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A major restoration and permanent
exhibition illustrate the upstairs downstairs
story of Maymont.
Open Tuesday-Sunday, 12-5pm for Self-Guided Tours
When you enter Maymont House Museum, you step into the luxurious world of James and Sallie May Dooley. Their Gilded Age mansion and its opulent furnishings testify to the tastes and lifestyle of the Richmond business tycoon and his wife who built, decorated, and lived here between 1893 and 1925. In its own day, the grand estate gained wide reputation as a showplace.
At the same time, many men and women experienced Maymont as a workplace. At any given moment, the Dooleys employed seven to ten domestic employees—nearly all African-American—to maintain the elegance and order of their home.
Service Staff Duties:
- Cleaned the thirty-three room mansion
- Fed a dozen people on a daily basis and hundreds on occasion
- Washed and ironed
- Helped the Dooleys bathe and dress
- Transported them in well-running carriages and motor-cars
Maymont House witnessed a dynamic interplay between employer and employee, upper-class and working-class individuals, white and black, old and young. This relationship was played out against a background of rapidly changing domestic technology. It was also set in the turbulent social and political landscape of a strictly segregated South.
Restoration of Maymont's kitchen, wine cellar, laundry, butler's bedroom, maids' bedroom, butler's pantry, and other service areas was completed in May 2005. Through eight period rooms and a new permanent exhibition, visitors can now meet specific employees and consider their lives in and outside the workplace. They can also examine an era of dramatically changing household technology. And they can learn the historical context of domestic service in Gilded Age Richmond, the South, and the United States.
Maymont's domestic employees met the challenges of running an elaborate estate, but they were much more than the sum and substance of their duties. Behind the scenes, they were individuals with their own skills, personalities, goals, and challenges. And, upon leaving Maymont's gates, they took pride, a work ethic, and modest wages into the community to raise families, support businesses and churches, and to help build today's Richmond.
Project Sponsors
Maymont's domestic service interpretation and exhibition project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the William H., John G. and Emma Scott Foundation, the Robins Foundation, the Anne Carter Robins & Walter R. Robins, Jr. Foundation, and private donors.
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