Kindling A Reluctant Fire, The Billiard Room Fireplace

"It was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather with which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it well above freezing."

- William Dean Howells describing Twain's Billiard Room in his book, "My Mark Twain."

For more than a year, The Mark Twain House & Museum has been restoring Mark Twain's Billiard Room, the place he described as "the very most satisfactory study that ever was."

Twain's Billiard Room fireplace proved to be an exceptionally challenging architectural feature to restore. William Dean Howells alludes to the performance of the fireplace when, in his biography of Twain, he writes about "kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth." His references perhaps foreshadowed the physical evidence curators would grapple with in their attempts to restore the fireplace.

Below the face of the fireplace mantel is the chimney mass. As early as the 1960s, when researchers first removed the existing brick face of the fireplace, they found a chimney mass of distressed brick, probably blackened by years of smoke migrating through the masonry joints.

After much consideration, curators for this initial restoration decided that the best treatment for this feature was a fireplace face of ceramic tile mirroring the hearth (thought to be original), and wood mantel surround. Though conjectural, the approach was complimentary to the surrounding finishes and, from 1974 until 2003, it stood in place. The re-restoration of the Billiard Room in 2003 provided curators a fresh opportunity to evaluate the treatment of the fireplace. After documenting the existing fireplace, tradesmen with a background in historic fireplaces construction, began disassembling the 1974 ceramic tile and wood mantel revealing, once again, the blackened chimney mass.

Billiard fireplace 1959 Hal Holbrook detail1With the subsurface of the fireplace mantel revealed, the curator and researchers determined that the shape and form of the chimney mass made it unlikely that a ceramic tile mantel face would have been the original treatment. The big break however, came through serendipity. The curator and the decorative painters removed a wood molding located on the chimney breast. Beneath the wood element, written in pencil on original plaster, were the words: "Bricks to Show." After carefully stripping wallpaper and paint-below the earliest layers of red paint applied by the Clemenses-down to the original plaster, researchers revealed a schematic drawing depicting a brick fireplace very similar to that shown in the earliest photographs of the fireplace, circa 1958. This drawing, coupled with the photograph, became the blueprint for reconstructing a brick-faced fireplace.

The Billiard Room Hearth

Curators at The Mark Twain House have always believed that the hearth, composed of green and red ceramic tiles, was original to the room when Twain kindled his fires there. The floral motif of the glazed green border tiles was a common Victorian motif and the earliest photographs of the room-from the 1950s-show the tiles in place. The recent restoration of room provided an opportunity to test our assumptions. Many of the tiles had become de-bonded from the hearth and needed to be repaired and re-set onto the hearth. In the process of carefully removing the tiles from the setting bed, the curator recorded the information imprinted on the back of the tiles and took samples of the plaster, on which the tiles had been bonded.

The maker's mark located on the back of the tiles provided our first clue to the relative date of the tiles. The green tiles composing the border of the hearth had on the back, in low relief, the name: Minton, Hollins, & Co; Patent Tile Works, Stoke On Trent. Review of such period journals as The American Architect and Building News, and The British Architect, indicated that the company, based in England, was a prolific designer and manufacturer of ceramic tiles during the 1870s and into the 1890s. More interesting and conclusive was the plaster on which the hearth tiles were set. Analysis of the plaster samples under an electron-microscope showed that the plaster shared almost the exact chemical composition of plaster samples taken during the recent restoration of the marble flooring in the Front Hallway of the Mark Twain House. The Museum established that the marble flooring was originally installed using plaster as a bond coat sometime between 1875 and 1881.

After repairing the ceramic hearth tiles, tradesmen re-installed them using the more traditional method of bonding them to a plaster setting bed.