Historic Real Estate

Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States

Whitney Martinko

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812296990
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

A detailed study of early historical preservation efforts between the 1780s and the 1850s In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how Americans in the fledgling United States pointed to evidence of the past in the world around them and debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. From Indigenous mounds in the Ohio Valley to Independence Hall in Philadelphia; from Benjamin Franklin's childhood home in Boston to St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; from Dutch colonial manors of the Hudson Valley to Henry Clay's Kentucky estate, early advocates of preservation strove not only to place boundaries on competitive real estate markets but also to determine what should not be for sale, how consumers should behave, and how certain types of labor should be valued.Before historic preservation existed as we know it today, many Americans articulated eclectic and sometimes contradictory definitions of architectural preservation to work out practical strategies for defining the relationship between public good and private profit. In arguing for the preservation of houses of worship and Indigenous earthworks, for example, some invoked the "public interest" of their stewards to strengthen corporate control of these collective spaces. Meanwhile, businessmen and political partisans adopted preservation of commercial sites to create opportunities for, and limits on, individual profit in a growing marketplace of goods. And owners of old houses and ancestral estates developed methods of preservation to reconcile competing demands for the seclusion of, and access to, American homes to shape the ways that capitalism affected family economies. In these ways, individuals harnessed preservation to garner political, economic, and social profit from the performance of public service.Ultimately, Martinko argues, by portraying the problems of the real estate market as social rather than economic, advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.

Notes

Works frequently cited have been identified by the following abbreviations:

AAS	American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
HABS	Historic American Buildings Survey, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/
HALS	Historic American Landscapes Survey, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/
HCFP	Henry Clay Family Papers Series II, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
HSP	Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
MDOCA	Manuscripts and Documents of the Ohio Company of Associates, Special Collections, Marietta College, Marietta, Ohio
MVLAER	Mount Vernon Ladies Association Early Records, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, Mount Vernon, Virginia
NIRC	Narragansett Indian Records Collection, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence
RIHS	Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence
RISA	Rhode Island State Archives, Providence
RPP	Rufus Putnam Papers, Special Collections, Marietta College, Marietta, Ohio
TSTFR	Touro Synagogue Trust Fund Records (ID 06/06.01/1636-1836 C#27), Treasury Department Trust Fund Records, 1823–1891, Rhode Island State Archives, Providence

Preface

1. “Confident Philadelphia Officials Preemptively Raze Center City to Make Room for Amazon Headquarters,” Onion, Nov. 16, 2017, https://www.theonion.com/confident-philadelphia-officials-preemptively-raze-cent-1820509855.

2. For current definitions of preservation, conservation, rehabilitation, reconstruction, and restoration, see William J. Murtagh, Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America, 3rd ed. (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2006), 4–9.

3. On trees as historic markers, see Laura Turner Igoe, “‘The limb in my Fathers arms’: The Environmental and Material Creation of a Treaty Elm Relic,” Common-place: Journal of Early American Life 17:1 (Fall 2016), http://common-place.org/book/the-limb-in-my-fathers-arms-the-environmental-and-material-creation-of-a-treaty-elm-relic/; Robert F. Trent, “The Charter Oak Artifacts,” Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 49:3 (Summer 1984), 125; Thomas J. Campanella, Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). On settler colonial conservation of green spaces, see Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Elizabeth Milroy, The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–1876 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016); Richard William Judd, The Untilled Garden: Natural History and the Spirit of Conservation in America, 1740–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Adam Wesley Dean, Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

Introduction

1. “Ritual deposition” refers to burials of objects, flora, and fauna that melded sacred and secular meanings. Archaeologists believe that the monumental conical mound was likely built between 800 BCE and 100 CE and the other geometric earthworks were constructed between 100 CE and 500 CE as a ceremonial complex aligned with seasonal solar positions. Archaeological research indicates that people inhabited the surrounding area during the Middle Woodland and Mississippian eras but did not make physical interventions to the earthworks. William F. Roman, Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians of the Eastern Woodlands (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2000), 129–142; A. Martin Byers, The Ohio Hopewell Episode: Paradigm Lost and Paradigm Regained (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2004); Darlene Applegate and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., Woodland Period Systematics in the Middle Ohio Valley (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); William H. Pickard, “1990 Excavations at Capitolium Mound (33WNI3), Marietta, Washington County, Ohio: A Working Evaluation,” in A View from the Core: A Synthesis of Ohio Hopewell Archaeology, ed. Paul J. Pacheco (Columbus: Ohio Archaeological Council, 1996), 274–285.

2. Archaeologists sometimes refer to the Adena and the Hopewell as separate cultural groups, but Indigenous knowledge and recent academic research eschew these divisions in favor of a narrative of continuous development. Members of many Indigenous nations in the United States and Canada descend from these groups. Lisa A. Mills, “Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of the Ohio Hopewell of the Hopewell Mound Group,” PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2003; Elliott M. Abrams, “Hopewell Archaeology: A View from the Northern Woodlands,” Journal of Archaeological Research 17:2 (June 2009), 169–204; Jarrod Burks and Robert A. Cook, “Beyond Squier and Davis: Rediscovering Ohio’s Earthworks Using Geophysical Remote Sensing,” American Antiquity 76:4 (Oct. 2011), 667–689; Geoffrey Sea, “Key Adena Earthworks and Preserve Saved in Ohio,” Apr. 8, 2014, Indian Country Today Media Network, https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/key-adena-earthworks-and-preserve-saved-in-ohio-PvAXN6og5Uy026cZrj-acg/; Eric Gary Anderson, “Earthworks and Contemporary Indigenous American Literature: Foundations and Futures,” Native South 9 (2016), 1–26; Marti L. Chaatsmith, “Singing at a Center of the Indian World: The SAI and Ohio Earthworks,” American Indian Quarterly 37:3 (Spring 2013), 181–198; Edward R. Henry, “Building Bundles, Building Memories: Processes of Remembering in Adena-Hopewell Societies of Eastern North America,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 24:1 (Mar. 2017), 188–228.

3. Residents of the early United States continued early modern debates about the relationship between principles of classical republicanism and classical liberalism. The debates extended from the belief that the material and moral states of men were linked. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (New York: New Press, 2010); Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 42–64; Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 24; Brian Phillips Murphy, Building the Empire State: Political Economy in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 10–13.

4. On cultural definitions of citizenship in the early United States, see Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Thomas M. Allen, A Republic in Time (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public After the Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Jennifer Van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

5. The work of Pierre Nora inspired a boom in st...