Category Archives: Houses

July 18, 2011

Cars at the Codman Estate

By daseger

I went out to Historic New England’s Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts this weekend to view what must have been hundreds of antique automobiles parked in its surrounding fields.  As all of you in this area know, Sunday was a hot and bright day, and all that chrome seemed to make it hotter and brighter!  I liked the juxtaposition of the twentieth-century cars with the eighteenth-century house; the Codman house, alternatively known as “The Grange”, was built around 1740 but considerably altered in the 1790s, so that it looks like a proper (though a bit boxy) Salem Federal house to an amateur architectural historian such as myself.

I am sorry to disappoint antique automobile aficionados, but I arrived a bit late and wanted to take as many photographs as possible so I didn’t gather that much information about the cars.  This is really a shame, as their owners (all men, as far as I could tell) were extremely eager to tell onlookers all about them—both the history of the car and their history with the car.  I wish I had had more time to hear every car tale.  For the most part, except for a few Jaguars and MGs, this was an American car meet-up:  all models of Fords, Studebakers, Hudsons, Packards, Cadillacs. Lots of trucks!  I did see a few original Beetles, but the only older BMW was decidedly late for the party and turned away.

Not a great picture, but very representative of the day:  great variety and gleaming chrome.

I kept checking back, but I never saw this guy, only his legs.

  For some reason, I was particularly taken with all the trucks on display. Vintage trucks are so much more attractive than the behemoths on the road today! This early REO truck got a lot of attention (I liked its wheels).


Lots of big, LONG mid-century American cars, both convertibles and hard-tops.  The Thunderbirds seemed particularly numerous and beautiful, both inside and out.

My very favorite (despite Mr. Nader), the Corvair, and a perfect Packard.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Houses

July 17, 2011

A Turned Out Tavern

By daseger

This major fundraising event for the Museums of Old York, the annual Decorator Show House, opened this weekend and runs through August 13.  This is the 22nd Show House, and it’s a bit different from previous ones in that it is not a Shingle cottage on the coast but rather a former colonial tavern turned homestead in York Village. Very appropriate both  for York and for Old York (as we used to call this 100+ year-old museum/preservation organization), which stewards 9 colonial structures.

The house that has been referred to as the Emerson House since its acquisition by a family of that name after the American Revolution began its life as the Woodbridge Tavern around 1719.  It has been adapted and expanded in quite a dramatic fashion over the centuries, but you can still see the tavern origins in the house’s front rooms.  I went to the preview party the other night and particularly liked the front paneled parlor, decked out in black-and-tan.  Above that room is a “bedchamber” with an eighteenth (or early nineteenth-?) century stenciled floor which you can see peeking out from under its protective floor-covering.

A few pictures of the exterior:  one from circa 1880, when the house was situated (like all old houses) right on the main road; it was moved back after the turn of the century and also considerably expanded, so much so that it almost resembles a Colonial Revival house rather than a Colonial one.  The others I took last week.  The doorknocker decorates a particularly beautiful tavern door with original hinges, which you can only see from the interior (and I wasn’t allowed to photograph!)

1 Comment   |  tags: , | posted in History, Houses

July 16, 2011

A Grand Garden Estate in North Salem

By daseger

A century ago, North Salem (still sometimes referred to by its colonial name:  Northfields) was a horticultural hotspot, with several large private gardens, the “garden cemetery” Greenlawn, and the remnants of the Manning Orchard in its midst.  On Dearborn Street, where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s uncle Robert Manning had established his nursery earlier in the previous century (and where Hawthorne himself briefly lived) there was a grand garden estate that was connected to some of Salem’s most prominent mercantile families:  the Dodges, the Bertrams, and the Emmertons.

The house around which this garden estate was created still stands on Dearborn Street but its garden is gone, divided up into house lots in the 1950s and 1960s.  A circular street now exists where once paths lead from the house to the North River through a meticulously landscaped garden.  According to Bryant Tolles, author of Architecture in Salem, the house’s origins are somewhat shrouded in mystery.  Its columns give it a Greek Revival appearance but apparently the date 1790 is scratched on an interior plaster wall. The documented history of the house begins with Pickering Dodge, Jr. in the 1830s:  the son of  wealthy Salem merchant with a Federal seat on Chestnut Street, he apparently wanted a “country house” (a mile or so down the road) where he could engage in horticultural pursuits.  He purchased the pre-existing Dearborn Street house, probably added the columns, and began laying out the garden.  Over the next century, the garden was expanded and embellished, probably most dramatically when the estate was in the possession of Jennie Bertram Emmerton, the fabulously wealthy daughter of Salem’s great merchant philanthropist Captain John Bertram and mother of House of Seven Gables Settlement Association Caroline Emmerton, in the 1880s.

