 Welcome. My name is Betsy Gardner and I am the president of this great organization. I want to please remind you to turn off your cell phones. That's the most important. The second announcement is remember to wait for the microphones during our question and answer period. We have very nice volunteers that go around and save your questions to the question and answer period. And that way everyone will hear your absolutely fantastic question. Now I have an announcement about next week. Anne Galloway is not able to come. And that is a big disappointment. However, the person who is coming is Colin Main. That's how you say it. M-E-Y-N. And he is the new news person at Vermont Digger. He's a legendary English language and Cambodian paper. He worked for there. He was an editor and a reporter. And that paper was shut down by the government in 2017. He's a brilliant editor and insightful journalist. These are Anne Galloway's words. He has worked at Vermont Digger since February and has brought renewed rigor to the newsroom. He, of anyone in our shop, understands how fake news and government intimidation of journalists has quelled free speech both here and abroad. He is very excited about the talk. So I hope you all will come back. We will miss Anne, but this sounds like a very interesting talk. And Beth Wood, who is our program chairman, has heard him speak and says he is excellent. So I'm putting in a plug. And now Michael will introduce the speaker. Good afternoon. Today it's my great pleasure to welcome back to Triple E, Professor Glenn Andrus. Glenn Andrus is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art and Architecture at Middlebury College. From 1970 until 2015, he taught a wide variety of courses, primarily in architectural and urban history. Professor Andrus earned a bachelor's degree in architecture at Cornell and a PhD in architectural history at Princeton. His doctoral dissertation centered on the Villa Medici in Rome, which perhaps some of you have visited. From 1970 to 2015, he taught the courses, as I said, in architectural and urban history. Over the years, Glenn Andrus has designed and presented lectures, seminars, exhibitions, and even bicycle tours, drawing on Vermont history and the regional built environment. He's been a longtime member of the Vermont Advisory Council on Historical Preservation and has published widely on many topics, including the architecture of Florence, New England meeting houses, Vermont regional architecture, and American modernism. Among his recent work is the book Buildings of Vermont, co-authored with Curtis Johnson, a volume in the Buildings of the United States series, which is sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians. He also co-curated an exhibition observing Vermont architecture at the Middlebury Museum of Art, and later at the Vermont Marble Museum in Proctor, which perhaps many of you have seen. The title of today's lecture is Justin Morrill, The Man and His Homestead. Please join me in giving a warm, triple E welcome to Professor Glenn Andrus. Oh, yeah, we can have the lights. And can you hear me all right? Okay, the mic is picking up. Okay, good. This, it's fine this way. Yeah, I think people can see the screen more clearly if the lights are out. We're going to explore the story this afternoon of a famous Vermonter, one of the gems among the Vermont State Historic sites, maybe in the hopes that it can tempt you to go visit it someday. Justin Morrill lived from 1810 to 1898. He celebrated as a great legislator. He was a representative in Washington from 1855 to 1867, and then followed that up as a senator between 1867 and his death in 1898. During that time, his actions did a great deal to shape the nation economically through his work on the Senate Finance Committee, the nation educationally through the Morrill Act of 1862, and the nation's capital, where he spent 44 years, aesthetically, through his activities on the Senate Committee on Buildings and Grounds. Among other things, he completed the oversaw the completion of the Washington Monument, the embellishment of the Capitol Building internally and externally. He worked with Frederick Law Olmstead to correct the two horizontal proportions of the Capitol Building by developing the terrorist west approach to the building, and he oversaw the construction of the Great Library of Congress. Of his building involvements, an 1899 memorial address by Missouri Senator George Vest noted, quote, he was devoted to architecture and studied it as an expert. He often said to me that no people could arrive at the first rank in civilization and refinement who are not devoted to architecture and its majestic and beautiful forms of art, unquote. He's known for his Washington achievements, but as the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined. And one might have predicted these actions from his roots in Stratford, Vermont. The practical and successful businessman, the autodidact, anxious for educational opportunities for the average man, the bibliophile, the horticulturalist, and the builder. And I propose this afternoon that we look at Morrill's Stratford homestead and its context for the light that had shed on this great American figure. And in this, we're very fortunate because along with Jefferson's Monticello, which we see in the upper two images here, with which it shares its creator's passions for architectural invention and expression, landscape, and horticulture. The Morrill homestead, which we have in the two lower images, is one of the best preserved and most highly personal homes in America. It has a power to reveal things about its owner, his personal