| Let There Be Light
SPU alumni restore the glories of gaslit America
IT WAS THE SORT OF DISCOVERY that gives historians goose bumps. While
researching a scholarly paper, Dan Mattausch
read in an obscure diary entry penned by the
commissioner of public buildings that on
September 9, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln was almost
killed by a gas leak in his office over the East Room of the White
House. By the time he was discovered, the air was deadly with
concentrated carbon dioxide, and Lincoln nearly suffocated. In
just over seven months, he would be dead of an assassin’s bullet,
but had he died before he was re-elected and the Civil War was
won, how might it have altered the course of a nation?
Dan and Nancy Mattausch spent three years restoring the Cortelyou House, from its richly woven floorcoverings to its open-flame gas lights.
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“The authorities downplayed it at the time,” says Mattausch,
a 1985 Seattle Pacific University graduate and political science
major. “Between concern for Lincoln’s high-strung wife and the
course of the Civil War, it pretty much slipped by history.”
But it caught the eye of Mattausch, the country’s foremost
expert on antique lighting, a passion and profession he calls “my
strange little niche.” He is proud to be the standard bearer for the
now-lost
gaslight industry, once the third-largest American commercial
enterprise behind railroads and mining. “Probably every
one of our ancestors used it, and every city with more than 6,000
people was lit by gas,” he explains. “It lasted for 150 years.”
When you are the authority, prepare for a colorful collection
of requests, from Hollywood to the White House. Mattausch
helped maintain the authenticity of historic lighting on the bigbudget
film Gods and Generals for Ted Turner Pictures. He provided
period expertise for Oprah Winfrey’s television adaptation
of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Visit the Smithsonian’s Air
and Space Museum, marvel at the Wright Brothers’ plane, and
just behind it are gas lights on loan from the Mattausch collection.
William Allman, curator for the White House, recently
stopped by for a consultation, and last year in the U.S. Senate,
Mattausch lectured on “Lighting Fires in Public Buildings,” a
lighthearted discussion of gas lighting in government structures.
While Mattausch always dreamed large — he was convinced
he would one day have a career in politics and work at the U.S.
Capitol — he is as surprised as anyone about where his life has
taken him. “You should have plans for your future,” he says, “but
you should also realize that there may be better plans for you
than you could ever imagine.”
His designs for the future began in earnest at King’s High
School in Seattle and at Seattle Pacific. “At SPU, I was marinated
in the Christian faith and very fortunate to be a part of the General
Honors program [precursor to today’s University Scholars
program]. So I experienced Seattle Pacific ‘a la carte’ and received
an excellent education in political science, history, and economics.”
Mattausch also knew some of the now-deceased “giants of SPU,”
including Professor of Psychology Philip Ashton, President C.
Dorr Demaray, Professor of Biblical Studies Joseph Davis, and
Professor of History Roy Swanstrom, through whom he gained
“a broader, richer historical context for understanding the world.”
Besides founding the campus College Republican Club, and
being active in the GOP at state and national levels, Mattausch
was an ASSP executive vice president and opinions editor of
The Falcon. Before graduating, he married computer science
major Nancy Anunson ’86, whom he met the second week of
her freshman year when 2nd Hill raided 6th Hill. The newlyweds
went east, where Mattausch earned a master’s degree in
public policy from Georgetown University and is now a dissertation
away from a doctoral degree in American government.
Ironically, he eventually worked in the Capitol building as a
U.S. Historical Society Fellow in the Office of the Curator of
the Architect of the Capitol, but in 20 years has had no involvement
in politics.
“We live in the eye of the hurricane,” he says. “Our neighbors are congressmen, senators, and diplomats. Literally 15 feet from
our door, high-powered people on their cell phones charge past
every day while we live a 19th-century lifestyle.”
Dan and Nancy Mattausch own several historic properties
within nine blocks of the U.S. Capitol building. Their current
residence is the Cortelyou House, two blocks away from the
Capitol — a 5,000-square-foot Victorian built in 1891, the same
year that Seattle Pacific was founded. In 1900, it became home
to George Bruce Cortelyou, a trusted aide to Presidents William
McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Cortelyou was also the first
secretary of commerce and labor, chairman of the Republican
Party, postmaster general, and secretary of the treasury. He went
on to become president of a gas company and for 26 years led its
growth to become the second largest utility company in America,
Consolidated Edison.
The challenge of restoring the home’s period furnishings and
many working gasoliers, gas sconces, and a combination gas and
electric chandelier has involved something of a treasure hunt —
and the search for exactly the right thing has been rewarded
many times over. “Some pieces have simply been given to me by
major dealers,” says Dan Mattausch. “To them, it may be old, but
who knows how to use a gaslight burner?”
Sometimes the hunt requires more than a little ingenuity and,
on rare occasions, an acceptable degree of compromise. When
original tubing for supplying gas to portable gas lamps was found
to have hardened and rotted over time, Mattausch spent a year
and a half searching for the solution. He finally discovered that a
modern airbrush hose made a workable substitute. Soon a lamp
base in the shape of a statuesque female holding aloft a gaslit bowl
of light added its warm glow to the music room, supplied with
fuel via the hose tethered to the gas and electric chandelier above.
While the couple has spent hours polishing and burnishing,
for extremely valuable pieces they employ conservation specialists
in museum metal finishing and restoration. National Park
Service historical standards are exacting, as are the Mattausches’.
They insist that the primary objects in the Cortelyou House be a
minimum of 100 years old.
Until the Mattausches came along, important details in many
national historic restorations were allowed to slide. While preservationists
went to great lengths to recreate precise interiors,
they commonly used anachronistic lighting that was off by at
least 50 years. The craft and knowledge had been all but lost.
The fact that Dan Mattausch set out to do something about
that is a story of necessity being the mother of invention. While
restoring the Cortelyou House, an antique lighting question
arose. No one knew the answer, prompting Mattausch to visit
the National Museum of American History and the Library of
Congress to learn the technology of how early lights operated.
Nancy Mattausch shared his passion on the decorative side of
the gaslight equation and after two years, they had built a
research database of over 5,000 gas lighting patents. Before he
knew it, Dan Mattausch was more knowledgeable on the subject
than anyone else.
“The greatest research facilities in the history of mankind are
just three blocks from our house,” says Mattausch. He thinks it a
godsend that his wife, who writes databases and provides financial
tracking for the Navy, could literally supply the in-house
technical support for their historic lighting passion.
Today, in a home designed for entertaining up to 100 guests,
Mattausch lives and works as an independent scholar, billing himself
as a “preservation consultant for historic lighting.” He enjoys
working on museum projects such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello
and the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop, and owning and displaying
the oldest surviving gas lighting objects in the country. But
the most fun for him is in the simple act of “firing up the lights”
and sharing with visitors the warm luminosity of a bygone age.
— BY CLINT KELLY
— PHOTO BY JAMES KEGLEY
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