This Friday we step back to the 1991 Holiday House Tour to visit a home designed and built by the Moldens in 1988. The home has a Florida influence and an open floor plan which allows for panoramic views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Round Hill, and Signal Knob. Keep a sharp eye out in the decorations for family antique pieces as well as various animal themes. View all sixteen images at the top of the Flickr photostream, or at the end of the 1991 Holiday House Tour album. Happy viewing!
Happy Friday! Before we get to the images, mark your calendars for a PHW Walk and Learn tour. The event will be held at the Clowser House, 152 Tomahawk Trail in Shawneeland on Saturday, September 30 at 1 PM. This free event will help introduce you to the Clowser Foundation and their efforts to save the ancestral home of one of Winchester’s pioneer families. Be sure to dress for the weather and wear comfortable walking shoes.
Directions to the Clowser House from Winchester: Head west on Rt. 50 (Northwestern Turnpike) and turn left onto Back Mountain Road (State Route 614). Proceed until you see Tom’s Market on your right. Turn right at Tom’s Market onto Rosenberger Lane (State Route 753). Take a left at the intersection entering Shawneeland onto Tomahawk Trail. The Clowser House is the brick house on the right side of the road. There is a small gravel parking lot for visitors. We hope to see you there!
This week, we have 20 new images of the Newtown Tavern in Stephens City when it was open for the 1988 Holiday House Tour. The tavern was built in 1819 and remained in use until 1906, when it was converted to a residence. At the time of the Holiday House Tour, the Newtown Tavern was operating as a bed and breakfast. See the images at the top of the Flickr photostream.
This week, we added 23 images to our Flickr account of a building known as Indian Spring from the 1988 Holiday House Tour. The site has roots back to the very earliest settlers who came with Yost Hite to the area in 1732, Jacob and Magdalena Chrisman. Much like the story of Abram’s Delight in Winchester, the original, likely log home was replaced in the 1750s by a more substantial limestone structure. The oldest part of the stone house built by Jacob Chrisman dates to 1751, as recorded in the gable. Two log buildings were also extant on the property and noted in the 1988 brochure; one of those may be Chrisman’s original dwelling.
In addition to hosting some of the oldest remaining structures in Frederick County, the original 750 acre tract was also notable for the large spring, which was first called Indian Spring, and later Chrisman’s and Stickley’s Spring as the ownership of the property changed hands. In addition to being an important landmark for the area, the spring was also a hub for early religious gatherings. Bishop Francis Asbury, a famous traveling Methodist minister, was reportedly the first to use the spring for a camp meeting. T.K. Cartmell writes in his Shenandoah Valley Pioneers and Their Descendants (p. 204):
“There was an ideal place [for a primitive Methodist Camp Meeting] near the centre of the Upper Circuit . . . . The place . . . was Chrisman’s Spring . . . . The famous spring and adjacent forests were freely offered by this generous family. The oldest inhabitant to day has no recollection of the first Camp Meeting with the old tent wagons on the ground and roughly improvised annexes to offer shelter to the families who had come well provided with food. The scanty sleeping accommodations were sufficient to induce the Campers to remain on the Grounds for about ten days . . . . Kercheval says, ‘The first Camp Meeting held in the Valley in my memory was at Chrisman’s Spring . . . probably in the month of August 1806.'”
If you are interested in learning more about this important site, more details may be found in Some Old Homes in Frederick County, Virginia by Garland Quarles, p. 67-69. Other images of Indian Spring and the log building thought to be Chrisman’s original home may be found on pages 6 and 7 of Frederick County, Virginia: History Through Architecture by Maral Kalbian. Further historical and genealogical references to Jacob and Magdalena Chrisman may be found at chrisman.org and Shenandoah Valley Pioneers and Their Descendants. Christian History issue 114 is dedicated to Francis Asbury and the history of camp meetings.
Happy Friday! There is a lot to cover this holiday weekend. First, the Celebrating Patsy Cline Block Party will be held Saturday, September 2 in front of the Patsy Cline House at 608 S. Kent St. The block party is free but tours of the house are $5. A special exhibit will be presented of an item that has not been on display before at the house. Attendees are asked to bring chairs to the event. For more information, call 540-662-5555 or visit their website.
For Friday Photos this week, we found some reference photos for the house art from Holiday House Tour 2003 and 2004. The houses are primarily on North Braddock Street, Washington Street, and Stewart Street. Check out the the 23 photos at the top of our Flickr photostream.
From the National Trust comes the August and early September outlook for the Historic Tax Credit. There is information in the blog post about how to add your business or organization to a letter of support for the historic tax credit, how to check if your representative is a cosponsor for the Historic Tax Credit Improvement Act, and information on how to sign up for a webinar on the historic tax credit September 21 at 2 p.m.