values, his choices, and his interests. It's a precious embodiment of the person and of his times. In looking at the homestead, I'd like to acknowledge my gratitude to the friends of the homestead, to the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, and to the Vermont Historical Society for making accessible, indispensable factual and visual materials. This is not a mansion, and it's not by a famous professional designer or master builder, but it still ranks as one of the finest examples of high-style domestic Gothic revival in the country. In fact, it is famous nationwide for that. Its Gothic style was cutting edge for its times, and it was scholarly in its application. It's also a style that's considered somewhat elitist and romantic, and as such, it was never dominant in the popular taste. It was certainly unusual in a rural Vermont that was somewhat remote from the centers of high-style. It is also not what one might expect from a self-made son of a blacksmith, who educated a school dropout, who educated himself while working as a small-town storekeeper, and whose most famous achievement would be an act designed to make education, particularly in the practical, agricultural, and mechanical fields, kind of akin to our stress today on STEM subjects, broadly available. Here, though, I think it's significant to note that moral didn't see that kind of education as purely technical, but rather, quote, where all the needful science and higher graces of classical studies would be taught. And although he was not characterized as a romantic, he also did such things as write poetry. Moral designed the house and its grounds himself, and he had it built between 1848 and 1851, once he had acquired the means to retire at age 38 from storekeeping, and was able to pursue his personal interests in farming and horticulture as a gentleman farmer, hoping to improve crop yields and breeds, and before he married in 1851 and began his family. His initial foray into architecture was thus very much a solo act, but it was hardly approached in an uninformed fashion. Moral had exhibited a sensitivity to architecture and landscape as early as 1841, when he made a major trip south and west, spending some time in Washington, D.C., and indicating in his journal a strong response to the architecture and landscape of the public buildings in the nation's capital. In pursuit of this interest, he characteristically turned to his books, studying and appearing to have been highly influenced by the writings of Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing was a landscape designer and horticulturalist in the Hudson River Valley. He's often considered to be the father of American landscape design. In spite of his early death in 1852 at the age of 37, he was extremely influential as a result of his publications, beginning with a treatise on the theory and practice of landscape gardening adapted to North America, which he published in 1841, which was America's first book on landscape design, followed by his editorship of the journal The Horticulturalist between 1846 and 1852. He was an advocate of the English picturesque or natural style of landscape, exemplified here on the left by Stourhead in wheelchair in England. He found it to be a style that was particularly suited to suburban or rural settings, and he adapted it for private tracks, smaller than those immense English estates. Thus, his plan for a rural house, which we see in the right image there, had ornamental front lawns with winding paths and so on, and specimen tree plantings, and then in behind the house, you have the orchard and the vegetable gardens. He felt that homes built in such settings should coordinate with this landscape vision. Now, not an architect himself, he collaborated with another advocate of the picturesque style, Alexander Jackson Davis, who had published a book entitled World Residences in 1837. In 1842, Downing published Cottage Residences, illustrated with plans and renderings by Davis. Jeffersonian, in his feelings that a life on the land was the most appropriate for the American citizenry, he would write, quote, Those elementary forces which give rise to the highest genius and finest character may be traced back to the farmhouse and the rural cottage. It is the solitude and freedom of the family home in the country, which constantly preserves the purity of the nation and invigorates its intellectual powers. There is a moral influence in a country home, when among an educated, truthful and refined people, it is an echo of their character. Happy is he who lives this life of a cultivated mind in the country, unquote. This is just the life that moral aspired to. He would write, quote, It has long been regarded by men as most fortunate to have been born in a city, notwithstanding that leaders of cities often hail from rural districts, but I have an abiding affection and respect for my native town and for its citizens. In his later travels to Europe, while admiring the achievements of its culture, he would write, quote, More than ever, I am thankful that I was born in New England and that I am to return there, unquote. A moral acquired and annotated copies of Downing's cottage residences in 1844, the horticulturalist, and an 1849 edition of a treatise on the theory and practice of landscape gardening. From Downing's writings in cottage residences and then in his 1850 architecture of country houses, we can gain many insights into the homestead and its creator. The house, with its 17 rooms and landscape setting, would qualify in Downing's terms as a villa, which he defined as a country residence of a certain size with