Tag Archives: Architecture

May 27, 2025

White Houses of Thomaston

By daseger

We’re up in midcoast Maine for a long Memorial Day weekend and I spent an afternoon walking around Thomaston, which was the site of a very early English arrival in 1605: I’m not sure why this is not more heralded, or at least discussed. It became a very important shipbuilding town over the nineteenth century but for me, growing up in southern Maine, Thomaston had two associations: the prison and large white houses. The Maine State Prison at Thomaston was in operation from 1824 to 2002, and because of my adolescent preoccupation with the Isles of Shoals and the 1873 Smuttynose Murders I knew that the murderer, Louis Wagner, was held and executed at there. My other Thomaston association is far more pleasant: an impression of a succession of large white houses as we drove through on Route One. So I went back to look for the great white houses: there are indeed so many, and not just on the highway.

The most majestic white house of Thomaston (likely very prominent among my childhood impressions) is actually a recreation: of General Henry Knox’s Montpelier. The Revolutionary War hero was married to an heir of the Waldo Patent, which had allocated a large chunk of midcoast Maine to Boston merchant Samuel Waldo in the early 18th century. Waldo’s grandaughter Lucy Knox became his sole heir as her family, the Fluckers, were notable Loyalists who left the country at the onset of the Revolution. After Knox had finished his military and government service, he and Lucy retired to Thomaston and built Montpelier in 1794. They lived there until his death in 1806, after which the house was occupied by members of the Knox family until 1854, when it was sold. Several decades later it was demolished to my way for the Knox and Lincoln Railroad, and recreated in 1930 as a perfect Colonial Revival monument: now it houses the Henry Knox Museum. Was Montpelier the inspiration for all the stately white houses of Thomaston or was it James Overlock (1813-1906), who designed and built scores of solid structures in vernacular and revival styles with all the new building technologies of his day? Likely both, with a healthy measure of New England traditionalism, but all these white houses are certainly a testament to Thomaston’s shipbuilding wealth in the nineteenth century, and to the preservation efforts of their successive owners.

Just one sample of Thomaston’s white houses.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Travel

May 19, 2025

Norman Street Will Break Your Heart

By daseger

Norman Street has been an important street in Salem for centuries, serving as an east-west way first to the harbor, then to the train station, and linking downtown and the city’s west-lying residential neighborhoods. It was once tree-lined, along with Georgian colonial houses interspersed with shops. It had a bit of a reputation as an American “Harley Street,” with several prominent physicians in residence, and it even has an eerie element, referenced by an entry in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebook for 1839 in which he recounts a story told to him by Custom House inspector William Pike, who “Another time — or, as I think, two or three other times — saw the figure of a man standing motionless for half an hour in Norman street, where the headless ghost is said to walk.” Norman street was also Samuel McIntire-central: Fiske Kimball asserted that the great architect and woodcarver was born at #21, and both his father and brother lived (and worked) on the street. Despite its heritage, and because of its continuous role as a central corridor, Norman Street was very vulnerable to one of the most dominant forces of the twentieth century: the car. From about 1930, it was transformed from a human-scaled city street into a wide suburban “connector,” a process that was intensified with the construction of two large buildings at its eastern and western ends, a new U.S. Post Office building and the headquarters for the Holyoke Mutual Fire Insurance Company. These buildings wiped out more than 50 residences on their side of the street and adjacent streets, even more after the Holyoke building’s expansion in the 1970s. On the north side of Norman, the New England Telephone Company initiated a similar cascade of demolition commencing several decades earlier. Business and residency had co-existed on Norman Street since Salem’s founding, but these larger businesses brought more workers and more traffic. The street was widened considerably, causing it to lose much of its residential charm, and one by one the remaining colonial houses fell, along with all of its trees. There is no question that the car was the major culprit in this unfortunate transformation, but Norman Street is also a study in how little control a municipality has over urban development if it does not have robust planning tools in place, or if it chooses not to utilize those tools.  When I look at Norman Street today it appears that the City of Salem seems to have essentially written it off, leaving it to landlords and speeding cars. If you’re a preservationist or a pedestrian, Norman Street will break your heart, especially if you know what was there before.

Norman Street past.

Looking down (east) Norman Street in the 1880s and 1910s, Lee MSS & Frank Cousins slide, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum; the Cox House, 1890s, Dionne Collection, Salem State University Archives & Special Collections. EIGHT LARGE BRICK OVEN FIREPLACES in the Felt House, an “antiquarian’s delight.” Looking west towards Chestnut Street, Lee MSS, Phillips Library and “Newsboys” at the corner of Washington and Norman Streets, c. 1910, Salem State University Archives & Special Collections. The very famous Mansfield House with its carved stair and mantel, Cousins photos and Boston Architectural College Yearbook for 1925; wallpaper from Dr. Cook’s famous house on Norman Street, the Magazine Antiques, June 1925; Postcard of the new Holyoke Mutual Fire Insurance Company headquarters at the corner of Summer and Norman Streets, 1936, SSU Archives & Special Collections; the Texaco station across the street, 1979, MACRIS; New condos at the northeastern end of Norman Street, 1982, Boston Globe and SSU Archives & Special Collections.

