USA > Massachusetts > Hampshire County > Northampton > The Northampton book; chapters from 300 years in the life of a New England town, 1654-1954 > Part 14
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advantage of this scene. There is but one gazebo left on the edge of the cliff, at No. 44, where doubtless several once stood.
The town's last complete embodiment of the Romantic villa and a rare document of this intriguing era, was on the Edwards estate facing on Elm and Prospect Streets adjoining the Burnham School. Two stories tall with an arcaded ell, it was an evolution from the first whimsical structures in the Gothic manner and represented its culmination. It was taken down by Smith College for other occupation of the site in 1954.
As thrilling a product of the imaginative spirit as the era pro- duced was the Gothic Seminary of 1835, Miss Dwight's School for Young Females-a fantastic creation of brick and wide areas of traceried glass with crocketed pinnacles and spires. By 1860 it was the Collegiate Institute, later Dr. Thompson's Shady Lawn. It was demolished around 1915.
Ballou's New York Illustrated Weekly for 1850 carried a front-page woodcut of the new Town Hall at Northampton. Here young architect Pratt had joined with the new mode. It was a box of a building, but he made the matter-of-fact exciting by towers on the front and towers at the corners, all terminating in fierce battlements. The walls were of brick surfaced with stucco that played at being great blocks of stone separated by joints that were depressions in the plaster. Long narrow windows on the front looked down the village street, and if the windows of the great hall itself were concessions to necessity for light and if the formidable crenellations along the edges of the roof were really only wooden ones and the eaves yielded to a little Tudor ginger- bread, the castellated towers offered grim slits for the crossbow. But no arrows were shot.
L. B. Williams' basket shop, built just after the Civil War, was not devoid of exterior grace and was treated as a very extended and blown-up house. But in factories there was to be less and less compromise with looks. There was no plan at all for their decent reconciliation with the community.
1860-1880
The young mid-Victorians looked on their architectural en- vironment as obsolete and dull and, after the war, were plagued by a violent itch to transform all that had been welcomed 30 years before as truly American. One of the popular American writers
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had gone so far as to speak of those white houses of the past as "wooden enormities" and the meeting-houses as "outrageous de- formities to the eye of taste."
The owners of the Manse had kept abreast of the times. Henry Hinckley, along with other progressive citizens, went to the 1876 Centennial. Perhaps that great show inspired him to make certain architectural improvements consistent with progress. Central heating had taken over the function of the fireplaces and gas lighting was an exciting novelty. The Centennial had little to say about the arts of the past, but the implication was more than clear that they were nothing to be proud of. So now much white panel- ling was torn out and walls papered in tones of brown replaced it. In the drawing room the Victorian ideal culminated in a Louis Philippe mantel in mahogany, floridly carved in the Grand Man- ner. To keep pace with this modernity, black walnut chairs, sprawling marble-topped tables, monumental beds and long pier- glasses in French-gilt frames, came trooping in.
It was a time of general interest in Nature, both scientific and artistic, that cultivated outdoor life and revived an appreciation of landscape. An open veranda was placed across the full length of the front; bay windows, initiated locally by architect Pratt and appearing as a contagion up and down the Valley, were added and the cupola or belvedere set atop the great roof was the first of others to appear successively in the town, whence a view of the spreading meadows and the galloping hills of the Holyoke Range could be enjoyed.
The high, wide and handsome era of that florid taste which flourished with post-war prosperity in the North left one arch- example that survived as a document of its time, until very re- cently, in the Luther Bodman mansion. It imparted a tone of stylized elegance to Elm Street and the town and Architect Pratt must have considered it his masterpiece. It was the community's most self-consciously impressive example of that smug style that spoke, not too modestly, of the opulent but restrained life within the tall rooms furnished with flowered Brussels carpets, whatnots, brocaded draperies with French-gilt lambrequins, ottomans, horsehair sofas and Rogers groups. The mansion had its perfect setting on a slight eminence, with a deep foreground of lawn in- terrupted by the ornate cast iron fountain with water falling from basin to basin, as the scenery of approach. Replete with a first
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class Horatio Alger tale of its creation, it represented the very climax of the "American Ease" style. It has given way, in 1954, for the new Smith College chapel.