land, a portion of which was laid out as a pleasure ground. He went on to say, in this country where there were neither castles nor futile, barons, palaces of princes, the villa was the highest form of residence. And he describes it as the country house of a person of competence or wealth, sufficient to build and maintain it with some taste and elegance. The most refined home of America, the home of its most leisurely and educated class of citizens. Amid the serenity and peace of sylvan scenes surrounded by the perennial freshness of nature enriched without and within by objects of universal beauty and interest, objects that touch the heart and awaken the understanding, it is in such houses that we should look for the happiest social and moral development of our people. Morals' grounds, which sloped downhill toward the house, were shaped by terracing and were fed by an ingenious underground system of waterworks of his own devising. They were laid out with both ornamental and practical aims, much as described by Downing. So that we find the house set among ornamental lawns, just as we find in the case of the Downing example. To the south was the fruit garden, a place of formal beds of berries and vegetables defined by dwarf fruit trees and focusing on an ornamental fountain. Above it, a field held a summer house pavilion. And then behind the house was the kitchen garden where moral experimented to find varieties of vegetables and flowering plants that would be suited to Vermont. Beyond that were the farmyard, the orchard and the rough vegetable patch, and then finally uphill from that the wood lot. The grounds around the house proper were defined by what Downing suggested as a well-made board fence that would also separate the grounds of the house from the farm road. And then the kitchen garden, which we see here with the remains of its hot house here, was originally screened from view from the house by a buckthorn hedge. The ornamental lawns were shaped by curving paths and a carriage circle. There were clustered specimen tree plantings here, and there were flower beds in the forms of Fleur-de-Lis and arabasques. Very much in the manner of the flower beds we still find at the Gothic Revival Roseland College, or cottage rather, in Connecticut. But Downing considered what might be an appropriate style for a house in this kind of a natural setting. And he railed against the fashionable Greek revival. He could see no reason for living in a pagan temple. For him, a house, quote, should say something of the character of the family within as much as possible of their life and history, their tastes and their associations. And he advocated two styles for this, the Italianate and the Gothic. The Italianate, and these are illustrations from his book by Davis, but the Italianate he found to be a picturesque adaptation of classical forms with strong eaves, low roof pitches, and spacious verandas that he said made it very well suited to southern climes. He found it rational, logical, and sensible in its dominant and regular horizontal lines, saying, the man of common sense views only, if he is true to himself, will naturally prefer a regular house with few angles, but with order and method stamped upon its unbroken lines of cornice and regular rows of windows. He will do nothing without reason. He will have no caprices and no whims either in his life or in his house, unquote. Gothic, on the other hand, he found to be more poetic, aspiring, and imaginative in its upward lines of pointed architecture. It was suited to, quote, men of imagination, men whose aspirations never leave them at rest, men whose ambition and energy will give them no peace within the mere bounds of rationality. These are the men for picturesque villas, country houses with high roofs, steep gables, unsymmetrical and capricious forms. It is for such that the architect may safely introduce every feature that indicates originality, boldness, energy, and variety of character. Well, that secular interpretation of the Gothic style is not always the way that the Gothic had been viewed in America. It entered America as an ecclesiastical style with particular Anglican associations, as the American Episcopal Church sought an imagery to distinguish it from the Congregationalists and the Baptists. In the early 19th century, one finds attempts to convert otherwise federal church forms with the application of pointed windows and things like finials and spires on the buildings, as we see in Charles Bullfinch's Federal Street Church built in Boston in 1809. It took on a more archeological set of credentials with Ithiel Towne's Trinity Church in New Haven, Connecticut, built between 1814 and 1817, where he used a tower, or based his tower, on the 16th century tower of All Saints Darby, published by British architect James Gibbs in his influential book of architecture in 1728. As elsewhere in New England, Vermont was introduced to the Gothic taste through structures like these. Indeed, the state would play a very important national role in the propagation of the Gothic style. The first Gothic church in Vermont arrived in 1826-27, and that was St. Stephen's Church in Middlebury, built under Rector Benjamin Bosworth Smith, who published in Middlebury a national journal called The Episcopal Register. And in that, in 1827, he wrote an essay strongly advocating for Gothic as the only proper style for his denomination. Based on, quote, humble English country churches, snug low Gothic structures with massive walls of rough unhewn stone adorned with a few plain windows and a decent humble tower. The doorway detail of St. Stephen's, the carving of which