Living with antiques: Rosemary Lodge in Water Mill, New York

Magazine Antiques, July, 2000 by Mary Anne Hunting

In the 1980s the current owners of Rosemary Lodge in Water Mill, New York, often thought about selling their shingle style cottage because they could no longer bear the noise from the nearby Montauk Highway. But then the motto "Hold Fast All I Give Thee" would stare them in the face (P1. III). These words had been carved into a panel by Henry Turbell Rose (Fig. 3), a Protestant minister, who had conceived and built the house starting in 1883 on farmland first settled by one of his ancestors in 1730. [ROUTER.sup.1] Unable to ignore the carved message, the owners, R. A. Cordingley and Elford A. King, both architects, quite literally had the house picked up in 1986 and moved fourtenths of a mile to a quieter location (see Pl. V). They have painstakingly modernized it without harming the indelible signature left by Rose, who with his own hands had produced all the interior woodwork and furniture, much of which he personalized with carved mottoes and other decorations. [2] For this reason, Rosemary Lodge was rece ntly added to both the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places.

The Reverend Rose inherited his amateur carpentry and cabinetmaking skills from his father, Eliphalet S. Rose (1810-1870), whose similar passions had coalesced in the building of a farmhouse for his family of nine in Rockford, Illinois, in 1854. Henry Rose lived in that house from the age of eleven until he went to Beloit College in Wisconsin in 1862. Between 1866 and 1869 he attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and while there he made a number of visits to the old Rose homestead in Water Mill, then owned by his uncle Henry Martyn Rose. According to the Reverend Rose's only child, Helen Cromwell Rose, he was drawn to the old clapboarded and shingled farmhouse that stood on the property "Its wealth of tradition was deeply welded into my father's heart," she wrote. [3] However, the Reverend Rose returned to the Midwest in 1869 and remained there for the next fourteen years, serving in three different parishes and marrying Mary Cromwell of Brooklyn, New York In 1883 he accepted a position at th e John Street Congregational Church in Lowell, Massachusetts, and decided to put his life's savings, energy, and time into building a cottage across the road from the family homestead in Water Mill. [4]

One of the most interesting aspects about Rosemary Lodge is how fully documented it is. Between 1883 and 1919, when he died, the Reverend Rose recorded the entire building and furnishing process in a diary he entitled "The Story of Rosemary Lodge," which also includes a list of his building expenses, floor plans, room inventories taken about 1918, a visitor's log, newspaper articles, photographs, and a log of his travels to and from the cottage. [5] The story is further enriched by the recent discovery of Helen Rose's manuscript biography of her father written in 1936. [6] Together, these documents not only provide invaluable information about the Roses' two-and-one-half-story house, reportedly one of the first resort cottages in Water Mill, [7] but they also present a delightful account of summers spent m rural Long Island around the turn of the twentieth century.

"The Story of Rosemary Lodge" begins with the Reverend Rose's recollection of "almost casually" asking his Uncle Henry if he could buy a parcel of land on which to "build a little house":

Standing at his already antiquated gate and looking over to his acres across the road, he said to me, "You may have a half acre over there; but it must not he where it will shut off my view of the ocean."

The following spring Rose agreed to pay his uncle fifty dollars for the land, and he hired the Lowell architect Frederick W. Stickney to prepare drawings, which were completed for twenty-five dollars in just two weeks. With drawings in hand, Rose traveled to Water Mill and asked three local builders for bids, "for the work complete up to readiness for plastering." He rejected them all as too expensive (the lowest bid was $1,920), and decided to act as his own contractor. He hired three or four carpenters to help build the house, including Leonard Aldrich, "employed to boss the job," and Egbert Bishop, "the best mason (though a Methodist!) I ever knew"; and he set about acquiring his own supplies--stained glass from Boston, window frames and sashes from Lowell, and lumber, paint, and brick from New York City. Taking just short of a month to erect, the shingled and painted clapboarded frame was completed at 3:30 P.M. on August 23, 1884, at a cost of $1,350. In the spirit of earlier American traditions, Rose cel ebrated the enclosure of the house with a housewarming. According to his diary, the hearth was christened with a fire, supper was served on a workbench lit by candles, and the few merry guests danced the Virginia reel. The house was named "in honor of its fair mistress." [8]

Rosemary Lodge is an excellent example of the American shingle style, which synthesized the earlier vernacular traditions of woodframed buildings with aspects of the Queen Anne and colonial revival styles. The style's principles of construction worked well for such a simple and inexpensive building. At its core, the wood frame of Rosemary Lodge is a rectangular block, capped by a steep gabled roof with the ridge across the shorter axis and with multiple projecting eaves and dormers (see Pls. II, VI). The asymmetrical massing and irregular outlines are characteristic of the shingle style at its most evolved. [9]