The colonial revival

Richard Guy Wilson, introducing this book of essays about the colonial revival movement in the United States, writes: "What does Colonial Revival mean? Although to some the apparent obtuseness of such a question may render it redundant, any attempt to define the Colonial Revival can become so complex that the response begins to resemble the later manner of Henry James with multiple layers, qualifications, asides, and repetitions." The book bears out this assessment, as some two dozen essayists expand on the many forms of colonial revivalism, from deft additions to existing buildings to construction from the ground up. It is even pointed out that the colonial revival was itself reviving a revival, since the early colonists were reviving the sorts of things they had left behind in Europe.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's house on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, represents one of the more piecemeal applications of the colonial revival in Sarah M. Heald's essay. His house was a Georgian mansion where George Washington stayed for nine months during the American Revolution. Three of Longfellow's poems set the stage for the revival: "To a Child," remembering the presence of Washington; "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858) celebrating the diligence of young spinner at her wheel; and "The Old Clock on the Stairs" (1845). Artifacts eventually caught up with the poetic themes. There were a number of pictures of Washington as husband and warrior in various rooms, and in 1844 Longfellow added a plaster copy of Houdon's bust of Washington. This was placed on the stair landing, although the poem of the following year had a tall-clock in this position. A spinning wheel was not part of the household until at least a decade after the relevant poem. It was added to the bedroom of the two youngest children, Edith and Annie, at their request, but as a decoration, not a hobby. A tall-case clock did not replace the bust of Washington on the stair landing until Longfellow bought a Dutch example in 1877, more than thirty years after he wrote the poem.

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By this time the house positively vibrated with the past, and as one of his daughters wrote to a cousin in 1875, "I hardly want to return to the present day, especially as this house is such a fine chance to keep up with the delusion." Longfellow's children created a trust to preserve the house. The essay ends: "The Longfellows were not unique in their romantic impulses nor furnishings, yet their roles as prominent players in the creation of these historical myths reveal deep ironies which can provide lessons of caution to all keepers and consumers of our past."

The next gradation of colonial revivalism was remodeling houses into colonials. This was made easier at the turn of the twentieth century by the loosest possible definition of colonial as any style before Victorian, according to Betsey Hunter Bradley. These makeovers could be more or less cosmetic. Among the more extreme was the novelist Louis Bromfield's house at his Ohio farm, which is the subject of an essay by Barbara Powers. Bromfield's local architect, Louis Andre Lamoureux, wrote that his client "wanted a good unostentatious farmhouse in the Ohio tradition, yet no tradition existed for it." Bromfield insisted that the house incorporate the old farmhouse on the property. So Lamoureux pieced together a triumphant pastiche of Ohio architecture by borrowing features from houses in the Ohio towns of Marietta, Twinsburg, Richfield, Lakewood, Zoar, Cincinnati, Painesville, and Norwalk. The result would have left a colonist speechless: a thirty-two room house with seven bedrooms and five baths.

The extreme colonial revivalist just started from the ground up. The headquarters of the National Society of Colonial Dames sprang up between 1928 and 1930 on East Seventy-first Street in New York City. Pauline C. Metcalf relates that the dames wanted "as exactly as circumstances permit, one of those private dwellings, which belonged to affluent citizens before the Revolutionary War." To this end the architect Richard Henry Dana "drew upon nine historical sources for the exterior of the house and fifteen for the interiors, which ranged in locale from Kittery Point, Maine, to Charleston, South Carolina." The black-and-white marble floor in the entrance hall was modeled on one in Yorktown, Virginia, which, alas, was a replacement for a simple wooden floor there. However, it "exemplifies how architects of Dana's generation reinforced the concept of making American eighteenth-century interiors grander than they would have been originally." In the ballroom is a mantel brought from the Mercer's Guild Hall in London at one end and a replica of the same at the other end. The dining room was brought from a house in Ipswich, England, and the hand-painted Chinese wallpaper came from a castle in Yorkshire. "Like the natural waxed woodwork, it provides another example of decorating taste that has become associated with that of the Colonial Revival.... It is unlikely that such paper would have been found in a New York town house of the 1750s."