Farm House: College Farm to University Museum

8. Restoration and Museum

After 110 years of continual use, there were no immediate plans for another tenant after Andre moved out in the summer of 1970. Some believed the Farm House had outlived its usefulness on campus and there was talk of just bulldozing the century-old house, since it needed substantial repairs, to make room for a modern classroom building. For the first time in its long history of service to the college, the Farm House stood empty, waiting for a decision as to its fate. Andre and the dean of the Department of Home Economics, Helen LeBaron, were in favor of preserving the Farm House as a “heritage house.” They wrote to John Pace and William Whitman on May 14, 1970, urging that an advisory committee be formed with the speci fic purpose of developing a plan for furnishing each room of the house and establishing guidelines for soliciting gifts and specific items needed for the house. They also recommended that the committee be made up of faculty members from the Colleges of Agriculture and Home Economics “with particular interest in the project and knowledgeable of period furnishings and equipment.” Both deans also pledged their departments’ commitment to be responsible for the management of the Farm House if it became a heritage house. John Pace, head of the Office of Space and Schedules, and William Whitman, director of the physical plant at the university, quickly endorsed Andre and LeBaron’s proposal and sent a memo to Iowa State president W. Robert Parks asking if he concurred with the proposal and if so to “indicate the same to the good Deans.” President Parks, known for his contributions to Iowa State’s cul8 • Restoration and Museum 163 This chapter is adapted in part from an article commissioned by the University Museums and written by Debra Steilen, former curator of the Farm House Museum. tural climate, responded immediately by appointing Carl Hamilton, vice president of information and development at the university, as chair of a committee whose mission was the renovation of the Farm House. Hamilton selected committee members who represented areas directly concerned with renovation and preservation: Neva Petersen , professor of applied art; Wesley Shank, professor of architecture ; and Robert Harvey, professor of landscape architecture. Lawton Patten, professor of architecture, joined the committee in 1973. The first meeting of the Farm House committee took place on April 1, 1971. Hamilton, Petersen, Shank, and Harvey began by establishing goals for the project: the integrity of the house would be maintained and furnished in a manner to make the structure into a totally useful facility. As Hamilton later explained, the committee decided that there would be a “cut-off” date of 1910-12 for the rehabilitation and furnishing of the house. They were not planning to make it any particular period but instead to “reflect the living conditions and life style that prevailed throughout the total occupation.” The date was determined by the exterior of the house, which was stuccoed in 1910-12 to stabilize the outside walls of the house. To remove the stucco and return the exterior of the house to an earlier period would destroy the soft red bricks beneath the stucco. Wesley Shank agreed to gather information on the Farm House from the university archives to assist with the restoration project. On April 20, 1971, the committee members met for the first time at the Farm House. They invited Dean Floyd Andre to join them on an inspection tour of the house with John Pace, Charles DeKovic, and Rupert Kenyon from the university’s physical plant. Everyone was shocked and dismayed with the obvious deterioration of the house and the enormous task ahead of them. Most of the damage to the interior of the house was due to moisture seeping through the roof, walls, doors and windows. The ceiling in the west parlor was sagging across the center. The worst damage was on the third floor where water had loosened the plaster on the ceilings. In one room the moisture had gone through to the floor below. The committee agreed that fixing the roof was the first priority and work on the interior could not begin until the house was weatherproofed. The apparently simple matter of roofing the house turned out not to be so simple. The work included repairing and rebuilding portions of the roof structure, rebuilding the built-in gutters, installing sheet metal flashing, reroofing all the sloping roofs with wood shingles , and rebuilding...