The last two photos of condo conversion and construction in the 1980s represent a positive change for Norman Street: the return of residents! The business blocks and setbacks, along with the widening of the street, have certainly left their mark, however, as you can see from the photographs below which I took this weekend. It’s hard to recognize this once charming street. A couple of years ago, I kind of got my hopes up for Norman, and that’s why heartbreak is in my title (and also the description of the Felt House above). Responding to the crush of traffic at the terrible intersection of Norman and Summer, the City installed a mini roundabout, and I thought this might be the start of a concerted effort to recognize the street as a proper entrance corridor, but no, it’s just a circle of fake brick in the middle of the road. Drivers still get so frustrated by this intersection that they tend to speed up before and after, which is why I’m always anxious about crossing Norman Street. Bordering this circle are beautiful Chestnut Street houses on the west side and the hulking former Holyoke building  and an 18th century house with a strident 21st century addition on the east: this space sends a mixed message! Last summer, the weeds surrounding the Holyoke building reached up to its lower windows, and signs and litter are always strewn about. Its owner has had difficulty finding commercial tenants, and so part of the building (I think the original 1930s building) will now be consigned to a homeless center for families operated by Centerboard, the largest housing provider in Massachusetts. A proposed new housing development for the Texaco site across the street has just been granted significant tax credits by the Commonwealth, and so will now go forward. At the very least, this project (you can see a rendering here, but it’s from a couple of years ago) should eliminate that hole along the streetscape, but I hope the design does more than that. In fact, I think that this new building is Norman Street’s only hope.

Norman Street present.

 

It would be nice if that “Caution X-Walk Ahead” sign was positioned towards drivers in the street rather than pedestrians on the sidewalk.

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May 5, 2025

My Top Ten Books on Salem’s Architectural History

By daseger

I thought I would combine my traditional spring book list with the Preservation Month of May and put together a list of my top ten books on Salem architecture in historical context. I’m a rank amateur admirer of New England architecture up to about 1840 or 1850 but a bit more focused on the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when it comes to Salem structures. While I am offended by every new Salem building which is erected there’s enough inventory from this golden era to keep me enthralled—for now: I’m not at all convinced that our city’s self-professed preservation ethic still holds. These are the books about Salem houses from which I have learned the most and to which I return the most often: some are just picture books but I find myself going back to them again and again for some reason. But this first book, Fiske Kimball’s study of Samuel McIntire, defined architectural history for me. I love Dean Lahikainen’s more recent Samuel McIntire: Woodcarver of Salem too, but Kimball is always near. I’m a big fan of Frank Cousins, of course, but I share the view of his contemporaries at the Essex Institute that his McIntire book was a bit slight—and so they commissioned Kimball. I do rely on Cousins’ (and Phil M. Riley’s) Colonial Architecture in Salem quite a bit though, so it’s number two. I’ll read anything by Frank Chouteau Brown, and the compilation Colonial architecture in Massachusetts : from material originally published as the White pine series of architectural monographs, edited by Russell F. Whitehead and Frank Chouteau Brown (1977) includes one of his classic Salem articles. Likewise, I will read anything by his fellow architect Frank E. Wallis, who came up from Boston to measure and draw Salem exteriors and interiors often in his early career. Wallis was a big contributor to a succession of portfolios of measured drawings published as The Georgian Period and edited by William Rotch Ware which were first published in The American Architect and Building News. These portfolios are GORGEOUS—my former neighbors had one and let me peruse it for a bit: I have no idea why I don’t have at least one myself!

I carry Edwin Whitefield’s books with me in the car everywhere, just because they are so charming. You never know when I will find myself in a town with one of his houses!  Albert MacDonald’s Old Colonial Brick Houses of New England, which has the long subtitle edited and published with the purpose of furthering a wider knowledge of the beautiful forms of domestic architecture developed during the time of the colonies and the early days of the republic is pretty much a picture book too, as is Halliday’s Collection of Photographs of Colonial and Provincial Houses 1628-1775. Early American Architecture by Hugh Morrison is rather old-fashioned but also very practical—it’s the only book on this list that has anything to say about construction. And finally, this is BORING I know, but if you’re interested in Salem architecture you must realize that it was written about quite a bit in early architectural periodicals, so I felt that I should include this classic bibliography.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Salem

