Appleton and Isham: Pioneers of Historic Preservation

Introduction

Preservation of historic sites and vintage architecture has become a major focus in the contemporary period, but the idea of preservation is much older than that. Preservation is not simply a matter of saving everything that is old or unique, and there are always a number of decisions to make as to what to preserve and how to do so within the business and social needs of the community. Not everything can be preserved, and not everything may deserve to be preserved. The needs of the population for new and viable structures means that some of the old must give way to the new, and deciding when to take a stand requires a coherent concept of preservation — an understanding of both its importance and its limitations.

Different theorists have addressed this issue as they have also sought to motivate the movement for the preservation of the worthy and the important. Two such theorists, with somewhat different approaches to the subject, are William Sumner Appleton and Norman Morrison Isham, both of whom left writings on preservation and took direct action in furtherance of their goals.

William Sumner Appleton and the Founding of SPNEA

William Sumner Appleton lived at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in the Boston area, where preservation was maturing from a string of spontaneous efforts into an institutionalized movement. As this transformation took place, both the aims of preservation and its methods were changed, a process in which Appleton played a key role. In the nineteenth century, Boston did not have an organization dedicated to preservation as such. The Bostonian Society was meant to serve that function, but the group seemed satisfied by the single project of looking after the Old State House. The Trustees of Reservations was also nominally interested in historic structures, but in practice the group refused to accept any such structures for years because they had no means of maintaining them. Even a genuine desire for preservation can be stymied when there are no funds to achieve the goal. The national Daughters of the American Revolution was organized in 1890 and included preservation in its mission, leading in Massachusetts to participation in the Bulfinch State House campaign, but nothing beyond (Mason and Page 96).

The first standing regional preservation institution in America came indirectly out of another ad hoc effort — the restoration of Paul Revere's house in Boston. That structure was the oldest remaining building in the city, dating from sometime between 1676 and 1681. Descendants of Paul Revere joined with others to form the Paul Revere Memorial Association to purchase the building. In 1907, the group began a restoration unlike any other Boston had seen:

"The Old South Church and the two statehouses were major public buildings, their treatment a matter of widespread amateur debate. The Revere house, on the other hand, was outside the daily ambit of its preservers, and had undergone radical and unrecorded changes. Its restorers aimed to return it 'to its original condition,' so its treatment became a matter for expert investigation, not architecture but archaeology." (Mason and Page 96)

The memorial association made an even greater contribution to preservation in the form of its secretary, William Sumner Appleton Jr. The Revere House changed his focus from patriotism to architecture, and in 1910, he chartered the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), a name Appleton himself called an unfortunate mouthful (Mason and Page 96).

Appleton had a patrician sense of family, honor, and country, developed through his upbringing on Beacon Street in Boston. He had a strong sense of "Brahmin ancestry and gentility" (Lindgren 17). In Appleton's youth, Beacon Hill was the center of Bostonian aristocracy. His father sold the family home and moved the entire family to Europe in 1887 for over a year. Upon his return, Appleton attended St. Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire — the first of the Brahmin-created boarding schools and one particularly committed to the traditions of the British gentry. Within that environment, he mixed with the children of Brahmins and New York and Philadelphia industrialists (Lindgren 18).

Appleton continued his education at Harvard, which "imparted an ideological system that stressed a student's obligation to community through mugwump politics, upper-class institutions, and conservative economics. Elitism permeated its instruction, and students learned that democracy produced chaos, New England's heritage deserved respect, and stability offered future certainty" (Lindgren 18). His education only reinforced his sense of traditionalism and class identity. He sought to recover and preserve his family heritage and once stated of his home, "In New England the old order passes so swiftly . . . that I know hardly any other place so wholly of the olden time" (Lindgren 19).

Appleton's Preservation Philosophy and Practice

The preservation society Appleton founded was infused with his sense of class, tradition, and the need to preserve both. In the first Bulletin published by the society, Appleton issued a preservation manifesto of unprecedented ambition. On the cover was a photograph of the John Hancock house, built in 1737 by Thomas Hancock and destroyed in 1863. Appleton wrote, "Our New England antiquities are fast disappearing . . . because no society has made their preservation its exclusive object." To correct this, he wanted "a large and strong society, which shall cover the whole field . . . and act instantly wherever needed to lead in the preservation of noteworthy buildings and historic sites" (Mason and Page 98). Appleton never mentioned the Old South or either statehouse; the only Boston buildings he cited were of domestic scale. The society's program thus embraced modest structures and sought to acquire them "through gift, purchase, or otherwise, and then to restore them, and finally to let them to tenants under wise restrictions" (Mason and Page 98).

