The Campbell House porch, Main St. Bennington, VT

 This is a look at a beautifully designed porch.

I included commentary about how a porch was used in a time before the automobile, when seeing and being seen was a art form with etiquette and rules.

 

 How to design the perfect porch for the month of August.

 

The Campbell House, built in 1896, Bennington, Vt., was designed by  William Bull, Bennington's premier Late Victorian architect.

 

 1 - Make one side (on the left here) ample so family and friends can gather, admire the owner’s factory across the road, and observe the community passing by. 

Set your house back from the street. This allows gentile lounging and discrete watching, without engagement with the public.

Originally a small porch (with an awning!) was in the middle of the 2nd floor, between the windows.

 In the attic another porch - now glassed in - had a view north to the mountains. 

 

2 - Always put a tower above your porch so it’s clear where the action is.

Add a great finial!
The plaster ornaments around the frieze anchoring the turret were the latest fashion. 

  

 Weatherproof plaster that could hold ornate shapes was newly invented. These patterns are still available  and made from the original molds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3 -  Include a wide stair which curves outward.
The house is set more than 6 ft above the street which could a  daunting height. If a stair were narrow it would be forbidding. 

Those wide, curved, shallow steps solve the problem. One can climb them leisurely; be seen, pause, and be welcomed (or not). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 4 - Curve your porch! Curve your railing! Add double columns too. William Bull was a master at using curves. They make spaces slightly larger. But visually, physically, circles draw the eye; they are dramatic. They also soften the character of, and welcome you into, the space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5 - Add as many patterns as you can. You do not want bored companions. 

Choose sensibly: stone for bases, fretwork for airing the porch, solid pedestals for those columns, sturdy railings and balusters for young gentlemen to carelessly lounge on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6 - Double columns are good. More is always better. Ionic capitals represent 'grace and beauty', the right ideas for a summer porch. 

Set the curved horns on angle, with 2 faces each, not 2 per end as in the Classic design. Add some acanthus leaves as a flourish.
Your family and friends will visit whether or not your cook can provide excellent lemonade and ginger snaps. 

 

 

 

The Miller's Toll - How it was built

I wrote about the  history of The Miller's Toll Restaurant on Main St. in Bennington here: https://passingbyjgr.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-vermont-steak-house-was-cigar.html

This post is about its construction about 1825.

All the good framing that I was fortunate to see is now hidden again as the renovations are completed. Invisible. Behind siding, insulation, interior walls, new paint.

I can't say,"Next time you're there look at this!"  Instead this post answers the questions I get: "That old? How to do you know? What are you looking at?"



I started checking Bennington's old maps, seeing if they show the house. They do.

Here is a small part of the 1877 Bird's Eye View map of Bennington.

In the middle, beside the Walloomsac River,  above and left  of the bridge, is the house.
It is a 2 story house with a back wing and a porch on 2 sides. There are 3 windows on the second floor in the front and a chimney in the middle.







This is  what the 2nd floor looked like 3 years ago.

The 3 windows seen on the map are still there.
The roof still has the same pitch with the gable facing the street.
The bunch of wood in the  photograph in the middle of the floor - where the surface changes -  covers the hole where the chimney was.












The hole in the roof for the chimney is now patched. It is right where the map placed it.

It's the same house. It was here in 1877.

The gable faces the street. That was the 'new' way to build in the 1830's.  The house is at least that old.
 
The 1835 Hinsdill Map of Bennington has dot in this spot.*
Is this house that dot?  Yes.   Here is how I can tell.

Warning! Now begin some picky details!
I think this is fun so I like sharing it.
If you don't, thanks for reading this far


The ridge beam, running down the middle of the picture, has 5 sides. It was once a tree, cut to this shape, and notched to catch the rafters. Ridge beams with 5 sides were standard in Bennington houses from about 1765 to about 1850.

Notice that the roof sheathing is  wide boards with vane. 'Vane' is the edge of the tree. The boards were not trimmed, but used as they were sliced off the log by the saw.
The frame, painted here in the photo, is typical of New England post and beam, timber frame construction.
The square posts support beams connected with mortise and tenon joints held together with wooden pegs.

Here the frame is exposed and painted. By the1830's the beams would have been hidden in the wall, and ceiling.  The lath (see the photo below) would have covered the posts and beams as well as the exterior sheathing. 

The walls have no studs. Instead planks sit side by side.  Bennington had lots of wood and saw blades to cut them into wide panels. The intermediate studs we had earlier used in the post and beam frame gave way to plank walls.
Those planks  were cut at Safford's saw mill located just across the Walloomsac River.
This is reasonably common here in the Tri-State area. Sometimes it can be found in houses in western NY and Ohio. That indicates that a framer trained here took his skills with him when he moved west.









