Adventures in Restoration: Journey from 18th Century Relic to 21st Century Home
Lisa Minardi, Executive Director, Historic Trappe
This ADAF Lecture will be broadcast on Zoom, click here to register for the online event.

Daniel Heister House, Built in Montgomery County, PA in 1757.

A Philadelphia desk and bookcase made by Leonard Kessler for Friedrich Schenckels, c. 1777.

Kitchen with 12 Foot Wide Hearth
Together with her late husband Philip Bradley, Ms. Minardi purchased the Daniel Hiester House in 2017 and embarked on a massive restoration project. An extraordinarily intact and refined example of Pennsylvania German architecture, the house was built in 1757 and retains many original features including five fireplaces, eight built-in cupboards and closets, a baroque staircase, and massive roof framing. The house was painstakingly restored to its original condition, keeping modern intrusions as minimal as possible. It is furnished with Pennsylvania German and Philadelphia-area furniture, redware, and other antiques from the mid-to-late 1700s, similar to what the Hiester family would have owned. This lecture will delve into the long journey of restoring and furnishing the Hiester House, a labor of love that remains ongoing to this day. Old houses, and collections, are never really finished!
Lisa Minardi is executive director of Historic Trappe, where she oversees three historic houses associated with the Muhlenberg family and the Center for Pennsylvania German Studies. She is also editor of Americana Insights, an annual volume series dedicated to presenting groundbreaking research on traditional Americana and folk art. Lisa is also director of the Lutheran Archives Center at Philadelphia. Lisa holds a B.A. in history and museum studies from Ursinus College, an M.A. from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, and is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where she is researching the German-speaking community of early Philadelphia for her dissertation. She is the curator of numerous exhibitions and author of many books and articles on Pennsylvania German art and culture, including Pastors & Patriots: The Muhlenberg Family of Pennsylvania and A Colorful Folk: Pennsylvania Germans & the Art of Everyday Life. Lisa has also extensively studied and written about Pennsylvania furniture, including for the Winterthur exhibition catalogue Paint, Pattern & People: Furniture of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1725–1850 and for four major articles in the American Furniture journal focusing on Pennsylvania German painted chests, sulfur inlay, Philadelphia cabinetmakers, and Reading federal furniture.