We take a yearly business trip to Atlanta every summer and in 2014 we planned on the return drive to visit the desk in the Smithsonian and get observations and photos of the desk on display there.
At the Smithsonian, again our impression was ours looked older and more used. Or course the one on display would be cleaned and conserved but it did not show it's near as much as we expected or could tell through the glass case it was in on display. A few months later this was confirmed by Lon Schleining when he wrote to me during an email exchange with an unprompted observation:
"In the 'for what it's worth' category of comment, the original is in much better over-all condition than yours."
After the Smithsonian we then visited the Hayes Presidential Museum and Library at Speigel Grove in Ohio. Again, our impression was that his desk was in essentially unused condition with some shelf rash and marks perhaps from a display brackets. The corners are sharp, and no obvious signs of being used for anything other than display. This example marked two has a few other things that distinguish it from the rest of the 1880 copies which I'll discuss in particular in a separate post but the immediate thought was to distance the known 1880 desks from ours in time.
So, we came home still wondering where our desk can placed in time, getting a lot of "well, maybe" feedback and nothing definitive. Did Jefferson have two or more made? Did a switcheroo happen in the Treasury Workshops as many persons seemed to have extraordinary access to the original shortly after it was gifted to the nation. We considered all sorts of plots and the likely suspects. We let our imaginations run wild.
Nancy had suggested after we had gotten the report from the Chicago Conservation Center to do some forensics testing but we felt at the time it was best to see what we could figure out diagnostically from visiting other known 1880 replicas or corresponding with the various institutions who had one in the their collections before we committed to a sizable laboratory bill.
The rest of 2014's research was focused on finding what we could find and attempting to speak with or meet someone who could either give us a definitive answer or point us to someone who could. The whole time we were pretty convinced we had something special but with the looming doubt "There's no way it could be the original desk"
Comments