Starting in January 2024, the crews from Phoenix 1 Restoration and Construction began removing every piece of exposed siding and replacing them with specially sourced cypress boards cut to the correct historical dimensions. Fanthorp Inn staff were already aware that during the first restoration in 1986, the crew wrote messages on some of the boards before affixing them to the inn. During this project, we found even more!
Some lighthearted messages included crew members’ names, messages about Texas’ sesquicentennial of 1986, and estimations on when these messages would be seen again. On one board, the message “Hello future man” can be read along with lyrics to the Zager and Evans song “2525.” That same board predicted that the next restoration would occur in 2020, which ended up being fairly accurate. Staff and volunteers from the Washington-on-the Brazos complex continued the tradition by writing our own messages on the new siding before it was affixed on the inn.
By mid-February, the windows had returned from their offsite facility. New wood casings had been constructed and the original Fanthorp glass panes put in place. The Fanthorp original doors were also taken to the offsite facility and refinished, with careful pains taken to match the period-correct graining. Back at the inn, the siding project was completed later that month and the gutters were reinstalled.
Exterior painting was completed by mid-March. The colors were matched to the earliest pigments listed in the paint analysis, and are as close as modern technology can provide to the colors visitors like Francis Lubbock and Sam Houston would have seen when they visited in the 1850s. In April, Phoenix 1 completed the exterior restoration by installing the doors, removing scaffolding, and developing special panels to allow guests to see the 19th-century graffiti discovered during this project.
From April to July, volunteers and staff from across the Washington-on-the-Brazos complex worked on several interior restoration projects. The first-floor rooms were scraped and painted, and a new gift shop area was created and stocked with many items pertaining to the Fanthorp story. New furnishings were also acquired, including a four-poster bed along with several tables and dishes.
Two hotel rooms, which had been used for storage, were cleared and furnished, allowing visitors to see all seven hotel rooms for the first time. The most impressive acquisition was an 1850 model Kirkman cottage piano, which now lives in the Fanthorp dining hall. The Star of the Republic Museum staff helped with the acquisition and manufacture of over a dozen new period art pieces and lithographs that now decorate the walls of the inn.
