Tag Archives: Historic Interiors

June 16, 2025

Patriot Properties

By daseger

An eventful weekend—one of several coming up this summer! I’m going to focus on one event out of several I participated in—a house tour of Patriots’ homes in Marblehead—simply because it yielded the best pictures. Having done this a couple of times myself, I am always grateful to homeowners who open up their houses to the public. As I am focusing on Marblehead, right next door to Salem, today, I have to admit that I’m feeling a bit envious of our neighbor for three essential reasons these days. First of all, it seems to have a very engaged electorate which has much more power than we do in Salem. I had an appointment there last week which happened to fall on local election day, and saw tons of people and signs out and about. Marblehead residents elect their board and commission members and city clerk, while in Salem we only elect a Mayor and city councillors, and the former appoints all the commissioners with the rubber stamp of the latter. There are often uncontested elections in Salem and the voter turnout is very low: 28% in the last mayoral election I believe. Marblehead is a town so they have town meetings! I feel quite disenfranchised by comparison. The second reason I envy Marblehead is its Revolutionary fort, Fort Sewall, which is perfectly preserved and well-maintained in contrast to Fort Pickering, Salem’s major historic fort, which has been left to rot and ruin by the City of Salem. This is, I believe, another example of civic engagement or the lack thereof. The third reason I envy Marblehead, pretty much every single day, is that it has a professional historical society, unlike Salem. The Marblehead Museum was established as the Marblehead Historical Society in 1898, and it continues its mission “to preserve, protect, and promote Marblehead’s past as a means of enriching the present” today. Salem has no such institution; it failed to develop one as the Essex Institute served that role for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before its assimilation into the Peabody Essex Museum. The Marblehead Museum combines its stewardship roles (of both Marblehead’s historic record and its three properties) in conjuction with a very active calendar of interpretive events, including this weekend’s house tour, which couldn’t have been more timely.

The tour of five houses was self-guided, and so the first house for myself and my friend Liz was the Robert Hooper House on Washington Street, a 1769 reconstruction of an earlier home which I always thought was a Federal house. It has recently been restored so we were both eager to get in, and once inside you could immediately tell it was pre-Revolutionary even with its vibrant decoration. The carriage house was open too, and the views down to its terraced garden were spectacular, even on a rainy day. At first, I was a bit confused as to why this house was on a tour of homes associated with Patriots as I had my Marblehead Robert Hoopers mixed up: the owner of this house was NOT the famouse Loyalist Robert “King” Hooper, whose house is located just across the way, but rather another Robert Hooper. It was also confusing to read that George Washington visited this house during his 1789 visit to Marblehead: I don’t think this is the case as he is recorded as having been greeted at the Lee Mansion just down the street. But Robert “NO KING” Hooper’s son, also named Robert Hooper, was married to a daughter of Marblehead’s most illustrious Revolutionary general, John Glover, and as they inherited the house after his father’s death in 1814 that’s quite enough of a patriot connection for me.

Then we walked over to Franklin Street and the Devereux House, a very classical Georgian house built in 1764 by Marblehead merchant Joseph Homan. Persons enslaved by him likely lived here before Homan sold the property to Eldridge Gerry of “Gerrymandering” fame. Gerry gifted the house to his sister Elizabeth, the wife of Selectman Burrill Devereux who welcomed President Washington to town in 1789. A lovely house, well-maintained over the years and now the home of another Patriot, with whom we discussed the Army’s (rather than the President’s) big birthday.

The most famous Marblehead Patriot (who was born in Salem) is undoubtedly General John Glover, who ferried General Washington and his troops across the Delaware on Christmas night 1776 in advance of their big victory at Trenton. There is a Glover Square named after him, and in the midst of this square is the house most closely associated with him. Like the Devereux House, it’s on the National Register, and features yet another impressive Georgian entrance hall.

On our way back to our final stop, the Jeremiah Lee Mansion, we realized we had missed a house, which is of course a capital crime on any house tour. So we made a little detour to see the Martin-Hulen-Lemaster House on Washington Street. Its generous owner allowed us to see the entire 1755 house, and you could really appreciate the space created by its gambrel roof on the third floor. Marblehead ship captain Elias Hulen, Jr., whose father served on the Seacoast Guards and as a privateer during the Revolution, owned and occupied this house after its orginal owners departed for Maine in the 1770s.