In back and on both sides of the house was the lush garden, revealed by the photographs and plans produced for the Works Progress Administration’s Historic American Building Survey around 1940. From what we can see of it, the garden still looks pretty good, but there is an evident sense of neglect about the place, probably best represented by the “leaning” octagonal summerhouse.

All historic photographs from the Library of Congress’s Built in America collection.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in History, Houses, Salem

July 10, 2011

Map Rooms

By daseger

The phrase “Map Room” conjures up images of the headquarters of a strategic military command or a rare book library, but map bedrooms run in my family for at least several generations, from Great-Great Uncle Morris’s dark map-lined bedroom off the kitchen in the old Cape house of my mother’s family to the present-day bedrooms in my parents’ house in York Harbor and that of my brother and his partner in Rhinebeck, New York.  I have dormer bedrooms on the third floor that are perfect candidates for a map room but have yet to get around to it:  as a distant observer of the creation of these map rooms, I know that in both cases it was not an easy process!

First up is the York Harbor map room which is a second-floor corner bedroom wallpapered with maps by my mother and then carefully restored by my stepmother several decades later.  My mother used standard National Geographic maps, yellow nautical charts with New England coastlines, and “historical” maps of Great Britain which she purchased by sending over her request and a blank check.

Now for my brother’s map room, another second-floor bedroom which has an interesting sloping ceiling, kind of the reverse of dormers.  He too used National Geographic maps, along with city maps, State Department maps, and French and Italian road maps from the 1950s and 1960s.  According to him there are tons of considerations you must take into account when making your map room:  the size and shape of the map, whether it has a border, content, and process.  He applied three coats of polyurethane after his placement was completed, sanding in between.

If you don’t want to bother with all that, you can just buy map wallpaper or decals, or blow up one map for a single wall as opposed to a whole room.  You often see such examples in shelter magazines, like this room in a recent House Beautiful:

Attractive but obviously not as impressive as a custom map room.  And now from the present and the attainable to the inaccessible past and future, a few fantastic map rooms:  the sixteenth-century map room of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome and New York photographer Lori Nix‘s futuristic diorama of a map room gone feral.

10 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Design, Houses

July 6, 2011

Lady Pepperell and Her House

By daseger

On our way up to York Harbor last week we stopped at one of my very favorite houses, the Lady Pepperell House in Kittery Point.  I can’t remember when I first saw this house, but by my teens I was biking over from York to gaze at it and sneak around the grounds.  It just seemed so effortlessly elegant and graceful, when compared to both the colonial architecture of York Village and the Victorian cottages of York Harbor.  We didn’t have to sneak around this time, as the owner graciously let us walk around the grounds and take some photographs.

Dolphins over the front door!

The house was built in 1760 by the newly-widowed Lady Mary Hirst Pepperell, and its architectural history has already been carefully recounted by The Down East Dilettante.  Actually I find myself a bit more interested in the lady than the house at this point in my life, for some reason.  Lady Mary appears to have been a woman who was surrounded by very powerful and ambitious men all her life, until the latter part, when she clearly lived life on her own terms.  She also had solid Salem connections:  her paternal grandfather William Hirst was a prosperous Salem planter and her maternal grandfather, the diarist and Judge Samuel Sewall, was on the bench during the Witch Trials.  Her father, Grove Hirst, apparently made a fortune as a Boston merchant, making her a very good catch for her husband, the up-and-coming William Pepperell, also a successful merchant (out of Kittery, then part of Massachusetts) who would go on to reap military and noble honors after he organized and led the New England expedition that captured the French garrison at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in 1745 and became the first colonial Baronet shortly thereafter.  And so Mary became a Lady, although many references establish that her privileged Boston background and education had already made her one.

