Driving home to Massachusetts from the Hudson River Valley last weekend, I actually drove west, as my brother told me there was a village across the river which I might enjoy: Athens. All the day before when we were touring the riverfront estates of my last post we would look across and see some great house and every time I asked him where it was he would say Athens. I don’t think he was correct as it is a bit more to the north, but still I had Athens on my mind when I woke up the next day and was determined to go there. It’s just across the Rip Van Winkle bridge from Hudson, north of Catskill, which I visited last year, bordered by Cairo (of course) on the west. Apparently there is both a town and a village of Athens and I believe I was in the latter; no one has ever been able to explain the differing jurisdictions that you find in New York and New Jersey—hamlets, villages, boroughs, towns and townships—to me so I am perpetually confused. This seemed like a village, a river village, and it was absolutely charming. Probably the most famous building in Athens is its lighthouse, which really is a lighthouse, but my sentry was the 1706 Jan van Loon house: how different Dutch and English First-Period houses are!
There are several streets of historic houses clustered along the river and I immediately focused on the brick structures. The Northrup house (1803, first up below) is in need of some work but it features the characteristic elevated first floor that I saw on several Athens houses, an architectural feature which I always associated exclusively with southern houses for some reason. There were some lovely wooden houses, but the region’s clay banks supported as many as eight brickyards in nineteenth-century Athens, and fostered masonry construction: I just couldn’t capture enough of these old brick houses, glowing in the autumn sun.
About forty minutes inland from Salem to the northwest are the towns of Andover and North Andover, both early settlements and bustling towns today. Due to the anniversary of the last executions of the Salem Witch Trials on Friday, I had Samuel Wardwell—who hailed from Andover, along with several other victims—on my mind, so I decided to drive there and see if I could find the location of his farm, which is always referred to as lying in the “southern” part of what was then one big Andover. That was my goal, but I got waylaid and distracted by the other Andover, the North Parish, which became North Andover in 1855. I hadn’t realized that North Andover was actually the first settlement: whenever I see North or South or East or West I assume that that designated location was settled after the adjoining town without the geographical adjective (is there are word for that?) But in the case of the Andovers, this assumption is incorrect. And because I assumed North Andover was later, I had always given it short shrift and driven through or around or by it—but this Saturday, the weather was fine and I had time so I drove into it, and spent a considerable amount of time in the vicinity of its perfectly pristine center village, in which a striking Gothic Revival Church overlooks one of the prettiest commons I have ever seen. It was the first day of Fall, and the North Andover Fall Festival was in full swing, so I parked the car and walked all around the old town center.
All of the houses above surround the large Common, and bordering it is the little building built for the North Andover Hay Scales Company, established in 1819, which Walter Muir Whitehill refers to as “a rustic corporation of twenty-five proprietors who not only missioned a public utility but had a good sociable time doing so”. (Old-Time New England, October 1948). And down the road apiece is the Trustees of Reservations’ Stevens-Coolidge estate, with its extensive gardens, and this intriguing brick double house.
On the other side of the Common, I walked past the North Andover Historical Society, a rather stately Greek Revival house and two “Salem Federals”, which really do have the air of displaced Salem houses, especially the Kittredge Mansion (1784), which looks just like the Peirce-Nichols House! Apparently its design is attributed to Samuel McIntire, which is complete news to me—must find out much more about this house.
The Kittredge Mansion & gate in HABS photographs from 1940-41, Library of Congress.
Finally I came to the beautiful Parson Barnard House (1715), which was long believed to be the home of Simon and Anne Bradstreet and has been owned and maintained by the North Andover Historical Society since 1950. It is perfectly situated and colored for early fall reveries, and I could have sat there looking at it for quite some time, but Wardwell business was pressing, so I retrieved my car, drove over the other Andover, and took a really cool virtual tour of its downtown courtesy of the Andover Center for History and Culture.
I’m using the expression “turnkey” in typical contrary fashion here: it’s a real estate term which generally means a house that requires no repairs or refurbishment, just turn the key and you are home in your new purchase. The Rundlet-May house in Portsmouth struck me as a turnkey house in another sense: Ralph May, the fourth of his generation to live in the house, donated it to Historic New England (then the Society for the Preservation for New England Antiquities) in 1971 and now when you enter the house (or turn the key, in a sense) it seems as if you are within a space that he just left. This is an imposing Federal, made less so by the lived-in ambiance of a home to four generations of the same family.