The fickle architectural career of the Burnham School, née the Deacon Napier place, can hardly be matched. It wears the finery of modillioned cornice and the typical Palladian windows of the Adam period, but it yielded to the new vogue that faced the gable towards the street and the fine porch and doorway are an obvious betrayal of Roman for Greek. When it became a school the mansion dropped all allegiance to its native past and came out in Yankee-French provincial of a Mansard roof, thus gaining a full third of interior space without disturbing its two stories and cornice. The ingenious designer brought it to climax by raising a mansarded tower above the central Grecian entrance porch and its balcony, and to those who were versed in the right taste of the time it recalled the great pavilions of the New Louvre.
When John Clarke bequeathed funds for a public library and memorial to soldiers of the Civil War, the architects were chosen from competitive drawings. There could have been no more con- clusive evidence that the old gods were dead than that in this conservative New England town the successful competitors were from Cincinnati. The temper of the West was for the pompous French manner that was in high favor for the General Grant post offices and city halls. Incidentally, the bronze soldier and sailor set out in front to announce the building's memorial function, are the only examples of sculpture the community has ever cared to have outside the cemetery.
Just at the close of the war, Architect Pratt designed a new banking house for that unique institution, the Smith Charities. It was the most academic effort of his career, a dignified classical composition of facade, with gleaming plate glass in the Florentine windows. Brownstone was the urbane material appropriate to an important structure and the Northampton National, now the Co- Operative Bank, was a typical business building in the New York idiom, on the Center Street corner.
Montgomery Schuyler, the architectural critic, visiting the city, remarked that discovering the remarkable brick cornices such as that of the Columbian Building and those across the street, had made his introduction to the place interesting.
It was part of the Victorian era's compromise with partisan
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preference in architectural style to discriminate according to a building's purpose. For civic use, something with classical gene- alogy for business, other towns might fancy Gothic but there was no such insistence in Northampton. For churches, there was gen- eral agreement that the mediaeval tradition should be respected. The Baptists built a modest brick edifice with square, pointed windows and a turreted tower that could have mothered that of College Hall across the way a few years later.
The new St. John's Church in 1866 on Bridge Street, now the Synagogue, was another essay in Gothic from architect Pratt's hand. It was of wood by economic necessity but, the next best thing, was painted brown.
When fire destroyed the Old First Church in 1812, a new struc- ture completed in 1876 was designed by Peabody and Stearns of Boston, architects for College Hall. It was built of Connecticut brownstone to the pinnacle of its spire. Its tall interior with at- tenuated iron columns and trussed roof is a type developed by English architects of the time and the old-timers must have suf- fered pained shock at the general effect of rich, warm color and the conspicuous decorative importance given the organ pipes and choir, since only a few years before a near schism had occurred over the introduction of any organ at all. The interior, by means of its rather unusual glass for the period, warm wall color and the handsome cherry woodwork throughout, achieves a truly rare atmosphere of mellow amber light. It is unique among its con- temporaries in the region in that it has resisted the swiftly chang- ing vogues of church decorators and retained much of its original scheme of color.
St. Mary's began with a humble place of worship on upper King Street that, with enlargement and rebuilding, developed as an austere white meeting-house rather than as a liturgical church. But in 1885 the present St. Mary's was dedicated. In its Victorian- Gothic it followed a structural scheme not unlike that of the First Church. The use of cast iron columns, in this case covered to simulate masonry, was bringing new proportions to church in- teriors.
At the outset of the Smith College experiment, the trustees de- cided on "a central building for academic instruction and to group around it dwelling houses to be conducted so far as possi- ble like well-ordered and refined private homes." Although Judge
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Dewey's templar residence was the first of these dwellings, the choice of Gothic for the new college was proof of the high favor it had attained in New England.
Pierce Hall with its budding tower, diminutive pointed portal and small scale is College Hall's offspring that never grew up. In this era much was made of individual parts, such as the tower of College Hall, the porch of Pierce, the recessed doorway of Hill- yer with the mass of its upper wall supported by the Gothic column. It is obvious that the exteriors were thought of as a series of separate events not intimately related to each other.
