Peering Through Stucco

Beginning about the late 1830s, perhaps due to the Greek Revival style and the emerging Gothic Revival style, stucco became a popular exterior surfacing material. It was sometimes applied to older existing homes to hide wall treatments that were no longer fashionable. New Jersey has several dozen houses from the 18th century that probably exhibited patterned brickwork when new, but were covered in stucco in the 19th century. One such building is the Trenton Friends meetinghouse, built in 1739 with Flemish checker brickwork and the date executed in blue vitrified headers—though one would never know it to look at the building today. Two 19th-century eyewitnesses each wrote about its transformation. Another is a house at the Smithville museum village in Burlington County, where failing stucco is slowly revealing a date in the gable.

To recover this architectural legacy, it will be essential to find a technology that can image the patterned brickwork beneath the stucco without requiring the stucco’s removal. Infrared thermography has seemed rather promising as the tool of choice, but I am not aware of any reports that this technology has been successfully tried for this or a similar purpose.