March 26, 2025

Virginia Green

By daseger

Sorry for the delay in posting part II of my spring break road trip: I came back with a nasty flu so re-entry and re-engagement have been stalled. I’m feeling a bit better today and I thought it would make me feel better yet by looking at my photos. From the Eastern Shore, we traveled over the scary Chesapeake Bay bridge/tunnel up to Williamsburg for a few days, then we visited my sisters-in-law in Richmond. It was a real treat to stay in the Williamsburg Inn, and I do like Williamsburg in general even if it has its “history disneyland” qualities, but its highlights on this particular trip were definitely the George Wythe House and the museums. On the way up to Richmond, we stopped at the Berkeley Plantation on the James River, a beautiful and very history-rich site. I always love the capital, and we also visited Monticello up in Charlottesville, which I haven’t been to since I was in college. On the long drive back myself this past Saturday, I stopped on Virginia’s northern neck to visit Menokin, a plantation ruin in the midst of an interpretive restoration. As I drove north from there, I started feeling a bit gray but was thinking mostly of green: as we drove down we saw increasing green and on my ride home I was seeing less. That’s one of the things I like most about my March break trips down south: we won’t see that green in Salem for a while.

Four plantations: Eyre Hall on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Berkeley and one of its “dependencies,”, Monticello & Menokin.

Eyre Hall, overlooking the Chesapeake on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, is a well-preserved, privately-owned 18th-century plantation whose owners open up its gardens to visitors, so we drove right in and I snuck a photograph of the house. The gardens are supposedly beautiful, but it was a a bit early for blooms. Berkeley has direct connections to the Harrison presidential family and to the Civil War, and is also a site rich in the history and documentation of slavery. There is also a claim to America’s “First Thanksgiving” in 1619, which I’m not going to explore because I’m from Massachusetts. Monticello was of course Thomas Jefferson’s beloved home, and he also has a tie to Berkeley and to the George Wythe house in Williamsburg. The Hemings family is also showcased at Monticello, which was the busiest site we visited by far: it was kind of difficult to take in the house on our packed tour. Menokin, as you can see, is currently a ruin, but its restorers have big plans. I took a lot of notes on interpretation over the week, but I haven’t really sorted them out and I’m not quite up to it, so I’m going to reserve my thoughts on inclusion/exclusion (and Thomas Jefferson!) for later.

Colonial Williamsburg: including the George Whythe (rhymes wth Smith) house, the Capitol and Governor’s Palace, and the museums.

And a view of the University of Virginia’s Lawn from the Rotunda (which I never knew you could spot from Monticello before last week).

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March 8, 2025

A Salem Women’s History Tour

By daseger

For International Women’s Day today, I thought I would put together a walking tour of Salem women’s history. Of course, every street and every building in Salem has traces of women’s history, most of it hidden from us. I would like to include more than “notable” women on my tour, and I think I’ve busted out that category a bit, but there’s still a lot of work to do and a lot more to learn. I decided to limit the tour to existing buildings, so it definitely skews towards the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I read revews of Salem walking tours occasionally, mostly because I want some sign of hope that Salem tourists are interested in topics other than the Salem Witch Trials, and that’s the number one complaint: we stood on the sidewalk looking at a parking lot. If they were interested in something other than the Salem Witch Trials, they would no doubt see more buildings and places than parking lots. So my tour is all about buildings, and the women who lived in them. Beware if you want to do it yourself: it’s a long tour—I easily got in my 10,000 steps!

We’re starting on Derby Street, right next to the Custom House, at 1) The Brookhouse Home for Aged Women. Not only is this a McIntire building and an early (1861) example of a privately-established residential home for senior women, but it was also the home of Massachusetts congressman and Secretary of the Navy Benjamin W. Crowninshield, whose wife Mary was quite the Washington socialite: her letters are very revealing about the social scene during the administrations of Presidents Madison and Monroe in general and Dolley Madison in particular. Mary Crowninshield spared no detail, either of drapery or dress trimmings.

Then it’s on to another impressive brick Federal house turned social institution, 2) the Woman’s Friends Society on Hawthorne Boulevard. Founded in 1876 as a residence and employment “bureau” for younger women, the Society acquired its impressive brick double house from Salem’s famed philanthropist Captain John Bertram and his daughter Jennie (Bertram) Emmerton, the mother of Caroline Emmerton of House of the Seven Gables fame. So it is the Emmerton House, and it continues in its original mission. Lots of women’s stories to tell here, as it also became a center for social work, craft eduction, and public health initiatives.

We walk westerly on Charter Street until we come to the so-called 3) Grimshawe House where the famous Peabody sisters lived and where Nathaniel Hawthorne courted his future wife, Sophia. This house was built around 177o and educators Elizabeth and Mary lived here between 1835-1841 with said Sophia, their parents and brother. It has been in decline for most of the second half of the twentieth century, serving as a eerie gray neighbor of the Charter Street cemetery, but last year signs of restoration (and color) appeared.

