Textile Conservation: Uniform Jacket from War of 1812

On a bright spring afternoon, Jessica Hack’s workroom in a converted grocery store in the Algiers Point neighborhood of New Orleans hums with projects.

A Brussels tapestry from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century covers an 8x16-foot table. Nearby is a nineteenth-century Greek Orthodox priest’s chasuble, embroidered in shades of blue, purple, white, yellow, and orange, from Holy Trinity Cathedral in Bayou St. John. Against one wall, protected by acid-free paper, stands a large double-sided flag, with six stars on one side and twelve on the other, probably made during the War of 1812. According to Hack, “It is one of only three eighteen-star flags known to have survived.”

Assistant Erin Reynolds laboriously dabs a small Civil War flag with cotton swabs dipped in distilled water and a liquid organic cleaner called sodium laurel sulfate. “Normally we would put it in a tub of water, but we couldn’t do that with this one because of color bleed,” notes Hack. A pile of red- and blue-stained Q-tips rests next to the flag, testimony to the arduous process.

Yet to arrive but eagerly awaited: a uniform jacket from the War of 1812 that will be delivered by the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans—once it has raised the $35,000 fee. Hack estimates it will take 350 to 400 hours of conservation work.

“The coat was on my wish list,” says Hack, who has done conservation and restoration for the museum since the 1980s. “Sometimes there’s something so special you really want to work on it.”

That morning, I had viewed the coat, courtesy of Wayne Phillips, the LSM’s curator of costumes and textiles. It was draped on a torso form in the museum’s warehouse in the French Quarter. Made of dark navy wool with a red wool collar, cuffs, and tails, it is decorated with a metallic tape trim or “tape lace.” Its silver-plate buttons are stamped with the image of an eagle and a shield bearing the regiment’s number.

“The style dates to 1810,” Phillips told me. “This is the only one in existence of this particular style. The length of the tails reflected the status of the officer.”

The coat was worn by William Sutherland Hamilton (1787-1862), a lieutenant colonel with the 3rd U.S. Rifle Regiment.

Phillips has been in touch with Hamilton’s descendants and learned that he owned a cotton plantation outside of St. Francisville. “In letters to his father, he said he believed he was not cut out for military life. He left the military and became a very successful planter.” Hamilton later became a prominent politician in West Feliciana Parish, serving in the Louisiana Legislature and running unsuccessfully for governor in 1830. A descendant donated his uniform jacket to the museum in the 1920s.

Hack prefers to call it a coatee, “a more precise description that identifies it as a jacket with long tails.”

“It’s very high quality, fine wool,” she says. “It’s fabulous, but it’s full of holes.”

She will begin her conservation of the 200-year old item by hand, vacuum-cleaning it through a screen of fiberglass mesh with a low-suction HEPA-filtered cleaner.

She will then use a wet or dry cleaning process. She is leaning toward wet—hand-washing it in a solution of sodium lauryl sulfate, a neutral pH surfactant, and distilled water. “The reason I want to wet clean it is to rehydrate the fabric,” she says. “Textiles get very dried out over hundreds of years. Wool loses lanoline. The upshot of wet cleaning is softer, more supple fiber.”

New wool material hand-dyed to blend with the colors of the existing wool will be laid under each separate panel of the coat. Silk crepeline 2-ply thread, thinner than a human hair, will be hand-stitched to stabilize every moth hole—the back of the coatee is riddled with them—and secure them to the new wool support material. “When you sew with it, you don’t see the stitches,” says Hack. 

“Where there are seams in the coat you have to make pieces of support fabric and stitch them and fit them into the panels of the coat,” she says. “There’s only so much you want to deconstruct. I’m really interested in all the original hand stitching. There were no sewing machines back then. I want to keep things as original as possible.

“After all the patches are sewn in, it looks kind of lumpy, so you press it with an iron. We’ll put a handkerchief over an area, spray it with distilled water to create steam, and press it to relax it and flatten it out.”

The final product, says Hack, should look “unobtrusive. There’s not much chance of its looking new, but it doesn’t have to look wrecked. We will make it stable enough to be exhibited.”

