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Chers Amis,
If you have ever spent time in a Registry of Deeds, you know too well the gloom of large halls filled with shelves of dusty record books, and yet, I spend a lot of time in such places. I go for the building contracts. The record books for Boston alone contain hundreds of contracts from the nineteenth century that provide an intriguing window into past building practices and social customs. Unknown numbers remain in other Registries. In addition, libraries and archives throughout the region possess many more, often unnoticed in obscure files.
Simple contracts such as that for the Levi Conant House, reveal that the house was designed by an architect, its roof was slated, and its interior plaster walls were intended to be papered rather than painted. These treatments fit a house built on a parcel with deed restrictions intended to create a genteel neighborhood by prohibiting tradesmen and commercial uses.
At the other end of the spectrum, a thirty-five-page specification for the Hartley Lord House enumerates with precision hundreds of details from the construction of the foundation, to the species of wood used in the house’s frame, metal finishes for door hardware, and even the design of bins for the temporary storage of kitchen and household trash.
The minutes of public boards and trustees of religious societies are a particularly useful source that reveal as much about the social customs of the past as they do about building materials. With careful attention to rules of order, organizations such as the Trustees of Nantucket’s Methodist Episcopal Society recorded the full process by which they decided to build a meeting house in 1822. Working through multiple committees, they developed plans, cost estimates, raised money to pay for the building and built it in slightly more than a year.
Over the next few months, we will be transcribing and posting copies of many of these contracts and specifications. If you are aware of any detailed building accounts of this type, I would be glad to have a submission from you.
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