An ivory dress that has withstood four weddings over the past 95 years is now ready for at least two more.

When Mackenzie Wescott, 30, of Baltimore opened the box containing the gown worn by her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother - her inheritance following her grandmother's death in 2006 - her heart sank. The two-piece gown's full-sleeved velveteen top was badly stained, its satin skirting tattered and its back torn since Wescott's aunt wore it for her May 1987 wedding. The antique lace panel on the skirt's front and the high lace collar were preserved, but the dress needed work.

¡°It looked like it just was taken off after a night of drinking and dancing and celebrating, put in a box and sitting in there 15 years,¡± Wescott said. ¡°We were really disheartened.¡±

 
The ¡°we¡± refers to Wescott's younger sister, Farran, 25, a pediatric nurse in Charleston, S.C., and their mother, Cathy Wescott of Greencastle. Both Mackenzie and Farran are graduates of Greencastle-Antrim High School, years 1995 and 2000 respectively, and Cathy is a teacher in Hagerstown and formerly substitute-taught in Greencastle.

Victorian legacy

The story of the dress began with the 1912 wedding of Edith Libby Dixon and Howard Yard in

 
 
Denver, Colo. Members of Mamie Eisenhower's family, the Douds, attended the wedding, with the reception following in Denver's esteemed Brown Palace Hotel.

The Yards had three children. The youngest and only daughter was Edith Libby (Dixon) Yard's namesake, Edith Dixon Yard. Little Edith was just 5 when her mother died in 1927 and was fascinated with everything she could learn about her mother's life. When the naturally artistic Edith went to Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., for fashion design, she made a project of redesigning her mother's ultra-Victorian wedding dress to suit her own tastes.

¡°I guess she thought of it as her final project,¡± Cathy said. ¡°She was very proud of the dress. She really missed her mom for a long time.¡±

 
 
¡°She was the one who started this trend of wearing the dress,¡± Mackenzie added. ¡°She started the magic.¡±

Edith kept the inside piece, styled as a slip but designed to be worn with an A-line outer piece to show off the intricate lace panel in front. Where Libby's gown had a low neckline, Edith added a velveteen top with a high neckline, short lace collar and full sleeves with bells of lace covering her wrists. She added a velveteen and satin bow where Libby's Victorian brooch had been at the top of the A-line outerskirting, used eye hooks to fasten the inside piece at the back and traded her mother's chapel-length veil and floral headpiece for a simple lace bonnet and mantilla veil that just brushed the floor as she stood. A gold cross necklace completed the new look.

¡°It's not a traditional look,¡± Cathy said of her mother's design. ¡°You see so many brides with no neckline at all, and this has a very different, distinct look to it. It's elegant and it's velveteen and coming from another era.¡±

 
 
¡®So magical'

Edith Dixon Yard married Dr. Robert Madden on Nov. 17, 1945, in Scarsdale, N.Y. Madden was a dentist to the Marines, and he and Edith had seven children, the fourth and seventh of which were named Catherine and Rebecca.

¡°She was just an artist in every way,¡± Cathy said of her mother, describing her as ¡°a very creative person¡± who enjoyed working in watercolor, acrylic and oil. ¡°Imagine designing your own wedding dress.¡±

 
 
Cathy (Madden) Wescott tried on the dress as a teenager and still remembers the thrill of it - especially her surprise that it fit her like a glove.

¡°I was very close to my mom, and I was very touched with the fact that she had redone it,¡± Cathy said. ¡°It was just so magical to think that she had worn and redesigned her dress from her mom. So when I tried it on and I went to get married, I thought, well, I'd love to wear this dress. I know how nice it is; I just love it. I never thought it would start anything. I just thought it would be a fun thing.¡±

Third generation

 
 
Cathy Madden married Guy Wescott III on Dec. 31, 1976, in Lake Placid, N.Y. They have two daughters, Mackenzie and Farran.

Cathy altered nothing on her mother's dress, keeping its details right down to the cross necklace. The only sign of the 1970s in Cathy's wedding photos is the crown of white carnations, red roses and baby's breath she wore in place of a veil.

Cathy's younger sister, Becky, also chose to wear the dress for her May 1987 wedding to Steve Mason in Lake Tahoe, Nev. Becky removed the darkened lace bell cuffs from the sleeves, wore her mother's cameo and enjoyed the full height of the lace collar in Western style.

