This summer, the Webb Deane Stevens Museum is reconstructing the piazza that once stood at the front of the Silas Deane House. The piazza—what we’d call a covered porch today—was a defining feature of the house when Silas and Elizabeth Deane completed it ca. 1773. It was removed in the 1940s, when later owners and a different era of preservation theory dismissed it as a later addition. They were wrong. The piazza had been there all along.

Decades of research, archaeological evidence, and a rediscovered photograph have made the case. The reconstruction follows the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties: Rehabilitation, drawing on traditional 18th-century building methods alongside modern documentation and conservation practice. Students from the American College of the Building Arts are working on-site, learning the trades that built America’s earliest houses by helping to rebuild one of them.

When it’s finished, the piazza will restore something that has been missing from this façade—and from the story of Silas Deane himself—for nearly a century.

volution.

In 1965, an archaeological survey turned up evidence of the original piazza foundation. The case was real, but it wasn’t visual—and for decades, no one could picture what had been lost.

Decades later, the preservationist Anne Crofoot Kuckro came across a mid-19th-century photograph showing the Silas Deane House with its piazza intact. She recognized what it was immediately. So did everyone she showed it to.

That photograph is why this project exists. Without it, the piazza would still be a footnote in the house’s archaeological record. With it, we could see what to rebuild.

Training and supporting the next generation of preservation craftspeople is part of what we do. The Webb Deane Stevens Museum is more than a steward of three Revolutionary-era houses—it is a working preservation site, and projects like the piazza reconstruction are how knowledge in the traditional building trades is passed forward.

The reconstruction is led by WDS’s preservation team: TR Revella-Hamilton, Director of Preservation & Collections and a trained conservation architect, and Greg Candee, Director of Buildings & Grounds, joined by a roster of seasoned traditional tradesmen brought in for specialized work.

This summer, two interns from the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA)—the only college in the United States that grants bachelor’s degrees in the traditional building trades—join the team, supported by the Richard Hampton Jenrette Foundation.

For these students, the Deane House piazza is not a classroom exercise. It is a working project on a National Historic Landmark—a chance to hand-shape columns, cut joinery, and raise the frame piece by piece, using the same methods that built this house the first time. They learn by building. We teach by doing the work alongside them.

### June 8, 2026 — Groundbreaking

This morning, on the steps of the Silas Deane House, we broke ground on a project decades in the making. Joining us: NSCDA-CT Board President Beth Montgelas, Wethersfield Mayor Ken Lesser, lead donor Lee Kuckro—whose late wife Anne’s research made this project possible—Executive Director Brenton Grom, and elected officials from across the region.

The work begins this week.