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colonial revival

How Hartford’s Ancient Burying Ground Was Saved by the Gold Street Lady

The Ancient Burying Ground, the oldest historic site in Hartford, contains the remains of 6,000 men, women and children who settled the town.

But it might have disappeared were it not for the efforts of Emily Seymour Goodwin Holcombe, also known as the Gold Street Lady.

Beginning in 1640, anyone who died in town, regardless of race, religion or economic status, was interred in the Ancient Burying Ground. Not everyone could afford a tombstone, and most people didn’t have one. Only 563 stones marked graves in 1835, and today only 415 stones still stand.

the Ancient Burying Ground

Who’s Buried in the Ancient Burying Ground?

Buried in the Ancient Burying Ground are five early Connecticut governors; Hartford founders Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone; Jeremiah Wadsworth, commissary general of the Continental Army; and Daniel Gardiner, the first white child born in Connecticut.

The stones themselves show the progression of the stonecarver’s art, from simple facts about the deceased to elaborate death’s heads with batwings.

The Ancient Burying Ground, though, is located right in downtown Hartford on Gold Street, across from the Travelers Insurance Company Tower and near an apartment building designed by I.M. Pei.

Real estate development had threatened to gobble up what remained of the Ancient Burying Ground when preservationists stepped in.

Daniel Wadsworth, son of Jeremiah, started the effort to save the Ancient Burying Ground in 1836. He led the campaign to erect a brownstone obelisk in the cemetery with the names of the founders on it.

Mrs. Holcombe

Then in 1892, Emily Seymour Goodwin Holcombe stepped in. She came from an old New England family and married another WASP, John Marshall Holcombe, who rose to president of the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Co.

Emily Holcombe

Emily Holcombe started by organizing the Ruth Wyllys Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1892. Four years later she began restoring the Ancient Burying Ground, no small task. It required widening Gold Street, demolishing several buildings and preserving the crumbling gravestones. She raised $100,000 for the project and on June 17, 1899 – Bunker Hill Day – 5,000 people came to the dedication of the restored cemetery.

During the ceremony, one city official praised Emily Holcombe. “If any man of my knowledge in Hartford had undertaken the task, there would have been nothing left of him but the footprints of those who had stepped upon him,” he said. He added that ‘official boards and public men, court committees and obdurate property owners, all bowed to the persuasiveness of Mrs. Holcombe.’

Colonial Revival

The Colonial Revival was in full swing then, and Emily Holcombe was far from done. In 1903, the descendants of Founding Father Oliver Ellsworth gave his house to the Connecticut DAR. Emily Holcombe furnished it with period antiques and established it as a museum.

When the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis opened in 1904, the Connecticut State Building featured a colonial home furnished with restored heirloom furniture, Connecticut paintings and books on genealogy.

In 1909, Emily Holcombe helped save Connecticut’s Old State House, slated for demolition. Again she raised money for the project and argued for the building’s historic importance. She also persuaded the General Assembly to change Connecticut’s motto from the Nutmeg State to the Constitution State.

The Old Statehouse

When Emily Seymour Goodwin Holcombe died in 1923, she was afforded the rare honor of being laid to rest in the Ancient Burying Ground.

According to the Connecticut Encyclopedia of Biography, published in 1917, no one was better known in Connecticut than Mrs. Holcombe. “Her achievements have carried her name far beyond the confines of her native State,” it said. “She is a woman of great modesty, but possesses initiative to an unusually large degree with the will to accomplish an undertaking decided upon as necessary or desirable. She also possesses great tact, diplomacy and executive ability.”

There’s More

Over time, the cemetery again grew shabby. Homeless people sought refuge there, and vandals made mischief in it. In the 1980s, Hartford began locking the gates. A second restoration campaign restored some headstones, fixed the masonry and ironwork and added benches and litter containers. Shepherd Holcombe, Emily Holcombe’s grandson, led the effort.

Images: Ancient Burying Ground By Staib – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12647042. This story was updated in 2022.

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A Gilded Age Gentleman Farm in Each New England State

During the Gilded Age, the gentleman farm was an important element of the upper-class lifestyle. They served as formal summer mansions and working farms that often supplied produce and dairy products to the owners’ winter residences.

George Washington led the way as the nation’s first gentleman farmer in chief. But the fashion for elegant mansions sitting on landscaped farmland didn’t take hold until after the Civil War.

The Gentleman Farm

Gentleman farms reflected the outsize egos of their wealthy owners during an age of soaring inequality. They sat on large swathes of land, sometimes thousands of acres. Elite architects designed the mansions as well as the farmhouses, barns, carriage houses, greenhouses and follies.

Sometimes business moguls or their heirs used their farms to demonstrate their prowess in agricultural pursuits. They developed prize livestock or managed woodlots scientifically or created vast formal gardens. Landscape designers like Frederick Law Olmsted and Beatrix Farrand sculpted the grounds for scenic vistas, pleasant walks and interesting flower gardens.

The income tax put an end to many of the Gilded Age estates, though a brief perusal of real estate listings shows the gentleman farms may have entered a new heyday. Here, though, are six late-19^th to early 20^th century gentleman farms, one in each New England state.