From CityLab comes the article An Architectural Rescue Gone Wrong by Mark Byrnes. In short, it is a familiar story on the struggles of preserving the recent past for “ugly” buildings that don’t seem to mesh well with a “traditional” city. In an even more familiar refrain, in trying to please everyone, it seems no one is completely satisfied with the efforts to save Paul Rudolph’s Brutalist-style Orange County Government Center after decades of deferred maintenance and hurricane-related damage.
Last, A Short History of Fire Marks, The World’s Hottest Insurance-Related Antiques from Atlas Obscura is a five minute introduction of some various crests, why they were used, and resources to identify them in case you find one in your architectural travels.
Happy reading, viewing, and listening this weekend!
Happy Friday! This week we have started scanning images of the 1988 Holiday House Tour, which took place predominantly in Frederick County. This set of photos poses a bit more of a problem during digitizing than some of our past collections, as the images were placed in a photo book that does not have removable pages for ease of use on a flatbed scanner. On top of that, the pages themselves are of the adhesive variety, and the photos seem to be well and truly stuck in place. While that’s normally not much of a problem with photo editing software, a number of photos in this book were placed overlapping each other.
In order to not lose the overall look of both photos, on a number of the Monte Vista pages we have scanned the entire page without trying to crop them down to individual images. Also, the risk to try to unstick photos from the page (and the plastic cover sheet) to reveal what is beneath is unacceptable due to the likelihood the images would be damaged. The entire album (which is, as you would expect, rather bulky) is held in place with the binding supported during the scan and kept as still as possible, but a few pages do show some anomalies from this technique. The anomalies are an acceptable trade-off to making these images available and for making a digital copy before the adhesive material deteriorates and damages the images. You can view the images of Monte Vista and St. Thomas Chapel at the top of the Flickr photostream, or at the end of the Frederick County album.
If you are wondering what to do with an album or scrapbook in a similar state, you may want to read Preservation Basics: Preservation of Scrapbooks and Albums and Preservation Guidelines for Digitizing Library Materials. Each album is unique and will have its own challenges, but these Library of Congress guidelines can give you a good idea of where you might have the most problems and some best techniques to avoid damaging one-of-a-kind artifacts.
When a tantalizing story of a photographer who went around the country taking photographs of dinosaur statues and other roadside attractions crossed the PHW news feed, of course we had to check if Dinosaur Land made the cut. While we haven’t found the iconic brontosaurus, we did find a two other locally famous kitschy landmarks:
The apple at Kimberly’s (photo taken in 1982)
Two angles of the lighthouse on Weems Lane (now dismantled, removed from the site, and re-purposed), also in 1982. Sharp eyes can also spot a corner of the distinctive Hardee’s in the background of one picture.
If you too would like to browse or search the John Margolies collection, you can find over 11,000 images in the Library of Congress prints and photographs catalog. As you can guess, the collection is not just dinosaurs, but also gas stations, signs, drive-in theaters, mini golf courses, motels, and other interesting roadside follies.
Perhaps less impressive, this week we discovered an envelope of photos tucked into a file folder of Belle Grove Plantation while doing other filing tasks. These five images are circa 1986. You can see these photos at the end of the Frederick County album, or at the top of the photostream. Happy viewing!
We had a great question last week on whether there were any efforts to date window glass. As you might know, there were two usual ways to produce window glass by hand which were used until the early 1900s – crown glass and cylinder glass. In general, crown glass was used in older construction, with cylinder glass becoming more prominent during the Victorian era as larger windows with fewer individual panes became desirable. Crown glass is usually thinner, and ripples often have a circular pattern. Cylinder glass ripples and bubbles are usually less pronounced and parallel, like the example photo taken here at the Hexagon House (circa 1870).
Here are a few articles we found on the history of window glass, some guidelines for dating glass primarily based on thickness, and case studies applying and interpreting the dating guidelines to specific sites. These articles are on the technical side, but interesting reading nonetheless.
1. “The Value of Historic Window Glass” by David Dungworth
This article covers the period from about 1500-1960 in English glass manufacturing. While some of the information is likely to not apply here in America, the article contains many great illustrations of the way this glass looks, how it was made, and what color and surface texture you might see in the glass. The more technical aspects start in the second half of the article by breaking the glass down by chemical analysis into distinct periods of English glass manufacturing.
2. “A Comparison and Review of Window Glass Analysis Approaches in Historical Archaeology” by Jonathan Weiland
This brief is perhaps even more technically-heavy than the first, but it is geared toward American glass dating, primarily by measuring the thickness of glass and with an emphasis on archeology. Because of the archeology approach, there is also discussion on distinguishing window glass from mirrors, flat bottles, and other glass sources. If you like looking through charts and weighing different methods of analyzing data collected from a dig site or trash pit, this could be a good starting point.