Now we’re walking towards the McIntire Historic District along Front and Norman Streets and then we’re on Chestnut. There are quite few houses on this street worth noting in relation to women’s history, but I limited myself to 4) Mrs. Parker’s house at #8, 5) Hamilton Hall; 6) the Phillips House, and 7) a Caroline Emmerton-commisioned house. My neighbors just across the street live in the beautiful house occupied by Mary Saltonstall Parker, an author and artist at the turn of the last center. Mrs. Parker loved traditional crafts and antiques and wrote about both in a succession of small books which reflect the Colonial Revival movement, but she was also a “maker” herself and one of her embroidered samplers was on the cover of House Beautiful in 1915. Hamilton Hall is a veritable monument to women’s history, including the work of the Remond family, all those festive fundraising fairs in the nineteenth century, debutante assemblies and the lecture series sponsored by the Ladies Committee in the twentieth. And schools! Dancing schools and “dame schools,” including that of Lucy Stone in the 1880s below. I certainly learned a lot about a variety of women working at the Phillips House this past summer, including ladies of the Phillips family and their staff, but I wanted to spotlight this house at was also the home of Caroline Howard King, the author of one of the most popular (and literary) Salem memoirs, When I lived in Salem. Before the house was the Phillips House, it was actually a genteel boarding house, and Caroline lived there from the 1890s until her death in 1907, I believe. The last house below is Caroline Emmerton’s commissioned copy of the Derby House by architect William Rantoul: it completes the street.

Over on Essex Street, we stop at the venerable 8) David Mason House⁠. Notable for its namesake occupant’s role in Leslie’s Retreat in 1775, more than a century later it was purchased and restored by the prolific author and suffragist Grace Atkinson Oliver, who also served as a member of Salem’s School Board. Across the street is the 9) Quaker Cemetery, where one can reflect on the persecution of Salem’s Quakers in the seventeenth century, including Cassandra Southwick and her daughter Provided. Further down the street towards downtown are 10) the Cabot-Endicott-Low House, childhood home of Salem’s only “dollar princess,” Mary Endicott Chamberlain Carnegie, pictured below just before she presented her stepdaughters to Queen Victoria, of whom she was reportedly a favorite, 11) Caroline Emmerton’s stately house and 12) that of Susan Osgood, another preservationist of sorts, who was the niece of Salem’s first, Joseph Barlow Felt, who was married to Abigail Adams’ niece, also named Abigail. Because the Felts had no children, a lot of her aunt’s things ended up with Susan, including items that Abigail Felt inherited from HER aunt Abigail Adams. Susan donated Abigail’s Inauguration dress (+ slippers!!!) to the Smithsonian Institution, where they reside in the First Ladies exhibit.

Through the Ropes Garden and over to Federal Street and the 13) home of Salem’s first female physician, Dr. Sarah Sherman. She was an amazing woman, who was also elected to the School Board in 1879, the first “school suffrage” election in Salem. Then we will walk towards downtown, cross North Street, and visit two Lynde Street houses, home to two accomplished Marys. First up is the 14) house of Mary Bradford Hagar, who served as the chair of the Salem Ladies Centennial Committee in the 1870s, which organized Salem”s exhibits for the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Her committee did such a great job that it won national acclaim, and 100 years later in 1975, the Essex Institute mounted a re-exhibition. Next is the 15) house of Mary Harrod Northend, the prolific author of everything “Old Salem” in the early twentieth century. A very Colonial Revival street!

Salem walking tours always stop at the 16) Lyceum Building, now Turner’s Seafood Restaurant, on Church Street as it was supposedly the site of the first Witch Trial victim Bridget Bishop’s orchards, but I would include it on my tour because it was the site of so many meetings of Salem’s Suffrage Society from the 1870s on. I’m cheating a bit here as the present Lyceum building was not the one in which Salem’s Suffragists met: there was an earlier wooden structure on the same site. Like so many sites in central Salem, it is historic in more ways than one. Walking towards the Common, I think I would stop at the Peabody Essex Museum’s 17) Bray House, because it is so cute and also because Salem’s most successful commercial artist, Sarah Symonds, had a workship and retail space there.

I want to include at least one house on Washington Square on my tour, so I think I’m going with the present-day 18) Bertram House. What does this former home for aged men and current assisted living facility for both genders have to do with women’s history? My link is another Endicott and preservationist, Clara Endicott Sears (contemporary and cousin of Mary Endicott), who wrote a charming childhood memoir of life in this house with her grandparents entitled Early personal reminiscences in the old George Peabody mansion in Salem, Massachusetts (1956). The Bertram House overlooks the Common, where a grand historical pageant was present for the Salem Tercentenary in July of 1926: its author was Nellie Stearns Messer, who lived at 19) 15 Oliver Street, pictured just below. By all accounts that I have read and heard, she seems to have been a very active mid-century public historian, before that term was used. In addition to the Tercentenary pageant, she also wrote very substantive histories of the Tabernacle Church and Ropes House. We then walk northward towards Pleasant Street, and the 20) home of one of Salem’s most notable entrepreneurs, Charlotte Fairfield. Charlotte ran a coal company that undercut Salem’s coal cartel in the first decade of the twentieth century, and received lots of attention in the Boston papers for doing so. Independent indeed.