1880-1890
Early in the '80's the "summer house" that stands in the garden of the Manse succeeded an earlier one. It was probably the last to be built in the line of those little incidental garden ornaments that were some of the most capricious and charming items that came out of Romanticism. But this new one was neither dreamily fanci- ful nor exotic. The tops of its posts were embellished with squirm- ing hand-sawed brackets that are the badge of every-day car- pentry for the '80's and beyond. At least one whole street in Northampton was built up with ill-formed new houses writhing under tortured wooden ornament.
The Queen Anne style came from England, a fancy brew of some of the older forms, with emphasis on the jigsaw. It provided for everyday cheap building merely another spring-board into a new orgy of the quaint and picturesque. Fortunately, much of it was too flimsy to last long.
But apart from every-day promiscuous building, the inspiration of Charles Locke Eastlake, author of Hints on Household Taste, published in America in 1872, produced some distinguished re- sults and Northampton possesses one rare instance, as yet un- spoiled. The Williston home, now belonging to Burnham School, was planned by the architects of the First Church and Smith College. This is Queen Anne-Eastlake about as it came from the hands of its British progenitors. The picturesque ideal is sought for in the multiplicity and coordination of parts and materials. The interior is pure Eastlake, wrought with skill in woods finished in natural grain, and the craftsmanship, however tortured the forms may be, is superb. It represents the mode of 1885 at its very
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best in this country and constitutes a museum piece that can hardly be matched.
The Dimock house at Leeds yields little to the Williston on its interior, and is an adventure to see. The Eastlake staircase, struc- tural ceiling treatments, wainscots, parquet floors, doors with intricate inlays, and a chapel in the attic, offer the most spectacu- lar domestic interior to be seen in the region. The exterior, how- ever, is not to be compared with the Williston house.
All the larger homes used space prodigally. Big drafty halls, dramatic staircases, wide inter-room openings, long vistas from parlor through hall to parlor were typical and popular features.
The color system which belonged with this time has disap- peared-the warm colors: browns, maroon, subtle reds, terra- cotta and olive green. A little colored glass, a touch of gold in a weathervane, a wrought iron chimney brace, a Venetian lantern, an inlay of tiles in the chimney, were all related properties of this Queen Anne episode. Its character is effectually killed under a blanket of one light color, but at 154 South Street may be still felt the great sweep of gable, its cluster of many-paned windows gathered below its overhang, the swirl of upper balcony above the porch, with its spindles and insets of glass.
1890-1920
There are few towns from New England to Chicago without some mark of what began with the famous Boston architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, in the mid-'70's. However incidental to his design the cavernous round arch may have been, it was that which caught popular imagination, so that any courthouse, library, or church built in the next 10 years which did not have a great semicircular portal was indeed a pariah.
Isaac Damons' white Federal-mannered Court House gave way in 1885 to a new Court House of Dummerston Vermont granite trimmed with Longmeadow brownstone. It made a gesture to- ward the new style with its arcaded porch and round-headed win- dows and it was fireproof and would last forever.
Forbes Library was opened in 1895. The wall materials were the same as those the master himself had used in Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston-Monson granite and Longmeadow brownstone. It was fireproof too, with internal construction such as was being used in Boston's new Public Library that faced
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Trinity on the opposite side of Copley Square. But if Forbes derived in materials and structure from the two most epochal buildings in the country at the time, as a piece of architecture it would rate merely as one more architect's futile try at aping a leader. The science of library planning did not arrive until An- drew Carnegie spent millions to promote the cause a decade later. By the time Forbes Library was opened the winds of architecture were blowing from another quarter.
It would be interesting to know just what determined the archi- tect's reactionary retreat in the matter of the library, for the same architect had already built the Academy of Music, the facade of which signalled the first appearance in Northampton of a new manner. This was, in fact, a return to some very old manners which would lead to the burial of Queen Anne, Richardson, the Greeks, and the Romantics, so deep that they have not yet been resurrected.
Taste had completed a cycle. It was time for a change. Back to the taste of our earlier history! Back to white paint and our own colonial building!
