Two historic portraits have been restored to their home in the Manse and a public viewing will be Sunday (Dec. 7) after their restoration
For ages, two weathered faces lingered quietly in a small church lobby in Oglethorpe County, until their disappearance pushed a local historian’s search for answers.
After nearly a year of restoration and more than a decade of advocacy, the 1843 portraits of Rev. Thomas Goulding and his wife, Anne Holbrook Goulding, are finally ready to return to the Manse, Lexington’s historic seminary building.
Ashley Simpson noticed the large oil paintings hanging in the vestibule of the former Lexington Presbyterian Church many years ago. She made a mental note of the works, even though little was known beyond the names inscribed on the brass plaques beneath each frame.
“I was an art major, so I knew there were 19th-century portraits, but this is before the internet,” Simpson said. “So I would stand there and go, ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’”
Rev. Thomas Goulding, born in 1786, relocated to Oglethorpe County with his wife after the 1820 Savannah fire and disease outbreak forced them inland.
A minister and educator, Goulding taught Greek and Latin, trained future ministers and missionaries and served multiple rural churches. He also helped establish schools in the area, including the Bethlehem Female Academy, and oversaw the construction of Lexington’s first Presbyterian church in 1827.
The Manse is also believed to have been constructed under his direction as well.
Their portraits were painted by Edward Ludlow Mooney (1813-1887), a New York painter who specialized in oil on canvas, and the restoration of the portraits to their original home is meant to honor the Gouldings’ legacy and community preservation efforts.
In December 2015, she returned for a Christmas concert to discover that the portraits had been removed. Amid financial struggles and declining membership, the church dissolved, and the portraits were transferred to Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta.
After years of searching and countless phone calls, Simpson finally located the portraits at the seminary in 2019. Seeing them in person brought initial relief that quickly shifted to concern.
“I have to admit, my heart kind of fell because they were in worse shape than I remember,” Simpson said.
The paintings showed extensive cracking and damage from decades of storage without environmental controls.
“When buildings are used, there’s more dusting, there’s more cleaning,” said Ronnie Boggs, mayor of Lexington. “If you’ve got an empty building sitting there and you’re heating and air running, dust is circulating.”
With the seminary’s approval, the portraits were released to return to Lexington, but needed professional restoration before they could be displayed.
Funding for the restoration came from a grant awarded by the Watson-Brown Foundation.
The process, which was estimated to take eight months, took nearly a year. Conservators cleaned the surfaces, repaired age-related damage and stripped the radiator paint from the frames, replacing it with gold-leaf finish.
Rick Berry, former mayor of Lexington, wanted the portraits hung as his last ceremonial duty as mayor before he died in 2021.
“There’s no better place for them to be than right there,” Boggs said.
There is a public viewing of the Goulding portraits at the Manse in Lexington from 2-4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 7.