For the last leg of the tour we’re going to swing over to Pickman Street to see the building which houses the 21) Esther C. Mack Industrial School for Girls from the 1890s through the 1920s. Established by a large bequest in the will of its namesake, the school taught what we would call domestic rather than “industrial” skills, mostly sewing and cooking, to young girls and had quite a few collaborations with the Woman’s Friend Society. The photograph below, by Mary Harrod Northend, is of a sewing class. So many progressive women in Salem at this time: I haven’t even touched on the House of the Seven Gables except for showcasing several properties associated with its founder, Caroline Emmerton, or any of the public health and cultural initiatives of this era. This is why I get more than a little frustrated with the continuing almost-exclusive focus on 1692 in this city: it excludes so much history in general, and so much women’s history in particular. But we’ve walked enough for one tour, so I propose crossing the Common, perhaps taking a peak and the 22) birthplace of prominent Salem artist Fidelia Bridges, and then popping into the tavern at the Hawthorne Hotel for a drink, and a toast to the ladies.

Map made by John Northey for the Bicentennial in 1976: as you can see, there’s a lot more land to cover.

10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Historic Trails, Salem

December 30, 2024

Mills Mansion Shines

By daseger

We arrived at my brother’s house in Rhinebeck on Christmas Eve, ate, drank and were merry for two days, and then I woke up on the 26th eager to explore yet another Hudon Valley mansion, what I always want to do when I’m in the area. There are loads of Hudson Valley posts if you want to see past tours: I apologize for the unwieldlyness of my now 14-year-old blog, but you can find most things by keyword searches in the search box. Eventually I will get around to providing an index. The house I chose to visit was ironically located very close to my brother’s house, yet I had never cared to stop in. It’s a big classical revival Beaux-Arts building called the Mills Mansion, located in the midst of the Staatsburgh State Historic Site on the river. I had hiked the trails that used to constitute its vast estate estate, but never ventured through its doors. I pictured enormous square drab rooms, but my vision was wrong. The tour was labeled a “Gilded Age Christmas” and it was indeed very glittery! My brother and brother-in-law came along with me (along with my husband), and they confirmed that the last time they had been in the mansion it was a bit tired, but what we all encountered was a very engaging space, encompassing the efforts of both state staff obviously, but also a very active Friends group. All the docents in the building were so enthusiastic, so obviously happy to be there and share the stories of the mansion and the Mills family. It reminded me of my colleagues at the Phillips House this past summer.

The Mansion was just one home of Ogden and Ruth Livingston Mills, very wealthy members of the fabled NYC 400. Mr. Mills inherited a California gold rush fortune, and Mrs. Mills was New York aristocracy: her Livingston lineage went back to the seventeenth century in the Hudson River Valley. I really can’t think of a better recipe for a Gilded Age couple! She had inherited a much smaller Greek Revival structure generally called Livingston Manor, and in 1895 she and her husband commissioned the prestigious New York City architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White to remodel and enlarge it, a mission which was accomplished in only one year. It was expanded from 25 rooms to 79, and 14 bathrooms were added–if you want to see and study Gilded Age bathrooms, this is really the place! The new Mills Mansion, called Staatsburgh at this time, had its own coal-powered electric plant and central heating but also 23 fireplaces, some of which are quite baronial as you will see below. All the usual classical details were added to the exterior of both the two new wings and the original house in the center, and a huge portico tied everything together. The entire complex was not only a family home and guest palace, but also a working estate of 1600 acres, with gardens and greenhouses, a dairy barn, and additional outbuildings. The entirety, including all of the furnishings, was donated to the State of New York by the Mills’ daughter Gladys Mills Phipps in 1938, following the dearth of her parents in the 1920s. And so a large chuck of riverfront land was preserved for all of us to enjoy. The obligation to steward was also granted to New York State of course, and given the size of the Mansion, that is probably a constant process: several docents, with obvious pride and excitement, informed me that they had just won a grant to restore the period kitchen so that it could be added to the tour. It was obvious to me that both material preservation and interpretation were ongoing initiatives: an exhibition space adjoining the visitor entrance presents the site in a broad social and geographical context, and then you proceed upstairs and get wowed.

The grand reception rooms: library, drawing room, central hall, dining room, service pantry off dining room, a “golden” drawing room.

