Collections Corner
Though the Heurich family home was built to include an elevator shaft, Christian and Amelia Heurich never actually installed an elevator car. Instead, Christian used the stairs every day until he died at 102. But we can’t all be like him.
The elevator we use today was installed in 1987 by the Columbia Historical Society (today’s DC History Center), who used the building as their headquarters after Amelia Heurich passed away. Eventually the Historical Society moved out, but the elevator remains an important part of our operations. Today, the museum rents affordable studio spaces on the building’s third and fourth floors, called Brewmaster Studios, as part of our Urban Manufacturing Incubator program. Without the elevator, our creatives-in-residence would have to climb up and down multiple flights of stairs just to reach their offices. It’s also important that we have an elevator to ensure accessibility for museum tour and program visitors, and museum staff members whose offices are on the second floor.
Hello Heurich Community! I’m Emma Flolo, the Spring 2025 Public Programs Intern at the Heurich House Museum, and a graduate student pursuing a dual degree in History and Library & Information Science at the University of Maryland. The culmination of my work at the Heurich House is a public program titled Unprecedented: A Pop-up Exhibit. Unprecedented was a two-part program held during the Dupont ArtWalk on the first Fridays of May and June 2025. During part one, “Community Curation,” we asked participants to either bring an object from home or make a collage at the museum representative of their feelings and experiences since the 2024 presidential election. In June during part two, “Community Experience,” we put the materials on display, facilitating an exhibit experience created by and for community members.
Windows play a key role in protecting everything inside a building by keeping out the wind, rain, humidity, pests, and anything else that could come in from the outside. Inside the Heurich House are original hand-carved wood fireplaces, hand-painted ceiling canvases, hand-made original furnishings, and thousands of rugs, art, vases, textiles, and more. To protect all of that, we need properly secured and insulating windows.
Moisture from the ground beneath or next to a house, starting in the basement, rises up through a building’s foundation. It eventually will come into the house through the more humid outside ground walls in its search for a drier environment. The Heurich House’s original limestone plaster allows this to happen with relatively little damage. Unfortunately, years of house projects have caused numerous layers of wall paint to bond together, making it more challenging for water vapor to move freely through the walls. Now, the moisture coming into the house will push through the weakest layer, or oldest paint, first. Because the layers of paint are bonded to each other, they all fall off together. That is why you see peeling or flaking paint on the Heurich House’s basement walls.
There’s a lot of preservation, restoration, and maintenance work that needs to be done for a house as old as the Heurich House - 131 years old, to be exact. During many of those years, the ceiling in the Boudoir (Amelia Heurich’s sitting room on the 2nd floor) suffered from water damage, due to its position under a 3rd floor balcony with bad drainage.
We are always trying to learn more about how people would have actually experienced life and work in the home. In general, people’s reactions to Amelia's role often varies, but sometimes visitors express negative comments about her management style. In these cases, I encourage people to think of her role in a more nuanced way and consider the implications this has for the memory of women in power. At the symposium, it was exciting to hear other scholars’ research. There were so many different approaches to looking at food spaces and how people act (and interact) in them. Their reactions and questions about our work at the museum were thought provoking - only emphasizing my feeling that there’s always more research to do!
"Did the Brewery close during Prohibition?"
This is one of our most common questions about the Chr. Heurich Brewing Co. The short answer is: No, the company operated for eighty-three uninterrupted years from 1873 until 1956. So it only makes sense that a common follow up question is:
"How?"
Many people may not realize that a museum’s collections are always growing. Pieces of family history and breweriana are acquired as the Museum continues to research the people who lived and worked within the house, as well as the Heurich Brewery and its workers.
One of these new pieces of family history are two ledgers from Amelia L. Heurich, Christian Heurich’s third wife and the longest resident of the Heurich House. Amelia’s diaries are a key source of information for our research, so we were delighted to acquire her ledgers, where she tracked monthly spending, meal planning, and salaries of the house staff.