3. “Window Glass Dating: When Was McConnell’s Homestead Built?” by Grant L. Day
Putting article #2 in action is this paper on window glass dating conducted at the site of two structures near Lexington, Kentucky during excavations. The conclusions from the archeology here are combined with other historic knowledge on ownership and historic events to help extrapolate some theories about the glass found at the site.
4. Windows Through Time
Although not precisely scientific and the lack of scale between images may make comparisons difficult, the exhibit by the Historic Preservation Education Foundation catalogs the appearance of the entire window by period and style and not just the glass itself. If you have an intact window, this might prove useful to help date it. Don’t miss the muntin profiles, which are fairly reliable ways to date the wood in windows based on the shape of the wood bars which hold smaller pieces of glass together in the larger sash.
5. “Making A Home: Window Glass and the Transition from Slavery to Freedom” by Terry Brock
In addition to documenting the changes to slave quarters which continued to be used as African-American housing after the Civil War in St. Mary’s City in Maryland, this blog post is more easily accessible than some of the other articles here. For the visual learners who can’t stand wading through charts of thickness and age, the post has a very clear comparative thickness image of glass dated circa 1830, 1860, and 1900.
Above all, the lesson seems to be that dating glass is not yet a precise science, due in part to the variations of the skill of craftsmen and the tools and base materials impacting the thickness of the glass. Rough estimates based on visual clues and measurements, combined with other sources of corroboration, seem to be the best guides. Chemical analysis on historic glass does not yet seem to have been utilized in American glass dating, but perhaps we can look forward to it in the coming years.
While we were making a few cosmetic adjustments to the way our weekly PHW emails look, we also went in and made a couple other tweaks. Most should not affect you, but here’s the quick rundown:
1. About forty suspicious-looking emails from Yahoo and Laposte email addresses that signed up in two clusters without names were removed from the mailing list. If you are a real person who was caught in this pruning, we apologize and invite you to rejoin the list.
2. New subscribers should get a second welcome confirmation email from MailChimp.
3. If you unsubscribe from the email list, you should get a confirmation email with a resubscribe link (in case you are accidentally unsubscribed), because . . .
4. We added MailChimp’s built-in forward option at the bottom of the email to make it easier and a bit cleaner looking to send the emails to friends or share on Twitter or Facebook. The forward option might make it so your friend could unsubscribe you, so we erred to the side of caution in providing extra confirmation you meant to unsubscribe.
5. In a totally cosmetic adjustment, we unchecked the “mobile friendly images” setting for MailChimp, as it was actually making smaller thumbnails from our blog full-width instead of keeping them in-line with text. This might make some photos side scroll a bit on smaller phones, but hopefully this will be an acceptable compromise for desktop and tablet readers to not see unfortunately grainy images.
It’s that time again! PHW is at work on lining up sponsors for our 2017 Holiday House Tour. For many of us this event officially begins the holiday season with its guided tours of the festively decorated historic properties in Winchester. In addition to being a fun community tradition, the Holiday House Tour generates the monetary foundation that enables us to continue our mission to preserve the best of the area’s past.
As part of our promotional materials for the event, PHW will be producing a full color program booklet again this year. I invite you to place an ad in the booklet to show your support for PHW and to promote your business to a demographic interested in Old Town Winchester, its history, and its architecture. Ads are available in full page (5″x8″), half page (5″x4″), and business card (2″x3.5″) sizes. Enlarging the image shows the sizes, costs, and benefits of the sponsors’ ads in the program.
Please reserve your spot soon – ads are due by 5 PM on October 31 to ensure inclusion in the program booklet, which will be distributed in mid-November to ticket sale locations and local visitor centers around Winchester. Include your business name, contact information, and ad size in your reservation. Your print-ready digital ad files may be emailed to phwinc.org@gmail.com or submitted on CD or flash drive at the PHW Office, 530 Amherst Street, Winchester, VA 22601. If you have questions, do not hesitate to email us or call us at 540-667-3577.
Thank you for your support, and we hope to see you at our 41st Holiday House Tour this December 2 and 3!
Winchester Mayor John David Smith, Jr., Congresswoman Barbara Comstock, Delegate Chris Collins, SVBF Board Member Jim Wilkins, Jr., and SVBF CEO Keven M. Walker among others made remarks on the museum, its history, the changing of the exhibits and way it can enhance and expand upon the interpretation of the Civil War past the experience of names and dates at a battlefield. At the end of the proceedings, Mr. Wilkins was presented with the Graves Family Philanthropic Leadership Award in recognition of his philanthropy on behalf of battlefield preservation and other worthy causes.
Be sure to stop by the Shenandoah Valley Civil War Museum at 20 North Loudoun Street (most exhibit upgrades will not take place until winter, so there is still plenty of time to visit) or check them out online at civilwarmuseum.org. If you couldn’t make the event today, you can see twelve images of the ceremony at PHW’s Flickr account.