Only on cspan3. Each week american artifacts takes you to museums and Historic Places to learn about American History. The heurich house in washington dc was built by christian heurich, a german immigrant who started a successful Brewing Company in 1872. Today, we toured several rooms in that mansion, also called the castle, of the brewmasters castle to learn , about the heurich family. This is the first of a twopart series. Hi, welcome to the heurich house museum. This is the home of christian heurich, washington, d. C. s most important brewer. He was a philanthropist, and he also was the largest nongovernmental employer and landowner in the city during his lifetime. He lives to be 102, and when he died he was still operating his brewery, and he was the oldest brewer in the world at that time. We are standing at his Dupont Circle mansion which was really his i have arrived statement after he made it in america and built up his brewing empire. This was built between 1892 and 1894. It was a technological innovation of its time. It had all of the latest technology in it. He lived here with his family until he died in 1945 and his wife died in 1956. Heurich is an american story and he is an important story in washington, d. C. History that has been lost over time. In washington we are used to focusing on federal government and what was going on in congress and our culture is focused on the smithsonians. There are stories that have been lost over time, people who built up the city. There are people who have lived here for generations and this is their story and where they came from. So we are going to show you around the house today. It is one of the most intact Historic Houses in the country. It has all of the original furnishings, fixtures, and wall treatments, oneofakind objects, original family archives, and they help us tell the story in a deep meaningful way. Heurich came from very little. He was born in a small town to the south of bavaria in germany, before germany really was a country. He grew up with parents who ran a tavern. He also worked in the tavern, waking up really early to help serve and going to school. By the time he was 14, he was orphaned. His neighbors helped him get an apprenticeship in the brewing and butcher trade. Those are things that go together. He actually was apprenticed around europe, multiple different breweries, doing am a wandering apprenticeship, until he finally decided to come to america after the civil war. He moved to baltimore, where his sister had moved some years before, and decided to sort of explore a little bit more, going out on a ship with her sisters husband, it was a captain, and then he traveled out west. He apprenticed to some more breweries working on a farm, until he finally decided to come back and try to open his own brewery. That is when he landed in washington, d. C. That was in 1872. He did that by purchasing a failing brewery just a block south of here. When he purchased that brewery, pretty soon afterwards, schnell s widow, whonell had helped him build the brewery ended up marrying christian and , helping him build the brewery up into this very successful business. He was a pretty brilliant marketer, he introduced lager beer, change the brewery over from wheat beer and emilia , heurich really helped him. Unfortunately, she died of pneumonia and probably from overwork. Christian, a few years later, married matilda. Matilda was a different person, she was younger and she probably came from a higher level of society. She was the sister of the treasurer of his brewery and was actually born in germany. When they got married, they ended up building the house together, and matilda is the one who designed these rooms. She is the one who probably worked with the interior designers. You can really see that she sort of had an eye towards leveraging them a little further along in society, just based on the way these rooms were outfitted. Moving to Dupont Circle and building a house here was sort of the i have arrived statement for the heurichs. The neighborhood was a brandnew neighborhood at the time, it really only started in the 1870s, and it wasnt popular at first, but then all of the wealthy people started moving in, a lot of people who had made it in the gold rush built houses on the circle, and the heurichs, they had money, but they were middleclass to a certain extent, and this house was built in 1894, it was late victorian but it was sort of right at the edge of what was going out of style. But everything in here is the best of what would have been in style during the victorian time period. All of the furniture that you will see here today is original from 1894 and was still here in 1956. If you can sort of imagine that trajectory. Matilda and christian work with an interior design firm that were based out of new york and they were also germans. At that time, as we are approaching the turnofthecentury, homes were still being built with oldfashioned craftsmanship, but there was a lot of new prefabricated, mass fabricated stuff being put into these homes as well. So, you can see if you look around, the fireplaces are extremely intricately carved and those were handdone by a woodworking firm of german craftsmen that were local to d. C. But then if you can take a look at that paneling on the side of the door, you can see that its very precisely cut, probably made by machine and not by hand, and sort of plan those two putting those two things the changing of the times at that point. The furniture you see in the rooms is all probably from catalogs through the huber brothers, attempting to be low louis the 15th furniture. Victorians had distinct symbolism in the way the rooms were constructed and we have very masculine spaces versus very feminine spaces. This one, from the light colors was intended to be a feminine , space. If you look at the ceiling is handpainted by an artist whose other claim to fame was the Harrison White house. Harrison wasnt in the white house for very long. Everything you see was original to the family. This room probably, matilda might have intended it to be the formal area where she would entertain guests a more serious manner. In reality, this room ended up being used really just for major family events like funerals and , weddings. As i mentioned, this house was cutting edge for its time in terms of technology. One