In 1893, as in 1876, everybody had gone to a World's Fair. The sons and daughters of those who had come back from Philadel- phia fired with an urge to build a Swiss cottage or throw out the parlor mahogany and maple for black walnut, returned from Chicago equally fervent in the cause of white paint and the use of columns and pilasters and classical cornices. Committed to ornamental effects of one sort or another for so long a time, taste seized upon the finely detailed precedent of the Adam days and went it one better.
There are many interesting examples of the transition from the old to the newer style. Some architects, abhorring the jig-saw, had concentrated on geometry of form, using broad expanses of textured surface in stained shingles. A mind practised in that could hardly turn at once to the dryness of symmetrical composi- tion. The Hammond house at the corner of Elm Street and Har- rison Avenue was begun in 1891, by R. F. Putnam. Its fashion of vigorous outline of roof and the indispensable tower died hard. Here the tower is seen making its last stand, all but absorbed in the body of the house. In the porch the new classicism is almost triumphant, save that the columns and entablature scrupulously delineated are set on brick pedestals.
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The Masonic building was contemporary with the World's Fair and the architect, now become a student of Renaissance detail, tried it out on a business building, a problem that was to tax archi- tectural ingenuity for years to come.
SINCE 1920
Design inspired by our early native architecture, which was thought of as anything before the Greek Revival, received careful study from comparatively few architects, who found there a basis for developing fine proportion and intriguing detail. As reaction from the chaotic license of Queen Anne it took on more order, whether trying still to be exuberant or relapsing into dull plain- ness. Mostly "colonial" became what it mostly has remained, a label for any white dwelling of symmetrical front and green blinds and some gesture at a front doorway. Such houses as 281 and 330 Elm Street, 46 Harrison Avenue and 91 Round Hill Road represent contemporary planning moulded in old forms with some skill and feeling-not of the rank and file of the standard trappings. 20 Round Hill is a most carefully studied essay in the use of brick and wood by craftsmen of the 17th century in the eastern towns, such as Newburyport.
Kipling may have set the bungalow on its way, with a new name for the old one-story cottage that, in trying to live up to the queer name, assumed some bizarre guises. With it began such popular tagging as has offered us successively Cape Cod, Garri- son, Ranch House, Modern, Modernistic, Functional and their swift dilution, to the accompaniment of a daily quota of art and sentiment meted out by magazine and newspaper.
To a large and increasing degree the builder has already become merely an assembler of standardized parts and, in the current eco- nomic conditions, more and more prefabrication is the only an- swer to the demand for homes. In the greatest building boom in history, little houses put together at large expense, extend out along the highways in every direction from the city. There need be no dearth of ideas, for savings banks distribute alluring designs as part of the mortgage business and lumber yards, as part of the material market. But design proceeds, as always, on several levels and the lower derive in the beginning from the upper and the motley results belong to our time.
In these later years the dormitory system at Smith College has
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abandoned the dwelling for a more economical and concentrated housing for the student body. The terrain on Paradise Road sug- gested a plan on three levels and this was worked out as a Georgian scheme, following somewhat that of the Oxford and Cambridge Quads. It is designed to be seen as a series of surprise vistas. On entering from Paradise Road, one first observes the clock-tower on axis of the large quad and the repeating units unfolding along the sides of the enclosed square. From the center of this square the eye is led up the staircase on one side to a dramatized vista of Mandell Quadrangle, on the other to the semi-circular court of Scales and King on Elm Street.
The new High School is in the current of the new architec- ture, dating itself where it follows the convention of putting up a front to the street, but seen from the Bay State flats its interesting build-up of parts gives it more than transient style. Perhaps the most modern expression in the town is seen in the rapidly chang- ing shop-fronts.
The presence of a main industry of education has proved as slight a deterrent to the rapid disappearance of local documents of the history of our national culture here, as elsewhere. For what is termed progress must inexorably destroy every vestige of the very life and individuality that is built into a community through the years, and the same forces that built it up in a measure of dignity and beauty must inevitably tear those qualities down- a process that has operated with accelerated speed over the last few years and has reduced most large towns to the dead level of commonplace, increasingly ugly aspect.
