Don Floyd: Our 45-Year "White House" Fixer

1980s Don Floyd in the early days of the site's restoration. Here he's creating molds for recreating the decorative plaster. The blackened plaster was fire damaged in 1972 and was used to make the mold and create replacement pieces for sections too badly damaged to reuse.

Best described as a “multitalented craftsman,” Don has been involved in restoration projects at the Bellamy Mansion Museum for nearly a half century, including everything from the etched glass around the front door to huge mirror frames, parlor gasoliers, crown moldings, brass window valances, and even skeleton keys.

Don now works closely with museum site manager Bob Lock, who rediscovered a newspaper article written about Don 45 years ago! Writing in the 1980s, Helen Sharpe, a journalist for The Robesonian newspaper, was reminiscing about her fondness for the Floyd Hardware store on West 2nd Street in Lumberton, NC. Her focus quickly turned to Don. She wrote, “I couldn’t believe he knew so much about light fixtures, especially old ones. He did a lot of reading about them, knew how they were put together and how they should be maintained. When lovely old homes of the community would be taken down, he would be on hand to salvage an especially lovely fixture.”

The unrestored mansion as it looked when Don spotted it during a trip to Wilmington.

​Don’s fascination with the Bellamy Mansion began in 1968, Sharpe observed, when he traveled to Wilmington for the Azalea Festival air show.​ As he rode past the mansion it captured his imagination. At that time there was a store, Divine Antiques, run by Virginia Jennewein, in the basement. The rest of the home was unoccupied. He stopped to look in but was refused permission to see the rest of the interior. In response, he made the rash statement that he would etch and donate the glass for the front door should it be restored. The woman in the antique store replied, “Anybody that damned crazy can go in.”

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A few years after that, Sharpe remembers visiting Floyd Hardware and found Don in a state of alarm. "He was grieving that the Bellamy mansion in Wilmington had been the victim of arsonists. The fire in the mansion which occurred during the early ‘70s came at a time of racial troubles, and Don deeply feels the irony of this because the house is an example of the genius of Black artistic craftsmanship, one of the finest Greek revival buildings in the entire South.”

After the devastating 1972 fire at the mansion, Don was instrumental in the painstaking repairs to fixtures and other house features.

Among his projects back then was to repair the etched glass above the front door. Don recalls that he recreated the design in the lunette (or half-moon) window from his imagination. A few years later, he saw a picture of the original entrance and his design was virtually identical! Nearly five decades later, in 2019, Don revisited his previous work to re-etch some pieces of glass in the lunette and in the sidelight windows that had cracked over time.

More recently, Don took on the task of reproducing skeleton keys for the four adult bedroom level closets. The term ‘skeleton key’ refers to any key that can open multiple locks. Incidentally, closets were present in Europe from the 1500s but were usually whole rooms. America refined the idea into reach-in closets within walls in the mid 1800s. Early clothes closets employed pegs, although Thomas Jefferson reputedly had a hanger device in Monticello. One fine story of invention is that in 1903, Albert J. Parkhouse of the Timberlake Wire and Novelty Company in Jackson Mississippi, couldn't find a spot to hang his coat and upgraded the clothes peg idea by twisting wire into the shape we recognize as the modern hanger. Whatever the truth of these details, the Bellamy's locking closets, like the gasoliers and fixtures Don also fixed, were part of the ever-evolving world of domestic living.

Perhaps Don's longest project, and one has which led him to introspection on the history embodied by the site, was the restoration of the parlor mirror frames. They had been blackened and damaged in the 1972 fire. Also, water from the firehoses, having hit the hot mirror glass, had caused it to crack.

Back in 1860, John D. and Eliza Bellamy took a trip to New York and bought furnishings and fixtures for their new house. These included the gasoliers by Philadelphia company Cornelius and Baker, the piano by the Knabe company of Baltimore, and the large mirrors. 

The original mirror frames were finished with gold leaf. During the 1970s and 80s, while restoring the frames in his home workshop, the gilt would catch Don's eye and take his thoughts back to those original glory days of the house. He added that thinking of that Civil War era also called to mind the quote from Winston Churchill that, “History is written by the victors.” While considering the thousands of lives that were lost on both sides, Don laments there are no victors in war. In his view, both Confederates and Yankees came away physically and mentally crippled. Taking on an historic preservation project, which takes much time and attention to detail, often leads to reflection on the lives of those who came before.

Another tricky project was the restoration of the molding above the gasoliers. The parlor gasoliers were lit with coal gas, a by-product of naval stores processing. The medallions above the gasoliers were decorative, but served a practical purpose in hiding soot from the coal gas. The original medallions above the front parlor gasolier were, Don notes, "shaken loose by a group of kids on a tour in the house jumping up and down on the floor of the room above.” They had to be cleaned up and, in some cases, recast in plaster.

Don shared some memories about restoring these and the similarly involved crown molding in the foyer. Doing the work at home, it attracted the attention of some neighborhood kids who asked if they could help. He let them pour some of the molding material and before it dried, he invited the kids to put their names on the backs of the molds. That idea came from the discovery, during Preservation NC's 1990s restoration, of the 'WBG' initials on the back of an original piece of plaster in the house. The story of it's discovery and the man who inscribed it is a mainstay of museum tours today. WBG was William Benjamin Gould, an enslaved plasterer who worked on many antebellum homes in the Wilmington area, including Bellamy's, and made a daring escape downriver in 1862. Letting the kids etch their names was a nod to this fascinating history and Gould, the skilled enslaved craftsman who had originally created this beautiful plasterwork in 1860.

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Unlike many enslaved people, Gould was educated and literate. He was also a highly skilled plasterer. Consequently Gould's owner, planter Nicholas Nixon, hired him out and profited from those skills.

Speaking of the crown molding, Don says the design in the formal parlors is a dogwood pattern. The space behind is hollow. It would have been too heavy if that molding had been solid. He says the original had “shivers” (a.k.a. slivers) of heart pine mixed into plaster to make it stronger. Chuckling about his version of fortifying the new moldings he adds, "I used toothpicks.”

Check out some pictures of the mansion and slave quarters restoration. Our website features a before and after gallery here. There you can appreciate Don's decades of work, as well as that of many other preservation experts.