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.