In 1998, Laura Neal, owner of Fulton Framing in Washington, DC became part of an historical project. She was hired to construct the housing for a treasured national document-George Washington's Last Will and Testament (c.1799). Neal first became involved in this project when Christine Smith, a paper conservator (also in Washington, DC) contacted her. Smith had been awarded the job of repairing and housing the document by the circuit court of Fairfax County, VA. After examining the document and determining what was necessary for successful conservation, she was seeking a framer to work with her on the project.

Shown here is the mat package contructed by Laura Neal, in the center is the hinge construction she and conservator Christino Smith Designed to connect the two mats.

Since being handwritten in 1799 by Washington himself, the will had been in the possession of Fairfax County for most of its lifetime. It had been stored in the county's courthouse from the time of Washington's death until the U.S. Civil War broke out in 1861. In July of that year, as Union troops from the North marched on the courthouse, the court clerk gave the will to his wife who then snuck it through Union troop lines to their daughter's house in Washington, DC. There, it was buried in the wine cellar under coal where it remained for over a year.

Eventually, the court clerk retrieved the document and brought it to Richmond, VA (then the capital of the Confederacy). It remained there until 1865 when the war ended. Fairfax County officials reclaimed the document where it remained for more than three decades, after which it was sent to the Library of Congress.

In 1910, William Berwick, then a conservator with the U.S. Library of Congress, assessed the document and found that the sheets were split with small losses of the paper up and down each sheet. It seems that when the document was hastily hidden in that wine cellar during the Civil War, it had been folded vertically, and over the decades the folds weakened and the paper eventually began to split.

It had been stored in the courthouse since Berwick's treatment in 1910 until Smith had the opportunity to examine it in 1998. (In 1997, it had been sent to the Library of Congress. A treatment was proposed, but never executed.)


A primary goal was to house each page of the document in a package that would lie flat when folded back.
When the will arrived in Smith's hands, it was contained in an album which had been created by Berwick. "He had realigned the pages by applying wheat flour paste on both sides of each sheet," she explained. "He then had applied a very thin silk gauze to both sides of each sheet. The pages were then assembled and bound into the large, leather album." This album was an elaborate presentation, with covers of blue leather with gold lettering and silk moire lining the inside covers.

When planning a proposal for the document, Smith considered keeping it in the album format. However, upon further thought, she decided against it. "Yes, the album format kept it all together," she explains. "But when the pages were turned, the paper would bend where the vertical splits were, causing the paper to further crack."

Also, the silk gauze applied by Berwick had frayed and become brittle over the years, and Smith determined it could not be repaired successfully.

"My thoughts about how this should be displayed were that it should not be another album format, for one, because of the center splits," explains Smith. "But, also, it was intended to be a last will and testament, not a book." She decided that each of the 22 pages (with text on both sides) should be each contained in their own individual housing.

In considering how to actually house each of these pages, several factors came into play for Smith. A primary concern was that the final housing needed to withstand being handled by people not necessarily trained about such a delicate and valued item. Her goal was to create a package to protect the document all the time, whether in storage or on exhibition during special events. "The housing needed to both store and exhibit, as well as be able to be moved," says Smith.

Each strip was applied across two mats.
Another consideration was to not cover up any of the handwritten text. Each page of the will had been written with perfectly straight margins, which was good for creating window openings. However, the document had been trimmed over the years, and text on some pages ran right to the edge of the paper. "This meant that whatever housing the sheets were put in could not overlap the edges," explains Smith.

Other considerations were that the solution needed to feature a two-sided window opening. Smith also did not want to place the document back into a book format. The final design needed to serve all these needs.

She conceptualized the ideas of a double-sided window mat with mat covers on both sides that would rotate 360 degrees so, when folded back, the whole package would lie flat.

Once Smith had the concept in mind, she needed to find someone to construct the housings she envisioned. She presented her concept to three framers and after some discussion, she chose Neal for the job. Neal then went to work developing a way to bring the concept to reality for the project. She designed the hinging mechanism ultimately used for the piece. "This project was different from others I had worked on in the past with conservators in that there was a research and development phase that I needed to perform," she says. "Christine respected my role in the project and what I had to bring to it as a framer."


Dovetails were cut from each strip.

Since an overriding concern was that the will would be handled by a variety of people once it was returned to the Fairfax County Courthouse, it was important that the housing be "foolproof." In developing the hinge mechanism, Neal considered using linen tape. However, she and Smith decided against it since linen tape can get brittle over an extended period of time. "We realized that the linen could become stressed and there would be no one on hand to fix it," explains Neal. "Also, we wanted a hinge construction that would not unravel."

Neal consulted with Terry Boone, a book conservator in University Park, MD. With Boone's help, she determined that the hinges would be made of a type of linen often used in book conservation, and a thin Japanese paper. The adhesive chosen was a polyvinyl acetate. (Boone also participated in the project in another capacity. She was chosen to construct the storage boxes for the matboard housings-made of the same board used to create the actual housings.)

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