Fort Ticonderoga has received funding from the International Paper Foundation to support the preservation and installment of an important portrait of WWI veteran and museum co-founder Stephen HP Pell. This project supports the conservation of this painting as it prepares for its role in telling the many stories connected to the National Historic Landmark Pavilion, the c. 1826-1837 summer home of the Pell family at Ticonderoga and will be on display in the Pavilion when it opens to the public this August.
“Fort Ticonderoga is grateful to the International Paper Foundation for their continued generous support,” said Beth L. Hill, Fort Ticonderoga president and CEO. “Their investments result in our ability to expand our museum educational reach and broaden our visitors experience, thereby generating increased economic impact and educational value to a growing audience and the community we serve.”
A full-length portrait of museum co-founders Sarah Pell with her children and her husband Stephen Pell in his First World War uniform will be installed in the Pavilion.
“The Pavilion greeted presidents, dignitaries, statesmen, and suffragists who shaped the nation, and the world, when they visited Ticonderoga,” said Miranda Peters, Fort Ticonderoga VP of Collections & Digital Production. “International Paper’s generous support for conservation of Stephen’s portrait will enable the museum to reinstall these paintings in the entrance foyer of the Pavilion where they will be accessible to the public for the first time.”
About the Pavilion
The Pavilion was built as a summer home in 1826 by William Ferris Pell and is considered by scholars to be one of America’s earliest summer homes. By the early 1840s the house was used as a hotel, its primary function through 1900. As a hotel, the house welcomed travelers passing through Ticonderoga while traveling by steamboat on Lake George and Lake Champlain. The hotel is known to have accommodated such guests as Robert Todd Lincoln, son of President Abraham Lincoln; the prominent French & Indian War historian, Francis Parkman; and prolific Adirondack photographer, Seneca Ray Stoddard. When William Ferris Pell’s great-grandson, Stephen and his wife Sarah Pell began the restoration of Fort Ticonderoga in 1909, they simultaneously undertook the restoration of the Pavilion and used the house as a summer residence for many years. There are around 1500 pieces of fine and decorative arts in Fort Ticonderoga’s collection connected to the Pavilion.
About Fort Ticonderoga
Welcoming visitors since 1909, Fort Ticonderoga preserves North America’s largest 18th-century artillery collection, 2,000 acres of historic landscape on Lake Champlain, and Carillon Battlefield, and the largest series of untouched Revolutionary War era earthworks surviving in America. As a multi-day destination and the premier place to learn more about our nation’s earliest years and America’s military heritage, Fort Ticonderoga engages more than 75,000 visitors each year with an economic impact of more than $12 million annually and offers programs, historic interpretation, boat cruises, tours, demonstrations, and exhibits throughout the year, and is open for daily visitation May through October. Fort Ticonderoga is supported in part through generous donations and with some general operating support made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.