Eolia Mansion at Harkness State Park

Birdseye view of a Connecticut’s gentleman farm, Eolia.

Stephen V. Harkness had the good fortune to invest silently in John D. Rockefeller’s fledgling Standard Oil Co. His son Edward, clearly a fan of the gentleman farm, built a 42-room mansion on 230 acres overlooking Long Island Sound and named it Eolia.

The family used the estate as a summer retreat and a working farm, which included a prize dairy herd and vegetable gardens. They later added outbuildings, like the teahouse and the carriage house.

Architect James Gamble Rogers redesigned the interior of the Roman Renaissance Revival style mansion to evoke the feeling of the inside of an oyster shell. Landscape designer Beatrix Farrand improved the grounds with lush formal gardens.

In 1920, Mary Harkness turned some of the grounds into a summer camp for children with polio. In 1950, she left the estate to the State of Connecticut. For years the house had to be boarded up, but by 1998 it had been restored.

People can rent Eolia for weddings and parties, as well as visit the estate on weekends and holidays from Memorial Day Weekend to Labor Day.

275 Great Neck Rd., Waterford, Conn.

Isaac W. Dyer Estate

The Isaac W. Dyer Estate in Gorham, Maine.

Gilded Age gentleman farms are increasingly scarce in Maine, but the Isaac W. Dyer Estate survives in a rural section of Gorham.

Isaac W. Dyer and his wife lived in Portland, where he built a large corporate law practice. For many years he served as district attorney, earning a reputation as an old-school conservative. Dyer also wrote a biography of Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle.

He bought the large Greek Revival farmhouse and 126 acres in 1887 and transformed it into a gentleman farm. Eventually he built many of the outbuildings, including sheds, barns, a garage and a greenhouse. Landscapers created a croquet lawn, a sweeping circular driveway and a rare walled garden.

In 1998, the National Register of Historic Places put the Isaac W. Dyer Estate on its list.

The Dyer Estate has shrunk to 6.4 acres and is privately owned.

180 Fort Hill Rd., Gorham, Maine

Turner Hill Farm

Turner Hill Farms, one of several gentleman farms in Ipswich, Mass.

North Shore businessman Charles Rice and his wife Anne Proctor Rice bought 700 acres and a farmhouse on Turner Hill in Ipswich, Mass., just before the turn of the century. They then crossed the Atlantic with their architect, William Rantoul, to check out the gentleman farms in England and Scotland for ideas. The Rices came back and spent the next few years building an immense Elizabethan mansion.

They also built 13 other buildings, including cottages for the butler and gardener, stables, a garage and barns. As many as 50 people worked the farm in the summer to pick produce and fruit and milk the 20 cows. The gigantic house required 22 domestic servants.

The Turners had three children, and during the summer held children’s parties every week for 175 children. Anne Rice, a skilled equestrienne, broke many bones riding over the property, and in 1933 died when her horse threw her. Charles Rice declined and died 10 years later. The LaSalette Fathers bought the property and turned it into a spiritual retreat. The National Register of Historic Places listed Turner Hill Farm in 1982.

Today it functions as a golf club and condominiums. Another gentleman farm in Ipswich, Castle Hill, is less than 10 miles away.

Historic Ipswich has fascinating photos of Turner Hill’s early days. Click here to see them.

251 Turner Hill, Ipswich, Mass.

The Fells, John Hay’s Gentleman Farm

The Fells in full bloom in Newbury, N.H.

In the 1880s, New Hampshire farmers were abandoning their land and moving west for better farmland. The New Hampshire state government stepped in and encouraged wealthy families to buy up the properties and turn them into gentleman farms.

John Hay, who served as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary and U.S. Secretary of State, answered the call. He bought 1,000 acres of land on the shores of Lake Sunapee in 1888. Hay hoped to establish a summer colony for his group of friends. But then one of his friends, Clover Adams, committed suicide, and Hay abandoned his plan.

Instead, Hay built a rustic cottage and named the property The Fells, a term for a rocky upland pasture. His son Clarence and wife later expanded the cottage into a 22-room Colonial Revival mansion. Clarence wrote a book about it in 1962, called Gardening in Granite. “This is about a rock garden on Lake Sunapee, in the foothills of the White Mountains,” he wrote.

The Hays donated much of the land to the government, and when they died The Fells became a nonprofit organization. The Fells, a preservation project of The Garden Conservancy, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today visitors can hike the forest paths and, in season, visit the house and grounds, which include a rose terrace, a rock garden of rare alpines and a hidden walled garden.

456 Route 103A, Newbury, N.H.

CCRI Knight Campus, Once a Gentleman Farm

Part of the old Knight Estate, now a community college in Warwick, R.I.

The Fruit of the Loom brand started with Rhode Island’s Knight family, headed by Benjamin and Robert Knight. When Robert died in 1912, the New York Times called him the largest cotton manufacturer in the world.

The Knights actually replaced the Spragues as the dominant manufacturing family in Rhode Island. When the Sprague family’s businesses went belly up in the financial panic of 1873, the Knight family bought many of the Spragues’ textile mills, mill housing, company stores and large farms.