Staatsburgh/ Mills Mansion was the Mills’ “autumn” house, and when they were in residence, they had lots of guests, attended to by a staff of 25. The bedrooms upstairs were separated and designated to single men and single women guests and married couples: bathrooms were interspersed liberally. There’s a rather widespread belief that Edith Wharton, who was very familiar with this region and its social scene, had used the Mansion for her depiction of Bellomont in the House of Mirth so I was looking for Lily Bart’s bedroom of course. That would make Lily’s hosts, the Trenors, Ruth and Ogden Mills, and Ruth does have a certain “ambitious hostess” reputation. Apparently she was very pleased that she could secure the services of celebrity architect Stanford White for her project before he designed the neighboring Vanderbilt Mansion. Ever the gracious hostess, Mrs. Mills even provided her guests with a safe in which they could deposit their valuables upon arrival.

Guest bedrooms and bathrooms and the safe.

The Mills Mansion docents did not stress Mrs. Mills’ competitive hospitality but rather her family life, and her fraility. She had a heart condition, so her bedroom, an extravagant raspberry damask confection, was located on the first floor adjacent to the reception rooms rather than upstairs. Her husband’s bedroom was just across the way, with a connecting bathroom in between. A smaller staircase connected these rooms to the Mills children’s bedroom upstairs, and doors could be closed to create a more private family “townhouse,” which I thought was pretty clever. All in all, our visit to the very festive Mills Mansion was the beginning of a perfect day after Christmas.

The Mills Family’s “townhouse” within the Mansion.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Culture

December 23, 2024

Merry Christmas from Salem

By daseger

No deep dive here, just some photographs of Salem at Christmas time: my neighborhood, my house, other houses. It’s been a tough semester and a tough month, and I’m tired. I did Thanksgiving, so my brother and brother-in-law are on for Christmas and we’re off to the Hudson River Valley tomorrow. Many of us in Salem have experienced a loss today, and these pictures make me happy: I hope they give pleasure to you as well. Salem is really beautiful in December in general and at Christmas time in particular: at that other holiday she is wearing a costume and not her true self.

Love this wreath!

We were fortunate to be invited to a dinner at the Pickering House before the Hamilton Hall dance, which has been held since at least World War II, with similar events before—way before! I hope these two ladies don’t mind their inclusion in this post, I was just so impressed by their gowns–and their purses!

Home–and away we go. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

P.S. MANTELS! Thanks, Patricia.

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December 9, 2024

Christmas in Salem 2024

By daseger

This past weekend was very busy: there was the annual Christmas in Salem tour of historic homes decorated for the holidays, Christmas teas at the Phillips House, and my new neighbors hosted a very festive party across the street. I love the Christmas season in Salem: it commences a period of relative radio silence by the witch-profiteers although we definitely have more dark stores than light in Salem now. The Christmas in Salem tour is venerable: it has been the major fundraiser for our even more venerable preservation organization, Historic Salem, Inc. (HSI), for decades, and before that it was run by the Visiting Nurses Association. It’s always been the best alternative/corrective to Witch City and it is popular: it’s a tradition for many Salem residents but also visitors from across New England. I’ve served as a guide or house captain for years, I’ve had two houses on the tour, and I seldom miss it: a couple of years ago I was housebound with sciatica and miserable, both because I was in pain and missing out. It’s a huge effort, both by Historic Salem in general and its Christmas in Salem committee in particular, and of course by the homeowners; an amazing expression of generosity and community by all. The tour varies its neighborhood focus and theme every year and this year it was centered on the core of the McIntire Historic District, Federal and Essex Streets, and named “Brick by Brick”. This name wasn’t entirely clear to me (because I was thinking brick houses) until I got the program, which highlights Salem’s brick sidewalks, which have been quite endangered up to the formation of Historic Salem’s Brick Committee and are now experiencing some much-needed restoration. So that’s another initiative to thank HSI for.

The Tour headquarters was the Assembly House, one of the Peabody Essex Museum houses which I haven’t been in for years. So I was excited, but it seems to have lost much of the texture which I remembered, so we didn’t linger long. The second-floor landing was always one of my favorite architectural features and that seemed the same. In general, the Federal Street houses were earlier and the Essex Street houses “Victorian,” with the exception the Corwin House, of course. There were several public buildings on the tour (besides the Corwin House, the First Church, Grace Church, and the Salem Athenaeum) but I skipped them in the interests of time. I heard they were decorated beautifully though, my loss! The decorations get ever more creative with each passing year: you might notice a cocktail subtext below.