The Rundlet-May House (1807) and views out back from its second and third floors.
Even though the house itself is an extravagant construction on large urban acreage, everything about its interior speaks to Yankee thrift: from the original peach damask wallpaper in one of the front parlors to the original Edison light bulb in a fixture on the second-floor landing–which is turned on once a year. It’s the perfect old-money house. John Rundlet, the self-made man who built (and apparently designed?) the house purchased and commissioned the best of everything (including a Rumford Roaster and a Rumford Range) and his descendants seem to have changed very little other than altering the use of its rooms to suit their activities and professions.
First-floor parlors, hall and kitchen (with Rumford Roaster) and fire buckets, of course. I found several early 20th-century postcards of the house which referred to Samuel McIntire as the carver of the right parlor’s mantle (above), but I think this is just an illustration of the Salem architect and woodcarver’s fame in the midst of the Colonial Revival era.
There’s probably too much furniture–beautiful as it all is—in the house: tables and dressers and painted chairs. Should a beautiful card table be situated just inches away facing an even more beautiful Portsmouth bureau in a narrow window nook of an upstairs bedroom? No necessarily, but this placement allows us to see both of these pieces. There’s also a lot of stuff. But it’s their stuff and their home, and we are all privileged to be able to enter within!
Second and Third Floors, including Ralph May’s 3rd floor study, with all of his stuff. Below: this “musical” decorative motif ran through the house—it caught my eye because the same motif is on one of my Fancy chairs. (the last photograph).
On a very humid Friday I spent a precious hour in the most beautiful house in America: the Gardner-Pingree House, built here in Salem in 1804 and widely acknowledged to be Samuel McIntire’s masterpiece. The house has experienced several refurbishments following its donation by the Pingree family to the Essex Institute in 1933, and its most recent refresh (1989) remains definitive, exposing the colorful and crafted world of a merchant in the midst of Salem’s golden age. With the merger of the Institute and the Peabody Museum in 1992 and the consolidation of the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), the house remains a seldom-scene showpiece, and also a symbol of the commitment of the Institute to Salem’s material heritage. Actually, to be fair, the house has served as a the setting for an interactive performance I attended a few years ago, and is apparently open for daily tours, but I can never figure out when from the PEM’s inscrutable website (you try!) so when I saw that it was going to be open all afternoon on a designated “Free Fun Friday,” I beat it over there.
It is an absolutely beautiful house, inside and out: I remain overwhelmed by the 1989 restoration and its ongoing ability to both accentuate the interior and somehow also make it more accessible and intimate. It is a storied house. It is a much-documented house: I did a cursory review of twentieth-century historical architectural texts and found it in nearly every one. It is an influential house: especially its entrance, which has been replicated on several stately suburban homes (oddly juxtaposed with houses which do not also replicate the Gardner-Pingree’s perfect proportions).
Detroit Publishing Co. photograph of Gardner-Pingree, 1906, Library of Congress; Albert MacDonald, Old Brick Houses of New England, 1917; Mansions of Massachusetts, 1977; the front parlor in the 1940s,houses in Atlanta and Brookline, MA supposedly inspired by the Gardner-Pingree.
But it’s also a powerful house, in its original situation (unlike the Crowninshield-Bentley and Ward houses to its side and rear, also part of the PEM’s”Essex Block Neighborhood” of historic houses, which the Essex Institute referred to as an “outdoor museum”) overlooking Salem’s original main street and the former Essex Institute buildings which housed the Phillips Library collections up until their removal from Salem in 2011. As all of you no doubt know, this was supposed to be a temporary move but has now been made permanent: Salem’s Phillips Library is now ensconced in an industrial building off the highway in Rowley. The PEM has presented several sound arguments for this move–most grounded in the priority of stewardship rather than access–but also one which I never quite understood: the scholarly synchronicity of having material collections and texts in close proximity. But when you stand in this house right next door to where Salem’s historical archives were housed for so long, you can see the connection–but in this case it counters PEM’s rationale for archival relocation. The house—like all of PEM’s houses—are material objects as well, and the textual context of its construction, embellishment, and occupation has now been removed. I felt this so strongly when I was in the second-story southwest bedroom: a very beautiful room which was also the site of sensational murder, of Captain Joseph White—the third owner of the house–in 1830. Looking at the site of the now-former Phillips Library from the western window of this room, I realized that all the questions that I had about this house could not be answered by going next door, but only by going to Rowley: there is no synchronicity in that reality!