of the Technology Innovations in the house where electriers. The majority of the fixtures you see when you walk through the house are made to be both gas and electric. Thats because this house was built when electricity was coming to washington dc, and especially to this neighborhood, and it may not have even gotten here yet. We know this house was fit with electricity before the white house even was. Once electricity did come in, it was probably spotty and so they needed to rely on the gas at that point. Eventually the heurich had the family had the gas cut off throughout the house. The doorways and all of the rooms have pocket doors. That also kind of served as extra protection for fire. They had curtains on either side, that was just the style of the time. Unfortunately, most of our curtains are in storage right now, but we still have a lot of the originals. This is another parlor, another formal parlor, that would have been used as a more private space. Still to entertain guests, but maybe a little bit more intimate of a setting, and thats how matilda designed this room. So you can see it has very similar furnishings to the front parlor. This room is probably the most intact room in terms of wall treatments. The stencil on the wall is original here, whereas in the front parlor, it had been redone by the Historical Society when they were here occupying the house from 1956 until 2003. As you can see, the way the setup is, they would have been sitting, having tea, or it was intended to be that way. Unfortunately this room was never really used for that purpose. Sadly, matilda didnt really get to use this house. She died a few months after it was completed. And you know christian was , pretty sad. At this point hes getting close to 60, he has lost 2 wives, he didnt have any children, and he ends up marrying amelia, just like the first wife, who is actually the niece of his first wife. We call her amelia ii. Amelia did not use this house the same way matilda probably intended it to be used. The rooms that we have looked at, the front parlor and this parlor, were both closed off for most of the time this house was lipton. So, the pocket doors were closed, the curtains were closed, the shades were closed. We have even been told that amelia ii used to keep cardboard in between the window and the shade and the exterior to protect the shades. So she is pretty serious about keeping these rooms closed and not using them. And again they were really only , used for formal occasions. What space the family did use the most was the front reception room, which i can show you right now. And were going to go past our friend, the suit of armor. This room was really like the casual space. You can get a feeling for the character, based on the fact that they chose to spend most of the time in this space. We have pictures of christian and amelia sitting at this table, looking at books and reading the paper, and christian in his later years used to take a nap on this couch treated full couch, which folded down sort of like a futon. In the later years in the 1950s , when amelia was in her final years, there was also a television in this room and she used to sit in here and watch tv. This room was where we have photos of them entertaining family, and it was really the space that was most commonly used. If you think about the house and this grand mansion with these formal parlors, most of that space is closed off because they are considered to be too formal, and this gives us more of a feeling about who the heurichs were, where they saw themselves in society, and they were just a solid, sort of familyoriented group of people. Probably when matilda built this room, it would have been matilda intended to be a more masculine parlor, maybe christians sitting room and reading room, but theres very little evidence that was ever how it was used. But we can look around theres a really great ceiling mural that all these arts and industries painted on them, and the wall murals of figures of people that christian would have these important figures to know. That is a very victorian symbol, demonstrating these aspects of your personality and what you think is important to your visitors. We have a wonderful fireplace in this room. Its probably the easiest to see the fire back in here, which is actually a work of art done by eli vetter, he does work in the have works in the smithsonian as well. And, there are 15 fireplaces in the house and we have evidence that none have ever been there. Desolate. Lit. Theyre basically in their original condition because of that. This house when it was built had central heat. They would not have had a reason to like the fireplace they were , very decorative. Most of the way we think the fireplaces and we have them in our homes today. The other room used most in this house was the dining room. We will take a look at that right now. So here we have another room that the heurichs didnt use, it is the music room. Again, these doors would have been close, just like the front parlor. You can see through the doorways great shot right here, and we , have their 1901 steinway that was handpainted that was rarely , rarely used. Maybe for special occasions. The musicians balcony, which is open on three sides, was really not ever used. It was probably intended for musicians to perform up there and sort of be out of the way. We do today put musicians up there and have performances, and it sounds incredible. It is actually Pretty Amazing surround sound that you can hear throughout the house when you have musicians up there. But again, this probably was rarely used. The piece of furniture that is in this room that everybody always asks about this this little lounge loveseat thing. We dont really know what to call it nobody really knows what , it is. We have some decorative art scholars stumped. We actually have a professor who brings his class here and always asked him to tell us what it is. At the end he says, i dont even know what it is. So it is just a mishmash of different styles and things, but its a pretty great piece to talk about. So now, we can talk a little bit about the dining room. This room was one of the spaces the family really did use the most. Amelia heurich, the second, the second wife had all of the , children, all of heurichs children, and there were four of them. There was chris