American Gothic

 

We love this house for many reasons,” Keith Moxey says of the Carpenter Gothic-style home he and his wife, Michael Holly, share in Williamstown, Massachusetts. “Among them, I suppose, is that we are historians with an interest in and affection for the past. We feel lucky to be living here.”
“I always refer to this house in the feminine,” Holly says. “The Carpenter Gothic is a kind of feminine style in its elaboration. I don’t feel like her owner, but like her caretaker. Our job is to maintain her glory and add to it.”

 

These sentiments befit both the venerable circa-1852 Gothic Revival residence and the two art historians who own it. Michael—so named because her mother loved the name and knew she’d have just one child—is the Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at The Clark. Keith is the Barbara Novak Professor of Art History and the art history department chair at Barnard College; he also teaches at Columbia University.

 

The couple purchased their home in 2000, about fifteen years after its painstaking restoration by Williamstown-based builder Robert Crosky for the previous owners. When Crosky first saw it, the house had suffered from decades of use as offices and housing by Williams College. It had lost most of the architectural features that give the Carpenter Gothic style its distinctive appeal: the intricate wooden scrollwork trim was missing from its porch, bargeboard, and steep gables; its louvered shutters were gone; the ten-foot finials that originally topped each gable were missing; a Colonial-style front door had replaced the original; most of its stained glass windows had vanished or were broken; windows were denuded of their pointed-arch surrounds; and its stately, clustered hexagonal chimneys had been reconfigured into ordinary rectangles.

 

Stripped of its embellishments, the Carpenter Gothic cottage was bereft of its charm. Sir Christopher Wren’s historic phrase, “God is in the details,” is especially true of this style, which traces its beginnings to the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages. In the mid-nineteenth century, carpenters fashioned Gothic Revival details in wood with hand carving and with newly invented scroll-saws, creating the vernacular expression we call Carpenter Gothic.

 

Crosky spent countless hours poring over mid-nineteenth-century photographs of the house, trying to discern the subtleties of its details. In the restoration, he says, “We kept it grounded. This is an architectural style that emerges out of the earth and reaches toward the sky. I wanted it to be perfect.”

 

A red oak—now towering more than fifty feet in height—was a sapling in the early photographs. From this, and by studying the angle of the sun on the east façade and the shadows cast by the trim, Crosky calculated the size of the gable finials, the heights and dimensions of the chimneys, and the measurements of the scrollwork. From old photographs and a pair of screen doors found in the attic, he reinvented the paneled front door, which was replicated in oak, and he returned the screen doors to their rightful location.

 

Over time the house yielded additional physical evidence of its past. “We stripped the house of everything that had been added later and started over. It was a process of discovery,” Crosky recalls. “We took layers off, and we would see an outline of something that would allow us to re-measure and rescale a detail.”

 

He and the restoration team replicated the original chimneys; replaced the ridge roll, gutters, flashings, water diverters, and drip edges in copper; restored the slate roof with new pieces matched to the originals by a Vermont quarry; replicated the original exterior siding of wide boards butted together lengthwise; and painted the house a deep gray with red trim, typical of the earth and stone hues of the Gothic Revival.

 

Crosky also studied period pattern books, heeding their warnings about flimsy “gingerbread” trim. He recreated nearly three hundred separate pieces of fanciful exterior trim using three-dimensional wooden prototypes to assure the accuracy of size and form. The trim was then crafted from mahogany—durable in weather, though dense and difficult to carve, done with a scroll saw and a large band saw—and sealed with epoxy. Likewise, ten-foot finials were crafted of mahogany and mounted to the peaks of the gables.

 

The historic interior was “originally more like a cottage in feeling with less ornamentation” than on the exterior, Crosky says, “light and airy, but at the same time imposing and solid.”

 

Interior walls were re-plastered, the seven fireplaces were repaired, finishes on mantels and floors were refurbished, and original windows were repaired. “When we were finished,” Crosky says, “it was hard to tell the difference between the 1860s photographs and what the house is today.”

 

 

Moxey and Holly appreciate all of the work that went into the restoration of their home. “During the first part of my life, I would have thought this house very ugly. I was raised with one idea of beauty: I wanted high modernism,” Holly says. “Now I appreciate the Gothic, because it’s validated by so many things that are consonant with the world—the sense of elaboration on a shelter, having fun with a building. You don’t need most of the knobs, pillars, capitals—they have nothing to do with the basic building—but they are a way to make it as beautiful as it can be made. No corner is left unadorned.”

 

The Chadbourne-Bascom house, as it’s sometimes called, was originally built circa 1852 for Paul Ansel Chadbourne, a Williams College graduate who taught elsewhere, returned to the college as a teacher, and went on to become Williams’s fifth president. Its next owner was John Bascom, a Williams professor. The house was constructed in two sections at two different times: an early structure—now the rear ell—was a south-facing early-nineteenth-century farmhouse, while the grander front section was added by Chadbourne to face east toward Park Street and the college.

 

At that time, Gothic Revival was the fashion in architecture, particularly appropriate for its college setting because it was associated with academic institutions and because it bespoke a high level of aesthetic refinement and cultural literacy. One standard architectural feature of the Gothic Revival style in America was the vine-covered porch.

“I love our front porch,” Michael Holly says. “Edith Wharton said ‘a porch is a summer room outside.’ It really welcomes your being outside. It’s that romantic idea of being there with neighbors dropping by.” The home’s private backyard garden, she adds, allows for time that is uninterrupted.