We finished up the tour at the 1768 Jeremiah Lee Mansion, a museum property which I’ve toured before and posted about here. It’s an amazing edifice, with interiors impressive in both detail and scale. Only the first floor was open for the tour so I took some photos of decorative details that I didn’t think I captured in my earlier post, and looked out the tall windows at the archeaological and structural evidence of the Marblehead Museum’s ambitious ongoing project, a $1.4 million renovation of Lee’s Brick Kitchen & Slave Quarters next door. When completed, this project will expand the Museum’s archival, office, and exhibition space in addition to revealing and interpreting spaces of enslavement and labor, a logical extension of the Museum’s continuous efforts to identify and document the lives of African American and Indigenous peoples in Marblehead’s history.

A few photos of the Jeremiah Lee Mansion interiors and the Brick Kitchen/Slave Quarters project behind and adjacent to the Mansion. The only king I was interested in this past weekend was the King of Prussia, as I was just fascinated by this plate! 

One more object of Marblehead envy popped up while I was looking at the Marblehead Museum’s website: the town retains reference to the original Pawtucket Tribe of our region in its land acknowledgement statement, while Salem’s excludes any reference to these native peoples in favor of the Massachusetts Tribe. I wish we could acknowledge the Pawtucket.

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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).

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, Tourism, Travel

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.

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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.

 

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December 2, 2024

Watercolor Dining Rooms

By daseger

I love dining rooms in general and my dining room in particular; I love renderings of dining rooms in general and watercolor renderings of dining rooms in particular: that’s pretty much the post! In the Victorian house I grew up in, the dining room did double duty as a sitting room of sorts, while my first Greek Revival house had an open kitchen/dining area. But my present house has a room that can be nothing other than a dining room and it’s my favorite room in the house. Dining rooms seem to be in danger of disappearing now, and I really hope that trend reverses itself.

My Thanksgiving dining room with and without a watercolor filter—definitely not very artistic!

My regard for dining rooms has artistic rather than social origins: I love all the things associated with dining rather than the act of dining. And when I was relatively young—in high school I think—I came across the paintings of English artist Mary Ellen Best (1809-1891), who painted her interior worlds with such charm and detail that they became imprinted in my mind. Her dining room in York remains one of my favorites: she also painted her family dining at the home of her grandmother and an elderly neighbor in her dining room. Best opened window after window into mid-nineteenth-century interiors in both England and Germany, where she lived after her marriage. We see kitchens, parlors, and drawing rooms in intimate detail: her use of watercolor gives these rooms a dreamy effect so we’re not too overwhelmed.

A very different artist, of another time and place, was Edgar W. Jenney, an architect and interior designer who retired to Nantucket in the 1920s. He offers more of a preservation prespective in his interior renderings of old Nantucket houses, large and small, but he was also a commercial artist: I first came across him when I saw his very Colonial Revival “Salem Room” in an old House and Garden. He seems much more focused on the overall ambiance than the details of daily life we see in Best’s paintings, but watercolor softens his scenes.

Two Nantucket dining rooms, 1930s,  by Edgar Whitefield Jenney, Rafael Osana Auctions and Nantucket Historical Society.

All of the above are artistic compositions, but watercolor was used for professional renderings as well so you can find some lovely paper dining rooms in trade catalogs published by wallpaper, fabric, and furniture companies in particular: there are myriad sources at the Internet Archive’s Building Heritage Technology Library. Architectural and Interior Design archives are another obvious source for these images: I was introduced to the wonderful work of Wisconsin interior decorator Odin J. Oyen here which led me to the first stunning dining room design below here. These kind of searches can go on for days and even weeks so be careful! Work interfered or I would have kept on going.

Two dining room elevation renderings from Historic New England’s Collections from Irving & Casson/A.H. Davenport. A dining room from Mary Brooks Picken’s Sewing for the Home (1941) and a Baltimore dining room from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Homes of Our Ancestors (1925).

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Art, Culture

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.

 

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

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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October 7, 2024

The First Weekend of October in Salem

By daseger

It’s been a long time since I spent an October weekend in Salem, but there I was on this past Saturday, walking through the crowded streets on my way to the Peabody Essex Museum to take their new “Brick by Brick” architectural walking tour (this is the exact same name as Historic Salem’s Christmas in Salem Tour this year; I sense collusion). I got behind some baby strollers which cleared my path like a snowplow, and dodged and darted amidst the sea of felt witch hat wearers. I knew they would put me in a nasty mood, so as soon as I spotted one “1692/They Missed One” t-shirt, I put on invisible blinders. This was the only day that I could take this tour, and I was desperate to get into one of the Peabody Essex Museum’s long-shuttered period houses: I wasn’t sure which one we were entering but it turned out to be Gardner-Pingree, the most beautiful house in the world! The tour encompassed all of the PEM’s houses save for the Assembly House, and we navigated the path between them relatively quietly armed with audio devices and earbuds, hardly new inventions but still apparently unknown to many Salem tour guides.

random scenes on my way and back; don’t drive to Salem!

