Editor’s note: In This State is a new weekly column by Andrew Nemethy, Bryan Pfeiffer and Dirk Van Susteren about Vermont’s characters and innovators, its unique ideas and quirky places. The three authors, who will take turns writing the column, formerly worked as reporters and editors for the The Times Argus and Rutland Herald and have contributed to other publications in Vermont and around the country.
MONTPELIER – On the second floor of the Statehouse, Curator David Schütz is doing a slow, awkward waltz with Gen. William Wallace Grout.
Grout looks on with a serious countenance befitting a Civil War general and Vermont congressman whose formal and capacious portrait was painted more than a century ago. His arms outstretched to hold the big ornate frame, Schütz has taken Grout off the wall because he’s unhappy with the surrounding paint and has asked for some touch up work in the frantic week before the Legislature reconvenes.
Not many people can walk into Vermont’s 1859 capitol and just pull things off the wall, but as curator, Schütz (pronounced “sheets”) has spent more than three decades researching, restoring and rearranging the Statehouse. He’s the maestro, and also the minister of minutiae, a chief picture hanger, color coordinator and drape decider. One minute he’s relating the vision of architect Thomas Silloway or an enthusiastic history about “ye olde men’s room” in the basement and its magnificent marble and row of urinals, the next pondering escutcheons and bullnoses, “voluptuous drapery” and wall colors whose paint names – “historic morning dew,” “clementine” – he has amazingly all committed to memory.
It may be the “People’s House,” a name Schütz thinks is a misnomer considering Silloway’s elegant intent, but its authentic 19th century decor is all Schütz.
“I’m very lucky. I’ve always from my early years been an interiors person,” he explains.
After 32 years, his interior knowledge of the Statehouse is encyclopedic, visionary and no less passionate than it was when he came to Vermont as an art history major with a masters in journalism, hired to assist Braintree art historian Daniel Robbins with Statehouse research.
This spring, Schütz hopes all the intimate knowledge and all the tales and history he has absorbed and recorded will be available in a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book titled, “Intimate Grandeur.” The book will showcase the transformation two decades of restoration have achieved, an effort that has returned the building to its intended “statement of splendor,” as he puts it.
In no small part, that showcase is due to Schütz’s near-maniacal passion for his job, one that he landed almost accidentally.
Schutz, an Ohio native, visited Vermont often at a young age. His father, a college professor, had ties to a family summer home in Dorset. After graduating with an art history major from Ohio State and obtaining a journalism degree from DePauw University in Indiana, he expected to end up in Boston or another major city in museum work, but on a lark applied for and won a job as research assistant to Robbins. He eventually helped Robbins author his scholarly 1980 book on the Statehouse, which along with Mary Green Nye’s 1936 guide, are the only books about the structure.
More importantly, Robbins’ report for the Vermont Arts Council on the Statehouse advocated creation of a curator’s position and formation of a Statehouse advocacy group, both of which became reality. Schütz was appointed curator, and Vermont Council on the Arts founding executive director Art Williams of Fayston became head of the Friends of the Vermont State House. That created an incredibly fruitful partnership: The Friends, a nonprofit citizens advocacy and preservation group, raised more than $1 million to restore the capitol, and Schütz worked tirelessly to turn the building into a museum-quality workplace.
“The best statehouses speak intimately to the states they serve,” he says. Many state chambers have been turned solely into museums or modernized and lost their character. Vermont, he says, is different.
“Ours is both a museum environment that looks just as it did 150 years ago, and yet is still very much in active use,” he says.
Schütz says he’s “incredibly pleased” at how the book has turned out and credits much of that to his collaborators. His co-author is Montpelier’s Nancy Price Graff, who has taken his prose and dug even deeper into Statehouse history and lore, spending the research time he didn’t have (as curator his job also includes monitoring no less than 235 historic state structures.)
“It’s been wonderful from my point of view because there is no way on earth I could have done this book without her,” he says.
The photographer is Jeb Wallace-Brodeur, also of Vermont, whose photographs have long graced the pages of Vermont Life, the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and many publications around the United States. The book, appropriately enough, is being published by the Friends of the Vermont State House.
Schütz hopes “Intimate Grandeur” will give Vermonters an accessible read on Statehouse history and convey “the sense that this building was as grand a building as Vermont was capable of creating in the 19th century.”
Schütz has spent much of his time as curator undoing years of modernization that “ate away, and very unconsciously” eroded the building’s character. Over the years, lamps, original skylights and windows, drapes and innumerable other items were replaced without historic context as they wore out. Little by little the Statehouse began losing its historic character, he says.
He notes most of Vermont’s iconic buildings are humble structures such as barns and general stores. But the Statehouse was designed to reflect a grand vision of democracy, and that’s what the restoration and book are both about.
It has not always been easy implementing that vision. He has gone to the mat – make that carpet – for authenticity on rugs, wall sconces, tin roofing and paints, while allowing the necessary changes to bring the Statehouse into the 21st century, from running extensive wiring for broadband to energy conservation and adding modern-day storage, not to mention a modern-day addition to the back of the Statehouse.
He loves to recount his most gleeful accomplishment: the removal of the ubiquitous brown upholstery that had spread across chairs and couches throughout the building. Knowing his visceral aversion, Vermont craftsman and conservator Jonathan Schechtman saved the last piece of upholstery removed and stitched a souvenir wallet from it for Schütz.
“It’s one of my favorite things,” he says with a smile. “It almost made me wistful for the loss of all that brown Naugahyde.”
When he’s about to pull his hair out, of which there’s not as much as there once was, he instead pulls out his ever-present sense of humor, whose generous application has helped ease many a conflict or crisis.
“I want the walls looking nice and smooth, within reason. Your best work,” he says with a wry smile directed toward longtime Statehouse painter Marc Marineau, who professes mock offense.
“OK, not your best work,” Schütz says with a laugh as he then wanders off to address another pressing detail, one of the endless string of decisions he makes, year in and year out, that have come to define the character of the Statehouse.
“I’m an advocate and I have advocacy in my very being,” Schütz says. “That’s one of the reasons I’m still in this job, why I’m still going 32 years later.”
