Va. House Fit for a President (Again)

The reconstruction of the house is finished, but it'll be a while before the furniture and decor are brought in. The plaster on the walls needs a few more months to cure, thanks to the Madison-era recipe of lime, sand and horsehair the restorers used for the sake of authenticity.

Yes, the people at the Montpelier Foundation, established by the National Trust to manage the property, are serious about authenticity.

So the house, which faces the rippling Blue Ridge Mountains and abuts the 200 acres of old-growth forest Madison preserved, is back to its modest 26 rooms, its carved stone mantels reinstalled, original doors back where they started. (Rich as they were, the du Ponts were thrifty; when they remodeled, they simply moved doors and such to different parts of the house or gave them to neighbors, rarely junking anything Madisonian.)

When William du Pont bought the house in 1901, he and his wife, Annie, decorated and expanded the place, leaving it to their daughter, Marion duPont Scott.

Scott was an independent, boundary-pushing horsewoman, one who, after two short-lived marriages in her 20s and the death of her parents, lived well into her 80s at Montpelier.

Scott and brother William trained racehorses (that's their white-fenced racetrack that you see from Montpelier's front windows), and three of her favorite horses are buried just north of the house.

Scott's one major change to the house was her art deco Red Room, where she kept photos of her horses, prizes from their races and a floor-to-ceiling mirror around the fireplace. The whole room is re-created in the visitor center's William duPont Gallery, which also houses information about the family.

The day I visited, the rain chased away any chance of ambling through the forest or visiting James and Dolley at the family cemetery. Instead, before the house tour and a walk through the formal gardens, I poked through the visitor center's exhibits, including "Treasures of Montpelier," which has one of Dolley's red dresses, her engagement ring and her snuff box.

There was also this: a scrap of wallpaper, a shred of red fabric, a ragged slip of paper with Madison's handwriting . . . all found in a mouse nest in a Montpelier wall.

Even Madison couldn't keep out the mice.