The Knight Estate in the Natick section of Warwick was considered the nicest of the Knights’ gentleman farms. It had a large Federal and Greek Revival home and a number of fine farm buildings. Robert Knight used the farm to develop prize livestock.

In the 20^th century, developers bulldozed some of the farm to make way for the Midland Mall. Then in 1964, Royal Webster Knight donated the farm to the State of Rhode Island for a junior college.

Today, the old Knight Farm forms the nucleus of the Community College of Rhode Island. In direct opposition to the ideal of the gracious farm, CCRI built a Brutalist megastructure on the campus to house all educational functions. Some of the original farm buildings still survive. The college uses the manor house as the president’s residence.

400 East Ave, Warwick, R.I.

Shelburne Farms

Shelburne Farms in Vermont, one of the Vanderbilt gentleman farms.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the richest men in history, had many descendants who built elaborate mansions and yachts. Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, chose to create one of the Vanderbilt’s gentleman farms in Shelburne, Vt. Her brother George then one-upped her with the granddaddy of them all, Biltmore, in Asheville, N.C.

Eliza and her husband, Dr. William Seward Webb, bought up small farms to create their 3,800-acre estate in 1886. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the winding drives, scenic vistas, parklands, gardens and a golf course. Architect Robert Henderson Robertson designed 16 buildings, including a stunning Shingle Style mansion. No less a conservationist than Gifford Pinchot advised them on forest management.

The farm began to shrink in 1910, and the next generations of Vanderbilts struggled to keep it up. In 1972, the Webb descendants incorporated Shelburne Farms as a nonprofit educational organization. It has 400 acres of sustainably managed woods and a grass-fed herd of Brown Swiss cows.

The National Register of Historic Places put Shelburne Farms on its list because of its significance as a Gilded Age ornamental farm.

It’s also one of the principal concert sites for the Vermont Mozart Festival. Shelburne Farms also features an inn and restaurant, open seasonally, on the shores of Lake Champlain, tours, walking trails, a children’s farmyard and a farm store that sells, among other things, cheddar cheese.

Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne, Vermont

Images: Eolia By I, PostMan1107, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2412245; Isaac W. Dyer Estate By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35570189; Turner Hill Farm By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21986299; Knight Estate By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20439041;The Fells, By The Fells –http://www.gardenvisit.com/assets/madge/the_fells_newbury/600x/the_fells_newbury_600x.jpg, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11155642. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Places Where a Revolutionary Hero Lived

You didn’t have to show courage in battle to be a revolutionary hero. But if you were, it probably took more than a century for historians and builders to restore your house and turn it into a museum.

Benjamin Edes and his partner, John Gill, did more to stir up revolutionary fervor in the American colonies than any other publisher. On the night of Dec. 16, 1771, Sons of Liberty secretly assembled at Edes’ home in Boston. They disguised themselves as Indians and walked down to the wharves. There a crowd gathered while they chopped open the tea chests on three ships and dumped all the tea into the harbor.

Today, you can visit Benjamin Edes’ old print shop, next to the Old North Church on the Freedom Trail.

Every New England state has a home or an office belonging to a hero of the American Revolution. Here are six of them, one for each state. All but one existed in obscurity for more than a century, their association with a revolutionary hero forgotten. The colonial revival stimulated interest in the old buildings, and historians transformed them into museums.

If you know of a landmark associated with a revolutionary hero, please share it in the comments section.

Nathan Hale Homestead

The Nathan Hale Homestead, which memorializes Connecticut’s most cherished revolutionary hero, in Coventry, Conn.

Every schoolchild knows the story of Nathan Hale, the young schoolmaster turned spy for George Washington. The famous Indian fighter Robert Rogers captured him on Long Island, and the British hanged him without a trial. The State of Connecticut considers him a revolutionary hero for his defiant last words, “I only regret that I have but one life to live for my country.”

When the Hale family hadn’t heard from Nathan in a while, his brother went to Old Saybrook, Conn., to track him down. He learned Nathan was killed and was given a trunk of his belongings.

The Hale family eventually sold the house and it passed through several hands. Then a Connecticut lawyer named George Dudley Seymour got caught up in the Nathan Hale story. He found out the house, sadly in need of repair, was for sale. Seymour bought it, restored it and filled it with Connecticut antiques, including Nathan’s trunk.

Nathan Hale never lived in the Nathan Hale Homestead, but he did live in a house on the same location. His family tore it down during the war to build the bigger house, which survived.

The Hale Homestead grounds are open year round from dawn to dusk, and the house itself is open for tours from May to October.

2299 South St., Coventry, Conn.

Wadsworth-Longfellow House

The Wadsworth-Longfellow House, home to a revolutionary hero and a poet.

Peleg Wadsworth, grandfather of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, served in the Continental Army as a brigadier general. His greatest moment in the war came during the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. As British warships drove American forces up the Penobscot River, Wadsworth saved his men by leading a retreat by land back to Boston.

The British later captured Wadsworth from his headquarters in Thomaston, Maine, and confined him at Fort George in Castine, Maine. He escaped by cutting a hole in the ceiling and crawling along the joists.

