By Charles Cohen
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, July 15, 2006; F01
Just before the bend in the driveway, the trees clear and, poof, there's a wooden mansion, so unusual that it serves as an architectural speed bump. Drivers hit the brakes to gaze at a miracle of accidental preservation.
"Looks like you have just come across the wow factor," Andy Cooper said as he greeted a visitor.
Three years ago, he and his wife, Pam, felt the same sensory ambush and have never recovered.
"When you come up the driveway and come out of the trees, it's just an incredible thing to be hiding in the woods," he said recently. What began as a curious visit up a driveway turned into what probably will be a lifelong commitment for the Coopers, who are restoring the ramshackle Prince George's County treasure, known as Hazelwood.
"You have to be able to look past the dirt and see the absolute beauty of the structure," Pam Cooper said.
Pam, who said she has "never been afraid to pick up a hammer," spends her weekdays reclaiming the mansion, mostly by herself. On weekends, Andy, an engineer, pitches in. Sometimes their son, Ethan, 16, joins them.
The Coopers, though, aren't just another family lost to the romantic quest to save a rustic relic. Rather, they are the first to participate in the county's historic property curatorship program, an effort to save some of the county's historic buildings, run by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.
The county's program is modeled after a long-established Maryland curatorship program, one of two in the country, where residents live in state-owned historic homes rent-free in return for caring for the property.
The Coopers don't yet live in Hazelwood because it still needs more work to be habitable. They provide not only manpower but also materials; the county supervises with regular inspections.
Hazelwood is one of the last remnants of the lost tobacco port town of Queen Anne, which was along the Patuxent River a few miles southeast of Bowie.
While most mansions are built to impress, Hazelwood began as a modest 18th-century dwelling for Maj. Thomas Lancaster Lansdale, a Revolutionary War hero. But what started out as a three-bedroom house was added onto in major ways around 1800 and then again around 1860, according to Christopher Wagnon, chief of natural and historical resources for the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.
The result is a mix of Colonial stoicism and Gothic showmanship steeped in history and begging to be saved and explored.
For about a year, the Coopers volunteered to work on the mansion to scope out what they would face as curators. They also wanted to assess the stress the project would place on their family and whether their basic home-repair skills would suffice.
After building a support system of experts, in April 2005 the Coopers signed a lease with the park commission. "Some of the things that looked bad weren't as bad as we thought and the things that were worse off, we had the right people around to tell us how to do it," Pam Cooper said.
Besides, she said, she had always wanted to experience the adventure of restoring a historic home.
Under the curatorship program, the Coopers will be able to live in the mansion as long as they actively restore the structure and maintain the 11-acre grounds.
In 1996, the county did a study that estimated it would cost $1.6 million to fully restore the structure. However, based on consultation with her own inspectors and a historic architect, Pam estimates the cost to make the house livable at about $600,000.
She points out, though, that the number is arbitrary -- it's based on a five-hour inspection done by flashlight while the house was still boarded up.
Some projects have been surprisingly less expensive than they first guessed, she said -- for instance, she's saving a lot of money by doing the masonry work and painting herself. But there could be other big bills ahead. For instance, the roof may have to be replaced.
"For someone looking for a cheap place to rent, this is not it," she said.
As far as Wagnon is concerned, the county has made out on the deal, saving a landmark at no cost to taxpayers.
"It's a big challenge for the curators," he said. "They are the ones that have the risk. They have to do the work."
After two years of scraping paint, jacking up beams and gingerly replacing windows one antique bubbled pane at a time, the Coopers still live in their farm house five miles away. And they just keep finding themselves immersed more deeply in the devilish details of preservation.
"It's like protecting art, like protecting the masters," Pam Cooper said. "There's art to these houses, especially a house like Hazelwood."
For instance, she attended a masonry conference in Annapolis last year so she could repair the fireplace and foundation herself. Now she works with traditional lime mortar -- park personnel bring her horse hair from other sites for the mix -- and orders hand-fired bricks from South Carolina for authenticity. She has opted for hand-buffing floors lest history be sanded away.
Andy, who commutes to a Baltimore engineering firm, worked up a computer-assisted drawing of one of the rare missing soapstone floor vents.
During a tour, they marvel not just at the house's aesthetics but also at how functional the design was. The house is a "living and breathing organism," Andy said.
Pam said, "The artistry and skill in the early 19th Century was just awesome -- there was always a reason for everything."
The success of the curatorship program, Wagnon said, will depend upon such idealists who "get smitten by these historic structures." The county has two other smaller, historic houses in need of curators.
The park commission bought the property 20 years ago; eventually, vandalism became a problem and the county boarded it up. Although a park police officer lives in a trailer on the grounds, that hasn't been enough to stem all problems over the years. The Coopers discovered two cherub-adorned Italianate plaster medallions pried from the wall and awaiting the return of looters.
While saving Hazelwood is daunting, the Coopers believed it was doable, mainly because the house escaped termite damage (for the most part) and water rot. The beams, walls and -- with a few exceptions -- floors were solid. It didn't need to be gutted. The big jobs were plastering, restoring fireplaces and painting the roof.
History is thick at Hazelwood, and the Coopers have heard plenty of ghost stories -- sightings, presumably of Lansdale, and tales of murder and suicide.
"Yeah, there have been some things that have happened and you can explain it away. As long as they don't throw me off the veranda, I'm okay," Pam said.
Even in broad daylight, the house can be downright spooky. A vulture routinely roosts on the giant chimneys.
All of this appeals to the storyteller in Pam, whose tour of the house includes a wooden pen in the attic that legend has it once imprisoned a crazy woman.
Her husband, however, almost spiked the restoration project when Pam started airing her desire to dress in a gown and waltz in front of the second-floor window.
"You do that," he said, "and I'll never set foot in that house."
Sometimes, in between chores, Pam will pause in the once-ornate hallway, where Andy's antique lathe splitter hangs as decoration, and imagine how the place operated in full party mode, when socialites stepped from boats and waltzed in through what is now the back door. She wonders about the lives of the slaves, the servants and the owners over the years.
Although the soil is rich with archeological finds, according to a county survey, she resists the urge to dig and ponder the meaning of the shards, just as she refrains from driving to a library to search the background of John, the paper hanger who signed a wall in 1859.
"I am busy scraping," she said. "I don't have time to do research."