The mill used a sash saw with a saw blade that went up and down. It left marks on the boards which are still visible today. Later circular saws left curved marks. Those saws were in the area by the 1840's.
In the photograph the left side shows the saw marks.

On the right side are the light and dark marks left from where lath was nailed on for plaster. The uneven lines mean that the lath was 'split'  - make from  boards. Later lath is cut in uniform widths instead of being split. 

For a more technical discussion you can read my blog post here: https://www.jgrarchitect.com/2020/07/the-millers-toll-bennington-vt-its.html

* Prints of the Hinsdill Map are in the Bennington Museum Research Library as well as several books on Bennington and Vermont.

Kevin's, Main St, North Bennington

     H. Clayton Simmons built this practical store and apartment block in 1903. He manufactured fire tube boilers, a heating system he invented, across the street. * 

     The economic panic in the late 1890’s – when unemployment had topped 13% - brought an end to extravagant Victorian buildings. Simmons’ Block was modern yet classical. It was symmetrical, with the traditional three parts: a base, a middle, and a top. The glass store fronts on the bottom floor are the base; the large windows above the middle. The top is emphasized by the flourish of the wide sheet metal cornice.

     The pattern came not from exterior decoration but from the elements of the building itself: the windows’ size and placement, the marble lintels and sills, the brick corners and fretting supporting the sheet metal cornice. 

     All of it is practical. The lintels support the bricks above the windows, the sills are an impervious surface. The brick corners provide stability; the brick fretting and cornice extend out to help keep the rain off the brick face. They hide the slope of the roof to the rear. The brick, marble, and sheet metal were fireproof.

     Earlier Mr. Simmons had dealt in hardware. He would have been familiar with the companies which sold embossed metal facades by mail. The parts would have been shipped to him by rail to the depot just up the street.

     Here, as well as on his own shop, he used this new technology for the cornices. Inside he installed ‘modern’ tin ceilings. The pattern, however, is Victorian: the simple center grid is surrounded by a wide band of leaves with rope edgings and flower corner blocks. It not only turns the corners but also morphs into the crown molding on the wall.

     The current dining room was once the post office. The post master’s window is still here.

     I wrote this in 2011. The post master's window may be gone now in 2017.

*     On Sept 3, 2017 I published this on face book, on Tim Wager's "Bennington History after Dirt was Invented" page. This reply came from Tim Rice. With his permission I add it here with my comment.

Ted Rice:     All steam locomotives used fire tube boilers, long before 1903. Water tube boilers weren't as common but also predated this time. They are usually used in heating systems. Flash tube boilers are more modern and safer as they only have a small amount of steam in them at a time. But Simmons certainly didn't "invent" fire tube boilers.

I answered:   Thanks Ted! The history I used: Walbridge's History of N. Bennington tells about Simmons. I know little about boilers. I suspect Simmons saw the opportunity to bring them to Bennington which made him the 'inventor ' .

Ted:    In fact, that seems to be the case: .http://bennington.pastperfectonline.com/byperson?keyword=Simmons%2C+William+Bernis

Me:      That's interesting and not just about inventions. WB Simmons was born in 1888, so he is too young to be the builder of Kevin's brick building unit. His father, HC Simmons, would have been the builder.

  

The 4 front doors of the Norton-Fenton House

Here's Bennington's Norton-Fenton House, built in 1838.
The small porches on either side of the 3 grand columns are modern additions. So are the storm doors.

I wrote about its history in an earlier post.  http://passingbyjgr.blogspot.com/2014/01/passing-by-norton-fenton-house.html



Recently I was asked why the house has 4 front doors.
The simple explanation is:
2 of the doors are for visitors, 2 are for the family; or perhaps for business.

The 'company' doors are grand with double Ionic columns.
The curled scrolls at the top of the columns were thought to symbolize wisdom and grace.

Today the columns are not readily visible from the street, sheltered by the porch roofs.



The secondary doors are those in the middle with no columns, only casings.

The fluted moldings have rosettes at the top, not capitals, a modern touch in 1838. The massive marble lintels make these doors sturdy and practical.



The house was built for an extended family. Judge Luman Norton and his wife lived on the left side; their daughter and her husband, Christopher Fenton, were on the right, Together they owned the pottery factories around the corner on the Walloomsac River.

The families must have wished to visit and share easily. There is, for example, a bake oven in the firebox of the Fenton house, but none on the Nortons'.  Those 2 family doors made it possible to quickly and easily go from one house to the other.

'Back' doors existed as well, for household chores.

It is possible that the 'family' doors were 'business' doors. They opened into rooms that could have been used as offices for the potteries. Before 1860, tradesmen's workrooms were often attached to their homes. Lawyers, judges, ministers, and doctors regularly had offices in their houses. Why not pottery owners too?

