It was Irene Seiberling Harrison who lured Judy Dobbins to Stan Hywet.
In the ’90s, Dobbins drove by the grand home when she took her daughter to school. The stately Tudor revival mansion with its red-brick exterior and sweeping grounds is impossible to miss. Built in 1915, Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens is the former home of Goodyear co-founder F.A. Seiberling and his family.
One day in 1995, Dobbins saw Irene out front. At the time, Irene, the second oldest child of F.A. and Gertrude Seiberling, lived at the gate lodge on the property. She would have been around 105 years old. (She lived to be 108.)
“She was out in front of the gate house waving at someone, and she’s like this big,” Dobbins said, her hand about five feet from the ground. “But she dressed to the nines. And I thought, ‘I’m gonna follow that woman in.’ And I just dropped my daughter off, and I came in and took the tour.”
Dobbins kept coming back, first as a visitor (she’s a retired preschool teacher and often brought kids to Stan Hywet for tours) and later, in 2016, as a volunteer. During the season, she gives Saturday tours and assists the education department. But from mid-January until the end of February, when the estate is closed to the public, she is one of 25 volunteers who help the staff clean Stan Hywet Hall — all 64,500 square feet of it.
Volunteers get to go off script
On a rainy morning in late January, Stan Hywet was alive with movement. On the first floor, the last Christmas decorations waited by the stairs to be put away. In the great hall, Reade Allen of RCA Window Cleaning stood on a tall ladder cleaning ornate sconces. Beneath him, mismatched bed sheets protected the room’s large area rug.
On the second floor, brooms, vacuums and a cart of cleaning supplies filled the landing. Volunteers shuffled from room to room, wearing gloves and blue booties. (Everyone involved in the cleaning process must either cover their shoes before coming inside or have a designated pair of shoes that they only wear inside the manor house.)
Leading the operation was Collections Manager Barb Welch. In addition to overseeing two collection technicians, she is also responsible for the documentation, care and upkeep of Stan Hywet’s entire collection, which includes the art, furniture and textiles in the manor house and gate lodge, along with the statues in the gardens. Welch previously served as a collections technician at Stan Hywet, and before that she was a volunteer. She’s been cleaning the manor for eight years. “I used to work another job before this, and I’d take vacation to come and clean,” she said, laughing.
Welch said many of the cleaning volunteers are also Stan Hywet tour guides. Cleaning the home gives them a chance to go off script, in a sense.
“Most of them are tour guides because they love the history; they love the family,” Welch said. “And when you have that, it just makes you so interested in all of the pieces. And most of the time through the year, you’re stuck to the tour route, and you’re not getting into the rooms. So they really like being able to get into the rooms and handle the objects and see them up close.”
A top-to-bottom operation
The cleaning of Stan Hywet is extensive. After Deck the Hall, Stan Hywet’s annual holiday event, the estate is closed to the public until early April. The crew starts at the top of the house and works its way down. Volunteers take everything they can out of a room before cleaning the space, including lamp shades, mirrors and artwork. Each piece is labeled to keep track of what’s been moved out and from where. Windows, woodwork, furniture, walls and fabrics are cleaned.
In the 40 years the Seiberlings lived at Stan Hywet, the size of the housekeeping staff varied, but Communications Manager Donna Spiegler estimated the family had “as many as 11 housekeeping staff on payroll,” especially in the earlier years of Stan Hywet.” She said the number dwindled by the time F.A. died in 1955.
On a recent cleaning day, the volunteers were finishing up in the William and Mary room (where President William Howard Taft once stayed) on the second floor and getting ready to start the master bedroom. The home’s original bedding and textiles are too fragile for modern washing machines, so they are vacuumed to remove dust. Welch pointed out a bedspread in F.A.’s sleeping porch. (She said F.A. was a big proponent of the health benefits of fresh air and slept on the porch every night, even in the winter. “He had his hot water bottle at his feet with a nightcap and earmuffs on his head.”)
When the edge of the bedspread became stained after lying on the floor, a group of volunteers known as the Stan Hywet Needlework Guild soaked the bedspread several times to remove the spot.
Once a room is cleaned and put back together, the furniture is covered in sheets until closer to opening day. Volunteers are on-site for cleaning Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. They clean three or four rooms a day.
Moth patrol reporting for duty
Like any old house, Stan Hywet has its quirks – and they extend to the cleaning process. In the library on the first floor, all the books are removed from their shelves for cleaning. The shelves are then flipped over to avoid warping. The mounted animal heads in the great hall are cleaned by vacuuming them through a screen. This way, the fur isn’t removed. The walls are also vacuumed, as many of them are covered in fabric.
And then there are the moths. Moth traps are set up in every room and checked every week.
“We count how many moths are in them so that we can track the activity in each individual room,” said Collections Technician Katrina Neff.
Fortunately, the moths have particular tastes. “They also only like natural fabrics, so some of our reproduction stuff that is synthetic blend they don’t like as much,” Neff explained. “So that also helps with keeping track of which curtains we should be double-checking more than others.”
If they start to see more moths in a trap, they check all the textiles in the room for infestations. Anything that’s small enough goes in the freezer to kill the moths. Everything else is vacuumed.
“As we clean, we’re assessing the condition of objects,” Welch said. “Every year, we’re documenting if something is deteriorating … if it needs to be taken off exhibit because it’s getting to the point where we can’t leave it out anymore. We assess that and determine what is important: [if] we just want to put it in storage or we want to restore it and put it back on exhibit.”
Chandelier wrestling, Stan Hywet style
Last year, the large chandelier in the great hall underwent a major restoration. In 2021, when the facilities director replaced a few lightbulbs, the entire lower tier of lights went out. They noticed that the chandelier still had its original cloth wiring and told Welch it would need to be replaced soon to avoid more issues. Then came the issue of how to get the chandelier down to repair it.
“It was mounted to a chain wrapped around a steel beam up in the attic above this. And as we started investigating how it was attached, we realized that it had to have been built in place. So they had to have brought scaffolding in and put it through the ceiling and then bolted it on both sides of the pipe that goes through the ceiling,” Welch said. “It was just crazy.”
Eventually, they installed a mechanism that lowers the chandelier with the touch of a button, making it easier to access for cleaning and repairs. Then there was the issue of getting the massive light fixture out of the house. Because of its size, it had to be taken apart and carried out piece by piece. Today, it’s back to prime working condition.
As the years go by, the issue isn’t just in keeping a 100-plus-year-old house in tip-top shape. It’s in finding people who can do the work required to keep the house in working order.
“It is absolutely a dying art. And it’s getting more and more expensive because of that. So when you find someone who does that work, it’s premium, so you’re paying the premium price for it,” Welch said. “We have a restoration carpenter that we work with a lot. And he is getting close to retirement age and it’s like, ‘What are we going to do when you retire?’”
For now, the Stan Hywet cleaning crew will keep working to preserve this historic home – moths, wonky lighting and all. For Dobbins, the charm of cleaning the former home of Irene Seiberling Harrison remains. She pointed out a small circular open area between the hallway and the music room.
“If you stand in the center, because of the shape of the dome, it reflects your voice like a microphone,” she said. “And it was made so that the Seiberling family could stand on that circle and greet their guests, even if a whole concert was going on in the background, and they could hear it. I think of the work that went into creating something like that. They thought of everything, every detail.”