The buttons will be cleaned but not shined. “We don’t polish them because that actually removes the finish and patina,” says Hack, who then reveals her formula for cleaning the buttons of surface dirt—ammonia and “enzyme extrusions,” also known as spit.

“You just spit on a Q-tip and rub it off,” she says. “Spit is a great cleaner. If you ever bleed on your clothing, spit on it right away and it will take the blood right off. But it has to be your own spit. It can’t be anybody else’s.”

Hack will thoroughly document the conservation process. “We will photograph the coatee really well inside and out,” she says. “And we prepare a final treatment report. Every day we keep a log: ‘We dyed it; here’s the recipe.’ We keep books of colors, patterns, threads.”

The process will probably take about four months. The work should be done in time for the museum’s December 2014 opening of its Battle of New Orleans bicentennial exhibit. 

“Jessica works for a lot of museums around the country, like the Biltmore Estate and the Smithsonian,” says Phillips. “We’re extremely lucky to have her in Louisiana. If we didn’t have her, this would have to be shipped out of state.”

Hack grew up in Florida and came to New Orleans to attend Newcomb College in the late 1960s. After graduating in art and anthropology, she took various jobs, including work as a scenic seamstress for the New Orleans Opera. “I worked for $2.50 an hour in a corrugated tin building in Metairie. You froze in the winter and fried in the summer. It was a great job, but we were starving.”

She doesn’t recall being particularly crafty. “I could not sew on a button as a child,” she says. “But in college my friends remember me embroidering and doing macramé. After college, I worked for several years as a freelance weaver and artist.

“I had a friend at Morton’s Auction, Stephen Croft, who sold carpets. In 1979, he sent me to New York to apprentice with a rug dealer who taught me to restore carpets. Nobody there spoke English. It was all gesture and point. I learned how to do invisible repairs to pristine condition.”

She gradually moved from doing restoration—which she defines as “replacing the missing materials with similar materials, using the same technology with which it was first created”—to conservation—which she defines as “stabilizing the existing material.”

In 1989, she spent a month at the University of London, studying conservation techniques in a program for mid-level professionals. “We spent half the day in academic classes on cleaning, chemistry, fibers. We went to Hampton Court and Covent Garden. We went to my tutor’s conservation studio. She did work for the Queen. They took us everywhere.”

About twenty years ago, Hack and her husband Jon Racherbaumer bought an abandoned 1880 grocery store in Algiers Point. The original store, about 1,200 square feet, is her work space, and they live in the rest of the 3,400-square-foot building.

“I like working at home,” she says. “We work on really big stuff. When everybody is here and we’re working on gigantic things, we long for a mezzanine.”

One thing Hack does not use in her work is old fabrics. “People ask me, ‘Do you use old materials?’ No. They’re as rotted as the things I’m fixing! Textiles have a hard enough time surviving our climate. Everything rots here. People look at a Civil War uniform and say ‘Bullet holes.’ I say, ‘No, they’re moth holes!’”

Hack finds that no two jobs are alike, and that variety keeps it interesting. “A complete conservator has many different techniques that take years and years to develop. I have a large staff—four full time and one part time. These are not one-person jobs.”

One of perhaps 200 textile conservators in the country, she has “acquired knowledge of many different types of textiles. We’re to a large degree self taught. I used to think there were magic answers out there, but you make it up as you go along. It is creative problem-solving on the fly, based on solid knowledge.”

It is also hard work, both mentally and physically. “My back is fried. It’s a high-stress profession that takes a toll on your body. You have to get up and move and walk and stretch. We work six to seven hours a day. There’s no working ten hours a day. It’s too exacting.”

Meanwhile, donations are coming in, leading to the day when curator Wayne Phillips will box up the coatee and deliver it to Hack. He is excited about handing it over to her.

“Conservators really are magicians,” he says. “I love giving something like this to Jessica and letting her go.

“It’s been 200 years since this coat was worn, and almost 100 years since it was donated to the museum in 1923. Now is the perfect time to restore it, because conservation technology has come so far.” 

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.