There is another way to consider the front doors -
The house itself is really 2 center entrance houses set side by side - with a hole where they join. Look at the windows across the 2nd floor - 5 on the left centered on a front door; 5 on the right also centered  over a front door.


Here is a picture of what the house would look like as double house - long, ordinary, undistinguished.
The red line is added to help to visualize the 2 houses.

 Changing the roof direction in the middle gives the  house a center. Then, of course, that bit of roof becomes a pediment which needs a visual support on each end. That space becomes the first thing a visitor sees. Adding the 3 columns just reinforces the effect.

The center section could have been brought forward. Instead it was recessed.  That made space for both windows and columns.

The drawing shows how elegant it is.
The main doors with their ornate columns, side lights, and transoms soften the austerity and power of those columns, and bring the viewers' eyes back from the pediment to the ground.



Then the business doors were added...  And with them the visual dilemma - where to look? which doors are the important?  the ones in the center, under the pediment? those with the columns?
Today I look and wonder what solution I would come up with if I had been the designer; the Nortons and Fentons, my clients.

I am very fond of this house. It is unique, it begins with the 100 yr old tradition of what a house should look like in 1830 and then creates something new. I am glad to see it useful 180 years after it was built, and especially glad that many different  people get to enjoy it.

William Bull's buildings: the Bennington Poor Farm

In 2011, Joe Hall and I wrote an article for The Walloomsack Review, the journal of the Bennington Museum, about William Bull. Joe had done the research: I was asked to write about the architecture.  I have described the architecture with more nuance here.

William C. Bull had a good job.

He owned a successful box manufacturing company on East Main St. in Bennington.

Still in 1891, at the age of 31, he began to design buildings - houses, churches, the Bennington train station - that still delight us today.

Bull left us no diaries or letters, few records - only his buildings. They tell us he enjoyed designing, playing with form and surface. He had a sense of place (how the building would fit the land) and massing (how the parts would fit together to appeal to us). He made memorable spaces for people to use and live in. 

He built in a time when people walked, or traveled by horse and wagon, by trolley, and by early cars that didn’t go very fast. At that pace there was plenty of time to look around. So his buildings engage you.

One of the last and simplest buildings  Bull designed, in 1914, was the Town Poor Farm on Willow Road.
It is placed to be seen from a distance. In the early 1900's 
 Willow Road connected East Road to Northside Drive and Rte 7a.  A traveler coming into town would see this building on the ridge across the valley, graceful and quiet on the land - simple but not poor or miserly.



Replacing a building which had burned down, it was built of concrete, a relatively new construction system. Today the concrete walls are sheathed in vinyl siding.

The building is very long. Here Bull played with the massing - divided the structure into parts - to create a dignified whole: a beginning (the entrance), a middle (the wings), and an end (the 2 chimney walls on either end).
He placed a traditional farm house  shape in the center with a large center entrance, a porch with triple columns, balanced windows each side. He placed that farm house a few feet in front of the wings and turned the roof so that the house was set off before  the north and south wings. 

This helped make the scale of the farm more personal, less intimidating, human.







 The windows in both wings are large and well proportioned - not skimpy or mean.
  
Large windows were also necessary to provide day lighting before we had reliable electricity.














The high end walls act as visual book ends, holding the rows of windows in place, anchoring the whole building to the land.  They give the building 'weight', importance.
The end walls also simplified the slate roof details - slate was the standard roofing of the time -  and enclosed the chimneys. . 








There are no frills here. The character is from the size and scale of the parts: the wall and roof height, the window proportions, the shapes of the parts put together.
The Town was graced with a building which did not look down upon its poor.


Today this is  the home of BROC, housing its offices and apartments. 
It is best seen from Rte 7 just north of the intersection with 67A and Kocher Drive.  

The poor house c.1880 (with thanks to Tim Wager).

The Vermont Steak House was a cigar manufactory?

Yes,
The Vermont Steak House was once a place where cigars were made.
So says the 1896 Sanborn Insurance map. 

Here's how I found out.

Last fall the Bennington Banner’s front page photo showed the beginning renovation of the Steak House, lately known as Peppermills, by John Redding of the Safford Mill Inn and Cafe.*

 The column said that the structure was built in the 1930’s.

I knew the building was older than that, that its framing was ‘post and beam', a system used 200 years ago. I decided to do some detective work.


I checked the maps in the Bennington Museum Library.  
Beginning with the 1835 Hinsdill map, the building is on every map we have of the town.

This is part of the 1867 Beers Atlas map.The house is in the middle with the owner's name (which we can't read) jutting up. M C Morgan's house - the Safford Inn - is just to the right, across the Walloomsac River.

