Dismantled in 2005, Tusculum still awaits restoration at Sweet Briar

In a whitewashed barn at SweetBriarCollege, a 360-year-oldplantation home lays in pieces a sprawling pile of wood and brick.

The home once stood about seven miles north of SweetBriaras the crow flies, on an Amherst County plantation known asTusculum. When it was built in the 1750s, Central Virginia was rugged frontier land.

In 2005, the college salvaged the home from a developer who had planned to raze it to build a housing community.

For SweetBriar, losingTusculumwould mean losing a link to its past. The estate was the childhood home of Maria Crawford Fletcher, the mother of Sweet Briars founder, and it provided a vital like to the colleges history as a plantation.

The two-story home was dismantled and stowed away in a ramshackle barn on the fringe of campus. With each piece meticulously labeled, it was a jigsaw puzzle waiting to be assembled.

By 2008, SweetBriarhatched a plan to rebuild the home on campus and convert it into classroom space. But there was one hitch: The school needed to raise $2 million.

You can imagine though, the economy took a dive just as we started working on this, said LynnRainville, founding director of theTusculumInstitute, the organization tasked with overseeing the restoration.

The recession forced theTusculumprojectto the back burner, allowing SweetBriarto focus on more pressing needs, such as renovating the library.

Right now the reconstruction is kind of on an indefinite hold,Rainvillesaid on a recent day in June. The pieces are all being protected.

Though the buildings fate is unknown, the TusculumInstitute remains committed to preserving local history.Rainvillehas shifted her focus to making history more accessible to the public through educational programs and online resources, such as creating a database of slave families.

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Dismantled in 2005, Tusculum still awaits restoration at Sweet Briar