is sometimes attributed to Smith himself, is derived from an English copy book, William Payne's Builder's Companion of 1762. Smith would go on to become Bishop of Kentucky between 1832 and 1868, where he saw a great deal of church construction. And then, as presiding national bishop between 1868 and 1884, he advocated for the Gothic style on a national stage. Well, St. Stephen's was quickly followed by St. James Arlington, which we have on the right screen there, 1829. This was designed by British architect William Passman, utilizing that Gibbs-derived tower that town had used in New Haven, Connecticut. We have no further buildings by Passman because he negotiated his return ticket to Britain as part of his pay for building this building. But this became the basic format for succeeding Episcopalian buildings. Thus, we have Ami B. Young's St. Paul's Cathedral in Burlington from 1832, unfortunately, it burned. And we have a string of churches in Rutland County by English expatriate builder John Cain. This is his charming St. Paul's in Wells from 1841. The Burlington Church is very unusual for Ami B. Young, who built his reputation as a Greek revivalist with buildings like the Vermont State House and the Boston Custom House. However, it was commissioned to be the Cathedral Church for Vermont's first Episcopal Bishop, John Henry Hopkins, who was a devotee of Gothic. Hopkins arrived in 1832 after having tried to create a Gothic church in Pennsylvania and finding himself unsatisfied with what he felt to be an uncouth combination of classic and Gothic forms. Desirous of capturing the true character of the style, he sat about collecting engravings of English Gothic buildings. And in 1836 he published in Burlington his essay on Gothic architecture with various plans and drawings for churches. It was the first American publication on the Gothic revival. It became a major force in the scholarly refinement of the Gothic style in America. He included a lengthy glossary of Gothic architectural terms and engravings of details from the likes of Windsor and Oxford and Westminster and Hampton Court. In it he stressed stone construction, warm colors, natural woodwork, and stained glass. And he even tried his hand at design with details for the interior of St. Paul's, the area around the altar, that he included as his plate number three in his book. The style would come fully of age in church building under the leadership of English expatriate architect Richard Upton with the construction of his academically correct Trinity Church in New York, 1839-40. Up John was a leading practitioner of the Gothic. He became associated with the English inspired New York based ecclesiological movement which stressed a return to medieval liturgical forms. Well with strong ties to the movement, Bishop Hopkins saw to it that a number of Vermont churches were commissioned from the ecclesiologist's ranks. Thus we find the charming Grace Church in Forestdale outside of Brandon from 1853. Built the same year that the Episcopal Church published a book called A Book of Plans for Churches and Parsonages and featured in that a very similar design by James Renwick who would go on to design St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Which was based on drawings published by the ecclesiologists of the 13th century church of St. Michael's Longstanton in Cambridgeshire. St. Michael's was seen as the ideal model for small rural churches. It had among other things a very distinctive dove coat or bell coat crowning its very steeply pitched roof. And we see it influencing things like Trinity Church in Madiwan rather New Jersey 1850 and Up John's St. Thomas in Aminia Union New York from 1852. So these are all contemporaneous and all influenced by this little church in Cambridgeshire. During Hopkins Episcopacy we know of two Vermont churches commissioned from New York ecclesiologist Joseph Coleman Hart, his St. Michael's in Brattleboro from 1858, his St. Luke's in St. Albans from 1860. And we have Up John himself designing the wonderful Emanuel Church in Bellows Falls built 1862 to 7 where the tower is based on that of Ely Cathedral in England and was destined to serve as the model for his now lost tower for the 1868 Church of St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Hopkins himself turned to actual designs of actual buildings with a chapel that he added to St. Paul's in Burlington, this too of course unfortunately was burned. In fact all of his Burlington area projects have been lost to fire. But also he built a bishops residence and an Episcopal Institute. We do have some extant buildings by Bishop Hopkins. Thus we have in Brandon we have the little church of St. Thomas and then in Rotland we have Trinity Church. St. Thomas was 1863, Trinity was 1865. So we have a strong movement to the Gothic in Vermont but of course it was ecclesiastical in character. And it wasn't the Anglican associations that would have recommended this as a style to congregationalist moral for his own domestic use. But there is another strain of domestic Gothic architecture. It got off to a slower start in America as a domestic style but it had begun in 18th century England beginning in 1749 as Horace Walpole in a close circle of his associates began to collect and copy details found around in the English countryside in order to give his home, Strawberry Hill, a medieval character. They purposely added elements, you see this crazy plan, they added elements to the building without any kind of an overall plan because they wanted it to look as if it had evolved over the centuries as many medieval buildings had done. And then Walpole used the