OLYMPIA — Former first lady Nancy Evans remembers the moment she realized that the Governor’s Mansion was a tourist destination.
“In the summer you leave the doors open there was no air conditioning and people, touring the Capitol, would innocently wander in. I remember coming downstairs and there were these people in the living room. They were very apologetic and I said, ‘No, no, let me show you around,’ ” she said.
Evans turned to her friends in 1976, including Judy Henderson, who recalls the request this way: “Would you please help me give tours? Because people are walking through my house.”
Henderson has been hosting mansion tours ever since. For more than 31 years she’s explained that the building next door to the Capitol is private home and public showpiece.
She tells her share of the 16,000 annual mansion visitors about the 1795 English cane-back sofa, explains the bicentennial quilt in the Victorian bedroom, and points to the artist’s signature on the dining room mural, painted to look like letters carved in a tree. “School kids love this,” she said.
The first two-thirds of the mansion’s history was marked by political battles and deteriorating conditions in the house, which was never intended to last so long.
Evans gets credit for saving the place. Through her husband, Gov. Dan Evan’s three terms in the governor’s office, she fought off a move to tear the mansion down, standardized its style, created the tour program and launched a foundation to furnish it.
That foundation is in charge of centennial celebrations that start Friday with a garden party.
It’s the first of four centennial events that organizers hope will keep the mansion in the public’s eye, and keep it from slipping back into jeopardy.
“We encourage people to come through because it’s a nice old house,” said Laurie Maricle, chairwoman of the Governor’s Mansion Foundation Centennial Committee.
As tour guides often point out, the mansion is the oldest building on the Capitol Campus, a full 20 years older than the Capitol itself.
It started out as a temporary reception hall for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific exposition in Seattle, a place where the state could receive dignitaries. A Tacoma architectural firm designed the 19-room Georgian mansion, and built it for $35,000.
Two men intent on being the first to live there never moved in. Gov. Albert Mead was present when the cornerstone was laid, but lost the subsequent primary election to fellow Republican Samuel Cosgrove.
Cosgrove became ill and died before he could take up residence, leaving a third man, then-Lt. Gov. Marion Hay, to become the first governor to live in the new executive residence.
Hay’s wife Lizzie outfitted the home, using furniture from Seattle department store Frederick &Nelson, including the dining room table and grandfather clock still in use today.
The mansion’s fate was frequently in question for the next 60 years. Saying there was no money to keep it warm, Gov. Ernest Lister moved out in 1915.
The original plans for the Capitol Campus, drafted in the 1920s, had a sandstone office building on the site. But for reasons fiscal and political, the mansion was left standing.
But its problems continued.
First Lady Evelyn Langlie was nearly hit by debris in a 1949 earthquake.
Legislators again suggested leveling the mansion in 1963, to make room for an office building. Finally, Nancy and Dan Evans took up residence there shortly after the 1964 election, and their work would remake the mansion.
The Evans family had visited the mansion before, but living there with small children turned out to be a different matter. It was so cold, Nancy said, she wore a coat indoors during the winter. When she used electric space heaters, they would overload the outdated wiring.
“There were just a lot of things, and it was very difficult. But very early on I heard there were some indications that people wanted to tear down the mansion and build an office building that was identical to the one on the other side of the Capitol and then build a modern mansion someplace else,” Evans said. “Without any conversation with my husband, I decided that was just not appropriate.”
Two gubernatorial elections later, in 1973, the Legislature set aside $600,000 to renovate the mansion.
Since the Hay family took up residence in 1909, each governor and first lady had added to the decor as they saw fit. Evans wanted to set a standard, and established the Foundation for the Preservation of the Governor’s Mansion in 1972.
“There was no format for keeping the pieces as part of a cohesive plan. My mission was to do that and do it through private monies,” she said. “I got a lot of support, I talked to historians, I talked to a lot of architects. I found a woman who was a friend who would help me.”
That is the pattern that has outfitted the executive residence to this day: an informal network of history buffs, friends of friends, charitable groups and donors mostly, but not all, women attending to the needs of the day.
And the style has also been constant, a Georgian look with furniture mostly dating from 1780 to 1830.
What’s the most common question on mansion tours?
“Where’s the governor?” said tour guide Edie Beam. “Well, he’s working, he or she.”
If they aren’t working next door in the Legislative Building, governors travel to other parts of the state frequently.
The exception to the rule, Beam said, was Gov. Booth Gardner. He would occasionally be found playing the piano as groups came through.
“You can forget your tour, because they would want to talk to him,” Beam said.
For all the focus on refined and defined taste, the politicians who call the mansion home have their own styles.
Gov. Gary Locke, who brought three newborns home to the mansion, began a Halloween tradition of hosting trick-or-treaters from the community, appearing in costume with family members on the front porch.
Less fun for the Locke family was an infestation of bats in the roof that required the family to get rabies vaccinations.
Gov. Chris Gregoire discovered the wild side of the place in 2006, when the State Patrol hired a trapper to keep raccoons roving the nearby hillside from attacking her small dog, Franz.
It prompted so much teasing that Gregoire mentioned it in that year’s State of the State Address. In fact, the state’s second female governor has faced a regular parade of mansion stories.
A longtime Olympia resident, she has often told the story of calling for pizza delivery just after moving in and being stumped when asked for her address.
“It’s the mansion,” she told the driver.
Then there was a love affair between a trooper and a cadet in the guardhouse at the mansion gate that resulted in discipline for the trooper in 2006.
And the state Republican Party asked for all records of repairs to the mansion last year, suspecting Gregoire was doing more than appropriate.
Since she took office, the taxpayers have footed the bill for many repairs, including $100,000 for exterior painting and repairs, and $24,000 to replace kitchen appliances capable of cooking for 100 people or more.
An earlier project, a $300,000 fence installed at the request of the State Patrol in 2001, also is a reflection of changing times at the mansion.
Security is tighter and there are more restrictions on what governors can do in what Gregoire called “the people’s house.”
Her critics complained loudly two years ago, when she auctioned off a dinner in the mansion at a candidate’s fundraiser. They said she was using public resources for political purposes.
Hounded by reporters over the controversy, the usually cool Gregoire opened up about life in the mansion, where the upstairs is home, and the downstairs is a museum.
She said she and her husband, the state’s first first gentleman, Mike, planned to buy the food and cook the dinner upstairs, but canceled because of the controversy.
“I think that’s wrong. I ought to be able to live in that house,” Gregoire said. “Come live in it for a week. … You know, it’s a difficult place to live in, folks. You have the guards there all the time. You’re not free to do a whole lot.”
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