The 18th century Esek Hopkins Homestead in Wanskuck was filled with the sounds of hammering and drilling the last week of February as a group of DIY rehabbers worked on restoring two of the staircases inside. The group of five — plus instructor Noel Sanchez of Casa Buena Builders and a couple of City Parks Department employees — arrived with varying levels of experience in the trades for PPS’s crash course on historic staircase restoration.

“I feel much more confident doing it in my own home now,” Richard Park, one of the attendees, said. He’s been rehabbing his own place — a Second Empire-style home in North Elmwood built in 1893 — for the last three years. Six and a half staircases and some creaky steps led him to the workshop in February.

The Hopkins house is an interesting practice case, to say the least. The famous homestead was built in stages — the earliest section dates from the 1740s, prior to Esek Hopkins’ purchase of the property, and subsequent additions were added around 1760, 1800, and some time between 1820 and 1840. The house has also undergone a variety of stylistic changes depending on the tastes of the Hopkins family members over the years, resulting in a hodgepodge of quirky additions and interior details added over the course of the 150-year timespan (1754-1906) when the family inhabited it. The home’s interior boasts what is probably one of the single most disorienting layouts in Providence.

The first discovery of the week was unearthed almost right away, with the careful removal of the trim in the curved stairwell by the front entrance — a part of the building which dates back to 1760. As the group pried away the modest, eggshell-colored trim from the wall, they found a flash of wallpaper hidden underneath the white paint of the entryway. A creamy white with floral details the color of a shy leafy green, mild teal, and pale yellow, it appeared to date back to the early 1900s. At the turn of the 20th century, the last Hopkins inhabitant, Eliza Angell Gould, had the home restored “closest to the original state as possible,” before preparing to donate it to the City, according to architectural research. In addition to the floral pattern, the wallpaper also featured quaint scenes of Victorian-era couples out for a stroll. 

(Also found in the front stairwell were a couple of old dimes — though not too old. Much to the group’s chagrin, they were only from the 1980s.)

After the trim was removed, any excess paint was carefully scraped off and the pieces were set aside, to be re-added after the steps were stabilized. For the most part, the group’s repairs were invisible, located on the underside of the staircases, underneath the original pieces of wood. 

“What you see is not that great, but underneath is a whole new framing structure for each step,” Mike Plumer, one of the group, said as they were finishing up the front stairwell. Plumer spent the week decked out in his Newport Restoration Foundation gear — he works as the organization’s field carpenter. 

“I think it is a little underwhelming,” Park joked in reply.

Plumer also mentioned that they had determined the stairwell was made of fir, which helps date when it was constructed. “Fir didn’t come into play until after a train [came from] the Pacific,” he said, so even if the gable portion of the house had been built in 1760, the stairs had probably been renovated sometime after the 1850s, perhaps when Hopkins descendant Sophia Hawes West “Victorianized” the home after inheriting it in 1865. 

Each member of the group had a different connection with history and restoration carpentry. For Jake Spencer, the love of history came along first. As a teenager, he frequently volunteered at the Nathanael Greene Homestead in Coventry, leading tours. As he became more involved in the organization, preservation carpentry naturally became a skillset he needed to grow. He and Josh Wojnar, another historic staircase workshop attendee, eventually became docents for the house. Wojnar started out in construction and found himself getting more involved with the Nathanael Greene Homestead as his kids started spending time playing on the grounds. He said his interest in history grew as he started helping around the Homestead more. Wojnar is now the on-site caretaker for the Homestead, and he and Spencer make up the curatorial department. The two also have their own carpentry business.

Wojnar, Spencer, and another member of the group, Mike Jones, focused their efforts on the back stairwell, in the gambrel part of the house. The gambrel portion is the oldest section — only in the last decade or two have local historians acknowledged that this section predates Esek Hopkins’ purchase of the land in 1754. It seems to have been built between 1740 and 1750. Likely older than the front stairwell, the back stairs needed a little extra attention — for one, the height of each stair was different. Luckily, because the stairwell is positioned over the basement stairwell, the group was able to attack the task of stabilization from both sides of the staircase. The team created custom risers and a new frame for those steps to even out the height of each one. 

“We were trying to rely on levels too much, trying to get [the new pieces] something that everything around them wasn’t: level,” Wojnar reflected at the end of the process — the group had accidentally miscut a few pieces of wood while constructing the new frame. 

Plumer, who worked with Park and some employees from the Parks Department on the front stairs, said something to a similar effect: Fixing the sag on some of the steps created some issues when it came to fitting the pieces back together.  

On Wednesday, halfway through the workshop, a group of seven — the five men, one Parks Department employee, and Sanchez — found themselves standing in a circle in the musty basement of the house, necks stooped so as not to get cobwebs caught in their hair from the low ceiling. Everyone was discussing how to improve the basement stairwell, a handful of steep, narrow steps that led very close to the stone wall of the home’s foundation. In examining the wooden steps, they found most of the supporting planks halfway rotted away; the left side of the short staircase seemed to be held up by hope alone. Park grabbed what should have been a supportive rail and it came right out of the ground. 

“Well, careful going back up,” Sanchez said.

The group ultimately decided to stabilize the stairwell with new risers and adjust the flow of it, so instead of leading directly into a stone wall, the stairs turned slightly at the bottom. The steep height couldn’t be helped — like a lot of historic staircases, the one in the Esek Hopkins House basement will probably never quite make it up to code, at least not without more invasive changes to the home. 

In addition to the four days the group spent working on the staircases in the Esek Hopkins Homestead, the group visited local artist Anya Talatinian on Thursday to learn how to craft wooden balusters. Talatinian completed a 5-week window restoration intensive through BuildingWorks a few years ago, and has worked a few carpentry jobs since then. The guys hesitated to call their baluster recreations on the wood-turner “duplicates”; Jones instead opted to describe them as “homages to the original.”

On the final day of the workshop, which was unseasonably warm for late February, the group wrapped up their work on the basement stairwell, with its newly constructed bottom steps. They bade each other farewell on the front lawn before heading to their cars, exchanging phone numbers and asking whether the next workshop — this one focused on repairing the stone hearth in the dining room — was still open for registration.

“It gives you a chance to be creative,” Sanchez said on the last day of the workshop, referring to working in historic homes. “And try to come up with a solution.”

By Keating Zelenke / Mary A. Gowdey Special Projects Fellow / kzelenke@ppsri.org