house as the setting for the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto where he actually described the rooms in the house and he had things like suits of armor that would mysteriously clatter down the hallways and what have you. Well from this venture Gothic gained a reputation as a style for romantic literary and eccentric patrons. And it tended to be used less for houses than as a romantic accessory for picturesque garden follies set in picturesque landscapes. Thus we get the ruined castle built at Hagley Park in Britain in 1747 and in that pattern in 1795 eccentric William Beckford hired architect James Wyatt to build a huge Gothic folly on his Wiltshire estate. He admired it so that in 1798 he had Wyatt turn into it, turn it into his real residence and he moved in. It was called Fountale Abbey. Unfortunately it's poorly structured 273 foot tower collapsed in a suitably romantic way in a thunderstorm in 1825. But by that time it achieved great fame even in America. In fact in Vermont the Middlebury newspaper had published descriptions of the house and later the obituary of its last owner, Mr. Farquhar. Americans were developing a romantic taste for things Gothic. Since the teens they had been snapping up and devouring the novels of Sir Walter Scott. And Scott's Gothic Revival home at Abbotsford in Scotland had become a major tourist destination. And then so they had these romantic associations and then with a new freedom that was provided to Americans by improved roads and transportation, they began moving out into the suburban fringes of metropolitan areas where they too could indulge themselves in picturesque landscapes. And for such settings we find architect A.J. Davis practicing out of New York espousing Gothic as a style that by virtue of its pictorially varied elevation could be closely connected to the qualities of the site. He advocated for the style in his 1837 book Rural Residences, a sponsor of which was General William Paulding. Paulding was an ex mayor of New York City and a close friend of Washington Irving and other Hudson River romantics. And he bought an estate at Tarrytown overlooking the Hudson River. And then he hired Davis to create a villa for him. The result was Lindhurst begun in 1838. Here's the elevation, here a plan of Lindhurst. And then the next year, in 1839, Richard Upjohn built Kingscote in Newport, Rhode Island as a summer retreat for a rich Charlestonian. Though they were considered follies by most of their immediate contemporaries, these two houses established a national image for the Gothic villa that was soon to be popularized by Downing. They had qualities that transcended ecclesiastical connotations, anglophilia, and mere romantic historic revivalism. Their primary benefit was seen to be in their picturesquely irregular massing. On the one hand, it permitted them to work with the irregularities of the landscape, making them ideal for rural settings. The broken lines were felt to reflect natural foliage in the landscape around it. The varied orientations of windows and particularly bays, as we see here, here, here, for example, in these plans, meant that they could focus rooms on multiple vistas out in the landscape. And the porches, or verandas, here, the veranda wrapping around Lindhurst, here along one flank of Kingscote, opened the house as a transition to the surrounding nature. Suddenly, Americans are beginning to want their houses to relate outward to their landscape. These were certainly characteristics that were utilized by Moral in planning his home. Here we have the steep roofs and broken profile. Originally, there was a terrace opening off of the front of his dining room. There were bay windows in the dining room and in the parlor opening out to the landscape. And they carried balconies up above that opened the chambers on the second floor, also outward towards the landscape. And then there was a veranda with a southern exposure off the parlor that was accessed by floor-length windows that could be thrown open so that you could step right out from the parlor onto the veranda and thus toward the landscape as well. The Gothic was also recognized as facilitating flexible planning. The preceding Georgian federal and Greek styles had valued axial symmetry and regularity of fenestration that tended to dictate rather stiff arrangements of interior components. With Gothic, it was possible to come up with a personal and functional plan and then to wrap it in an irregular exterior because you want the exterior to be irregular anyhow. Both Davis and after him downing would stress this planning practicality, downing making individuality and fitness or usefulness basic principles for rural building. But we're fortunate to have sets of plans drawn by moral that show the original layout of the house as well as refinements he made as he studied the design. In these we find moral quite literally following downing's strictures. He said it should have a sheltered entry and a veranda. It said that the parlor should have the most beautiful view, a distant prospect of trees, lawn and flower garden. And here we have a front bay that opens to the decorative front lawns and then we have those floor-length windows opening to view out to the side orchard garden and the fountain. The library, he said, should have fewer distractions. It should be more secluded, more internal. And here we find the library, though he did advocate that it could have access to the first floor bedroom and dressing room. And what all in this guys would also very conveniently work as an office for the resident. The dining room with its china closet here had close