Montpelier is being renovated

MONTPELIER STATION, Va. — James Madison's ancestral home looks like it was struck by a tornado.

The south wing has crumbled onto the lawn in peach-colored heaps of brick and wood. The floors are peeled away, and the opulent mint-green wallpaper is exposed to the sun.

This is no disaster. The mess in Madison's backyard is part of a $30 million home improvement project that will remove two centuries of additions and return the 244-year-old mansion, called Montpelier, to the way it looked when the fourth president lived there.

"We want to bring his presence back," Montpelier Foundation President Michael Quinn said. "We want you to walk in the house and think he's still living in there."

Although visitors will have limited access to the mansion's interior until this summer, the estate will remain open daily throughout the restoration. Furnishings will be on display in a nearby education center; the gardens, old-growth forest, slave quarter and other sites on the estate will be fully accessible, and special tours will offer an inside look at the restoration progress and plans.

The restoration was begun partly because Madison's home, built on 2,700 acres of grassy hills and horse tracks about 90 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., bears little resemblance to the way it looked when Dolley Madison sold it in 1844.

William duPont, a businessman who bought the house in 1901, buried many of the original features as he converted Montpelier into the kind of country house that was popular at the time in wealthy neighborhoods along the east coast.

The exterior walls were covered with plaster and mango paint. The library where Madison once pondered the Constitution was turned into a bedroom. The duPonts reused just about everything: Madison's doors and windows were pulled off their hinges and pounded into other rooms as the mansion more than doubled in size.

The result has left Montpelier in a poor state for historians, and it has long played second fiddle to Thomas Jefferson's carefully preserved mansion, 25 miles away at Monticello.

Montpelier officials have talked about restoring the home for years. It was the dying wish of its last resident, Marion duPont Scott, who turned the property over to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1983.

More than a decade after public tours began in 1987,