Well, the pictures above represent most, but not all, of the tour houses on Federal and its off streets. The other thing that has always struck me about the Christmas in Salem tour is the value encompassed. We’re not talking about a mere six or seven buildings, but rather 14, along with a “bonus second visit to favorite house.” The value of this tour is also based in the sheer quality and diversity of the architecture: it’s always a great representative of the sheer quality and diversity of Salem’s architecture. And so on to some really stately Revival homes on Essex: an Italianate house with its own hill (always impressive) and the Balch House, Salem’s most distinguished Second Empire structure, which served as the city’s American Legion headquarters for much of the twentieth century (see black & white photo below, from PEM’s Phillips Library). These are very exuberant houses which have recently been “refreshed” and it was great to see them both so shiny and festive.

 

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Salem

November 18, 2024

Mint McIntire

By daseger

It’s always a big moment when a Salem house crafted by Samuel McIntire comes on the market, and that moment is approaching! Likely the most important McIntire house still in private hands, the very-storied Cook-Oliver House at 142 Federal Street, is coming up for sale quite soon. This house will certainly need considerable work, but my title is an attempt to epitomize the great creative and material efforts of its successive owners to preserve McIntire’s design and craftsmanship. The house was built by Captain Samuel Cook (1769-1861) whose span of life represents Salem’s spectucular maritime rise and fall. He was one of a score of Salem captains and merchants who earned great profits by re-exporting commodities from the East Indies to Europe in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, and only a year or so after the dramatic shipwreck of his ship Volusia off Cape Cod in early 1802 he was able to finance the construction of a house which spared no expense by all accounts. The fortunes of these men always seem so fluid to me! The carved detail, evident inside and out, was so notable in its time that there emerged a narrative which connected Captain Cook’s house to an even more notable McIntire construction: the short-lived Derby Mansion in the center of town. Salem’s merchant prince or King, Elias Hasket Derby, financed the construction of what looks like a proper manor house in his declining years, and it was completed according to the plans of Charles Bulfinch and Samuel McIntire in 1799, the very year he died. Given its central and conspicuous location (right in the middle of what is now called Derby Square), the mansion’s life was short: it was torn down in 1815 to make way for what eventually became the Old Town Hall or Market House. Even though Cook’s house was built a decade earlier, there persisted a story that some of the woodwork was somehow salvaged by him. There is a particular focus on the gateposts of the Cook House having Derby Mansion origins, repeated again and again and again in periodicals and monographs on old American houses until Fiske Kimball dismissed the connection as “legend” in his 1940 study, Mr. Samuel McIntire, Carver: the Architect of Salem.

I was thrilled when my friend Michael Selbst, a very busy Salem realtor with the listing, texted me with an invitation to view the house just before the election, and we went in two days afterwards: a welcome distraction! As you can see, it was a sunny day and the house glowed, despite the traces of moving activity all around. I think that this is the only McIntire house in Salem in which I have not entered before: it was kind of chilling (in a good way) because I had seen so many photographs and now here I was in the real house. It’s hard to explain just how lovely this house is and the photos will not do it justice: there’s something about the combination of the smaller scale and the very detailed woodwork. It is not by any means a small house (especially with its additions) but it has a more intimate presence than the other McIntire houses I have been in: I was actually and immediately reminded of Leonardo’s embrace of the classical concept of in all things is the measure of man. It’s a humanist house!

These two doorways, to the right (parlor) and left (dining room) just as you enter the house, have been photographed so often over the last century or so that I was a little starstruck upon my entrance. 

It is also, and has always been, a family home, and Michael and its owners hope it will be a family home again, with its essential structure and details preserved intact. Captain Cook and his wife Sarah (Sally) lived in the house until their deaths in the 1860s and then it passed on to their daughter Sally and her husband Henry Kemble Oliver, real Renaissance Man: a soldier, officer, civil servant, politican and musician who served successively as mayor of both Lawrence and Salem. Sally Oliver died in 1866, but Henry continued to live at 142 Federal Street until his death in 1885. Several owners later, the long tenure of Dr. and Mrs. Carroli saw the only “losses” for the house as the Dufour wallpaper in the parlor was donated to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England) in 1904 and a cornice to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1920s. There are apartment and porch additions to the back that did not alter the original structure in any way. The woodwork throughout looks to my eye exactly as it does in the many photographs that date from the early twentieth century. After spending a good part of last year working on the Colonial Revival chapter for our forthcoming book Salem’s Centuries, not always a pleasant task as it involved documenting the “stripping” of several Salem houses, it was nice to see so much in situ!

I got a little flustered in the parlor looking at a unique fireplace insert, so I didn’t get proper photos of the mantle or even much of the room! So I have included some HABS photos, as well as two Frank Cousins views from Historic New England and the New York Public Library Digital Gallery with the Dufour paper, which was removed in 1904. The mantle remains the same! A lovely Palladian window on the second-floor landing, which has a very unique detail. More details, the dining room, kitchen, and my favorite third-floor bedroom. There are more bedrooms, and quite a few cute little rooms—I actually lost count: a sewing room? studies, a trunk room?