association with the kitchen. There were well considered service areas. The kitchen for instance had doors to yards on both sides of the house. And it had a china pantry and a food pantry. And then adjacent to the kitchen fireplace was a washroom with a heated water receptacle here. And adjacent to that was an enclosed bathing room. And then we have the kitchen and the washroom as well as the library all opening into a covered way that led to the woodshed and to an interior indoor privy and an outdoor privy. So function is really important in the designing of this house. Gothic irregularity also lent itself to adjustment and addition over time without compromising the aesthetics of the house. Thus Davis would greatly expand Lindhurst in the 1860s and McKim, Mead and White would add a huge addition to King's Coat in 1880. Well moral did similarly to his home in 1859. Expanding the dining room with a new window and twin china closets to either side. Creating service quarters above his, servants quarters above his woodshed. And then building a new library to accommodate his growing collection of books to the southeast of his master bedroom and a gym. Joining the veranda that went on into the into the parlor. So we get relation to rural setting, flexibility of functional planning and ability to accept change. These are all aspects of the Gothic that could appeal to a practical but also imaginative patron who sought to craft a house suited to his personal needs and who considered its unity with the landscape to be all important. As part of the package, moral also bought into the decorative aspects of the Gothic style. And he did it in a fashion that demonstrated the care and thoroughness with which he approached his projects. Here one finds barge boards, also called verge boards, these decorations in the gables. We find carved finials. We have tutor arches here over the front door that's a flattened pointed arch. We have four lobed quatra foils, trilobed treff foils. We have a pointed arched cusp window frame under what are called labels. They're drip moldings that go across above the windows. We have buttress like octagonal piers, all forms that are derived from the Gothic. His early vocabulary continues with great consistency in his later adjustments so that in the library and in the servants room we have orial windows. We have crenellations and little turrets on top of the library. And then of course this is the later window coming from his dining room. The richness continues inside with natural woodwork that was praised by Downing and Bishop Hopkins. And was used by Davis at Lindhurst and Upjohn at Kingscote. Here we have the entry hall at Kingscote with its natural woodwork and its stained glass. Here we have the entry hall in Stratford with the natural woodwork stained glass and this finely detailed staircase. These refined and quite scholarly interior and exterior details couldn't be had from Downing's plates which tended to stress plans and general exteriors but did not get involved in details. Some of them do appear in Bishop Hopkins book on the Gothic. For instance the crenellations here he has them as the entry to a church. We see them over the dining room window here. We see them here on the library. The carving of the tutor arch over the doorway very similar to the kinds of carvings that were in the book. And here the cusp pointed arch under a label that we find in the dining room window. We don't know though what kind of access moral may have had to Hopkins volume. We do know that he owned a copy of David Henry Arnott's 1850 Gothic architecture applied to modern residences. Which was another possible source for things like the entryway details. Really quite close here. And for the stair hall here are some Arnott's renderings of staircases and here we've got Morrill's staircase. Both Downing and Arnott praise the use of wood ribs on the ceilings of rooms. And this is something here we see an Arnott illustration of those wood ribs. And here we see that Morrill is utilizing that for the ceiling of his 1859 library edition. That the house wasn't a mere applique of gathered details. But also an exercise in careful design and Morrill's part seems confirmed by his own drawings. Thus the care with which he composed the south facade of the house. With its three floor length windows and its veranda. And interestingly his interiors he exploded the plan of his dining room here to show each of the elevations within the dining room. With the detailing that we find in the dining room this door was moved because he later put in a built-in recess for a buffet. But other than that these accurately show what ultimately was built in his dining room. Downing and Arnott preferred masonry and ideally stone for their Gothic. Now Morrill's house was of wood but he used what we call flush boarding. These are our boards that mortise into each other and create a relatively smooth surface rather than the overlapping clabbards. It plays down the woodenness of the house. And this is something that Upchan also did at King's Coat. And also Morrill followed Downing's stricture that details like verge boards should not be mere flat jigsaw cutouts. But rather should be carved from thick planks so that they would have more the appearance of carved stone tracery. Have some body to them. As for color Downing argued strongly against white which he found too jarring in its context to the surrounding landscape. He specified earth and masonry tones soft and quietly neutral. He published in fact a tinted color chart in his book with his preferred fawn, drab, warm grays and browns. Upchan used a scheme like that. For