Track 6, Presentation 2

Smoking Guns: Looking for Definitive Building Dating Evidence

Lots of Circumstantial Evidence but Not Enough for a Conviction

Best Farm Secondary House

Judith Capen

Principal, architrave p.c., architects

Robert Weinstein

Principal, architrave p.c., architects

judith.capen@architravepc.com

robert.weinstein@architravepc.com

We all want to know: How old is it?

This particular building was clearly old: a small single-story stone enclosure with a log structure on top dating to Maryland’s 18th c. wilderness. It exists today only because of its association with several ‘visible’ people and events, people and events long shaping views of history, often excluding the ‘spear carriers’ in highly visible ‘history.’ The highly visible people and events associated with this building included the Haitian slave uprising of the late 18th c. and a wealthy family, the Vincendieres fleeing it; the American Civil War and its memorialization from the late 1800s through establishment of the Monocacy National Battlefield.

However, its association with traditionally elite history cast little to no light on the building’s origins or age.Folk and vernacular structures tend to fly under the typical documentation radar.

The client, a public entity, wanted information on the building to put it into context with two other significant extant pre-Civil War buildings on the site. They wanted to know if the building predated occupation by the Vincendieres; was it originally a single-story stone building with the log structure added? If added to was it possible or likely the work was done by the Vincendieres? Earlier opinions were that the Secondary House might have housed enslaved people. Subsequent opinions varied: it might be a ‘tenant’ house from the ‘settlement’ period or maybe it dated in whole or part to the Vincendiere family.

The processes for analyzing historic buildings are well-established in the profession but none of the material investigative routes produces absolute dates. Sometimes even the archival record is ambiguous. Modest agricultural structures can be especially hard to date as can buildings in continuous in use for decades or centuries, inevitably modified, some changes obscuring the original building fabric. Many of the farms making up Civil War battlefields, including this site, had tenant farmers from after the war to as late at 1999. At the beginning of our investigation, we had to request it be cleaned from its most recent tenants, chickens, and that the cellar, a handy repository for building and site debris, be emptied.

Thus, understanding this building became an exercise in forensics, relying heavily on its material culture. We proceeded with established methodologies:

We looked for any applicable historic records or documentation. We did paint, nail, and structural analysis, thorough documentation, graphic and photographic.

With the results of our analyses, our team began a process of hypothesis construction. Much as we all wished for a definitive answer, the brackets of the materials’ analyses with frequent ambiguities in the scant written record forced us to conclude this project had no smoking guns for definitive dating.

Our final conclusions for this building:

·       It was probably present in its two-story form in 1798 (from a Polish traveler’s account), and may have been present in 1794, possibly the “south chamber of the east pavilion” on L’Hermitage, (name of Vincendiere property) where one of the refugees living with the Vincendiere family wrote his will.

·       All three of the Vincendiere major structures were present during the Civil War, clearly shown on maps of the Monocacy engagement drawn by combatants.

While we presented an entire series of plausible rival hypotheses to explain various scenarios of construction sequence explaining building anomalies, the client was primarily focused on building scenarios around the two highly visible threads at the site: the Vincendiere family and the Civil War battle. This is, of course, consistent with the presentation of history that has dominated Western thought.

NPS funding results in inadequate resources at many of their Battlefield sites. Unlike the high-profile battles of the Civil War, acquisition of the Best Farm portion of the site was only completed in 1996. Thus, Park management has focused on structures standing at the time of the battle as ‘scene setters,’ limiting work to stabilization and mothballing.

Ultimately, this may mean a more intact resource for future study. Technology advances may cast more definitive light on this small building’s origins. Construction history is complicated.

Judith Capen is a registered architect and founding principal of award-winning architrave pc architects in Washington, DC. Her work, buildings, design, research, and art, have all received awards. She has taught, lectured on, and published extensively on architectural design, historic preservation, and energy.

Robert Weinstein is a registered architect, founding principal, and longtime CEO of recognized architrave pc architects in Washington, DC, specializing in historic preservation. He is an award-winning photographer and has lectured and published extensively on historic preservation, both technical issues and case studies.