Two of Mary’s and William’s four children died in infancy, prompting her to write the poignant poem A Lamentation &c. On the Death of a Child.  Their son Andrew died in early adulthood, leaving only one surviving child, Elizabeth Pepperell Sparhawk.  Shortly after Sir William’s appointment as acting Governor of Massachusetts and Lieutenant General in 1759, he too died, leaving Mary a very wealthy widow.  She left the older Pepperell family homestead in Kittery to her grandson (who was made heir to the residue of the Pepperell fortune with the condition that abandon the surname of his birth, Sparhawk, for Pepperell) and promptly built her Georgian mansion.  When the War of Independence began 15 years later, the conspicuous Tory William Sparhawk Pepperell fled America for Britain (where he was rewarded with a new Baronet title) but his grandmother “weathered the storms of Revolution” at her home.  Mary Hirst Pepperell died in 1789, with the New England Gazetteer noting a few years later that her natural and acquired powers were said to be very respectable, and she was much admired for her wit and sweetness of manners.

A few images of Lady Pepperell and her house from Everett Schermerhorn Stackpole’s Old Kittery and her Families (1903), and two early nineteenth-century views of the house from the Detroit Publishing Company (Library of Congress) and Illustrated Memories of Portsmouth, York, York Harbor, York Beach, Kittery, Isles of Shoals, New Castle, and Rye (after 1900):

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Houses

July 5, 2011

Independence Day Idyll in York Harbor

By daseger

We spent the long holiday weekend in my hometown, York Harbor, Maine, with family and friends. Part of the larger and older town of York, the Harbor is a former Gilded Age “summer colony” where wealthy families from Boston, New York and Philadelphia whiled away their summers in 20-room shingle “cottages”, most of which still stand.  I grew up in one of these cottages, only partially winterized then and now, even though we lived in there all year long and my parents still do.  Like much of coastal York, York Harbor was and is a very different, much livelier place in the summer, and it seems to have been specially created for a warm, sunny and celebratory time such as this past weekend.

Some very random views of York Harbor, past and present, beginning with displays of the weekend colors, on a meticulously restored building on York Street, our family house (front and back, morning and early evening), and in our neighbors’ patriotic garden:

More color, and more cottages:

The first (real) cottages in York Harbor, built in the early eighteenth century, today and in the 1920s.

Historic New England’s Sayward-Wheeler House (1718), where I interned in college.

Lots of antique cars were out and about this past weekend, including a BMW 2002 which I have long coveted.

The York Harbor Reading Room, built in 1910 as a place for men to read newspapers, smoke cigars, and generally escape their families, and some men doing just that from the New England Magazine of that same year.

Artistic impressions from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries:  Martin Johnson Heade’s luminescent painting and small bronze beachcombers in the park overlooking York Harbor Beach.

Martin Johnson Heade, York Harbor, Coast of Maine, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago

9 Comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Houses

February 15, 2011

Save Sherlock’s House

By daseger

Actually it’s the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose country house is endangered. Undershaw House, built by Doyle in the Surrey countryside south of London in 1897 for his  invalid wife and family, is threatened by partition and “redevelopment” and an energetic preservation effort has emerged to secure its protection: the Save Undershaw Preservation Trust.  Photographs of the house in 1900 and today are from the Trust’s website and the BBC, along with one showing the Doyle family in residence at the height of a Surrey summer from the New York Public Library. 

Historic Preservation must be a local effort, but often a national, or even global, focus can really help.  Salem has certainly confronted its preservation challenges in the past, from the threatened “Witch House” (which I still prefer to call the Jonathan Corwin House) in the 1940s to urban renewal 20 years later.  Local preservationists were on the front line in both cases, but a timely article by famed architectural writer Ada Louise Huxtable in the New York Times (“Urban Renewal Plan Threatens Historic Sites in Salem, Mass.”, October 13, 1965) certainly helped to prevent the total levelling of downtown.  More recently, Walmart abandoned its plans to build a store on the Wilderness Battlefield in Virginia under pressure from a coalition of local and national preservation organizations, including the Civil War Trust.  I imagine there are voices in Britain saying we have so many old, Edwardian, authors’, country, etc….houses, we can’t save them all  but it looks like a pretty special house to me.

Arthur Conan Doyle sold Undershaw after the successive deaths of his wife and son, but in the two decades that the family was in residence he published several Sherlock stories and novels, including the Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in the Strand Magazine from 1901-4.  A Strand cover is pictured below, along with one of Sidney Paget’s illustrations from Baskervilles, a sketch of Arthur Conan Doyle at the height of his fame, and–just to establish our Salem interest and connection–the box for Parker Brothers’ Sherlock Holmes Game from 1904.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Houses