 
 
¡°I think my mom really wanted me to wear it, and I tried it on and it fit perfectly,¡± Becky said. ¡°It had the beautiful ivory antique look to it, and the higher neck, and all the lace. It had everything I wanted to wear in a dress, plus ... after looking at my mom in it and my mom's mom in it, I wanted me in it.¡±

Becky said she is most likely responsible for the holes in the dress's underskirt because she did a good bit of walking outside after the wedding and had pictures taken outdoors. The style of the dress, she said, fit the look of her wedding - and Cathy's.

¡°It kind of went well with the surroundings,¡± Becky said. ¡°It looked right. Neither of our weddings would have had the ¡®prom' looks - none of that would have worked. It was a really comfortable dress, really well-made.¡±

 
 
The rows of buttons on the back of the dress were the talk of the wedding.

¡°I think when I walked down the church (aisle) ... I could hear all these ladies say, ¡®Look at the back of that dress!'¡± she said. ¡°I loved the satin on it, to tell you the truth, the antique satin. It wasn't important for me to wear refrigerator white. Everybody thought it was pretty cool that I was wearing my mom's wedding dress.¡±

Edith Madden lost no time in recovering the precious dress after Becky's wedding.

 
 
¡°My mom made me take it off¡± immediately after the wedding, Becky said. ¡°She took it right off, and it was not in my possession any more. The next time I saw it was back up in Maine.¡±

Even so, the lace cuffs mysteriously disappeared after Becky had them removed.

¡°The seamstress that did it out here (in Nevada) has no clue what happened to the lace,¡± she said.

Passing on

At the reading of Edith Madden's will after her death Sept. 4, 2006, Mackenzie Wescott was shocked to receive anything as the eldest granddaughter, much less the treasured gown.

¡°We go and run, we open the box, and we pull it out,¡± Mackenzie said of her excitement at the time, her face falling as she remembered seeing the tears, holes and stains.

¡°I think your heart sank, didn't it?¡± Cathy said.

Mackenzie nodded.

Late last summer, Cathy saw an advertisement in The Record Herald for antique dress restoration by Tio Seilhamer of Tio Designs in Waynesboro. The timing was perfect. Cathy asked Mackenzie to bring the dress to Greencastle the next time she visited, and by fall, the dress was in Seilhamer's hands.

¡°Tio, I think, looked at it, and her heart had sunk, too,¡± Cathy said. ¡°The next time I spoke with her, about three or four weeks later, and I went to visit her, she said, ¡®There's no question, we're going to restore this.'¡±

Seilhamer's excitement and hope for the dress helped the family see it in a different light.

¡°I was thinking, ¡®We'll make pillows out of it,'¡± Mackenzie said. ¡°I was just like, how could you restore something with those stains?¡±

Rebirth

Seilhamer was born in 1940, so this project had extra meaning because the Wescotts' dress was redesigned when she was a young girl in Thailand. She's no newcomer to sewing - she worked at her family's dress shop in Bangkok years ago, studied fashion design in Paris and Japan and has designed numerous formal and informal dresses through her company, Tio Designs, since retiring from her nursing career at Washington County Hospital in 2006.

The antique wedding dress was, to her, a welcome challenge.

¡°This dress is like me,¡± she said. ¡°It's special to me.¡±

Seilhamer spent more than a month strategizing how she would bring the gown back to life. She decided to shorten the sleeves to three-quarter length, using diamond shapes of the extra fabric to replace the yellow-stained cloth under the arms. It would have been hard, she said, to find new fabric to match.

¡°You can't find velvet like this anymore,¡± Seilhamer said just before Thanksgiving from the sewing room of her West Third Street home.

She removed a tattered section under the train, painstakingly reinforced aging and torn pieces with new cloth and specially cleaned the gown for Mackenzie to try on Friday, Nov. 23.

¡°Wow,¡± Cathy said, gazing in awe at her daughter in the dress that day. ¡°I just can't believe it's restored.¡±

Mackenzie has no wedding plans at present, but even so, Cathy reminded her daughter there is no pressure to wear the gown down the aisle. Mackenzie countered that she and Farran still want to wear it, at least, for photos. Her favorite detail on the dress was the now-lost lace bell cuffs, which she'll have restored for her wedding if she can find antique lace to match. Mackenzie also plans to wear her grandmother's cameo, likely on a ribbon around her neck to keep the fragile velveteen from tearing.

The dress looks restored now, but work must still be done so it can withstand movement. Seilhamer plans to reinforce the back underskirting, the part that dates to 1912, because it pulls apart at the slightest touch.

¡°It might take only three days to restore, but she gave it a lot of intense thought,¡± Cathy said. ¡°It was so far gone. The thought that went into it is remarkable. We're so thrilled.¡±