About
Those Photos
by Doris Sherrow, September 2000
This year’s
Portland Historical Society calendar
will feature photographs from the prolific historical research of Jessie
Alsop for the Colonial Dames Old Houses of Connecticut project.
In the early 20th century, the Colonial
Dames began to inventory the oldest houses in the various towns. Local
history buffs did this research (people like me living half a century
ago). The form they had to fill out was lengthy and complex. They had
to shoot a clear photograph of the house for the front page, and describe,
in detail, its exterior. They had to describe each room, noting fireplaces,
paneling, chair railing, wainscoting, courting benches, triple-run staircases,
and a host of colonial-period architectural details.
If there was a local historic name for the
house, they jotted it down in the blanks for "Known as…"
Then they embarked on the tangled puzzle of the historical title search,
transcribing the essence of each deed onto the form. Sometimes you can
hopscotch from buyer to seller to buyer to seller to original builder
in a single afternoon. Sometimes not: the c.1690 William Cornwell house,
which stood on Glastonbury Turnpike until a decade ago, took me one full
37 ½ hour week to nail down in 1980! (But what a week that was---!)
Jessie Alsop was born on Staten Island in
1875, although she was a descendant of the well-to-do Middletown Alsops.
Somewhere on her family tree was poet Richard Alsop, who had been
one of the early 1800s literary group known as the "Hartford Wits."
Jessie’s father’s business took the family to the midwest where
she grew up, but in adulthood she came to Middletown to live with her
aunt, Lucy Alsop. She worked as a clerk at the Middletown National
Bank for many years, retiring in 1934.
All in all, she wrote several pamphlets
and books on local history, numerous columns for the Middletown Press,
and completed the forms for nine Colonial Dames monographs. These are
filed at the Connecticut State Library; Portland Public Library has photocopies
of them.
Miss Alsop’s photographs were taken
around 1948 and often show how these buildings have changed in the intervening
half-century. My house, for example, the Job Bates house, didn’t
have its east side picture window at that time, just an ordinary double-hung
2-over-2 window.
Portland Public Library also has a file
of pictures and partial research for perhaps 40 other old houses for which
the Colonial Dames forms were not completed or submitted to the State
Library. Consequently this file contained original photographs!
This year’s Historical Society calendar,
which we hope to have ready for the Portland Agricultural Fair in early
October, will show fifteen of these old photographs. One actually dates
from 1912, and another, perhaps the 1890s.
Many of these houses have since been researched
by the Greater Middletown Preservation Trust in their 1979-80 project,
and we can supply you with the builder’s name. Of the fifteen, ten
are still standing, though perhaps changed. Three are gone. And two--we
have no idea where or what they are or were! We are offering these old
photographs in the hope that someone will recognize them and tell us!
One house stands on a slight rise behind
a white picket fence--or at least it did in 1948! It has dark wood shingle
siding, original 12/12 and 8/12 windows picked out in white trim, and
a center chimney. At first, I thought it was the Elisha Shepard house
at 32 Indian Hill Avenue. After I had gazed at this picture for, all totaled,
several hours, it hit me that the Elisha Shepard house has a 5-bay façade
and this has 4 bays. (A "bay" in this sense is an opening, door
or window, on the front.) So it’s not the Elisha Shepard house!
The other "mystery house" is a
classic 5-bay, 2-story center chimney colonial with a Victorian bay window
added to the left side. This photograph was not taken by Jessie Alsop--she
was probably still out west, or maybe even just a tot in Staten Island
when this picture was snapped!
Near the house are a boy of 8 or 10, a bearded
man, possibly his father, and, near the open front door, a woman in a
long dress with her hair pinned up--likely the mother. In the foreground
sit a white-haired, white-bearded old man (the grandfather?) with his
cane clutched in one hand and his broad-brimmed hat doffed in the other,
and a sweet-faced little girl with chin-length hair and a dog at her knee.
At first I thought this was the house referred
to in a typed sheet next to the picture--that house was reputed to be
haunted! Then I realized the haunted house had been made of stone, and
this house is clearly clapboard. Consequently we have no idea where this
house is, or was, either!
So come to the Portland Agricultural
Fair, look for the Historical booth, and get yourself a set of pictures
that haven’t been seen for half a century. And please, let us know
where the two mystery houses are! Or were!