My questions–and where the answers can be found: in the Phillips Library, in Rowley: How did the Gardner Family transform this parcel of land into “Gardner’s Corner” over the 18th century? What are the details of the spectacular rise and fall of the fortunes of John Gardner (1771-1847) who built this beautiful house and was only able to live in it for six years before selling it to his brother-in-law, Nathaniel West? Of course the War of 1812 had much to do with the fall, but I’d like to know more, and there are boxes of Gardner family history in the Phillips (MS 147). What was the extent of the slave trading of the murder victim, Captain Joseph White? (Log 9, for White’s brigantines Hind and Eliza, and MSS 0.188, William Fairfield’s account of a slave mutiny aboard the Felicity, also owned by White). I don’t think I have any questions about the murder and equally-sensational trial, which apparently inspired Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Parker Brothers, but I’d like to know how the Adroit Fire Club (Delay Not) worked, as well as the sources of the Rumford Roaster, and all about the (again!) rising, falling, rising and diverse fortunes of the two David Pingrees (MS 901). Family histories, house histories, Salem’s history: they’re all connected, of course.
I’ve just returned from a brief getaway to the Granite State during which I drove all over much of its lower half (two-thirds?) but became focused on just two towns: New Ipswich and Tamworth. I don’t think I’ve ever developed a proper appreciation for this neighboring state and so I’m trying to work on that: I’ve lived in Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts, and so New Hampshire was always just a place “in between”, to drive through rather than a destination. Growing up, my father worked at two universities on either side of the state, Dartmouth and UNH, but we lived in Vermont during the earlier period and Maine during the later–and not just over the line of either adjoining state. So I think I always wondered secretly: did my parents DISLIKE New Hampshire? During my teenaged years in southern Maine, Portsmouth, New Hampshire was our go-to town, but somehow I always disassociated it with the rest of the state, as if it was an island. It is not. This particular weekend I was headed up to see a friend in the Lakes Region but decided to take a detour to the southwestern part of the state so I could see a Historic New England house that I’d never visited before: the Barrett House in New Ipswich. Amazing: a high Federal house in a very unlikely place—or is it? New Hampshire is full of perfect white two-story federals, but the Barrett House is something more grand: Portsmouth-like, or even (dare I say it) Salem-like. What’s it doing in sleepy New Ipswich?
Well of course New Ipswich was not sleepy when pioneering textile manufacturer Charles Barrett built this grand house as a wedding gift for his son Charles Jr. and daughter-in-law Martha Minot, whose father promised to furnish the house in a manner complementing its (then) cutting-edge style. Across the field in front was the textile mill, down the road was the (Third) New Hampshire Turnpike, connecting Vermont and Massachusetts. After New Ipswich chose not to accept a railroad stop several decades later, its manufacturing era came to an end but an impressive architectural legacy remained, including the 1817 “Appleton Manor” which is now for sale. Successive generations of the Barretts owned and occupied the house into the twentieth century, also their Boston businesses determined that it became more of a country retreat than a primary residence. This evolution echoes that of several houses in central New Ipswich, contributing to the preservation of its architectural landscape. Historic New England’s predecessor, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), acquired both the Barrett House and its neighboring George Barrett Sr. house in 1948.
The house in 1904, Cambridge Historical Society; Barretts remain on the walls.
Like all of Historic New England’s properties, the house is interpreted in a very personal way, utilizing extensive family furnishings: Barrett Mill-made linens, Barrett-bound books, portraits, furniture, all manner of accessories. All of this creates a feeling of intimacy, as does the smallish scale of the rooms–I found the rather imposing exterior of this house to be somewhat deceptive. It’s perfectly open and light (look at all of those 12 over 12 windows!) and square and Federal: no Victorian additions or “improvements”, and only a bit of stuffy Victorian decor in a back parlor. Even the third-floor ballroom, which extends over the width of the house, retains an aura of intimacy: sparsely furnished with family chairs of different eras, gathered in a circle for conversation and company.
