By Tyler Horne, Winterthur Tour Program Assistant
There are many ways to view Winterthur: as the home of Henry Francis du Pont, as a world-class museum of decorative arts, and as a gorgeous garden and natural landscape. For our current guided tour, Architecture of Independence, we invite you to think beyond a single home and explore the architectural collection H. F. assembled to decorate the walls. The tour traces a patchwork of rooms and fragments brought together from across the young United States. It offers a rare opportunity for visitors to discover the architectural styles and details that represent all thirteen original colonies, all gathered in one museum.
Wentworth Room
Winterthur’s architectural collection contains elements from seventy-seven historical properties: moldings, paneling, mantels, porches, and other decorative details that once belonged to houses across Colonial America. On this tour, we open doors usually kept closed, exploring seldom-seen spaces, and encourage visitors to consider how styles, materials, and craftsmanship reveal social and political life in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
McIntire Porch
Visitors will enter the house through the rarely used South Wing via the McIntire Porch and explore rarely visited spaces, including the Federal Parlor, a masterpiece of Federal architecture designed by influential architect Asher Benjamin.
Federal Parlor
Around the corner, they will also see the Charleston Dining Room, a space decorated with architecture from a historical Georgian hotel operated by Jehu Jones, a free African American man living in Charleston, South Carolina in the early 1800s.
Charleston Dining Room
As Winterthur marks 75 years as a center for decorative arts and scholarship, and as the country commemorates its 250th anniversary, Architecture of Independence offers visitors a timely way to examine how Americans of the founding era expressed ideas through design and consider the many hands that made these expressions possible. We welcome you to experience our collection of colonial architectural treasures, all under one roof.
Explore these rooms and other seldom-seen spaces on the Architecture of Independence Tour.