurate for the time James Madison retired, I couldn’t find any information on whether the original depot was painted this color. Was the color chosen to indicate the buildings' connection to each other?

I am impressed with the Montpelier Foundation’s incorporation of information about African-Americans, pre- and post-emancipation, into its presentations and exhibits. In addition to the exhibit here, the main tour, map, and supplemental materials at Montpelier include information on the likely living quarters and daily lives of the slaves who lived and worked on the estate during Madison’s time. And across the street, Gilmore Cabin, a restored freedman’s home, sheds light on the lives of emancipated slaves. I find this much better than the previous handling at historic museums (which mostly consisted of a mumbled—or worse, challenging—variation of “Yes, [the residents of this house] owned slaves, but most people of their standing did during that time”). It seems to me that this level of integration of both white and black American stories at historic houses museums is fairly recent—within the last five to ten years.

And last, from the department of anachronism: I was bemused and a bit disturbed by the No Guns sign outside the depot. I know it's not period, but I wouldn't have thought gun-toting would be a common enough problem at museums to need to explicitly forbid.

1910 No Smoking and No Guns signs? Montpelier Station train depot.

The Montpelier Station train depot is worth a visit if you're in the area.

Hollin Hills House & Garden Tour 2014

Every year, Hollin Hills, a planned community of mid-century houses located in Alexandria, Virginia, holds a house and garden tour. This year's tour was held in May and was the first since the Hollin Hills Historic District was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Hollin Hills is one of the few planned communities where the houses were designed by a single architect, Charles Goodman. Another rare quality is the location of the houses on irregularly shaped plots designed specifically for uninterrupted views (i.e., no fences, but hedges and other landscaping options for marking off property are allowed).

I love mid-century houses and the Hollin Hills tour is spectacularly well organized and worth seeing. The self-guided tour cost $25 for advance registration ($30 at the door) and included eleven houses (three were garden only); a 28-page booklet; and lectures on Hollin Hills and the historical context of planned communities, open-plan houses, and natural landscaping. The booklet contains not only a map of the community with the locations of the tour houses identified, but also two-page spreads of each house on the tour, which include a line drawing of the house, a short narrative on the house's history/features, and the model of the house (there are about eight standard models).

After I attended the lectures, I met up with friends Gin, Tanja, and Meg at Gin's Hollin Hills home (not on the tour) for brunch on her screened-in back porch with its lovely, very green view. Then we headed out. The houses on the tour were in two clusters; walking was easy within the clusters (although, frequently, there weren't sidewalks), but we drove between clusters.

Because these houses are lived in by the owners, I got a real feel for how these spaces worked. The interior design of the houses ranged from original or updated mid-century modern (one of the houses won The Washington Post's Mad Men house style contest) to traditional. Some were open-house staged; others were more party ready. Usually not all rooms were open for the tour, but sometimes even when a room wasn't open, it could be viewed from the outside because the drapes of the floor-to-ceiling windows were open. I was inspired by some of the kitchen designs and fell in love with more than one landscaped backyard (and boy do I want a large, circular, faux-wicker sectional sofa—and patio to put it on).

Some of the houses have not been changed from the original floor plans; others have been extensively renovated with rooms added and walls removed. Most however keep with Goodman's aesthetic of open, flowing floor plans and large windows for sunlight. I particularly enjoyed seeing the mostly unrenovated c. 1950s kitchen in a home still lived in by its original owner (whose favorite color I'm pretty sure is red) and the extensively renovated home with the walk-in wine refrigerator.

I'm not posting any pictures, because these are private homes; however, the Hollin Hills website has a photo gallery.

Toured May 3, 2014