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dcnovice -> RE: Labor Day has been cancelled ... (9/4/2012 5:20:18 PM)
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quote:
Seen any empty chairs around, dc?
Only for you, Firm! [:)]
Two favorites from the Woodrow Wilson House in DC, where I work as a part-time guide:
[image]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-phPx8EiX4Nw/TxnGLbkGb4I/AAAAAAAAANI/61fYgb8BRq8/s1600/Chair+and+Cane+Web.jpg[/image]
This brown chair in the library was where the ex-President, largely an invalid due to a massive stroke in 1919, spent the bulk of his waking hours. Due to his poor health, he was allowed one visitor a day, and he generally received his guests while sitting here. He often took his meals here as well, being of a generation that believed one didn't sit at the dinner table unless properly dressed in black tie (no mean feat to don when half your body is paralyzed). Because the stroke and hypertension had taken a huge toll on Wilson's vision, reading was difficult. So Mrs. Wilson usually read to him as he ate.
[image]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-G7njIV9SZjo/TnjlKakhD7I/AAAAAAAAALs/Yz3dtGVi3U4/s400/Wilson+Bellange+Chair+Web.jpg[/image]
President James Monroe purchased this chair for the White House as part of his rebuilding and refurbishing after the British torched the place in 1814. It sat in what is now the Blue Room. Some time later, it was auctioned off. (Tastes had changed, and historic preservation wasn't on anyone's radar back then.) It was bought by a local jeweler named Galt, whose shop was the Washington equivalent of Tiffany. On his death in the 1930s, he bequeathed the chair to his former daughter-in-law, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. (She married the President some years after he first husband, Norman Galt, had died.) Rumor has it that Jackie Kennedy tried to persuade Mrs. Wilson to give the chair back to the White House but struck out.
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