AN INTERESTING HOUSE, & QUESTIONS WHOSE ANSWERS I DO NOT KNOW

I have a particular fondness for the houses of Federal era New England---and if that house, as is increasingly rare, has survived in untouched condition---free of replacement windows, plastic shutters, or any of the dozens of injustices so often inflicted upon them by well intentioned (or not so well intentioned) owners, then so much the better.  A little faded neglect?  Better still.  I understand all too well when I read Nancy Lancaster's musings on how the shabby and pure Virginia houses of her youth affected her aesthetic sensibilities, for so too is it for me with the faded houses that still populated New England in my own youth some fifty years later.  

I love these buildings for many reasons---for their reflection of the aspirations of a new country, for their classically inspired proportions and details, and for a certain provincial quality that pervades all but the most sophisticated examples.  I wonder at their details, executed in the pine that was so plentiful in New England, but based on examples that would have been executed in stone in England, or in Italy whence came their ultimate inspiration.  I mused recently in other posts about a pair of country houses in Dorchester, built for members of the glittering new society that formed around Boston after the Revolution.

Thus, when I came across the photograph above in the course of searching pictures for my posts about the Swan (click here) and Morton (here) Houses, I was, as they might have said in Federal America, 'smote' between the eyes.  Here it all was---and with the bravura gesture of the high pediment, a detail traveled from Palladian Italy via Georgian England.  In years of passionate architectural tourism, I thought I had encountered them all, but this one, at least to me, was news.  And its condition!  Untouched, unimproved, shabby but not derelict.  If I could marry a photograph, this would be the one.  But, being an old fashioned guy, I thought we should become acquainted first, yet maddeningly little information could be found about my new love.  The caption stated that it was the 'Dearborn Mansion, Grove Hall' and that the picture was taken in 1868, and apparently, like the Swan and Morton houses, had been in Dorchester.  I googled myself into a stupor, and nearly went without dinner trying to find out more about my mysterious new love, but came up empty.  I roamed through my own library, and not a bit more solid information could be found.  A General Dearborn had been prominent in Roxbury and Dorchester affairs.  A neighborhood in Roxbury, which borders Dorchester, is known as Grove Hall, after a long demolished mansion---but, that mansion was not Dearborn's.

Plate 55, Design for a House, from Asher Benjamin's American Builder's Companion

And what of its amazing design?  What early designer had created this? One of the many talented carpenter builders?  One of the early and rare architects, like Charles Bulfinch?  Had its design come from a pattern book?  And how, without knowing it, had he nevertheless so evoked the Veneto in this house, while he was probably only thinking of England?  There are several related houses in New England that follow the general design  of this house, but none quite have its elan. In Asher Benjamin's Builder's Companion, one of the designs shown is for a house with a tall central pavilion, and the fanlight in the Dearborn house, with its spiderweb tracery, follows one in Benjamin.  Charles Bulfinch, like Stanford White, has more buildings attributed to him than are reasonable, but the central pavilion on the Dearborn house certainly makes one think of the library building that centered his design for the long vanished Franklin Crescent, Boston's echo of Adamesque London (and whose ambitious development ruined Bulfinch financially).

The Franklin Crescent, and Bulfinch's original drawing for the library at center.

And then, what of those grand and graceful spandrels that flank the pavilion and give the design its unexpected Bravura?  It is a composition and motif one sees over and over in English work, in turn inspired by Italian originals.  One is immediately reminded of the end pavilions at Palladio's Villa Barbara at Maser.

End Pavilion of Villa Barbaro at Maser, by Andrea Palladio

And Bulfinch mined the composition for his brilliant masterpiece, the so-called 'Brick Church' at Lancaster Massachusetts.

The First Church of Christ Unitarian, Lancaster Massachusetts, by Charles Bulfinch, 1816

The composition of the Dearborn house had been used before in New England.  An early example is a house built around 1800 for Samuel Tenney in Exeter, New Hampshire.  This house was built by a housewright named Ebenezer Clifford, working with a designer-housewright named Bradbury Johnson.  Although probably nearly contemporary with the Dearborn house, its design, thought to be based on a plate in a pattern book by English architect Roger Morris, looks backward, and Georgian, rather than neo-classical in aspect appears to be earlier than it is.

The Samuel Tenney House, Exeter, New Hampshire, 1800 (Historic American Buildings Survey)

A few years later, Johnson would design his verion of Bulfinch's crescent for the New Hampshire Fire & Marine Insurance Company on Market Square in Portsmouth, again utilizing the high central pavilion (the right wing is now much altered).

The New Hampshire Fire & Marine Insurance Company building, now the Portsmouth Athenaeum, 1803

In Kennebunk, Maine, the William Lord mansion, built in 1801, closely echoes the design of the Dearborn mansion, but without the quite the scale and bravura and perfect integration of parts.

The William Lord mansion, Kennebunk, 1801 (White Pine Monographs, Volume IV, no. 2, 1916)

The Sullivan Dorr house in Providence, Rhode Island, designed in 1809 by John Holden Greene follows the center pavilion composition, but with a flat roof.

Here I digress for a moment, with a picture of the portico on the Dorr House, in an American Federal Version of the Strawberry Hill Gothick style, as applied to a house of American inspiration and otherwise neo-classical detailing.

Sullivan Dorr House, by Samuel Holden Greene, Providence

Portico of the Sullivan Dorr house combines Gothick details with neo-classical detailing on the ceiling cove.

But now I've wandered a bit far from my original points, which were curiousity about the Dearborn house in particular, and in general the beauty with which the architects of the early Republic designed buildings that hark back to England of the 18th century, when her architects in turn were borrowing from 16th century Italy.  And the tradition continued---compare for example, Phillip Trammel Shutze's 'Swan House', designed for the Inman family in 1928.  It is fascinating to me to consider two designers, working in very different eras and circumstances, the later probably knowing nothing of the earlier house, but dealing with some of the same inspirations that had created the earlier house, arriving at the same design solutions, if on a grander and more sophisticated scale, 125 years later.

Once again, the Dearborn house (Prints & Drawings Department, Boston Public Library, via Flickr)

'Swan House' in Atlanta, designed in 1928 by Philip Trammel Shutze

 Postscript:  The first comment below mentions the modernist influence.  To that end, here is a photo of the house William Welles Bosworth designed for himself in 1928 at Matinecock, Long Island, a sort of Vogue Regency modern take on Schinkel does ancient Rome.

And another Postscript:  Thanks to commenter Anonymous, of the Hudson River Anonymouses, for bringing Locust Lawn, one of the purest adaptations of Asher Benjamin's design, to the fore.  I remember driving past it years ago, and naturally nearing going off the road (My bumper sticker reads "I brake for unusual Federal houses").  

"Locust Lawn", the Josiah Hasbrouck House in Gardiner, New York, 1814.