King's Coat we see it in stony gray here with details then picked up in a contrasting color. Morrill originally used a tan paint for his house mixed with sand in order to simulate the effect of stone. But later he seems to have taken a hint from a Downing comment that while a mansion should be sober in color a cottage should have a quote cheerful mellow hue harmonizing with the vergeure of the country. And he repainted it in rosier tones which he felt simulated those of cut sandstone. As Gothic taste caught on in the 1840s and 1850s we find builders tending to imitate superficial features of this style. And it gives us what we call carpenter Gothic with jigsaw and gingerbread trim and appended porches and sharply pointed dormers. Here's an example in a charming example in Bristol from 1855 here in Windsor from 1847. Relatively few though bought into the full program of the Gothic villa. And these few did seem to be the remarkable kinds of persons that Downing thought the style was best suited to. In Vermont the homestead belongs to a very special class it exists one of only a handful of significant Gothic villas in the state. All were built in semi rural settings within a decade of each other beginning in the mid 1840s. All for what Downing would claim as would class rather as men of imagination ambition and energy men whose aspirations never leave them at rest. The earliest of these and that most literally based on Downing was Glimmerstone in Cavendish built between 1844 and 1847. It was the home of Henry Fullerton manager of the Black River Canal and manufacturing woollen mill and a member of a very stylistically conscious family. Subsequently his younger brother Frederick would build a Downing inspired Italian eight house in the more town like setting of Chester's Main Street and would underwrite the construction of an up John derived church. Henry's more rural house that we have here was closely based by its builder Lucius Page on Downing's design number seven called a cottage in the old English style. It's in stone which Downing preferred if the builder could afford it and in this case it's a very particular kind of stone. It's built in what we call Snect Ashlert which is a rare type of Scottish masonry that can be found only in Windsor County. There was a pocket of Scottish descended masons who knew how to do this stuff and so we find it only actually in the area close to Chester. But it's an asymmetrical building with what Downing called a truncated gable which he felt was suggestive of homely hospitable shelter. And it expresses imagination in the fact that every one of its fourteen gables has a different pattern of bargeboard trim. In 1856 or in 1850 rather 26 year old Vermont artist Thomas Waterman Wood built Athenwood on what were then the outskirts of Montpelier. Its name Athenwood was actually a reference to his wife. His wife's name was Minerva. Minerva being the goddess of wisdom in Rome, Athena being the goddess of wisdom in Greece so he just made the transfer there. But here Wood imaginatively decorated his entry porch it doesn't pick out very clearly but here and here with grape leaves and vines. And then his doors, window heads and dormers were all decorated with tulip leaves. There were nine foot diamond pane windows and a strategically angled bay window that directed views out to different aspects of the landscape. A second floor room had a tutor arched ceiling picked out with wooden ribs that rested on plaster busts of Athena. One of the most popular portrait and genre painters of his day Wood would open a studio in New York City and would serve as president of the National Academy of Design and the American Watercolor Society. But until his death in 1903 he returned annually in the summer to paint in the Gothic studio that he built adjacent to his Montpelier home. In 1853 we find lawyer Lawrence Brainer Jr. who had made a fortune through mercantile banking steamboat and railroad enterprises building himself a Gothic villa on hillside at the edge of St. Albans. This one's a brick with an asymmetrical plan, an array of steeply pitched gables and dormers, clustered octagonal chimneys, bay windows and a tutor arched veranda. It's particularly notable for some of the most elaborate barge boards in Vermont, these pointed arches within these exaggerated drops from them. He was a member of the Whig and Free Soil parties and served as U.S. Senator from Vermont in the 1850s. Our sense of his household is enriched by knowledge of the son who grew up in that house, Ezra Brainerd, was a precocious youth with near encyclopedic interests who would go on to become one of the most important and beloved professors at Middlebury College, teaching everything from physics and mathematics to English and rhetoric before he served for twenty-three years as college president. An avid botanist in private moments, he pursued the categorization and hybridization of violets. These weren't ordinary people and their homes were not mere gingerbread cottages. Among them, moral and wood are of particular interest because they designed their own homes, investing them with highly personal quality. And morals is of the most interest because it so perfectly embodies the entire program set forth by Downing and incorporates the finest high-style gothic details in Vermont. Moral did build another home in Washington, D.C. in 1876, and this was in an Urbain French Second Empire style with Mansard roof. It wasn't of his design, however, but rather it was designed by Edward Clark who at the time was the architect of the Capitol building. And here we find moral and his family spending their winters as he