I always feel sorry for the Gardner Pingree House this time of year: it’s so beautiful and the tourists don’t seem to notice it; they lean on its amazing fence looking away and down at their phones. But being inside while the crowd was outside was very calming; I could barely hear a thing! It’s a fortress against vulgarity. We got to go into the McIntire summerhouse out back and then heard brief histories outside the exteriors of all the other PEM buildings, again while tourists turned their back on them, their doors rendered to mere frames for selfies.

 Gardner-Pingree, Crowninshield-Bentley, Derby-Beebe summerhouse, John Ward, and Andrew Safford houses of the Peabody Essex Museum.

The main guide (Isabel? I believe, in the striped shirt) was very good at weaving in general Salem history with the history of the houses, so I think this would be a very good tour for new visitors to Salem who are not looking for well-worn witch trial narratives and ghost stories. It also has the benefit of getting new visitors out of the congested downtown into the McIntire Historic District, where the Peirce-Nichols house and Ropes Mansion are located. Salem’s “Heritage Trail” (yellow line) just doesn’t go there. The Ropes is the only PEM House that is open on weekends, and it is a Hocus Pocus house with a beautiful late-season garden, so it’s always a draw, but Peirce-Nichols hasn’t been open for decades. I don’t follow the party line in Salem that “tourists come for the witch stuff, but come again for the history” but my summer at the Phillips House has convinced me that a certain percentage of our tourists are actually coming for the history, so I’m glad that there are institutions which can provide it.

Peirce-Nichols house and Ropes Mansion garden–now in full bloom.

back to work: one good thing about October is I can’t find excuses not to walk to work, along Lafayette Street where there is a range of “decorations”. I like these little skeletons.

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August 5, 2024

The Bowman House

By daseger

We were vacationing in midcoast Maine last week so I took the opportunity to visit Historic New England’s newest property, the Bowman House, with a few friends. We also saw the nearby Pownalborough Court House, which is one of the most extraordinary Colonial buildings I have ever encountered. The Bowman House is in Dresden, right on what was a very busy Kennebec River short at the time of its construction in the mid-eighteenth century. Now it sits amongst tranquil rolling lawn: this photograph is of the rear, of course; the front entrance looks upon the River.

The house is a very high-style Georgian construction, the type you see built in shipbuilding centers. It has a very charming air about it, partially provided by the architecture, but also by the restoration and decoration, which was the work of Bill Waters, who worked and lived in the house for decades. He died in 2016, after having donated the house to Historic New England with the qualification of lifetime tenure. So even though this house was built in 1762 for Joshua Bowman, a judge with Hancock connections, it really felt like Bill Water’s 21st century Georgian house: his personality shined through both his preservation efforts and his possessions. Since I’ve been working for Historic New England myself this summer, I’ve been thinking about the differences between the work of a tour guide and a professor, and one major one is that the work of the former is a lot more personal: you’re talking to and with smaller groups about more intimate stories rather than trends, causes and consequences. Historic New England’s interpretion focuses on the people who lived in its houses as much as their architectural history, and “Bill’s house” is a great example. (Although our guide did introduce us to local master builder Gershom Flagg, who built both the Bowman House and the Pownalborough Courthouses, and now I am obsessed!) Bill Waters came to the house through the Burrage sisters, Mildred and Madeleine, notable artists and world travelers who moved to Wiscasset in 1962 and became interested in the region’s historic architecture. In 1961 they purchased the Bowman House, and sold it to Waters several years later, and he and his life partner Cyrus Pinkham began their life’s (house) work. 

Bill Waters with Bowman descendant Florence Bixby and the Burrage Sisters in 1968 (Maine Historical Society), and more recently.

So let’s go into the house, shall we? You enter through a single-story sun room which was likely a nineteenth-century addition (the house served as the office for an ice-supply business in the later 19th century) and then into the kitchen and a series of first-floor parlors and dining room adjoining a spacious central hallway—wonderful reproduction wallpapers throughout, including the pillar-and-arch paper that I think is also in Hamilton House? Throughout his tenure, Waters worked to bring as many period-appropriate and/or Bowen furnishings into the house, and everything seems perfect and very colorful, but also very, very livable.

There are several spaces in which he seems like he just stepped away…….like the bar (above) and lots of whimsy, like the feathers on his canopy bed (below). Artful assembly throughout, and very special mirrors!

We exited through the sunroom, a very comfortable space which reveals Waters’ appreciation of trade signs (as well as his southern roots, represented by a small image of General Robert E. Lee) and then drove down the road to the Courthouse: wow! Photographs don’t quite represent the scale of this 1761 building.

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