Here is partial view of the 1877 birds eye view  map which hangs in the entry of the Bennington Free Library.

The house that is shown in the 1877 map is still here. It is clearly drawn -  as is seen here in the middle of an expanded piece of that map.
The Walloomsac River swings under Main Street, past the Safford Inn on the right, and on past to flow under Safford Street. On the left side of the river, across from the Inn is what we have called the Vermont Steak House: 2 stories, a peaked roof with the gable facing the street, a back wing, and what seems to be a porch on the street and right side, and a chimney. 

The 1896 Sanborn Insurance map labels the house a

“Cigar Manufactory”. 

The 1893 Register for Bennington has this ad:
"R. Ovies, Manufacturer of Fine Cigars" 
 Ramon Ovies and his son, Raymond J.Ovies are listed as residents here.

 Making cigars in Bennington? Why?
I did some research. I found out that many bustling towns like Bennington had places where cigars were put together either for a regional company or for local use. Teenage girls - who were supposed to have nimble fingers and would work for little pay - usually assembled the cigars. They were often immigrants who could be hired even if they didn't speak English. 

The 1906 Sanborn map labels the house a Butcher Shop. R.J. Ovies now runs the store; his father is simply a resident. Note the Ovies' listings in the Register.
By 1921, the one story front entrance has been added to the Grocery. 
On the 1930’s maps it has become a restaurant.  

John Redding and I took a good look at the frame. It is the traditional post and beam construction  we expected in a 200 yr. old house. The ridge pole is the old style: 5 sided. The pegs are long, the sheathing boards wide. The rafters and joists show the marks of an ‘up and down’ sash saw, the kind of saw used before 1830, one that would have been at Safford’s saw mill which  was located right across Main Street on the Walloomsac River.

We also saw original clapboard, molding and roofing, in the style popular about 1825. All been left there, just covered up when the second floor of the back wing was built around it. The lines of the original rear shed were easy to see. The chimney location matched the chimney on the house shown in the 1877 map.

This house really was built almost 200 years ago. It has had a fascinating career as it has adapted to the needs of one era after another.   

John Redding and his wife, Lisa Harrington-Redding, have good plans for their new restaurant here, the Miller's Toll Dinner Club and Lounge. I look forward to enjoying what they will offer. 
I am also happy that the Safford Mills is preparing the house for its next century.  


* all pictures can be expanded for easier viewing by clicking on them 

Chimneys as Decoration: The Campbell House

                                                                                                           September 7, 2015

Introduction
What’s a chimney? 

The place that takes smoke up and outside when you light a fire inside a house. 

When that fire was in a fireplace the chimney needed to be right above the fire to carry away the smoke. The fireplace was inside the house; the chimney was too. Both radiated heat into the house. The chimney was mostly invisible until it exited the house above the roof.
The chimney shown, c. 1710, has 5 flues serving 5 fireplaces. 

By 1860 we had invented stoves, stove pipes and furnaces.

The pipes took the smoke to the chimney - wherever it was. The chimney could be outside the house, visible. It became not just useful but decorative.
These stoves (left)  are from the 1895 Montgomery Ward catalog. One burns wood, the other coal. Both are definitely decorative! The furnace (right), from the Sears Roebuck 1910 catalog, is just as clearly utilitarian, belonging in the basement . 

The Campbell House Chimney 

William Bull, Bennington’s Victorian architect, designed this house for William Campbell at 207 W. Main Street, Bennington, in 1894.  Bull knew the house would be seen from many different angles. The house sits at the intersection of  two prominent streets, Main and Dewey. Campbell's factory was located across Main Street along side the river - approximately where the parking lot for St. Francis de Sales Church is today.  Bull created wonderful aspects and details to be enjoyed by the Campbells, by visitors and those just passing by.


The house has several chimneys. The one most visible from Main and Dewey Street is on the right above.

It begins as stone, rough ashlar with accented  corners, set against the first floor wall. At the 2nd floor it angles and then morphs into brick, tucked behind a 2nd floor overhang. As it rises through the eaves the brick is embellished with arches, ribs and corbels. Definitely decorative!

It is also very high –precariously so. An iron rod fastened to the roof is required to hold the chimney securely: decidedly boring. But look: an iron confection  in the center of rod’s span! The utilitarian tie rod becomes an airy delight: just a little string up there tied in a bow. 



              





Catalogue No. 37, Montgomery Ward & Co. Spring and Summer 1895, Dover Publications, NY, 1969, unabridged facsimile with introduction; images from Page 421.
Sears, Roebuck Home Builder's Catalog, The Complete illustrated 1910 Edition, Dover Publications, Inc. NY, 1990; image from page 98.