Building Order on Beacon Hill, 1790-1850
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
BUILDING ORDER ON BEACON HILL, 1790-1850 by Jeffrey Eugene Klee A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art History Spring 2016 © 2016 Jeffrey Eugene Klee All Rights Reserved ProQuest Number: 10157856 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ProQuest 10157856 Published by ProQuest LLC (2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 BUILDING ORDER ON BEACON HILL, 1790-1850 by Jeffrey Eugene Klee Approved: __________________________________________________________ Lawrence Nees, Ph.D. Chair of the Department of Art History Approved: __________________________________________________________ George H. Watson, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Approved: __________________________________________________________ Ann L. Ardis, Ph.D. Senior Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed: __________________________________________________________ Bernard L. Herman, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed: __________________________________________________________ Damie Stillman, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed: __________________________________________________________ Sandy Isenstadt, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Signed: __________________________________________________________ Cary Carson, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Where to begin? If writing a dissertation were a job, I would have been fired a long time ago. In the dozen or so years that I’ve been working on this, the debts that I owe to friends, family, and fellow scholars have accumulated to a troublesome degree. First position rightly belongs to Abbott Lowell Cummings, who set me on the path toward a dissertation on Beacon Hill in his undergraduate courses on early American architecture at Yale, which were leavened with memorable field trips to old buildings in southeastern Connecticut. “Uncle Abbott” was a generous, patient, unfailingly encouraging teacher who never let his status as a guru of New England architecture put unnecessary distance between him and his students. Open, approachable, and modest while possessing an astounding depth of knowledge about early building, he is a model scholar and mentor. In gratitude, I dedicate this dissertation to him. It was Abbott who suggested that I come to Delaware to work with Bernie Herman and Damie Stillman. Bernie took the curiosity about early buildings that I had indulged as a pleasant sideline to an undergraduate design major and refined it into a rigorous and intellectually expansive pursuit, showing me how to use buildings to ask larger questions about culture and history. His lecture courses were inspirational, using a range of material from jokes to duck decoys to farm houses to weave complex, subtle, illuminating stories about the past. His seminars were enormously, delightfully challenging, requiring students to venture far beyond comfortable disciplinary boundaries to find insights in unexpected places and things. Outside the classroom, Bernie showed me how to develop my own insights about the material world through iv careful, systematic fieldwork from southern Delaware to the north shore of Boston. He also demonstrated that the pleasures of fieldwork were not only intellectual. If his humor was relatively restrained around the seminar table, he gave freer rein to his affection for wordplay in the cellars and attics of the houses of the Delaware Valley. Damie Stillman similarly combined field trips with classroom teaching in memorable ways but I am most grateful for his attention to his students’ development as professional scholars. Damie reads and listens attentively and patiently, kindly correcting slips of all kinds to help students refine their prose, make their thinking more rigorous, and avoid needless embarrassment in more public and less friendly venues. I am especially grateful for the care with which he edited the manuscript of this dissertation. Other Delaware faculty were important to my development from an undisciplined student but Perry Chapman deserves special mention. Her ability to make Dutch painting and culture a source of endless fascination nearly convinced me to change my major from American art to Baroque. She was an exceptional seminar leader, somehow managing to guide discussions so that the perfect slide to illustrate a student’s point seemed to be always at the ready. But her most significant contribution to my life as a historian of architecture was her insistence upon, and demonstration of, respect for the historiography of art history as a rigorous, thoughtful discipline. She did not suffer lazy, ill-informed speculation gladly. More than anyone, she urged us to ensure that our work engaged with the larger problems of our field and that we understood the long arc of its development. Finally, although he arrived at Delaware after I had completed my coursework, Sandy Isenstadt generously agreed to be a reader of this dissertation. His perspective has been invaluable for showing points at which I might address more fully the larger intellectual problems of our field and for v showing ways in which I might make the narrative more powerful and more persuasive. I am grateful to have had such a skilled group of teachers at the University of Delaware. My fortune was equally good in finding another set of mentors at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, where I began work in 2004. Cary Carson combines a wonderfully mischievous sense of humor with a formidable intellect and an easygoing sociability in a way that is, if not unique, highly extraordinary. As a scholar, his appreciation for clarity and narrative thrust and his impatience for jargon and intellectual fashion is a standard that I aspire to, if I do not always achieve. I am very grateful to have the benefit of his insights as a reader of this dissertation. While Cary encouraged me to become a stronger and more effective writer, Ed Chappell pushed me to become a better fieldworker, stopping at nothing to complete a recording project and always demanding scrupulous attention to the smallest detail of woodwork, hardware, or technology, if it could inform the larger understanding of a building or building culture. His relentless pursuit of answers and his determination to develop a record that can form an enduring contribution to scholarship are evident in the voluminous field records he has created for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. But as intense and as thorough as Ed is, it is Willie Graham who has shown me just how dogged and how precise a fieldworker can be. In addition to showing me how to refine fieldwork to an empirical science, he also has helped me to see it as an art, a craft that can be practiced with attention to its visual qualities as well as its intellectual ones. He has improved my drawing but above all pushed me to take better photographs, ones that both represent a building effectively and that also are more than just a record of an object. Finally, Carl Lounsbury combines skill in field vi investigation with a remarkable depth of knowledge and a farsighted perspective on the practice of history. I am grateful for his including me as part of his summer field school in the College of William and Mary’s NIAHD program, in which I have been able to further develop my skills while also enjoying the pleasures of passing those skills to another generation of historians. In working closely with Carl, particularly on the publication of The Chesapeake House, I have come to recognize the qualities required of a scholar who seeks to make a lasting contribution to his field, including intellectual rigor, scrupulous research, and persistence. I hope that this dissertation, 12 years in the making, at least demonstrates this last virtue. It hasn’t been easy to study Boston from Virginia but my work has been hugely aided by scholars in New England who have provided encouragement and help from a distance. Keith Morgan regularly checked on my progress, urging me not just to finish but to move toward publication. Laura Driemeyer sent me an early draft of her own dissertation on Charlestown, which provided both useful comparative material and a much-needed model for how to write a richly documented history of Boston-area building. As a resident of Beacon Hill, Martha McNamara took a personal interest in my research and has provided both encouragement and access to key sites. The chapter on domestic service is much a more complete account thanks to her help. Finally, Claire Dempsey has provided extraordinary support from the beginning of my research, offering timely words of reassurance, tips on access to sources, and arranging my visit to record the remains of the John P.