 

“Trees planted here in the nineteenth century are still with us,” Holly continues. “We have planted more, because my husband loves trees. The trees and gardens—that’s her jewelry.”

 

Moxey inventories the historic trees on the property: the towering red oak on the front lawn; “a stripling,” as pictured in a photo from the 1860s; huge white pines; and an enormous, fairly rare pin-leaf beech in the back garden. To this collection he added additional trees—species, as it happens, that the leading force of America’s Gothic Revival, Andrew Jackson Downing, recommended for planting around rural Gothic residences: beech, horse chestnut, shad, and broadleaf magnolia, several of them to commemorate anniversaries and family members who passed away.

 

The house resonates with Moxey’s academic specialty—the art of the Renaissance and Northern Europe, with a particular focus on the Netherlands and Germany in the sixteenth century—because, as he says, the architecture and decoration used in “Northern Europe in the sixteenth century was still of the Middle Ages.” 

 

One of the distinctive features in the couple’s decoration of the house is its color scheme—a rich, saturated palette that includes mustard yellow and navy blue—inspired by the home of poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Weimar, Germany. “The colors reminded us of the stained-glass cathedral windows of the Middle Ages,” Holly says. “So much of the original stained glass that was in the house has been lost, and the paint colors were a way to bring that back.” Original stained-glass windows survive in the kitchen and master bedroom and as small accents in windows in other rooms.

 

The Arts and Crafts furniture the couple had used in a previous home in Rochester, New York, fits perfectly in its current setting—both the Gothic Revival style and the Arts and Crafts movement trace their roots and inspirations to design and crafts guilds of the Middle Ages. English proponents of the nineteenth century’s Gothic Revival, notably A.W.N. Pugin and John Ruskin, were seminal figures in the later development of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

 

“I also love this house because it recalls the communal aspiration of the Middle Ages,” Holly notes. “Cathedrals, for instance, were participated in by all parts of society. Their welcoming aspects encouraged gathering: this was the spirit of the age. This house is like that. On cold winter nights, we light the fireplaces, and the fellows from The Clark, who come from all over the world, gather here. There’s something about the ethos of the house that welcomes them.”  [OCTOBER 2010]

 

A GOTHIC TALE

The Gothic Revival architectural style—the first of the Victorian romantic revival styles to emerge in America—traces its origins through seven centuries to the great cathedrals of medieval Europe. After its apogee in the Middle Ages, the design never quite died out, as it continued to be used in churches and universities and because existing medieval buildings required continuous repair and restoration.

 

The Gothic style re-emerged in eighteenth century England, when society embraced the picturesque; many garden pavilions and several country residences were constructed in this romantic style. Chief among them was Strawberry Hill in London, the home of Horace Walpole, who penned the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, in 1764. This book, along with others such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, fueled a craze for ruined castles, mysterious cloisters, and antiquarian collections.

 

From England, the architecture migrated to America, where the first Gothic buildings were churches built in Virginia; one, Historic St. Luke’s, constructed circa 1640, survives.

Prone as they were to ape all things associated with Europe and its aristocracy, wealthy Americans of the next century followed England’s lead, creating outbuildings in the Gothic style.

 

The first house in the United States to incorporate towers and pointed arches characteristic of this romantic motif was Sedgley, built in 1799 in Philadelphia. In 1832, the country’s second Gothic Revival residence took shape: Glen Ellen in Towson, Maryland, designed by New Haven, Connecticut, architects Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, and inspired by the owner’s visit to Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s Gothic Revival home in Scotland. Glen Ellen was, Davis boasted, “the first English perpendicular Gothic villa [in the United States] with barge boards, brackets, oriels, tracery in windows, etc.” Davis became known as the foremost American architect of Gothic Revival residences.

 

But it wasn’t an architect who led the Gothic Revival movement in the United States; it was Andrew Jackson Downing, the country’s foremost landscape designer. This was no accident of history; medieval Gothic cathedrals celebrated the natural world and humankind’s place in it, while early Gothic Revival garden structures in England were linked inextricably to landscape design. Downing’s pattern books, for which Davis did illustrations, had a profound impact on today’s ideas that buildings should harmonize with the landscape. Each of Downing’s books—The Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841), Cottage Residences (1842), and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850)—developed this idea. To illustrate how to achieve harmony between a residence and its setting, Downing offered extensive landscape and garden plans along with architectural designs by Davis and others.

 

The notion seemed suited to America, particularly to those rural areas that were becoming accessible by railroad and thus inhabited by the newly prosperous urban-professional and middle classes. Working primarily in the Hudson River Valley, Downing developed what he called the “rural Gothic” style, intended as the epitome of “thorough comfort and utility” and of “the domestic virtues, the love of home, rural beauty, and seclusion.” This idea was modeled on “the English cottage, with its many upward pointing gables, its intricate tracery, its spacious bay windows, and its walls planted with vines and flowering shrubs.”

 

To connect the building to its landscape, Downing advised that residential designs include a vine-covered porch and plantings and outbuildings that extended from the body of the house “to connect it, with a less abrupt manner, with the grounds,” a notion that is still a touchstone of successful landscape design. Downing originated the American concept of the vine-covered cottage and was also responsible for the popularity of the porch as a hallowed icon of American homes.—GM 

Gladys Montgomery is the editor of Berkshire Living home+garden and the author of Storybook Cottage: America’s Carpenter Gothic Style (Rizzoli, 2011), in which this house, and Paul Rocheleau’s photographs of it, are featured.

 

THE GOODS

Robert Crosky
Project Management
Williamstown, Mass.