The women of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America have been preserving history since 1891.
When nineteenth-century women launched America’s historic preservation movement, they were lobbying a nation enthralled with industrialization to save a material landscape threatened by “progress.” Founded in 1891, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA) spearheaded the effort to collect antiques and protect them within the walls of historic houses, each one offering a material culture microcosm of life in early America. In contrast to organizations focused on preserving the site of one illustrious man or one grand house, NSCDA women across the country focused on protecting endangered historic buildings in their state, city, or town that reflected significant people, places, and historical events within their community. In doing so, the women carefully selected historic houses, now museums, to collectively portray America’s rich tapestry of interwoven ethnicities, cultures, races, languages, and religions. Called Great American Treasures, the buildings of the NSCDA tell America’s story.
Today, the women of the NSCDA curate more than sixty historic houses and countless fine and decorative arts. In an age when advanced technology can provide virtual realities, some may question the relevance of these historic house museums. To do so disregards the power of the tangible. Preserved buildings, landscapes, and carefully curated interiors offer immediate immersion in a historic past—a simulated yet physical experience of another moment in time. As architect Richard Pratt wrote in Houses, History, and People (1965): “Houses are history. In an intimate physical sense, they are just about as close to history as it is possible to get. In them it is possible to look history face to face . . . to touch it . . . but what makes it seem to come alive most vividly is when in certain houses and certain places we consider what certain men and women did and said in those houses and those places.”
Fig. 4. This French-language Bible published by Daniel Duchemin (London, 1694) is preserved in Hanover House. Clemson University Department of Historic Properties photograph.
Early houses built along the Eastern seaboard recall the efforts of Great Britain to secure the fertile continent of North America in advance of their European rivals through immigration and colonization, encouraged by the prospects of religious freedom and economic opportunity. Among the droves of French Protestants (or Huguenots) who fled to English colonies, Paul de St. Julien demonstrated his appreciation for a land of religious freedom by naming his dwelling in South Carolina after George I, elector of Hanover, the protestant English king and friend of French Huguenots. Built about 1716, Hanover House was constructed of locally fired clay bricks and pit-sawn black cypress—likely by several of the forty-five enslaved Africans St. Julien owned (Fig. 2). Preserved today on the grounds of Clemson University, Hanover House retains the inscription “peu à peu” (little by little) on one of the two triple-flue chimneys (Fig. 3) and contains a French Bible printed in London for sale to Huguenot refugees (Fig. 4).
Irish immigrant Charles Carroll realized economic prosperity in the Colonies through a lucrative business venture, the Baltimore Ironworks, where more than two hundred enslaved individuals undertook the manufacture of pig iron. Charles Carroll, the Barrister, and his wife, Margaret Tilghman Carroll, fashioned and furnished Mount Clare on an eight-hundred-acre parcel of land adjacent to the business (Fig. 5). Remarkable examples of Maryland portraiture and decorative arts provide a window into the Carrolls’ lives, while an unearthed bundle excavated beneath the kitchen building doorway offers insight on those enslaved at Mount Clare. The intentionally buried objects, including a four-inch, heavily worked crystal, were part of a medicinal bundle, or nkisi, used in West African spiritual practices.
Preserved since 1913 by the NSCDA in New Hampshire, the Moffatt-Ladd House (Fig. 1) in Portsmouth not only illuminates the rich maritime history of the city through its wealthy owners and occupants, but it also reveals the lives and cultures of the free and enslaved people who built the grand dwelling, labored and lived at the property, and contributed to the multiculturalism of this and other early American port cities. The distinctive triple pattern of turned balusters for the main staircase are characteristic of the work of local craftsman Richard Mills, appearing as well in Mills’s own home in Portsmouth, now known as the Mills-Whipple House. While that building has been converted to apartments, at the Moffatt-Ladd House Mills’s work can be enjoyed in the setting it was originally meant to occupy.
Several NSCDA historic houses were home to American authors, philosophers, and theologians. At Gunston Hall, Founding Father George Mason penned the Virginia Declaration of Rights and conceived the United States Bill of Rights. Mason’s elegant Georgian mansion was surrounded by six thousand acres of tobacco and wheat fields along the Potomac River (Fig. 6). More than a hundred enslaved Africans and an unrecorded number of English indentured servants lived and labored alongside the Masons at Gunston Hall. Two of the indentured, William Buckland and William Bernard Sears, helped to design the elaborate interior, which also bears the marks of Sears’s skillful carving (Fig. 7). Following their work at Gunston Hall, the colonial elite of Virginia and Maryland called on Buckland and Sears to bring English design to their Chesapeake residences—from the Hammond Harwood House in Annapolis to the small dining room of George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
Many more historic houses erected somewhat later hosted pertinent discussions on the country’s future. Perched on the heights of Georgetown in the new Federal City, Dumbarton House accommodated the nation’s officials, foreign dignitaries, and congressmen in refined neoclassical spaces that reference ancient ideals (Fig. 8). In the dining room, the country’s business was conducted alongside well-orchestrated repasts. For example, the Dumbarton archives document that on April 4, 1818, South Carolina Congressman Henry Middleton and his wife, Mary, held a dinner party at which Secretary of State John Quincy Adams recorded the gathering of senators, congressmen, and senior officials from Massachusetts to Tennessee. Adams did not mention, however, the enslaved individuals—likely dressed in Middleton livery—who attended the dinner guests, nor the subjects discussed.
