For black Southerners, the turn of the twentieth century was anything but gilded.
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Slavery had ended, but subordination continued. A series of Jim Crow laws blocked the black vote and enforced racial segregation. With limited education and job opportunity, African Americans were compelled to take low-paying jobs in domestic service, agriculture, and some industries. Excluded from most jobs because of their race and gender, black women made up 90 percent of domestic servants in the Gilded Age South. Continuing to work after marrying and having children, many struggled to balance employers’ requirements for long hours or live-in service with the needs of their own families. Maymont today, as a museum and park open to the public, presents an
exhibition that tells the story of these workers, “In Service and Beyond.” In the exhibition, visitors meet Maymont employees, including head butler William Dilworth, lady’s maid Georgia Anderson, head cook Frances Twiggs Walker, and some of Mrs. Walker’s grown children who also worked on staff. The tour presents the mansion’s domestic zones, designed to keep the movement
and chores of domestic workers out of view and to isolate noise and cooking odors. At Maymont House, the staff’s domain included the service entrance, a narrow back stairway, the basement work spaces and bedrooms, the first-floor butler’s pantry, and a full bathroom on the third floor. The exhibition also enumerates the new technology that workers of the era
employed. A hand-operated dumbwaiter transported food between the basement and the butler’s pantry. A speaking tube allowed employees to coordinate the service of meals in the dining room. To summon staff, an electrified bell system connected buttons in upstairs rooms and the doorbells with an annunciator (call box) belowstairs. The Maymont era witnessed the advent of many inventions that revolutionized the home—electricity, central heat, modern plumbing, and a host of household
appliances. Maymont, among the first houses in the area wired for electricity, was equipped with combination gas-electric light fixtures. Central heat was supplied throughout the house by a coal-burning furnace connected to radiators encased in metal boxes that were suspended from the basement ceiling. Other modern conveniences in the mansion included hot and cold running water, three full bathrooms, two half-baths, and an Otis elevator. The restoration of Maymont’s service spaces and the interpretive exhibition
“In Service and Beyond” is the result of a decade-long research and planning project involving historians, restoration specialists, and museum professionals— more unseen movers behind a monumental task. Also contributing to the finished product were members of the Richmond community who shared oral histories and insights regarding interpretation of domestic service, and many descendants of Dooley employees, providing memories, artifacts, and photographs.
Maymont House Museum tours, Tuesday-Sunday, noon-5pm The 100-acre Maymont estate also features gardens, a collection of antique carriages, and more than 700 native Virginia animals in a Nature Center, Children’s Farm and outdoor wildlife exhibits. Information for this article courtesy of Maymont Foundation.
804-358-7166 www.maymont.org
www•myVmagazine.com
Vmagazine for women • APRIL 2010
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