Historic Curtain Found in Church
By Sandy Vondrasek Cooch

A painted stage curtain that spent decades rolled up in the rafters of an old horse shed—gathering dust, water stains, and mildew damage—came back to colorful life over the past few weeks in the basement of the East Braintree Church.

Working under supervision of professional textile conservator Michele Pietryka Pagan, local volunteers and conservation technicians spent two days lifting layers of accumulated grime from the panel, first with vacuums, then with dry sponges and cotton swabs.

The professionals reinforced frayed edges and patched the one corner of the cotton muslin curtain that had been eaten away by mold.

A few days later, Chris Hadsel of Burlington, director of the Vermont Painted Theater Curtain Project, and more local volunteers hung the curtain in the church basement, putting back in place a piece of church, and Grange, history.

In a telephone interview this week, Hadsel said the East Braintree curtain is typical of the 30 or so Grange curtains that have been found and catalogued in Vermont in the past five or six years. The richly-colored panel in East Braintree has a quiet "anonymous" pastoral scene in the center, ringed by 20 or so advertisements, all promoting Randolph businesses.

The curtain, likely painted in the 1920s or 30s, had been commissioned by Snowsville Grange #93, which met in the lower level of the church for many years.

A National Treasure

The newly cleaned panel is one of 176 painted theater curtains that have been identified, catalogued, and conserved as part of the Vermont Painted Theater Project.

Hadsel, who directs that project, noted that Vermont is the only state that has taken action to conserve its curtains as "a public collection," though hundreds of curtains exist in other states, mostly in the Northeast and upper Midwest.

Vermont’s curtains were painted by a small number of entrepreneurs who traveled from town to town, contracting with local Granges and others groups to produce the curtains. According to Hadsel, the oldest curtains in the Vermont collection date back to the 1890s, and the youngest are from the 1940s.

Vermont’s theater curtain conservation project has been "consistently supported" by the National Endowment for the Arts for the past five years, Hadsel said.

Although the 176 curtains located so far in Vermont are considered part of a "state collection," almost all remain in the towns where they originated, Hadsel said.

Each one, she noted, represent a village’s particular past: "These curtains have morphed from being theater props to being display items. These are historical pieces of art, a snapshot of a time that is gone."

Granville, Too

Another Grange curtain was just discovered in Granville, where it had been stored for years, Hadsel said.

Most of the Vermont curtains had been put away, out of sight, "for more than a generation," Hadsel noted. Their discovery, restoration, and public display are reliably a matter of great community excitement.

Hadsel said she suspects that in many other states, old painted curtains are rapidly disappearing.

"In Vermont, I don’t think anyone will ever again throw one out or let it rot," she said.

Hadsel said that a stipulation of the Vermont Painted Theater Curtain Project is that local volunteers be involved in the restoration work.

Two of the local volunteers, East Braintree Church members Sally Abel and Phyllis Small, spent all morning on Sept. 6 painstakingly vacuuming both sides of the curtain, and then all afternoon, rubbing the painted side with small pieces of dry sponge, inch-by-inch, to remove surface dirt.

Meanwhile, textile conservator Pagan and conservation technicians Cerelia Spencer of Cabot and Peter Isles of Hinesville focused on removing water stains and stabilizing the fabric base.

Conservator Michele Pagan, of Brookfield and Washington, D.C., is one of three professional conservators in the state who assist in the Vermont Painted Theater Curtain Project.

Pagan noted the iconography of the East Braintree curtain plants it firmly in the 20th century, pre-World War II.

The ads on the East Braintree curtain include long-time Randolph businesses, including The Thomas Store, the L.W Webster lumber mill, and Patch’s Studio.

Curtains from the 1800s feature "romantic, panoramic landscapes," Pagan said.

The final step of the restoration—repainting the patched corner—will occur after Abel researches what two ads had been painted there. The curtains were originally painted with distemper, a water-based paint containing pigment and animal hide glue as a binder. The 21st-century conservators use acrylic paints to recreate damaged areas.

Sally Abel said this week that she knows that one of the missing ads was for George Allen’s garage and another was for "a Tewksbury."

Abel, who also assisted in the long hours required to clean and re-hang the curtain, said the church will hold an open house to celebrate the restored curtain, probably next spring.