Plumb preserves

When visitors enter the newly arranged summer kitchen at the Plumb House, they find formerly bare walls and closed-off storage rooms now open and adorned with more than 50 taxidermy birds, dozens of butterflies and hundreds of bird eggs.

“The mouth flies open when they come through this door,” said Shirley Bridgeforth, president of the board of the Waynesboro Heritage Foundation, which oversees the city museum and historic house.

“You go back to the past,” she said. “It takes you back.”

The 205-year-old Plumb House at 1012 W. Main St. is popular for its preservation of five generations of the Plumb family and connections to the Civil War Battle of Waynesboro in 1865.

But the new exhibits feature the final Plumb in the home, Happy Plumb, who earned his taxidermy license in 1918, as can be seen hanging in his recreated taxidermy work area.

Plumb’s taxidermy comes to fluttering life beneath track lighting and alongside crisp display cases that reveal bright butterflies and bird eggs. Nooks hold a moth catcher, tools and a rattlesnake skin.

Also new are cases of arrowheads culled from a Plumb collection of more than 9,000.

Todd Lam, who helps with Plumb House tours, logged almost five hours on the renovation.

“We had quite a to-do,” he said.

Describing building shelves for birds and the tedious mounting and framing of arrowheads, Lam called the project a “labor of love.”

“We worked our butts off,” said John Huffer, Plumb House curator. “We’ll still be working on it.”

The renovations carry into the main house, where new signage tells the story of the battle, fresh paint coats most surfaces and new displays bring more archived items into view.

Schoolbooks, for example, are newly displayed and better preserved, Bridgeforth said.

One shadow box displays years’ worth of items found in archaeological digs. A shell, carpet swatch, rose water bottle and headless figurine jostle in the case.

“We have a ghost here too,” Bridgeforth joked as a cabinet slid open on its own.

That topic — ghosts — will be the focus of a tour Friday, the first major Plumb House event since the renovation grand opening in September. Ghost stories will be told on a walking tour from Stone Soup to the Plumb House and back.