All summer long at the Phillips House, I kept describing the original McIntire construction (or relocation to Chestnut Street) as “shallow,” just one room deep. You rarely see Federal houses with this original shallowness—over the nineteenth century they were built on and on and on as needs dictated and so they become more square than rectangular. There’s something about being able to see the backyard from the front door: it adds a lightness to a house. On the dining-room side of the Cook-Oliver house, a first-floor kitchen was added and then the apartments wing, but in the hall and on the parlor side, you can see right through. And what you see is a very expansive yard. A quarter of an acre! Very lavish for Salem, as if this house wasn’t amazing enough.

 

Appendix: Period Homes, 2005.

 

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November 11, 2024

Past and Future at the Crane Estate

By daseger

It’s been a difficult week; I don’t understand the choice that my fellow Americans have made. But I do understand that I am well-insulated from said choice, by my age, occupation, residence and background. I’m a very privileged person; my first thought when I realized how the election was going was: well, I can go back to the sixteenth century and work on my saffron book. And I can, and I will. In the here and now, I realized I needed to immerse myself in something pleasureable: for me, that is always historic architecture. This past weekend, I was indeed very privileged to be able to visit a Samuel McIntire house here in Salem that will come up for sale in the coming weeks: pictures forthcoming. It was so charming, so crafted, so preserved, so comforting. And on Saturday my husband and I drove up to Ipswich for a tour of Castle Hill at the Crane Estate: it was so grandiose, so gilded, so well-situated, but still, somehow, so comforting. The estate is centered by the “Great House” or Castle Hill, a Jacobean Revival (??? not really sure about this label—the front facade is said to be based on the National Trust’s Belton House, a later Stuart structure. Stuart Revival? Carolean Revival? Restoration Revival?) built between 1924-1928 on an ocean-fronted drumlin which provides inspiring views of the surrounding sea and marshland. A complex of mansion, outbuildings, and surrounding landscaped gardens and grounds was commissed by Chicago industrialist Richard Teller Crane Jr. and his wife Florence, who purchased the property in 1910. They first built an Italianate mansion, but as Florence hated it and its stucco walls failed they commissioned Chicago architect David Adler to design a more enduring building in another European style. The house has 59 rooms encompassed in nearly 60,000 square feet, and was donated to the Trustees of Reservations after the death of Mrs. Crane in 1949. We toured about half the house, and then proceeded up to the roof to see its cupola and the surrounding terrain and ocean, along with Crane Beach, the best in New England.

Inside are grand halls and Anglo interiors: there are floors and panels extricated from doomed houses across the Atlantic. The library, with its Grinling Gibbons overmantle carving and woodwork from a Tudor manor house named Cassiobury Park, is definitely the star of the first floor although the perfect-green dining room was a close second for me. As we proceeded upstairs, the rooms seemed more “American” to me, although there was some beautiful French wallpaper (Zuber?) in one of the halls. As Mr. Crane made his fortune in plumbing, the bathrooms are impressive in both fixtures and decorations, but I didn’t get any good photographs! (All summer long, whenever I showed visitors the relatively plain bathrooms at the Phillips House, they would comment oh the bathrooms are much better at Castle Hill. There was a ship’s cabin feel to the charming third-floor Billiards Room, which presently has no billiards table. From here we ascended up to the cupola and roof.

Back down to the gorgeous green dining room, from which I spied the butler in the kitchen washing champagne glasses, his tuxedo so perfectly of the twenties time that I thought he might be a ghost! But no, he came closer and was actually Brendan, a student in two of my courses this semester. I knew he worked at Castle Hill but somehow I had forgotten, so when I saw him, it was kind of a shock; you know, the shock you feel when you see a familiar person in an unfamiliar place. Brendan was very much in his element and I was very happy to see him so: much of my week’s disappointment was for my students, who are going to have to deal with the consequences of this election early in their lives and for longer than I. Something about Brendan in his tuxedo made me think that he was game, along with his contemporaries. Almost immediately after that pleasurable encounter, I stepped out of the house onto the grounds  and ran into none other than Senator/Secretary John Kerry! He was mid-stride and did not look like he wanted to talk and I didn’t really know what to say anyway, but as he walked away I thought, wow, he’s probably doing the same thing as me, coming to this beautifully-preserved Massachusetts place on a gorgeous fall day trying to forget the election. He looked at Crane Beach for a while and then he was gone. That brief encounter made me think of Kerry’s perspective and realize that my frustrations pale in comparison: imagine serving your country in many ways over many decades and then that man is elected president, not only once but twice! Ah well, it was a beautiful day at the Crane Estate.

That green! Brendan, and a wing-less gryphon. I didn’t take Senator Kerry’s photograph because it would have been rude, and I was in the midst of snapping the gryphon. Happy Veterans Day to the Senator and all of his comrades.

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