Listed in the North Wing section of the ca. 1812 Dinsmore and Neilson carpentry bill is a cellar stair.  Because these stairs were closely associated with the cellar kitchens, they appear to have been used to bring food up from the cellar and to take empty dishes back down.  At the start of the Restoration no visible traces of these stairs were seen and physical evidence suggested that they had been completely demolished during the ca. 1901 renovations.  As a result, no fragments of the stair survived that revealed what the stairs looked like and how they were framed.  In order to reconstruct these stairs the Restoration Team's first task was to investigate the original location of the stairs in hopes of finding physical evidence.