pursued his political life, but they always returned in the summer to Vermont. Moral to his library, to his veranda, and to his gardens. Returning as Downing had put it to the, quote, freedom of the family home in the country which constantly preserves the purity of the nation and invigorates its intellectual powers. Amid the serenity and peace of sylvan scenes surrounded by the perennial freshness of nature enriched in and without by objects of universal beauty and interest, objects that touch the heart and awaken the understanding. Over the years, these objects would come to include paintings acquired for moral in Europe by his friend George Perkins Marsh, prints acquired through the efforts of famous Vermont born sculptor Larkin Mead and a bust of Senator Moral by Preston Powers who was the son of Vermont sculptor Hiram Powers and the Continuer of the famous Powers Studio in Florence, Italy. And of course it included Moral's beloved books housed in his library which was embellished by a painted glass window of the picturesque Gothic ruins of Hollywood Abbey. This was a gift in 1868 on the heels of his 1867 trip to Europe on which he visited Hollywood along with Oxford, Kenilworth, and of course Q Gardens. The house, its gardens and outbuildings and its furnishings and collections are miraculously intact thanks to the fact that it remained with virtually no changes in the family hands up through World War II. Then it narrowly escaped conversion to a boarding school when preservationists acquired it and had it declared Vermont's first national historic landmark. In 1969 it was sold to the state for a historic site and today it's maintained by the state with the assistance of the Friends of the Moral Homestead. In its completeness and preservation the homestead is a precious important key to knowing Justin Moral as downing a pine, quote, to find a really original man living in an original and characteristic house is as satisfactory as to find an eagle's nest built on top of a mountain crab. Thank you. Okay I'd be happy to try to answer questions if you have any that you want to throw at me. I was wondering what makes something a folly? A folly? Well it was built with no particular purpose. I mean the English, like follies, they put them in their gardens and in picturesque gardening for instance, you might have a landscape that would have a Greek temple, a Roman temple, a hermit's cave, a woodsman's cottage, a ruined castle, all of these things scattered around in the landscape to make it look like the kinds of landscapes you might find in paintings. And those were all considered follies. They were things that had no economic purpose, no practical function other than to be decorative and kind of fun. They were eccentric. You've mentioned a number of buildings of this type built in the 1860s during the course of your talk. And I've always wondered because my own church which was not Gothic but is immediately to the south of St. Paul's cathedral site, so first Baptist which was built in 1864. I've always wondered where they got all the manpower during the Civil War when we were putting so many men on the battlefield. Okay and actually the Baptist church there is Italianate. So you know we have the two styles, Gothic versus Italian. Obviously they thought that the Baptists were more rational than the Episcopalians. But at that time Burlington was the second most important lumber port in America. And it was extremely wealthy. And the case of the Baptist church it was a gift from the millionaire Lumber Baron who lived up in the hill. Oh gosh. Barnes. Yeah. I've been trying to think of the name of the house now. UVM owns it. Yeah. Grass Mountain. And so that was I mean the thing you find in Burlington actually all around the town center at that time you find each of the major denominations building a quite fabulous church. The Congregationalists had done this a little earlier but you get College Street Congregational. You get the Methodist which is a very fine late Gothic building. You get the Baptist church. You have the additions to the chapel that was added on to St. Paul's. And then the Roman Catholics also of course their cathedral also burned in the 70s because of the arsonist. And that was high Gothic style. So Burlington had this set of fabulous later 19th century churches all because of the wealth of the city. And so they could afford to hire these these you know they could afford to hire all these craftsmen. You know it was the glory days of Burlington right up through the 1890s. Yeah yeah definitely and the thing is you're getting immigrants coming in all the time that immigrant labor was very important at that point. Yes. It seems to me that I have driven past the house in Montpelier. Yes. Way up on a block. It's going up a hill. Yeah. You can't stop. Is that in private hands or is that open for visitors. It was sold recently. Yes it's in private hands. And its maintenance has been unfortunately in question. You know but I believe that it was on the market a long time. And I believe it has been purchased now by somebody else who's you know who's going to maintain it. But it is you know it's a historic site in a way because Thomas Waterman Wood was a very important Vermont figure as a Vermont artist. The other thing that's happening of course is that so many of these buildings are just an endangered species today. That charming little chapel in Forestdale for instance just sold a year ago for $125,000 and is now a woodworking shop. And these are important buildings nationally but the base of support is disappearing. Any other questions? If not well thank you. Thank you very much.