Some positive and constructive attention to the science of town planning under modern conditions is fundamental to proper growth, to development of a community's special assets, indi- viduality, and appearance. In such direction the new Kollmorgen plant demonstrates how a utility establishment does not of neces- sity further the common trend towards shabbiness. Its crisp, clean shapes and good color, with wise use of lawn and trees, have created an oasis in the dreary length of once handsome King Street.
Along with the survey and glorification of past achievements, the theme and purpose of a Tercentenary celebration might well be directed towards awakening some pride of place, some posi- tive activity against the utter commonplace into which every live old town is descending. Appearance is a commercial asset.
Chapter Eighteen
Art and Artists
By OLIVER W. LARKIN
D URING the first century of Northampton's history, only a few American communities were sufficiently large or sufficiently prosperous to support painters. In the years before the Revolution, Boston could boast of Copley, Philadel- phia had Charles Willson Peale, and in New York, Annapolis, and Charleston there were several talented artists to whom the more affluent citizens could go for their portraits. The less im- portant centers had to depend on painters who went from town to town in search of patrons. A few limners appeared in the Con- necticut Valley during the post-Revolutionary years; and it was one such craftsman, as yet unidentified, who made the curious likeness of a man with a striped vest which is owned by our Historical Society, and which is said to represent Asahel Pom- eroy. It is hard and primitive, but gives a vigorous impression of a striking personality; and we can well believe that this is Asahel, the son of General Seth Pomeroy, who served in many public offices here, fought as an ensign during the Revolution, and kept a tavern on Main Street which was famous among travelers to this region.
Pomeroy was somewhat older when he sat for another travel- ing painter named Ralph Earle, who made occasional visits to the river towns after his return from a few years of training in Eng- land. Despite the harshness of his style, Earle succeeded in bring- ing to life the strong personalities of New England men and women, but his work was uneven, and his hand had grown un- steady when he made several pictures here in the closing years of the 18th century. One historian attributes Earle's decline to his intemperance. Perhaps the limner stayed too long in Pomeroy's tavern before drawing its proprietor; yet he managed to present
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the lean features and the old-fashioned dress of his sitter, and placed an agreeable landscape in the background. Another Earle canvas represents Robert or John Breck, and two others show the local watchmaker and jeweler Isaac Gere, whose brick shop was the first of its kind in Northampton, and his wife Jemima Kings- ley Gere. When these Earle portraits were done, about the year 1799, other men were working in the river towns. Richard Jennys was one of these, and also J. William Jennys; and although no Northampton portrait of theirs has been located, it is possible that one or both found customers here, since William Jennys did the excellent likenesses of Mr. and Mrs. David Billings in nearby Hatfield.
During the more secure and affluent years of the first half of the 19th century, American patrons wanted something more hand- some and more skillful than these stern and rather drab representa- tions. Gilbert Stuart was the leading portrait painter of the coun- try in 1813 when Caleb Strong of Northampton, during his second series of terms as Governor of Massachusetts, sat to him; and a year later Benjamin Tappan, a gold- and silversmith of this town, and his wife Sarah made the long journey to Boston for the same purpose. A few years later, however, it was possible for the Lymans, the Hinckleys, the Henshaws, and other prominent local families to pose here for Chester Harding, a tall, burly, farm-bred man who had lived at Conway and who had tried his hand at many ways of earning his living as woodsman, chairmaker, and peddler before he went west and became a sign painter in Pitts- burgh. There and in Kentucky he somehow learned to paint portraits, and in 182 1 his skill brought him 40 orders in Washing- ton. Having made the acquaintance of Senator E. H. Mills from Northampton, he was persuaded in the summer of 1822 to set up shop here, and as he recorded in his autobiography, was soon busy with commissions. During his visit, as he wrote, the annual cattle show was held. "I allowed my pictures to be exhibited among the mechanic arts. They elicited great admiration, and formed one of the chief attractions." Before he sailed for Europe in 1823, leaving his family in Northampton, he produced many fine portraits in which he combined good drawing with pleasant color and strong characterization, as in the canvases of Judge and Mrs. Henshaw, their handsome daughter Martha, and her hus- band, Senator Isaac Bates, all four of which are now in the Forbes
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