Period houses come in all shapes and sizes. Two among our 1999 listings are featured in this newsletter, one a grand 40-room McKim, Mead, and White-designed mansion; the other, a nine-room restored Federal with original Rufus Porter murals. Each has a special allure and each was touched by a giant in the history of American design. Yet the differences between the two, built just 55 years apart, are stark.

No American century, even the 20th just ending, witnessed such radical technological and stylistic change as the 19th.  From 1800 to 1899building technology and style evolved at a breathtaking pace.

These two properties reflect the phenomenal change in building size, technology, and detailing that took place in just a single human lifetime. The earlier house, built in 1825, looks back hundreds of years for precedent. It represents the end of the old way of house building and lifestyle. The later, from 1880, looks forward boldly, both in stylistic inspiration and in technology, embracing the 20th century.

The Edmund Parker House, a substantial late Federal farmhouse, was built in relative isolation from Boston commerce and society. But delicately reeded pilasters on some of the eight fireplace mantles and a stunning parlor decorated by the famous muralist Rufus Porter speak of the builder's desire to surround himself and his family with refinement. But luxurious it was not, for the pre-industrial era of the 1820s remained primitive by our standards. Rooms had to be heated by open fires. Most food the family ate was grown on the farm and prepared over an open hearth and in a "beehive" brick bake oven. There were, of course, no bathrooms or running water in the house. Well water was drawn by hand. And yet, for its day, in the countryside, this was about as sophisticated a home as one could find.

By contrast, The Ramparts, built 55 years later on Boston's North Shore, is light-years distant in technology, style, size, and expense from the Edmund Parker House. Built at Pride's Crossing for financier Francis Lee Higginson, the mansion was one of the first completed by the then new architectural partnership of McKim, Mead, and White. Technological advancement and the deep pockets of their affluent client Higginson freed Charles Follen McKim and Stanford White to experiment at The Ramparts with a blend of styles.

Unlike Parker's house, Higginson's had central heat (coal fired hot air). It had automatic lighting apparatus which used both gas jet and the new electric bulb illumination. The kitchen had a large cast iron range for cooking food grown elsewhere and delivered daily. Ice boxes, supplied with ice blocks through a "feeding" door at the service entrance meant year-round refrigeration as reliable as our own is today. There were multiple bathrooms with hot and cold running water, which fed huge cast-iron bathtubs, showers, and flush toilets.

These extraordinary mechanical advances allowed architects like McKim to break away from the constrained box form forced upon house rites of old when rooms huddled around center chimneys for warmth in winter.

For all intents and purposes, in 1880, Francis Lee Higginson and his family lived a forward-looking life at The Ramparts, one in many way similar to that which we live today. It was, to be sure, a far cry from Edmund Parker's home life in Winchester thirty or forty years earlier, for Parker had ushered out the end of a centuries-long housing tradition. Higginson, on the other hand, had caught the first wave of the modern era, benefiting from the industrial revolution that transformed America following the Civil War.

This furious pace of change made the 19th century pivotal in the history of residential architecture. It also is what for us at American Landmarks, makes listing and selling old houses so consistently satisfying.

Both houses have been meticulously restored and offer today's Buyer every possible convenience.

American Landmarks, LLC
One Mount Vernon Street, Winchester, MA 01890 (781) 729-5174