The (House) Dating Game

From New England, the house-dating capital of the world it's . . .

If you really want to touch a nerve with an old house owner, question the age of their house.

This is particularly true when you are dealing with early American houses that were built in the 17th, 18th, or early 19th centuries.  In stark contrast to a culture that tends to be obsessed with youth, connoisseurs of old houses want old.  Or older.  Or, best of all, oldest.

A quick drive around any ancient town in New England will give you some insight into the highly competitive world of structure dating.  This competition is carried out not on a field or court, of course, but on a series of handsome plaques affixed to the facades of America's historic buildings.

These signs are the work of historical societies, town historians, architectural historians, and homeowners, themselves. In the best of circumstances, the plaque might be accompanied by a bronze National Register of Historic Places plaque, which indicates a fairly rigorous vetting of the research done on the house.  In many cases, however, the information on the plaque can be of much more dubious quality.  And it is these more sketchy plaques that shine a light on the weird psychology of old house people.

Having spent more than my fair share of time around old houses and old house people, and having worked on the historic plaque program for my own town's historical society for ten years, there are some bizarre phenomenon that continue to both puzzle and amuse me:

The Spirit of '76 
If the plaques and historic home real estate sites are to believed, despite the whole war with England thing, the colonists were building houses like crazy in 1776.  Never mind that there must have been intense demand for manpower and supplies from the warring factions, every colonist was busy building an HGTV-worthy dream house. Strangely, this construction fever seems not to have been as fervent in 1775 or 1777.

The Pre-Rev Paradox
Among those few early American homes that weren't built in 1776, there seem to be surprisingly few that were built between 1777 and 1830, at least according to the homemade plaques.  In fact, almost anything that could even conceivably pass as being 18th century seems to be labeled as pre-Revolutionary War.

Now, on the surface, this makes no sense.  After all, shouldn't there be fewer houses remaining the further back one goes in time?  Particularly with the British showing a penchant for burning the property of "traitors" from time to time?

And what about the contravening evidence?  Many of these houses lack crucial details that would attest to their colonial status.  Many more possess details that would seem to indicate a post-Revolutionary war construction date.  All easily explainable, as it turns out.  Aren't those glaringly Greek Revival details?  Added in a major renovation.  Isn't that square rule timber framing, rather than the earlier scribe rule? The builder was an early adopter of new building technology.  Why do the land records indicate that no house existed on a property until 1815? Sloppy colonial record keeping.

To be sure, those can all be valid explanations for dating anomalies, but it is amazing how much effort it sometimes takes to explain away the evidence that might indicate that a house is a beautiful 1790s or 1800s structure, rather than an elaborately misunderstood pre-Revolutionary dwelling.  As for me, I am a staunch believer in Occum's Razor - the simplest explanation has the greatest likelihood of being correct. So, if it looks like a 1790s house, and the records point to it being a 1790s house, it probably is a 1790s house.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have lived the pain of losing a true colonial house.  When we bought the Enos Kellogg Homestead, it had a plaque with a very convincing "1753" boldly emblazoned on it.  We were beyond excited to live in a house that was "older than our country."  Until it wasn't.

Two years after moving in, we had an experienced researcher from the Norwalk Historical Society dig into the history of the house.  And the evidence was pretty compelling.  Our house had been built in 1784.  Or 1785.  Honestly, it even could have been 1786.  Who's to say?  "Circa 1784" was the decision.  And I was sort of depressed.  Even though our house was unchanged, it took a while before I felt like the house was not diminished in some way.  Emotionally, older is just cooler, somehow.

The 17th Century Core-ollary
This phenomenon refers to the earnestly stated coda that often accompanies a homeowner's description of their 18th century property.  It happens in person, but also in real estate blurbs, and sounds something like this:  "Well, the architectural historian/town/ historical society puts the house around 1725, but we believe that the core of the house is 1690s."  There is rarely any supporting evidence provided, and the date is always 1690s, never earlier.  I guess that 1680s or 1670s pushes credibility too much.  A variation is "The house is circa 1820, but the core is pre-1776."  As it turns out, there are more of these mysterious "cores" in the old house world than in an apple orchard.


The Jedi Mind Trick

Some homeowners seem to believe that all it takes is sheer force of will to date your house.

Deed research often is far from definitive, and generally involves a healthy does of conjecture. Property lines were described based on transient (over the course of centuries) landmarks and neighbors. Houses and outbuildings were built, knocked down, and moved.  Descriptors that once held meaning now mean nothing to anyone.  Enos Kellogg's will, for example, referenced "the wood lot", "the Wapon Swamp", and "the Salt Meadow at Barron Marsh, so-called". Unfortunately, these places are "so-called" by nobody in 2015.  I still have no idea what they mean.  All of this is to say that establishing an exact construction year is damn hard, even when good land records exist.

These are not the dates
 you are looking for.

So, if things are a bit ambiguous (or simply not to your liking), many homeowners past and present have chosen to go the authoritative route - by picking a date and ferociously committing to it. "Circa" be damned, and always pick a year than doesn't end in a zero or five (which make it sound like you are guessing).  If you aren't going to go with the always-popular 1776, try 1767, 1729, or 1693.  And remember, if you say it with enough conviction, it becomes true!
                               

Notwithstanding all of the mental games that we may be tempted to play with ourselves, it really is remarkable that we can even begin to establish any kind of reasonable date for the construction of an 18th century house.  Seriously, that was a long time ago, and I can't even remember when we built the shed in our back yard. I am always blown away how many land records survive from hundreds of years ago, and how accessible they are.  Architectural historians, meanwhile, continue to come up with new and better ways to analyze and interpret physical evidence, and the internet has made available a host of information to facilitate the research process.  Even dendrochronology (tree ring dating of wood) is becoming increasingly accessible to the public.  So, don't take that weathered plaque that has been hanging on your house since the 1930s for granted.  Do a little digging and learn something new about where you live.  Happy dating!