junior, anna marguerite, anna, and carla. Annamarguerite died when she was 9 months old. So only three of them lived to it also. Adulthood. Carla, the youngest, lived to be 106 and she only died a few years ago. We have a lot of her oral history and information about the family from her. We know the family had dinner in this room every night and when the kids were older and had their own families, they were always invited to come to dinner on any sunday, to have a big family dinner. We have a lot of photos of them sitting at this table, and instead of these giant dining room chairs, we have a lot of these chairs. They all sat on wood chairs. That is except for the two at the end when there was amelia and christian at this end of the table. This room really was the center of their family life, and if you look around, very german, stylistically. It still has the two opposite ideas of hand craftsmanship and the sideboards and the fireplace, but also the possibly catalog order, definitely machine made pieces, but then also if you look at the detail of the subject matter of the different pieces, we see there are very, very germanic. There are scenes from folklore, so we have griffins over on the sideboard, on the bottom there, there are carvings of rabbits that have just been hunted and killed. Hop sleeves are carved in desktops hops leaves are carved into a lot of the work here, and on the wall we have this tapestry, although it was purchased in washington, d. C. , the tavern scene of the time. That christiane heurich would have grown up in a tavern. As he sitting at the dining room table he is looking up and seeing this theme from his past, his own history. We have a lot of pieces in the rest of the house that sort of match these handcarved, germanic, very detailed pieces that were actually made in germany, in his home province. I will show you those a little bit later. So were going to go meet , michael, who is an adopted member of the family. He is actually a doll that amelia used to use, if there were going to be 13 people at the dining room table, which is an unlucky number, she would put michael as a guest. He would be the 14th seed. Lets go meet him and i will tell you more about that wacky story. So theres michael. Amelia, like a lot of people of her era, practiced spiritualism. It was something that swept through the nation. A bunch of mediums popped up and it was this thing, you would go talk to mediums and have them tell you what your deceased loved ones were saying, and we have in amelia and christians papers them talking about christian going to meet a medium downtown. She was very famous for a time , and spiritualism for some people was a phase they went through but for amelia, it was something that i think she held onto for her entire life. In her personal journals she talked about hearing rappings on the wall, which she took as signs of good or bad news, and if the curtains blew in the breeze, she thought it was her daughter annamarguerite coming to visit her. She really thought she could speak to spirits. It was for her entire life. It may have been something that was triggered by the death of her child. Were not quite sure, or if it was something she stuck with because of the grief she felt. That is why michael used to sit at the table, to prevent the unlucky number 13 at her dining room. Now on the second floor of the house, this was the floor the family lived in. This was where their bedrooms were, their most private quarters. A really great spot for us to look at all of the Wonderful Technology in this house. So, we can first see over here a couple different things. We have a central vacuum system that was put in a little bit later. I think we all wish we had Something Like that. The switches are up here. And right here, this is a call bell system. There were two different systems throughout this house. Bell was a pneumatic call system, the original and this is one, electric. There are a few of those throughout the house. This closet that we now use for our heating and airconditioning system originally was put in here because the house was made of concrete and steel, probably the most Important Technology , it was what made it fireproof, but because it was made of concrete, it was pretty hard to imagine ever doing renovations on the interior. So heurich ended up putting this elevator shaft in with the idea that later on, he would actually put a car and all the mechanisms for the elevator, but he just never did. That seems another piece of never actually created technology of the house. If we go over here, i can show you a very special mock sink. These were all things to make really the lives of the heurichs and their service more servants more convenient, more efficient. This is a self flushing sink. This sink would actually fill with water just like a toilet around the lip once you flushed it and then everything would go down the drain. Pretty nice if you are not having to lug up a mop bucket and you know wheel it around. , you could do the cleanup in the hallway. We can go over here and look at the speaking tube system. So there are three of these in the house. They actually still work because they were not electrified. They are just on copper tubes in the wall, and they go down to the kitchen. When you tuck in, you start by blowing into the tube, and that causes this whistle to blow in the kitchen out in the receiver end, and a little flap to come up. Thats how you know which floor is calling you, then you can open up that tube down there and talk back and forth to the person. This is also another call bell, just like the other electrical one that i showed you. We have the radiator left over from the central heating system. It started off with a coalfired, forced air heating system that goes throughout the entire house. Was functioning had hot and cold water running through the whole thing, even up to the fourth floor where the servants lived. So we do know that the heurichs always had servants living with them in this house and also coming in from outside and helping them out. The first floor was the servants floor. Women of european descent lived up there, only women, and then they had a chauffeur who lived over the carriage house. They had a horse and carriage at the beginning and then it was converted into a garage for their car. That was mr. Bender. We know they di