Wadsworth went home to Plymouth, Mass., but he returned to Maine and bought property in what is now Portland. He built the first brick house in the city, now known as the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. His son and wife lived in the house, where they raised their children.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s sister owned the house until her death in 1901, when she bequeathed it to the Maine Historical Society. The historical society runs it as a house museum – Maine’s first, as a matter of fact. It’s open May through October.

489 Congress St., Portland, Maine

Printing Office of Edes & Gill

Where Benjamin Edes published the Boston Gazette.

Benjamin Edes, along with his partner John Gill, didn’t fight in the war, but he was nonetheless a revolutionary hero. Edes, more than any other publisher, stoked public indignation over Parliament’s abuse of the American colonies.

Edes and Gill worked out of a print shop in Boston’s North End, near Paul Revere’s house and next to the Old North Church. The Old North Church now owns the building where Edes and Gill ran their printing press.

Edes escaped Boston during the siege and moved to Watertown, Mass., where he continued to publish the Boston Gazette until 1798. The British arrested his 17-year-old son Peter for 3-1/2 months, mostly because they hated his father.

The North End went from a fashionable neighborhood to a slum, then back to fashionable.The Printing Office of Edes & Gill opened as a museum in 2011. Interpreters show how colonial printers worked their trade on the museum’s historic equipment. They also explain how Boston’s patriot press incited the American colonies to rebellion.

21 Unity St., Boston, Mass.

Gen. John Stark House

The home of Indian fighter and revolutionary hero John Stark in Manchester, N.H.

Gen. John Stark gave New Hampshire its motto, which you’ve no doubt seen on its license plates: Live Free or Die.

The old Indian fighter marched his New Hampshire militia to Boston as soon as he heard about the Battles of Lexington and Concord. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, he led his men to a spot where he anticipated the British would attack. He may or may not have said, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” Someone did; it just isn’t clear who.

He was an unsung revolutionary hero of the Battle of Saratoga, where he and his men prevented the British from retreating north. His heroics at the Battle of Bennington are more widely remembered. Even today, many New Hampshirites can quote him: “There they are boys! We beat them today or Molly Stark sleeps a widow tonight!”

Stark famously went home to his farm in Derryfield (now Manchester) after the war and died at age 93. The Stark family sold his boyhood home in 1821, and then the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company bought it in 1835 to use as worker housing. In 1937, the company gave the building to the Daughters of the American Revolution, who restored it. They moved it to the original Stark farm in 1968 and turned it into a house museum.

2000 Elm St., Manchester, N.H.

Nathaniel Greene Homestead

The home of Nathanael Greene, revolutionary hero.

Nathanael Greene had asthma, walked with a pronounced limp and belonged to the pacifist Quaker religion.

None of that stopped him from becoming a revolutionary hero doing some of the toughest jobs of the war for independence.

When Americans despaired of ever evicting the British, Nathanael Greene lured Gen. Cornwallis away from his supply lines and into battles that inflicted heavy casualties. Greene took control of most of the South away from British forces and returned to his home in Rhode Island.

Nathanael Greene built the house in 1770, and his family lived there through the war. Greene moved his family to Newport at the war’s end in 1783, but then relocated to Georgia and died soon thereafter.

He had sold the Coventry house to his brother Jacob, and it remained in the Greene family until 1899. The family, though, rented it as a tenement house and neglected to keep it up.

In 1919, the Nathanael Greene Homestead Association formed to restore the former home of Rhode Island’s best known revolutionary hero. Today it’s a house museum, and part of the Anthony Village Historic District. Open for tours from April through October.

20 Taft St., Coventry, R.I.

Ethan Allen Homestead Museum

The Ethan Allen Homestead, home of Vermont’s greatest revolutionary hero.

Ethan Allen could claim stature as a revolutionary hero for capturing Fort Ticonderoga with Benedict Arnold in 1775. But he spent most of the war imprisoned by the British and then, after his release, ferreting out Loyalists in Vermont.

He spent the years after his imprisonment pursuing politics, writing books and speculating in land. He and his family moved to a new house overlooking the Winooski River in Burlington in 1787, but he only lived there until his death in 1789. His survivors sold the house, which passed through several hands. Local people always knew the house had belonged to Ethan Allen, but no one did much about it until a Burlington resident named William J. Van Patten bought it in 1902.

Van Patten donated 12 acres of the property to the Sons of the American Revolution on condition they maintain it as a park and build a tower to Vermont’s revolutionary hero. They did, and Van Patten lived in the house and ran the rest of the property as a dairy farm.

In the late 1980s, a surviving remnant of the farm was turned into The Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. It now functions as a house museum with living history events and lectures on Vermont’s history. Open May through October.

1 Ethan Allen Homestead, Burlington, Vt.

Images: By Sphilbrick – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11802250; Clough House By MLHalsey – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23197901; Gen. John Stark House By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19357747; Nathanael Greene Homestead By Camanda at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18112163; Ethan Allen Homestead By Mfwills; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:11, 24 October 2013 (UTC) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29160603

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Six Colonial Homes by Wallace Nutting

Wallace Nutting was a dyspeptic minister so overwhelmed by urban life and modern values that he led millions of Americans on a nostalgic journey into the colonial age.

