Havoc on Senate Floor: Tiles Replaced

English decorative tile, worn and scuffed since 1859 by the footsteps of millions of visitors to the U.S. Senate, is being uprooted and hauled away as trash.

The old Minton tiles are being replaced at a cost of about $1.5 million by replicas, produced by a corporate descendant of the Stoke-Upon-Trent company that made the originals for the expansion of the U.S. Capitol building nearly 130 years ago.

The old tile is being jackhammered out of Senate corridors in a four-phase project. Eventually, at least 20,000 of the ceramic squares--20% or more of the total--will be replaced.

Although many of the tiles are worn, they do bear the imprint of history.

“Many millions of people have trod on them,” said Elliott Carroll, executive assistant to the architect of the Capitol, who is in charge of the replacement project.

Since Abraham Lincoln

Those millions include every American President since Abraham Lincoln, hundreds of senators, thousands of lobbyists, thousands of foreign dignitaries, uncounted scores of millions of American and foreign tourists.

The tile--old and new--forms an intricate, multicolored carpet of sinuous mid-Victorian floral and geometric design.

The old, worn and not-so-worn tile is being broken into bits and hauled away as debris by contractors.

The reason: The surface of many of the old tiles, which for the most part measure 6 inches by 6 inches by 1 inch, have been badly worn by all those footsteps.

In high-traffic areas the designs have been all but worn away. Others show little or no apparent wear, but to keep a uniform appearance all of the tile in each area is being replaced.

Very Strong Grout

According to the architect’s office, the grout that holds the individual antique tiles in place is so strong that the only feasible way to remove them is to break them up. Some of the larger fragments are being saved as artifacts, Carroll said.

The replacement work is the culmination of a long process.

It involved photographing all the Senate’s historic tile floors and reactivating a long-disused English pottery process.

The new tiles, like the old, were made in Stoke-Upon-Trent, Staffordshire, England. The original firm was Minton, Hollings & Co. The present manufacturer is H. & R. Johnston Co.

Lost Technology

“It has taken some time,” Carroll said. “The company had lost the technology of making these encaustic tiles. It took some years before they could do the research to redevelop it.”

The original tile installation began in 1856 and took four years to complete. Replacing the old with the new may take several years in four separate phases, of which the first has now begun.

Virtually every visitor to the Senate since 1859 has walked on the old tile floors; millions more will walk on the new.

The House of Representatives replaced much of its similar tile flooring decades ago, but it made no attempt to find replicas because of the difficulty of the manufacturing process.

Most House corridors are now paved with black and white marble.