Sweet Briar looks to one day restore Tusculum plantation home

Credit: PARKER MICHELS-BOYCE/MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE

Sweet Briar College's Tusculum Institute has finalized plans to reinterpret a slave cabin on campus that formerly served as a farm tool museum.

In a whitewashed barn at Sweet Briar College, a 260-year-old plantation home lies in pieces a sprawling pile of wood and brick.

The home once stood about 7 miles north of Sweet Briar as the crow flies, on an Amherst County plantation known as Tusculum. When it was built in the 1750s, central Virginia was rugged frontier. In 2005, the college salvaged the home from a developer who had planned to raze it to build a housing community.

For Sweet Briar, losing Tusculum would mean losing a link to its past. The estate was the childhood home of Maria Crawford Fletcher, the mother of Sweet Briar's founder, and it provided a vital link to the college's history as a plantation.

The two-story home was dismantled and stowed 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, Sweet Briar hatched 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 Lynn Rainville, founding director of the Tusculum Institute, the organization tasked with overseeing the restoration.

The recession forced the Tusculum project to the back burner, allowing Sweet Briar to focus on more pressing needs, such as renovating the library.

"Right now, the reconstruction is kind of on an indefinite hold," Rainville said. "The pieces are all being protected."

Follow this link:
Sweet Briar looks to one day restore Tusculum plantation home