As the Martha Stewart of the Colonial Revival, he influenced the décor of countless American homes. He spurred a wave of historic preservation and advanced the study of American decorative arts and architecture.

Wallace Nutting

A nervous breakdown forced Wallace Nutting to retire from the pulpit at 43. He took to selling photographs of rural scenes and colonial homes to earn a living. Before Martha Stewart ever brandished her glue gun, Wallace Nutting created an empire of hand-tinted photographs, books, reproduction furniture and experiences, all evoking a better, happier time. By 1915, he earned $1,000 a day.

As an entrepreneur and a businessman, the Wallace Nutting name stood for quality, according to Charles T. Lyle, executive director of the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum, and curator of a recent Nutting exhibit.

Wallace Nutting

“Wallace Nutting was a true pioneer in the emerging fields of historic preservation, and in the study and appreciation of American decorative arts and architecture,” Lyle said. “Nutting created an aesthetic that popularized the use of American antiques that people wanted to have in their own homes and could live with comfortably.”

Historic New England has an online collection of Wallace Nutting photographs, called the Wallace Nutting photographic collection, 1910s-1930s. It’s searchable by state. Click here to see it.

Following are photographs of six colonial homes featured by Wallace Nutting. If you have any Wallace Nutting favorites, please share them in the comments section.

Joseph Webb House

In 1914 Wallace Nutting began buying a series of colonial homes that he called “The Wallace Nutting Chain of Colonial Picture Houses.” They gave him the freedom to create ‘a proper setting for quaint pictures with attractive background and furnishings.’ But he didn’t have to adapt to the schedules and room arrangements of the new house museums.

One of those homes was the Webb House in Wethersfield, Conn. Joseph Webb, a successful merchant with ships that traded in the West Indies, built it in 1752. He died at 34, leaving six children and a widow. Diplomat Silas Deane, executor of the estate, later married Webb’s widow and built a house next door.

Webb’s son Joseph, Jr., inherited the house. In 1774, he hosted Gen. George Washington for five nights while he planned the Siege of Yorktown with the Comte de Rochambeau. It passed through several owners after Webb sold it in 1790. Martin Welles bought it around 1820, and it stayed in his family until 1913. Wallace Nutting bought it in 1916 as a sales office, studio and tourist attraction.

He lovingly photographed the details of the house, including the doors, the fireplaces, the shell dome cupboard and the china inside. For a time the public flocked to Wethersfield to pay 25 cents for admission to the house. World War I and gas rationing interrupted the business.

Nutting sold the house to the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in 1919. Today it belongs to the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum.

211 Main Street, Wethersfield, Conn.

Wadsworth-Longfellow House

Wadsworth House

Since childhood, Wallace Nutting set his heart on becoming a Congregational minister. He grew up in Augusta, Maine, and attended Philips Exeter Academy before entering Harvard. After graduating seminary he took a job as minister at the Fryeburg Congregational Church for a season.

Wallace Nutting was back in Maine in 1914, photographing the Wadsworth House, now the Wadsworth-Longfellow House, in Portland.

Elizabeth and Peleg Wadsworth, a Revolutionary War general, raised 10 children in the house, built in 1785-86. It was the first brick building in Portland and the oldest standing building on the peninsula.

Wadsworth’s grandson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, lived in the house from the time he was 8 months old until he was 35. Henry’s younger sister Anne Longfellow Pierce was the last family member to live in the house. When she died in 1901, she left it to the Maine Historical Society, which has run it as Maine’s first house museum since 1902.

Wallace Nutting was buried in Augusta after he died at home in Framingham, Mass., on July 19, 1941, at age 79.

The Wadsworth-Longfellow House opens to the public from Maine through October; click here for information about hours and directions.

489 Congress Street, Portland, Maine.

Hazen-Spiller House

Wallace Nutting photo of the Hazen-Spiller House, courtesy Historic New England.

Wallace Nutting was born in the village of Gleasondale, Mass., on Nov. 17, 1861. His father died in the Civil War when he was eight months old.

A story about his ancestor resonated with him. The forebear was killed in an Indian raid in Groton, Mass., in 1639, and his head stuck on a pole to warn off new settlers.

Nutting returned to Massachusetts again and again. He bought the Cutler-Bartlett House in Newburyport and the Ironmaster’s House in Saugus.

In 1917 he bought the Hazen-Spiller House in Haverhill, where Indian raiders burned many wood houses. That may have contributed to the decision to have the house made of brick. Many brick makers lived in Haverhill, and the house is notable for both its size and its two fireplaces. Rather than two central fireplaces, the fireplaces in the house stand at either end of the building.

Richard Hazen, member of an early Haverhill family, built the house.

Nutting’s speculated the house was partially a shoe factory and garrison, used by early settlers to escape Indian raids. He dated the house to sometime before 1700. But today historians date it to 1724, after the Indian raids in Haverhill ceased.

Wallace Nutting operated the house as a museum in 1918, though it was not one of his more successful properties. Today the house has private ownership.

The Hazen-Spiller House today

8 Groveland St., Haverhill, Mass.

Wentworth-Gardner House

‘Colonial woman’ descending staircase, Wentworth-Gardner House.

