THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 13, 1995 TAG: 9504130437
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Frederick D. Nichols, who rescued Thomas Jefferson from Stanford White, died Sunday at a nursing home in Charlottesville.
He was 83 and a retired professor of architecture at the University of Virginia, where he spearheaded and supervised the 1976 restoration of Jefferson's celebrated Rotunda.
A native of Trinidad, Colo., who received a master's degree in architecture from Yale, Nichols became interested in Jefferson while sketching Virginia plantation houses for the Park Service's Depression-era historical building survey program.
When he joined the University of Virginia faculty in 1950, his interest blossomed into a passion. He established the university's department of architectural history and became an authority on Jefferson lore.
He was responsible for restoring Poplar Forest, Jefferson's octagonal summer home near Lynchburg, and for opening Montpelier, the house Jefferson designed for James Madison, to the public.
But his main accomplishment was recapturing the Rotunda, the capstone of Jefferson's acclaimed ``academical village,'' from the ravages of Stanford White, the flamboyant New York architect.
After a fire gutted the Rotunda in 1895, White reworked Jefferson's classical vision to his own taste, among other things turning Jefferson's intimate Dome Room into the ceiling of a two-story hall and installing pillars, balconies and what Jefferson purists saw as mutilations.
Although restoration had been a dream for many Virginians, Nichols made it happen.
A short man with a trademark bow tie and a perpetual twinkle in his eye, Nichols, who was frequently likened to Fred Astaire, was a man of such legendary charm that gardeners and students worshiped him and millionaires were putty in his hands.
He raised seed money for the project by holding annual Rotunda Balls, then used his charm on federal officials and private donors to raise the rest.
The restoration, exact to Jefferson's original plans, was completed in time for the 1976 bicentennial, but Nichols was never satisfied.
It seems that Jefferson's vision of an open-ended quadrangle with a 25-mile vista was spoiled at the turn of the century when a Stanford White building, Cabell Hall, was put up opposite the Rotunda.
Nichols told friends that his biggest regret was that during the campus turmoil of the 1960s he could not persuade his students to burn it down.
Nichols is survived by two sons, Frederick, of Barbourville, and Allen of Newport News; a daughter, Elizabeth Kasper of Baltimore, and six grandchildren.
KEYWORDS: DEATH OBITUARY by CNB