So long from the Dating Game!

The House in Pictures: 1890 - 2014

It occurred to me recently that I had never posted in one place all of the old pictures of the Enos Kellogg House that have come to us in various ways over the past fourteen years.  So, I sat down and tried to establish a chronology of the images in our collection.  While I knew the dates of the most recent photos, dating the earlier pictures required some detective work (and a lot of "circas").  

Trees proved to be the key to establishing the chronology of the early photos (and I'm talking about something much more rudimentary than dendrochronology here).  Clearly, as is the case with any real movie star, our house has a "good side", as almost all of the pictures that we have found were taken with the southeast corner of the house in the foreground.  This meant that I could watch the comings and goings of specific trees, as well as their growth progress, from a consistent angle.  An insanely huge elm tree in the oldest images was particularly helpful.

When viewed in chronological order, it is fascinating to watch the ebb and flow of the house's condition, as it goes from well-maintained, to a bit rundown, and back to well-maintained again following the renovations that occurred periodically.

Underneath each picture, I have noted where we got the image, as well as who lived in the house at the time pictured.

c.1890s

This image has descended in the Kellogg/Comstock family, and was very kindly shared with me by Enos Kellogg's great, great, great, great, great granddaughter (thanks, Deby!).

Living in the house at the time (and almost certainly the people pictured in the photo) were George E. "Edwin" Comstock and his wife Emma R. Comstock.  A super-close zoom will show a child in the half-open dutch door - presumably their adopted daughter Nettie.

Note the small vine growing on the post of the addition on the right side of the house.

c.1900-1910

Another picture from Enos Kellogg's great-times-5 granddaughter.  Clearly later than the photo above (that little vine from the first image has taken over the house!), but that massive tree is still in the right side of the frame.  It looks like they also replaced what I assume were the original 9-over-6 windows at some point between the previous picture and this one.  Bummer.

The residents are still Edwin, Emma and Nettie Comstock, plus Emma's father, Harvey Lyon, who was a partner in the nursery operated on the property.

c.1912

Click to Enlarge

I know this photo to be from 1912, as it is the front side of a postcard advertising a "Dahlia Fete" benefit held at the farm that year to raise money for the construction of Norwalk's Home for the Aged.  Emma Comstock was the Chairwoman of the group that raised funds for the home.  The September 17, 1912 issue of the Norwalk Hour recounts that "The Hour received a photographic card with a fine picture of the Comstock farm on one side and on the reverse the following original and catchy verses."  We were lucky to have found a copy of the same photographic card in a 1960 Yale University architectural history study of our house that was given to us by the previous owners.  The catch verses are shown at the right.

The residents of the house are unchanged from the previous image.

c.1935

This image was found online as part of the records of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program to create a "Census of Old Buildings in Connecticut", which I previously posted about here.  The WPA survey of our house appears to be from 1935.

Note that the (not original) front porch has been removed by this point.  

In 1935, at the time of the survey, the house was owned by John J. and Agnes Cavanagh.  The Cavanaghs, however, lived in a mansion elsewhere in Norwalk, which was a more befitting residence for the founder of the world's largest hat manufacturer, the Hat Corporation of America.  Town directories for Norwalk describe our house as the "Private Estate" of John Cavanagh, and show the resident of the house at this time to be Pliny Rogers, "Farm Superintendent for John J. Cavanagh".  Presumably our property was Mr. Cavanagh's gentleman's farm out in the relative "country" of West Norwalk.

1948

This image was also found in the 1960 Yale study of our house, and is dated 1948 in the lower left-hand corner.  The photograph was almost certainly provided by Mr. and Mrs. Robert R. Newell (whom I wrote about here).  The Newells purchased the Enos Kellogg House in 1947, and remained there until 1973.

Note that the house now sports an elaborate (and badly anachronistic) front porch, which was likely added by Dr. Albert Mittendorf and his wife Mildred, who owned the house from 1939 through 1947.  The house seems to have had a relatively recent overhaul.

c.1950s

This illustration of the house is a watercolor painted by Robert R. Newell. It comes from what appears to be an unpublished children's book "The Old House" (see it here).  A copy (but sadly not the original) of this little book conveyed to us when we bought the house.

The second porch is gone by this time, but we now have shutters that don't quite work with the window positioning.

1960

Another photo from the Yale study, although this one is contemporary with the study itself - 1960.  A tidy and well-loved house, still under the care of the Newell family.

2000

This photo is from the real estate listing for the property when we purchased it from William and Jane Ziegler in 2001.  A little overgrown once again, and a bit more run-down than the low-res picture might indicate.  Good thing we were too naive to know any better!

2014

And here we are now (more or less).  This is after 13 years of restoration, including removing encroaching plants, lowering the grade around the house, re-roofing, replacing windows, re-siding, re-painting, re-pointing the foundation, and restoring the c.1784 barn in background.  And that's just the work visible from the outside.


There are, of course, a few holes in our photographic chronology.  Obviously, there are not photos to be found from before the mid-19th century, although I hold out hope of a painting or drawing surfacing at some point (It could happen - an 1860s folk painting of my parents' 1830s mill and miller's house in Maryland turned up a few years ago on the Antiques Roadshow).

In terms of more recent decades, we have no images from the 1920s,'70s, '80s and '90s.  So, if any Cavanaghs, Newells, Miles, or Zieglers out there stumble on this page, please drop me a line.  I need to complete my collection.