Collections Corner

You may know that the Heurich House Museum’s conservatory originally had a glass roof. But were you aware that the Heurichs replaced the glass with tin-plated steel in the 1920s? 100 years later, it’s time for another upgrade. The roof now suffers from leaks caused by years of corrosion, both above the conservatory and the rest of our historic building. 

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. 

If you attended our Open House on the first Friday of September, then you were lucky enough to hear our historic grand piano being played. Christian Heurich bought the Steinway piano for his wife, Amelia, around the turn of the century. The piano was originally black, but the Heurichs had it hand-painted gold with floral designs, making it a one-of-kind piece.

Maerzen (or sometimes spelled Märzen) is originally from Bavaria, traditionally served during Oktoberfest, which despite its name, typically occurs in September until the beginning of October. If you're a fan of Senate beer, the Heurich House Museum's historic beer revival, then you probably know Senate is not the only beer the Chr. Heurich Brewing Co. brewed.  Other labels included Old Georgetown, Heurich Lager, and Bock.  For the Chr. Heurich Brewing Co, Maerzen was distinguished from its other labels as an all malt beer.

When you travel, do you buy a souvenir like a magnet or t-shirt? There are twenty-eight souvenir medallions on Christian Heurich's cane, suggesting this was a typical souvenir on his summer trips to Europe. Most of them came from Germany (specifically from the state of Bavaria) with a few from Austria. If you've ever visited Germany, you might recognize hiking trails or towns that are still popular today. For example, a few medallions are from Garmisch, now known as Garmisch-Partenkirchen, an alpine ski-town known for hosting the 1936 Winter Olympics. Another is a medallion from Eibsee Lake, a lake at the base of the mountain, Zugspitze, the highest peak in Germany.

Preservation of an old house entails keeping as much of the original “fabric” as possible. Restoration of an old house entails replacing the “broken” bits of a house so that it still functions as a house.  How much restoration is too much?  

One urgent project that topped the list was the original cast iron stairs and porch in the rear of the house.  The cast iron work dates from 1914 when the North wing addition was added.  Over the decades there were several temporary attempts to stabilize them. But the structure holding everything up was beginning to fail.  Pieces of steel added here and some floor jacks add there.  With the financial help of a grant, it was time to bring this porch and stairs back their original beauty and functionality.  

Historic houses have limited opportunities to expand their collections. Sometimes the memory of what belonged to the house was lost to time. Tracking an object's provenance, the record of who has owned an object throughout its lifetime, can be difficult or even impossible. Nonetheless, the Museum's collection is ever changing.

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!

Exhibits are not stagnant. During an exhibit, collections are sometimes taken off display and replaced with others from the collection’s storage. There are several reasons why museums rotate objects in exhibits, but removing an object from display can feel like the museum is taking away the public’s access, especially for long-running exhibits where it is accepted that you could come back any time to see the same exhibit. But the Heurich House Museum has important reasons why we have rotated objects off display.

"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.

I started the research journey with some foundational goals: our work would be focused on people and their unique life journeys, it would be documented and cited to ensure accuracy, and the process would be ongoing - often including more questions than answers.