Restoration
Beginning in 1991, with the help of Sacramento businessman and former Stanford University professor Peter McCuen, the Stanford Mansion underwent a 14-year renovation at the cost $22 million dollars. Accurate restoration of the home and its rooms was aided by both an extensive study of the home in 1986 through the Historic American Buildings Survey, and through a large collection of photographs of the home taken in 1868 by Alfred A. Hart, and again in 1872 by Eadweard Muybridge.
The repairs and restoration were completed in 2005, when the mansion opened to the public. California State Parks offers guided tours through the fully refurbished home. Rooms of the house have been restored to their 1872 appearance. The Leland Stanford Mansion is physically accessible, including the gardens, Visitor Center and restrooms. Elevators provide access to the upper floors of the Mansion’s tour route. A tactile model of the Mansion is also available in the Visitor Center.
The park is on the corner of 8th Street and N Street in downtown Sacramento, California, just two blocks away from the Capitol building. Prior to the reopening of the Stanford Mansion, California did not have a location for the hosting of official functions for nearly 40 years. Today the mansion is frequently used by the government of California to host foreign dignitaries. The Governor of California also retains an office in the mansion. Tours of the mansion are offered daily, but can be impacted by official functions on behalf of the Governor's Office or the California State Legislature leadership.
Read more about this topic: Leland Stanford Mansion State Historic Park
Famous quotes containing the word restoration:
“I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despite the fact that the American Revolution was successful—realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime—while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.”
—Irving Kristol (b. 1920)
“The King [Charles II] after the Restoration accused the poet, Edmund Waller, of having made finer verses in praise of Oliver Cromwell than of himself; to which he agreed, saying, that Fiction was the soul of Poetry.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)