During the Civil War, the Union Army seized a cotton merchant's house on Euterpe Street, and for years afterward it was used as an office for the Freedmen's Bureau, the government body that helped former slaves and refugees rebuild their lives.
Earlier this year, students and faculty with the Tulane School of Architecture Preservation Studies program used their expertise in traditional plaster and limewash to help renovate the historic house, putting a fresh face on a neighborhood landmark.
The students, led by professor Heather Knight, repaired the lime-based plaster that had crumbled off the double gallery house's exterior walls in large swaths, because of both basic wear and tear and damage from Hurricane Katrina. The repairs were made possible by a $45,000 federal hurricane recovery grant administered by the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism's Office of Historic Preservation.
Homeowner Mary Len Costa knew the house was listed in the National Register of Historic Places as "contributing to the historic value" of the Lower Garden District neighborhood, and she had heard of its use as a Freedmen's Bureau office. In applying for the preservation grant, she and her husband, Jacob Louis Costa, dug into the home's rich history.
The house was built in 1847 and sold seven years later to cotton merchant John Thornhill, who owned two other houses on Euterpe as well as a row of townhouses on Gravier Street, said Mary Len Costa. When Thornhill refused to sign an oath of allegiance during the Union Army occupation of New Orleans that began in 1862, his properties were seized and he was given 24 hours to vacate the house, Costa said.
Thornhill and his family fled, first to Cuba, then to Virginia, for the duration of the war. "The house, by all reports and by family history and oral history, was used a Freedmen's Bureau office," Costa said. "The Union Army occupied many houses in our neighborhood at the time. It was one of their three facilities. They operated a school, a hospital and this administrative building."
Though Costa has not been able to find much additional information about the building's use, she has compelling evidence in the copies of letters written on Thornhill's behalf to President Andrew Johnson, asking for the property's release from federal custody.
"There was some sort of decree that if you owned property with a value of more than $20,000, you had to petition the president to receive its release," Costa said. "(Thornhill) said, 'I'm a son of the South, but I did not use my fortune in support of the South.' "
The Thornhills returned some time afterward and eventually moved back into the Euterpe house, becoming popular figures and hosting lavish parties in New Orleans' arts and culture scene, Costa said. Thornhill even sent envoys up the Mississippi River to track down paintings and furniture that he claimed had been stolen by Union soldiers.
The house stayed in the Thornhill family for nearly 90 years until it was sold in 1940, and in the time since, the only repairs to the exterior plaster were done with cement -- a common mistake abhorred by preservationists, who say cement provides virtually no porousness for the ebb and flow of a tropical climate's humidity.
The Tulane preservation students removed nearly all of the old plaster and, through analysis of the samples, generated a formula to replicate the original, Knight said. The triple-coat application was blended seamlessly with the existing plaster, leaving the Costas' walls plumb, smooth and fresh.
"A lot of plasterers would have come in and knocked everything down," Knight said. "But my approach is to try to do a patchwork, because this plaster is more than 150 years old. There's still a guide under there."