8 minute read
Adapting Preservation for the Future
Above: William Sumner Appleton first worked on Jackson House, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and its eighteenth and nineteenth century additions in the 1930s.
by BENJAMIN HAAVIK Team Leader for Property Care
The Historic New England Preservation Philosophy – our overall approach to the care of landscapes, buildings, and objects – has been a cornerstone of the organization since its 1910 establishment. Founder William Sumner Appleton is widely recognized as the first professional preservationist in the United States and his approach continues to shape how we think about our work today. In Appleton’s time, preservation of the resource was the ultimate goal. Today, we are equally concerned with making sites accessible to all and addressing climate change – ideas that would have had little purchase when Appleton was alive.
Several of the preservation approaches Appleton developed for the physical care of our historic buildings are still in use today. One is the importance of respecting change over time. In the early twentieth century, it was a common practice to treat a building’s initial construction phase as the most precious and historic. The usual approach was to strip the later layers off a structure so they didn’t interfere with the interpretation of those earlier times. Appleton, while no stranger to this approach early in his career, realized that buildings did indeed evolve, and that change was not inherently in conflict with preserving and presenting the properties.
In 1930, when Appleton was asked why he left later additions on buildings, he said of Jackson House (c. 1644) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “The house is one of those best left showing the course of its evolution.” Appleton understood that the authenticity of the site was more about the layers of change than the original build. Similarly, in 1924, when Appleton was resisting a recommendation to remove the later addition of a beehive oven to the great stone chimney mass at Arnold House (c. 1693), in Lincoln, Rhode Island, he promoted a “thoroughly conservative” approach, saying, “What is left today can be changed tomorrow, whereas what is removed today can perhaps never be put back.” Once you remove something like a beehive oven from a building, it is very difficult to replace it authentically.
Appleton appreciated the value of maintenance and took a conservative approach to repair over restoration. When referring to work done on the Coffin House (c. 1654), in Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1930, he noted, “The more I work on these old houses the more I feel that the less of W. S. Appleton I put into them, the better it is.” In other words, the less we repair or intervene in a building the more authentic it remains.
Replacing materials in kind is another widely-held tenet of historic preservation that has roots in Appleton’s philosophy. “If you take out a piece of wood that was 6x6, let’s put back a piece that is the same; and if it should be hemlock, let’s use hemlock over again, or white pine, or oak, or whatever the case may be…,” Appleton wrote in 1942 of work underway at Arnold House. “It’s the idea of continuing the original work as closely as possible in reconstruction and repair.” Today, when making a repair at Historic New England, we think about matching materials, dimensions of the material, colors, distinguishing marks, and many other categories depending on the feature being repaired.
Appleton valued the pure preservation of the resources over adaptation, so he was not particularly interested in altering historic houses for modern use. He hesitantly introduced new services, such as electrical and plumbing, with the understanding that they could be invasive to the building. The caretakers who lived in Boardman House (c. 1692) in Saugus, Massachusetts, for example, used an outhouse until the 1950s when the decision was made, after Appleton’s death, that perhaps the caretakers deserved some level of modern convenience. In several circumstances auxiliary structures were modified or even brought to sites for caretaker use rather than making an intervention on primary structures.
Appleton’s resistance to permanent change influenced the preservation concept of reversibility – any upgrades or repairs we make to buildings should be able to be easily undone in the future. While reversibility wasn’t a term Appleton used, the idea certainly grew from seeds he sowed. Changes to servants’ quarters and work areas such as kitchens are classic examples. The history of house museums is filled with stories of renovations to these back-of-house operations on the assumption that no one would be interested in them.
Today, Historic New England visitors appreciate our light touch over the years. The reversibility of our interventions allows many of our spaces to be interpreted with a high level of authenticity. For example, Historic New England added a visitor center to Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in the 1990s. Housed within the historic Walter Gropius-designed two-car garage, the visitor center is what we call a “box-within-a-box,” a free-standing structure that can be dismantled and removed in the future without damage to the historic garage.
Over the years we have been faced with myriad issues that Appleton never had to grapple with. We now know that once-ubiquitous materials such as lead paint and asbestos are health hazards – including the siding we removed from Pierce House (1683) in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in the early 2000s. More recently, climate change has led us to reevaluate our preservation approaches at our historic sites. While maintenance is still our preferred option for retaining historic material, we know many of our gutter systems cannot handle the high volume of water they are now forced to manage in intense storms. If we don’t change the gutter size, we place the buildings at higher risk for water damage. Therefore, replacing gutters or other building and landscape features in kind is no longer the default preservation approach it used to be. To ensure historic resources survive for future generations, we must change our thinking.
The effort to make our sites inclusive and available to all also challenges aspects of traditional preservation philosophy. We want to preserve and share our resources and we are adapting our preservation approaches to allow for changes in how to access the sites. Adding ramps, chair lifts, railings, and widening door frames is necessary for accessibility, even if it involves the loss of historic material or changes to the aesthetics of a site. One of the major criteria when evaluating these changes is the reversibility of the intervention, and we try to find a middle ground that balances unprecedented access with historic and aesthetic considerations.
The work we do today to make our sites more inclusive, accessible, and resilient takes time and thought. Preservation needs to evolve and change to fit the times. We must ensure we are preserving for the right reasons. We look carefully at each intervention to determine the impact to the resource from the preservation and aesthetic perspectives, consider its reversibility, and assess the positive impact we might have on the resource by making a change. At Historic New England, our preservation philosophy will continue to evolve to better protect and share our important resources.