At the end of the society's second year, it had acquired two properties and had already refined the techniques of private intervention it would follow for decades. In this process, Appleton saved resources and used innovative means of acquiring properties by seeking gifts and bequests, buying houses subject to life occupancy, and financing restorations in return for reversion of property on their owners' deaths. In 1912, he started a "revolving fund" for this purpose, relying on local groups and keeping SPNEA as a purchaser of last resort: "He honed adaptive use as a preservation tool, rather than making every acquisition a house museum. Appleton's purpose was to stretch SPNEA's funds, but the idea that restored buildings could continue in the lives of their communities was a powerful one" (Mason and Page 98).

The first property acquired by SPNEA was the Swett-Ilsley House in Newbury, Massachusetts, built around 1670. Appleton chose this rambling structure — with a seventeenth-century core and later additions — as his first preservation project because he was especially interested in houses of the earliest colonial era, later dubbed the First Period. These humble dwellings were seen as vulnerable to drastic remodeling or even demolition. They were also less likely to be rescued by private restoration efforts than grander Georgian or Federal houses, and the society could acquire them at modest cost. These houses possessed a post-medieval aesthetic with great appeal to Appleton, who had studied with Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard, traveled extensively in Europe, and was familiar with the teachings of John Ruskin and William Morris: "Appleton valued hand craftsmanship wherever he found it, whether in an ingenious seventeenth-century door latch or a contemporary Boston-made Arts and Crafts vase" (Redfern para. 1).

Appleton followed the advice of restoration architect Henry Charles Dean and set about peeling away layers of lath and plaster at the Swett-Ilsley House, revealing original timbers, early eighteenth-century paneling, and one of the largest fireplaces in New England. Restoration stopped when funds were exhausted, before any long-gone original features such as diamond-paned casements could be recreated. The result was a house with an unrestored eighteenth-century exterior and a partially restored interior, reflecting elements of both the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

As he worked on this house, Appleton visited the neighboring Coffin House (from around 1654) and encountered a family still residing in their ancestral home, profoundly imbued with an awareness of old-time tradition: "Newbury's centennial had been celebrated in their front yard in 1735; a forebear, Joshua Coffin, had written the town's first and still definitive early history, in 1845. Appleton cultivated his relationship with the family, and fourteen years after his first visit, they gave the Coffin House to SPNEA to be preserved as a family memorial" (Redfern para. 2).

Appleton then undertook restoration of the Coffin House and brought to the project "a nuanced understanding gained from work on several other First Period properties during the 1920s. He had come to distrust the widely accepted practice of taking a house back to its presumed earliest appearance, which he termed more a memorial to the restorers than to the original builders. Instead, he chose to preserve the building's countless accretions so as to reflect the evolution of domestic life over three centuries. This approach, which can be seen at many of SPNEA's house museums today, has since become a distinguishing feature of SPNEA's preservation philosophy" (Redfern para. 2).

It was in 1915 that Appleton made his first visit to Newbury's fabled Spencer-Peirce-Little House, immediately recognizing the importance of this imposing stone mansion and noting that its two-story brick porch was unique in New England. He kept in regular touch with the Little family, hoping to secure the preservation of the property. Appleton died in 1947, but his thirty-year relationship with the family bore fruit in 1971 when Amelia and Agnes Little arranged for the land, buildings, and furnishings to come to SPNEA upon their deaths (Redfern para. 2).

Conclusion

Preservationists William Sumner Appleton and Norman Morrison Isham made their mark on the idea of preservation, left examples of their own work in this field, and — in the case of Appleton — created an ongoing organization dedicated to preservation. Appleton was more the Brahmin, offering his expertise and resources in service of preserving the work of American artisans of the past, while Isham held a more egalitarian vision of the value of preservation and of what kinds of buildings deserved to be preserved. Together, they set a pattern followed by many groups to this day.