The Maymont Mansion is closed in preparation for the biggest preservation project in Maymont's history!
It is expected to reopen in early 2025 with a fresh new red slate roof and upgraded climate control system.
About the Mansion
In 1886, James and Sallie Dooley acquired farmland on the banks of the James River, where they planned to build a new home. Their architect, Edgerton Stewart Rogers (1860-1901), born and educated in Rome, combined the Romanesque Revival style with the picturesque Queen Anne for the Dooley residence. By 1893, the Dooleys were living in their new 12,000 square-foot, 33-room home, which they named “May Mont,” a name which combines Mrs. Dooley’s maiden name and the French word for hill.
Among historic house museums, the Maymont Mansion is rare in that no intervening families or adaptive conversions separate us from the original owner’s 32-year occupancy. Despite the fact that no architectural drawings or other early records of its construction and design have survived, its physical integrity and ongoing research has provided a solid base of documentation. Within six months of Mrs. Dooley’s death in 1925, the mansion was opened to the public as a museum. The upper floors’ interiors and a large original collection remained relatively untouched until the beginning of the restoration in 1970. Since the nonprofit Maymont Foundation took responsibility for the estate in 1975, extensive conservation and restoration have greatly enhanced its authenticity, condition, and presentation.
Thus today, Maymont Mansion is a well-preserved document of Gilded Age design and the taste of well-educated, cosmopolitan millionaires. The house also illustrates the dynamic interplay between server and served, working class and upper class and Black and white through a compelling exhibition in its restored belowstairs rooms – the culmination of a decade-long research project that was completed in 2005.
Belowstairs: The Life of Domestic Employees
When you enter Maymont Mansion’s upper floors, you step into the luxurious world of James and Sallie May Dooley. But at the same time, many men and women experienced Maymont as a workplace. At any given moment, the Dooleys employed seven to ten domestic employees—nearly all African-American—to maintain the elegance and order of their home.
Domestic staff duties included cleaning the thirty-three room mansion, feeding a dozen people on a daily basis and hundreds on occasion, doing the washing and ironing, helping the Dooleys bathe and dress, and transporting the Dooleys in well-running carriages and motor-cars. Maymont Mansion witnessed a dynamic interplay between employer and employee, upper-class and working-class individuals, white and black, old and young. This relationship was played out against a background of rapidly changing domestic technology. It was also set in the turbulent social and political landscape of a strictly segregated South.
Restoration of Maymont’s kitchen, wine cellar, laundry, butler’s bedroom, maids’ bedroom, butler’s pantry, and other service areas was completed in May 2005. Through eight period rooms and informational panels, visitors can now meet specific employees and consider their lives in and outside the workplace. They can also examine an era of dramatically changing household technology and learn the historical context of domestic service in Gilded Age Richmond, the South, and the United States.
Maymont’s domestic employees met the challenges of running an elaborate estate, but they were much more than the sum and substance of their duties. Behind the scenes, they were individuals with their own skills, personalities, goals, and challenges. And, upon leaving Maymont’s gates, they took pride, a work ethic, and modest wages into the community to raise families, support businesses and churches, and to help build today’s Richmond.
Digital Collections
The Maymont Mansion Collection is comprised of works of decorative and fine arts acquired by James and Sallie Dooley in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They furnished the Maymont Mansion and their summer home, Swannanoa, with this collection.
The collection also includes practical items similar to those that would have been used by the estate's domestic staff, curated over the years by Maymont's historic collections staff.
Other Historic Buildings
Maymont’s original 100 acres are intact and retain the architectural and landscape features in place at the time of Mrs. Dooley’s death. More than 25 original buildings and garden structures are preserved.
The Normandy-style Carriage House (built of James River granite), the three-storied Stone Barn and the Water Tower were designed by Noland and Baskervill and constructed in the early 20th century. These principal buildings (in addition to the three-storied Garage, a granite compost house, chicken coop and gatehouse) all were connected by the old service road that begins at the Maymont Historic Estate entrance. Arrayed along a high ridge, this village-like assemblage of picturesque outbuildings would have been visible to guests entering along the magnolia-lined drive. These buildings have been adaptively renovated as public spaces and for institutional use.
Other original structures can be found throughout the estate. They include the Dooleys’ Doric temple-style mausoleum, gates, bridges and gazebos of differing styles including Italian Neoclassical, Victorian and rustic or Adirondack.
Carriage Collection
The Carriage Collection at Maymont was established in 1975 through the support of Elisabeth Scott Bocock, daughter of Frederic W. Scott, one of James Dooley’s business associates. The primary purpose of the Maymont Carriage Collection is to interpret horse-drawn transportation typical of country estates in Virginia during the period that the Dooleys lived at Maymont (1893-1925).
Other types of vehicles that would have been used in the Richmond area, equestrian equipment, harness and related items (such as lap robes, carriage whips and sleigh bells) round out the collection, which now totals more than 20 vehicles. Some rare vehicles in the collection include the park drag, bailey buggy, raffia governess cart, high-wheel sulky and landau. Several were donated from Mrs. Bocock’s Early Virginia Vehicular Museum. Others have been generously donated over the years from private collections.
Carriages typically owned by families such as the Dooleys are displayed in the Dooleys’ Carriage House, designed by Noland and Baskervill and completed in 1904. This building, constructed of granite quarried on the property, was the residence of the coachman and also housed the Dooleys’ carriage and riding horses. Adjacent to the stall, a large tack room provided storage for harness and horse equipment. Characteristic of carriage-house floor plans, this handsome building has a central courtyard with a cobblestone floor where the horses were “put to” the carriages and where both horses and carriages could be washed after a long drive on dusty or muddy roads. Maymont’s Carriage House exhibit affords a rare opportunity in the region to view a representative collection of fine vehicles actually housed in the appropriate period setting on a late-19th-century estate.
The collection also includes some unique commercial and special-use vehicles that are housed in Shed Row, the work yard area behind the Carriage House. Examples include a horse-drawn hearse, several toy and children’s vehicles, and a Thalhimer delivery wagon used by the historic Richmond department store in the 1890s. Also located in Shed Row are the horse stalls, as well as two reproduction vehicles: a wagonette and a surrey; and several light exercise carts, harness and other equipment.