Wallace Nutting eventually took his art of hand-colored photography to a new level. He began to stage scenes of domestic life with people dressed in colonial garb inside of colonial houses, such as the woman descending the staircase, above.

He bought the Wentworth-Gardner House in 1915 and restored it as one of his ‘Chain of Colonial Picture Homes.’ It’s a Georgian-style waterfront mansion in Portsmouth, N.H., built in 1760 by Mark Hunking Wentworth. Mark Wentworth was a wealthy member of the prominent Wentworth family. His brother was colonial Gov. Benning Wentworth. He built the house as a wedding gift for his son Thomas and his daughter-in-law Anne Tasker.

The house itself very nearly wound up in New York City. The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased it with the intention of dismantling it and moving it. But the museum changed its mind and left it in place. The house is notable for the skill of the local craftsmen who carved its intricate details to mimic the tastes of the English aristocracy.

Wentworth-Gardner House

Nutting removed later additions to the building and returned it to its 18th Century appearance. Today it is open to visitors, along with the adjacent Tobias Lear House, as a museum.

140 Mechanic St., Portsmouth, N.H.

Eleazer Arnold House

Nutting had his final pulpit at the Union Congregational Church in Providence. He hated the city, but he found a way to soothe his jangled nerves in the countryside. “I took long bicycle rides on Monday,” he wrote.

On those bicycle trips, he began to take photographs of landscapes. He then made a deal with a local printer to print platinotypes of birches and blossoms of photos he’d taken in Northern New England. Nutting had so much success he opened a studio in New York City, but soon moved to Southbury, Conn.

He photographed the Eleazer Arnold House in Lincoln, R.I. Wheeler, a tavern owner, built the house in 1693. It’s a rare example of a 17^th century ‘stone-ender,’ a house with fieldstone side walls and chimney and wooden end walls. The building type came from western England, mostly to northern Rhode Island.

Nutting’s photograph shows the side stone façade.

The Eleazer Arnold House was donated to Historic New England (then the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) in 1919, when Wallace Nutting took the photograph. The public can visit on weekends year-round from 11 am-4 pm.

487 Great Road, Lincoln, R.I.

Gen. David Robinson House

David Robinson House

Wallace Nutting collected furniture as props for his photographs, then opened a factory and sold high-quality reproductions. But he lost $100,000 in the venture, he wrote.

His furniture was so authentic unscrupulous dealers bought pieces, aged them artificially and sold them for a hundred times what they paid. Wallace Nutting also published The Furniture Treasury in 1928, which collectors then used as a standard guide for many years.

In the 1920s, Wallace Nutting began publishing his States Beautiful series of travel books. Read his book, Vermont Beautiful, online by clicking here.

David Robinson House

One example of Nutting’s colonial vignettes is this oddly hand-colored photograph of a man and a woman in period dress standing at the gate of the Gen. David Robinson House in Bennington, Vt. The man wears a coat tinted bright red but the woman is in black and white.

General David Robinson, a Revolutionary War general, built his house in 1796. Handed down through the family, in 1912 it contained an invaluable collection of Revolutionary relics. Those included the sword and hat worn by Robinson during the Battle of Bennington.

Monument Avenue, opposite the Robinson marker, Bennington, Vt.

Images: Wallace Nutting images courtesy Historic New England; Wentworth-Gardner House By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28778716; Hazen-Spiller House By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9715789. This story was updated i 2022.

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Wallace Stevens, Humdrum Hartford Lawyer By Day, Drunk and Belligerent Poet by Night

Wallace Stevens was a plodding insurance executive in Hartford for nearly all of his adult life, except when he spent winter vacations in Key West. There he got drunk and fought with Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway.

Wallace Stevens

Stevens was also a poet – on the side, to be sure. He didn’t publish his first book of poems until he was 44. At 72, just before he died, he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

He composed poems on slips of paper on his way to work in the morning, and had his secretary type them up.

His boss at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company knew nothing of Stevens’ hidden passion. “Unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart,” he said.

Robert Frost didn’t think much of Stevens’ poetry. The feeling was mutual.

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pa., on Oct. 2, 1879, the son of a lawyer and a schoolteacher. For a while he went to Harvard, where he published his poems in the school’s literary magazines. He needed to make money, though, so he went to the New York School of Law, passed the bar exam and went to work for a law firm.

Elsie Stevens as Mercury

He married the beautiful but uneducated Elsie Kachel, whose profile would later appear on the Mercury dime. She didn’t share his literary interests and showed signs of mental illness, straining their marriage.

In 1916, he moved to Hartford and began the humdrum existence of an insurance company lawyer. He moved to a large Colonial Revival house with his wife and only daughter.

At the office he was an introverted and dour presence. After hours he was socially inept, or worse when he drank too many martinis. A colleague called him, ‘tall, austere, very dignified.’

He found escape in booze, poetry and Key West, Florida.

He usually traveled without his wife on his annual winter vacations to Key West between 1922 and 1940.

Fight With Frost

In late March of 1935, Stevens was vacationing at the Casa Marina in Key West when he spotted Robert Frost on the beach.