First Floor: front parlor and dining room (with Zuber et Cie wallpaper!). I particularly loved the Chinese Export dishes, which did not belong to the Barretts. The back parlor is a bit more of a mix, befitting a family room.
Second Floor Bedrooms: back and front.
LOVE these “peacock” chairs, and below: “furnishing” for an early twentieth-century bathroom, one of the few additions to the house.
Third-floor ballroom.
Outbuildings: Like Salem’s Ropes Garden, the Barrett House was the setting for the 1979 Merchant-Ivory film The Europeans. Actually it was used far more extensively than the Ropes, for both interior and exterior scenes, and the Barrett’s Gothic Revival gazebo was a particularly effective backdrop. The Carriage House is full of carriages (of course), including a carriage-hearse!
Just a few more New Ipswich houses, for context, beginning with Charles Barrett Sr.’s house next door. There seems to be a fondness for those center projected gable entrances, perhaps inspired by the Barrett House?
Brakes literally screeched, disturbing a quiet neighborhood, as I spotted a beautiful abandoned house in Essex yesterday. I was on my way from Ipswich to Beverly to home on a rather circuitous route, and then I spotted this stately house on Western Avenue: striking in both its elegance and abandonment. Neighbors looked warily on as I took some pictures, and then I hopped back in the car and drove home so I could research the house, forgetting all about my Beverly errand. Here it is.
The Col. Andrews House (Barr Farm) yesterday and in 1979.
We are fortunate in Massachusetts to have MACRIS, a digital database of inventories of historical properties undertaken for the Massachusetts Historical Commission, and I quickly found the Essex house, which was identified as the Colonel Andrews House, built in 1806 and better known as the “Barr Farm”. Besides the decaying elegance, that’s what caught my attention: this is no country Colonial but a pristine Federal farmhouse. The inventory, which dates from 1979, is largely based on an interview with the 99-year-old Mrs. John Barr, who had lived in the house nearly her entire life and still lived there at that time. She notes that it had always been a farm (I didn’t even notice outbuildings–I only had eyes for the house) up until the death of her husband 40 years previously, and then it became “inactive”. And so it remains–or does it? That chimney looks rather rebuilt to me, and the surrounding lawn is mowed……
Salem is rich in historic carriage houses and I’ve posted on them before, but this Oliver Street cluster definitely deserves a spotlight. This short street runs from the Common to Bridge Street, and is named after the diversely prolific Henry Kemble Oliver (1800-1885), who served as mayor of both Salem and Lawrence as well as in various prominent state positions, during which he managed to publish both mathematical and musical compositions. His namesake street features a variety of predominately nineteenth-century buildings, and obviously served as the “back” of larger estates on Washington Square and Winter Street, consequently the carriage houses. The first one below belongs to the impressive White-Lord estate, built on the Common in 1811–as does this beautiful side door (I just love this door–I go out of my way to see it as often as possible). The White-Lord carriage house has recently been converted to a residence while its neighboring structures remain utility outbuildings, but now housing cars rather than carriages, of course.
Oliver Street on the 1898 Salem Atlas (digitized here); Side Door and carriage house of the Washington-Lord House at 31 Washington Square, Salem, above; Carriage Houses of the Joseph Story House on Winter Street and the White-Silsbee House at 33 Washington Square, both also built in 1811, along (the other side of) Oliver Street, below. As you can see, the Story Carriage House even has its own plaque!
All of these late-Federal brick structures–carriage houses and main houses, were built in the same year: 1811. This happens to be the very same year that the man who crafted material Salem, Samuel McIntire, died. So this year must be the absolute pinnacle of golden-age ascendant Salem, especially as the War of 1812 and its attendant consequences effectively ended Salem’s commercial heyday as a maritime port. A new era began, but these structures seem to have made that transition, and several more, quite smoothly. And here’s one more transitional Oliver Street outbuilding: not a fancy carriage house, but a good old barn, I think, converted into an equally utilitarian garage.