Spring cleaning at Pennsbury Manor

By THERESA KATALINAS
Bucks County Courier Times

William Penn once lived on the property where his re-created home stands, but he certainly didn't have to clean it.

The upkeep of the original Pennsbury Manor was left to Penn's many servants, who traveled the Delaware River by flatboat for such things as bricks, lime, locks, nails, chocolate, flour, bacon and coffee.

More than 300 years later, little has changed.

Instead of servants, the hired help and volunteers of the present-day Pennsbury Manor make sure the three-story manor house, circa 1939, is free of rodent infestation and spick-and-span for the 25,000 pairs of feet that walk through during annual visits.

Sound easy?

Maybe, if a week of cleaning windows, dusting walls and 17th- and 18th-century artifacts, buffing and waxing hardwood floors and vacuuming textiles and bed linens is a piece of cake. Last year, the yearly February cleaning took 147 hours, according to Diane Reed, a full-time Pennsbury Manor staffer.

Reed said she spruces up the manor house weekly and monthly as needed, but nothing comes close to the once-a-year, top-to-bottom cleaning.

The floors, for instance, are transformed from dull brown hues to a reinvigorated high gloss shine with help from an orange container of butchers wax, she said.

“They used to polish bowling alleys with it,” Reed said. “It's all done by hand. It takes three hours to dry and then we buff it.”

To keep centuries-old gold chandeliers, wooden chests and old-fashioned chairs in tip-top shape, curator Kim McCarty said staff and visitors follow the “hands off” approach recommended by conservators. Several over-polished artifacts have noticeable residue, McCarty said, adding that polish on others weakened the surface and literally bore a hole into the object.

“We're just taking the dust off,” McCarty said. “When you polish metal, it takes a very, very small layer of the metal off. ... Over 300 years, that's a lot of polishing.”

Theresa Katalinas can be reached at 215-269-5081 or tkatalinas@phillyBurbs.com.