As a poet, Frost’s reputation then outshone Stevens’. He had won two Pulitzer prizes. Stevens, on the other hand, had only published a volume of poetry, Harmonium, more than 10 years earlier. But as a denizen of Key West, Stevens had the upper hand. He was a successful businessman who’d been coming there for years, while Frost was a first-time tourist.

Stevens invited Frost to dinner with his friend Judge Arthur Powell. At cocktails before dinner, Stevens drank too many martinis and insulted Frost’s poetry. Frost later described Stevens’ drunken behavior to a lecture audience at the University of Miami.

Word of Frost’s gossip got back to Stevens. Frost wrote him a letter of apology, saying he’d only meant to be playful. He treasured the memory of that evening – which, he wrote, he was in a better condition to remember than Stevens.

Fight With Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

The next year. Stevens was again in Key West, and again he got drunk over cocktails at a party. Ernest Hemingway’s sister Ursula was there, too. That didn’t stop Stevens from loudly trashing Hemingway. She defended her brother. Stevens replied by calling Hemingway a ‘sap’ and ‘no real man.’

Ursula went to her brother’s home to tell him what happened. Stevens had already dumped on Hemingway twice before, and Hemingway was fed up. He followed his sister to the cocktail party, where Stevens was just leaving. Stevens drunkenly announced he wished Hemingway was there so he could knock him out with a single punch.

Stevens, at 6’2” and 220 lbs., was bigger than Hemingway, but 15 years older. He took a swing at him, and missed.

Hemingway punched Stevens twice, sending him splashing into a puddle – ‘spectacularly,’ Hemingway wrote to a friend.

As Stevens got to his feet, Hemingway started to take off his glasses. Stevens sucker punched him in the jaw, breaking his own fist in two places. Hemingway then whaled on the insurance executive until he went down and couldn’t get up.

Stevens spent the next five days in bed, a nurse and doctor tending to his broken hand and battered face.

Aftermath

A week later he meekly apologized to Ernest and Ursula Hemingway. He asked the writer to keep the story to himself, as word about it could hurt his career at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Hemingway agreed to a cover story that Stevens fell down a flight of stairs. He also kept his word to keep the matter quiet.

Hemingway, magnanimous in victory, later asked a friend to tell Stevens that he was a damn fine poet but that he couldn’t fight.

Stevens didn’t stop feuding with writers. Five years after he first insulted Frost, and again in Key West, Stevens said to him,

The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects.

Frost replied,

The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac.

With thanks to The Whole Harmonium, by Paul Maniani.

Images: Wallace Stevens, By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31317123. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Sears Houses

In the early part of the 20^th century, you could buy Sears houses for the price of a good pair of shoes today.

Times certainly changed. In 2005, a high-end Sears home sold for $900,000.

Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold about 100,000 kit houses from catalogs between 1908 and 1942. They were shipped by rail, with pre-cut lumber stamped for assembly. The company promised a man of average abilities that he could finish the house within 90 days — if he followed the 75-page instruction book.

Sears Houses

Sears got into the business of catalog homes because its building products division was losing money. Frank W. Kushel, who managed the company’s china department, was given the task of turning around building products. He suggested the company sell entire houses in 22 styles and ship them from the factory.

Sears copied the popular housing styles of the day, which included colonial revival features taken from historic New England homes. There’s even one model called The Puritan.

Sears marketed the houses as ‘machine made’ with already cut lumber. “No waste, no mistakes, no big labor bills,” read the catalog copy.

The kits came with nails, shingles, shellac, windows, doors, trim hardware, paint and downspouts. They did not include cement, bricks or plaster. Materials for indoor plumbing, electricity and central heating had to be bought separately.

By 1920, Sears was shipping an average of 125 houses a month. Nine years later, Sears sent 250 houses each month from just one of its four plants. The company boasted it was the world’s largest home builder.

Sears also financed home purchases, and half its homes were tied up in mortgage loans by the time of the Great Depression. The company lost $11 million on defaulted mortgages in 1934, and by 1940 it was out of the house business.

Hamden, Conn.

The C225

Realtors say a Sears house can sell for more because of the enduring quality of the materials and construction.

Sears homes were built throughout Connecticut. In Hartford alone there are dozens, but they are also in Putnam, Hamden, Canton, Shelton, Bethel, Plainville and Torrington.

The 1916 Sears catalog featured testimonials from two men who bought Sears houses in Connecticut.

D.G. Arnold wrote he was ‘well pleased’ with his home, Modern Home No. 119, in Putnam, Conn.

“All the rough lumber, doors, windows, clapboards, flooring, moldings and stairs, in fact everything required to finish a first class house, came from Sears, Roebuck and Co. at a savings of about $500, as compared with local prices,” he wrote. “My builder says he never used better finish and he has had fifty years’ experience.”

L.S. Chapman from Shelton wrote to say he saved several hundred dollars and found the materials better than expected. “Our house, No. C225, is beautiful.

The cottage at Lockwood Farm in Hamden is a Sears house. So are the Cello House, the Viola House and the Second Fiddle House at the Music Mountain in Falls Village, Canaan.