Women’s history is ever present at the NSCDA’s houses and even dominant at some. Named for a successful businessman and its first owner, the stately Andrew Low House in Savannah, Georgia (Fig. 11), is best known for its female occupants. Of them, Juliette “Daisy” Gordon Magill Low, wife of Andrew’s son William, was the most famous. Juliette founded the Girl Scouts of America and utilized the carriage house of the antebellum mansion as the group’s first headquarters (Fig. 10).
Houses and collections west of the Allegheny Mountains offer the stories of those who migrated to new territories as the United States expanded across the continent and into the Pacific. On behalf of the United States Government, John Harris Kinzie built the Historic Indian Agency House in Portage, Wisconsin, overlooking an ancient trail between the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers in the heart of the Ho-Chunk Nation’s homeland (Fig. 9). By the terms of an 1829 treaty, the Ho-Chunk tribal leaders agreed to relinquish their claim to the land in exchange for a thirty-year annuity payment; the Federal government agreed to build the Indian Agency House as a meeting place for the two nations. Juliette Magill Kinzie, John’s wife (and Juliette Gordon Low’s grandmother), wrote vivid firsthand accounts of the unspoiled landscape, the native people, and the raw realities of the events she and the house witnessed—the Black Hawk War, the ravages of famine, the displacement of annual tribal gatherings, and the US Government’s forced removal of America’s indigenous people. The fragment of a circular silver trade brooch excavated at the Agency House survives as a reminder of those who sought peace and partnership in a land dominated by conflict (Fig. 13).
The David Lenz House is one of multiple two-story dwellings constructed by the Harmonists, a utopian group of Germanic immigrants led by Reverend George Rapp to the wilderness of southwestern Indiana (Fig. 12). On the banks of the Wabash River, the Harmonists sought to establish a self-sustaining worker-owned community. The Harmonist kilns manufactured bricks for the community’s buildings, and the carpentry shop supplied milled timbers and furniture for the dormitories and houses. A cake pan found in the Lenz House is a rare survival of the specialized forms of red earthenware made by Harmonist potters for use by the community and for sale to outside purchasers (Fig. 14). The Harmonist Windsor-style bench in Figure 15 represents the most common survival of the community’s furniture forms, which were functional as well as aesthetically pleasing.
In California, construction of La Casa de Estudillo began in 1827 under the direction of Captain José María Estudillo, commandant of the San Diego Presidio (Fig. 16). He had been granted land below the presidio, where his family raised cattle on large rancheros and his son José Antonio Estudillo designed and built the adobe house, with its airy veranda bordering the courtyard. The thick adobe walls—an average of three to five feet and coated with a lime-based whitewash—kept the house cool in summer and warmer in winter. During the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), José Antonio remained neutral and stayed on the family’s rancho in El Cajon, while his wife, Maria Victoria Dominguez de Estudillo, sheltered Mexican women and children in the Casa de Estudillo.
West of the continental United States, Hawaiian Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia was a driving force in the building of a Protestant mission in Honolulu. After converting to Christianity, ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia created a numeric coding system to translate the Bible into his native language and encouraged the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Cornwall, Connecticut, to send a mission to Hawaii. In March 1820 the first Christian missionaries arrived, followed by a load of pre-cut lumber from New England sent aboard the Tartar to construct housing. The first Mission House was an American wood frame structure built on an adobe-walled basement (Fig. 17). A koa rocking chair with ivory details made by a missionary craftsman for Queen Ka’ahumanu survives as a reminder of cross-cultural exchange and the queen’s warm royal welcome of the transplanted New Englanders.
Fig. 15. Made either at New Harmony or at the Harmonist community in Economy, Pennsylvania, this square-back bench, 1815–1830, is functional yet elegant. Fashioned in cherry, walnut, chestnut, and hickory, it measures 70 inches long. National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Indiana; Armstrong photograph.
As the nation anticipates the semi-quincentennial anniversary of its declared independence from Great Britain, there is no better place than our Great American Treasures to understand the country’s beginnings. For, in a continuum of research and discovery at its historic houses, the NSCDA is helping all to appreciate the many people of diverse economic, religious, ethnic, and racial backgrounds who contributed to the development of America.
Fig. 17. The Hawaiian Mission House in Honolulu was constructed 1820–1821, after the arrival of a shipment of pre-cut lumber from Connecticut. Photograph courtesy of the Hawaiian Mission Houses, NSCDA-HI.
CAROL BORCHERT CADOU, former executive director of the NSCDA, is a member of the NSCDA-MD. She is the editor and co-author of the forthcoming Great American Treasures: Women Preserving History Since 1891, to be published by the Artist Book Foundation.
