July 24 & 25 are Ole Towne Festival days in Phillipsburg, and the Roseberry House will be open to all.  Our hours are 10 am to about 5 pm both Saturday and Sunday, and there is free parking (the Middle School parking lot), and a shuttlebus from the main festivities at Walters park to the Roseberry House, just about 3 blocks away.

We’ll have a full schedule of period music (more about that in a post next week) and re-enacters. We’ve learned a lot about the wall paintings and stenciling, and hope to have some artifacts on display.

The preliminary investigation is finished and now we’re just waiting for the lab analysis from the archaeologists and the paint and color specialists. No dramatic discoveries that will make any headlines, but an accretion of little things that ought to give us a better idea of  when the building was constructed, the walls plastered, and the painting and stencils applied. The wall paintings really are exceptional, and soon we’ll post a schematic from Autocad that will give everyone a good idea of what the parlors would have looked a couple hundred years ago. It’s been a pleasure being there with Chris Frey and Frank Welsh, listening to them explain something about the several layers of plaster, for example, or the profile of the nails pried from the lath and what that tells us about the age of the building. There’s years of scholarship behind those generalizations and inferences.  I’ll eventually post the complete reports here in the hope that a few people will be as interested as I am.