Sears didn’t make all pre-cut houses. There were actually six large companies that made kit houses, but none had the marketing clout of Sears and its famous catalog. Another company, Aladdin, sold enough homes to the Bristol Brass. Co. in 1916 to fill four blocks near the factory in Bristol, Conn.

Bucksport, Maine

The entrance to the Sears Belfast was modeled on the doorway of the Perkins House in Castine, Maine.

Identifying Sears houses has become a cottage industry for fanatics who produce books, blogs, documentaries and even bus tours by the Smithsonian Associates.

Sears enthusiasts argue whether Bucksport, Maine, has a neighborhood full of identical Sears houses – Belfasts, to be precise. Writer Scott Sowers says yes. Rose Thornton, who has made a career of identifying Sears houses, says no.

“The Sears Belfast and the Bucksport Houses are wildly different from one another,” wrote Thornton after examining a photo of a Bucksport house.

(Tangentially, the front doorway of the real Belfast was modeled on the doorway of the historic Perkins House, built in 1769 in Castine, Maine.)

People authenticate Sears houses by comparing them to the models in the Sears archives. That’s usually not enough, since houses are often altered over the years. They must also look for stamped lumber in the basement or attic, shipping labels on moldings or the characteristic ‘SR’ stamped on bathroom fixtures. (For other clues, click here.)

We did track down a Sears house on Lindsay Road in York, Maine.

A Sears house in York, Maine

Longmeadow, Mass.

A Sears Verona, catalog illustration

Sears houses arrived in two railroad box cars in a variety of styles and prices. At the high end was the Magnolia, a four-bedroom, high-ceilinged colonial modeled after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s house in Cambridge, Mass. It sold for $5,972. (See featured image.)

At the low end was the Natoma, a three-room house that sold for $191. It had no bathroom, but you could buy the outhouse separately.

The Natoma

The Verona was another ‘high-class home,’ according to the catalog, ‘of the Dutch type of colonial architecture.’ An authenticated Sears Verona has been identified at 115 Belleclaire Ave., in Longmeadow, Mass.

A house on Medway St. in Norfolk, Mass., is in contention for being a Sears house. Authentic Sears houses were also assembled in Newton, Easthampton, Boston, Woburn, Springfield, Wrentham, Cohasset and Pittsfield.

Claremont, N.H.

The Castleton, catalog illustration

Two small New England companies also sold kit houses.

The Thayer Portable House Co. operated in Keene, N.H., from about 1920 to 1940. It had grown from the Springfield Portable House Co. in Massachusetts. There was also the Robinson’s-Money-Saving-Mill-Made Cut-to-Fit Houses of Providence, R.I.

Still, Sears was king in New England, shipping homes from its factory in Philadelphia.

Two Sears houses have been identified on Mulberry Street in Claremont, N.H. One was a Castleton; the other, a Lorain. (Click here to read more about these houses.)

The Castleton was promoted as ‘dignified and substantial,’ ‘a well-designed house that will make a pleasant home.’ The Lorain was marketed as a charming six-room colonial with dark shutters, snowy walls and window boxes. You can watch a documentary about restoring a Lorain here.

Middletown, R.I.

The Parkside, an economical Sears house

The Parkside was a cute, economical four-room house sold from 1934 to 1940. There’s an authenticated Parkside at 43 Beacon St. in Middletown, R.I. The current owner did considerable research into the house’s history and put up a website about it. (Check it out here.)

In 1938, the Middletown Parkside sold for $1,372. In 2006, it sold for $222,000. Bob Wolfenden, a military veteran, built the house in 1940 and lived in it for the rest of his life. He was a professional carpenter who became superintendent of the Newport, R.I., Water Department. He and his wife Mildred had no children.

John Little bought the house and enlarged it after his friend Bob died. The Parkside then changed hands several times, became a rental and went into foreclosure. It needed repair by the time the current owner bought it in 2006. You can see pictures of the house over the years here.

Burlington, Vt.

An Alhambra, from the catalog

Burlington, Vt., has so many catalog houses there’s a field guide to them called A Guide to the Catalog Houses of Burlington, Vermont.

Burlington was an ideal market for kits of Sears houses as well as for those of its competitors, Aladdin and Gordon Van Tine. The city’s population grew by 10 percent every decade while growing richer. The expansion of the streetcar network opened up cheap empty land. Burlington could also be reached by two major railroads, making it easy to ship kit houses.

Kit houses cluster in Burlington’s South End, the Five Sisters neighborhood, south of the University of Vermont campus, the New North End and Lakeview Terrace. Of the 30 kit houses identified in the Burlington field guide, 14 came from Sears.

A cluster of Sears houses in Burlington shows the range of styles: A four-square Fullerton and a Westly bungalow were identified on N. Prospect Street. Also:

- A Dutch colonial Lucerne on Catherine Street,
- A colonial revival bungalow called a Crescent on St. Paul Street
- A Spanish Colonial Alhambra on South Winooski Avenue
- A Tudor Revival Barrington at Marian Street.

Images: Perkins House By S437885 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35346344; Sears Catalog House, by InAweofGod’s Creation, Creative Commons license. This story about Sears houses was updated in 2022.

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