Clermont Academy Clean-up Day

The History, Historic Buildings and Archives Committee had a clean-up day on Saturday (July 12th). The turnout was extraordinary: rolling up their sleeves and scrubbing, vacuuming, dusting, and moving furniture and sorting books were Evan and Joanna Hempel, Bill, Claudia, Gracie and Mark Teubl, Mike and Micaiah Williams, George Davis and David Stonington (who receives the award for traveling the greatest distance—he was here from Seattle!), Angela Goetz, Dagmar Payne, Joan Buser and her grandson Michael Palazzo, Jim Shannon, and Dianne O’Neal.

The building was cleaned, all the linens taken home and washed, all the books were dusted and reshelved and the furniture was sorted as “usable and useful” or “unusable and/or of no use in the Academy.” Many of the chairs are broken and not of sufficient value to merit repair. They will be sold at the tag sale during the Town Barbeque, unless anyone can tell us a historic or sentimental reason to keep them. One chair and one marble top table have been taken for minor repair. Bruce Maus is looking at the oak extension dining table that was rescued from the attic of the Town Hall, to figure out how it goes together—does anyone know where the leaves are? There should be several.

Please have a look at the photographs that we have posted. If you know anything about the chairs that we do not know—especially something that would be a reason to keep them, tell us. If you don’t like the bookshelves on the north wall, tell us that, too!

We will probably plan for one more cleaning day before the barbeque, so that we can put furniture that belongs in the northeast room in place. We have to coordinate with the Barbeque Committee; for the moment, that room is full of their material.
Submitted by Town Council member Dianne O'Neal

Eleven identical striped aprons were found in various drawers in the kitchen. Here they are drying on the line.

This set of four chairs is from the 1920s. All of them need repair. Their provenance (noted by the previous Academy Committee) is “donated by Mrs. Dalton.”

This set of six chairs is also probably circa 1920. We do not know the donor.

This set of 17 chairs was brought over from the attic of the Town Hall. They are solid and serviceable and will be used for meetings instead of the broken chairs. They date from around 1900, and although they started out as utilitarian meeting-room chairs, rather than as “dining room” quality, in an antique shop today, they would be priced considerably higher than the dining room sets that we propose to sell.

The bookshelves were moved to the north wall of the parlor, so they can sit against the wall. Though they were no doubt originally placed on the end walls to hide the ducts, the fact that they had to sit 8 inches away from the wall because of the ducts always made them seem uncomfortable and unstable. When we moved them, we found the date “1875” on the back.