Preservation posts: the online journal of the Historic Preservation Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Mar. 2015

Preservation Posts - March 2015 Preservation Posts - March 2015

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In this issue: -Women's History Month: Rose Standish Nichols -National Register Review Board to Meet in April -Revitalizing the Hardman Farm Bathtub, Part 1 -Recent News & Announcements -Upcoming Events
Division Director Dr. David Crass will resume his regular column next month.
REMINDER: HPD's office has moved. Our new street address is:
DNR Historic Preservation Division Jewett Center for Historic Preservation 2610 GA Hwy 155, SW Stockbridge, GA 30281
Women's History Month: Rose Standish Nichols
By Lynn Speno, National Register Specialist
In 2015 the Women's History Movement and the National Women's History Project celebrate their 35th anniversary. The national theme for this anniversary is "Weaving the Stories of Women's Lives." The March 2010 Preservation Posts issue documents why it is important to weave the history of women into National Register of Historic Places applications. Every property has a story to tell and most of those stories include women in some way or another. Please take a moment to read this article before you begin your National Register application and think about how women have contributed to the property you are thinking of nominating.
Summerville, an Augusta neighborhood listed in the National Register in 1980, includes a house with gardens designed by a female landscape architect, Rose Standish Nichols (1872-1960), a Massachusetts native. Nichols' landscape design for the house in Summerville was not documented in the nomination at the time the Summerville district was listed; however, landscape architecture was included as an area of significance recognizing the overall landscaping in the district. Today, with enhanced methods of research, including the ease of locating sources on the web, documenting all aspects of a property should be easier.
Nichols was one of the country's earliest professional landscape designers and the author of three books on landscapes - English Pleasure Gardens (1902), Italian Pleasure Gardens (1923), and Spanish and Portuguese Gardens (1924). At a time when women's roles were often confined to the home, Nichols' uncle, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, suggested she take up landscape architecture as a profession. She trained with Charles Platt, an influential 20th century architect, landscape designer, and neighbor in Cornish, New Hampshire. She then studied horticulture at Harvard's Bussey Institution and drawing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before beginning her professional work. Most of her commissions were in Illinois, where she worked with architects Howard Van Doren Shaw and David Adler, who were fellow protgs of Platt. The house in Augusta's Summerville neighborhood was built in 1909 by a Pennsylvania family as a winter retreat. Nichols was hired in 1920 by new owners from New York to expand both the existing landscape and an additional ten acres. The Summerville house is possibly Nichols' only Southern landscape design. Today the property has been reduced from its original acreage, thus removing many of its designed elements. However, it is exciting to know that one of the country's first female landscape architects played a role in the design of a landscape in Georgia.
More information about this garden and others in Georgia can be found at the Cherokee Garden Library at the Atlanta History Center. Stay tuned for next month's issue of Preservation Posts in which we highlight the Georgia Historic Landscape Initiative in honor of National Landscape Architecture Month.
National Register Review Board to Meet in April
By Denise Messick, National Register Historian
HPD will soon host the bi-annual meeting of the Georgia National Register Review Board. It will be held April 10 at the DNR Boardroom in the East Tower of the James H. "Sloppy" Floyd Building at 2 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in downtown Atlanta. As usual, National Register staff plans to present an interesting and varied group of nominations to the board. The complete agenda and other details can be found here. If you wish to attend, please contact Lynn Speno at lynn.speno@dnr.state.ga.us.
The nominations include three districts, five individual properties, and one "Traditional Cultural Place" (TCP), a first for Georgia. Four of the nine nominations are updated submittals for properties that were previously listed in some capacity. Updated nominations can serve a variety of purposes: to increase or decrease boundaries based on physical changes; to provide an extended period of significance due to the passage of time; to re-evaluate the eligibility status of each property; and/or to introduce additional documentation based on new scholarship. For example, the former Cherokee capital of New Echota in Gordon County is proposed to receive a designation as a TCP (in addition to its 1970 National Register listing) in order to recognize continued associations with traditional beliefs of the Cherokee. A TCP listing can address less tangible values, such as group identity or cultural practices, in ways that the National Register program may not normally consider.
Other nominations on the agenda include a c.1852 house in Milledgeville (Baldwin County) known as Rose Hill (pictured, right) and the c.1902 James A. Nolan House near Madison (Morgan County). Architecturally, these two houses are good examples to highlight the difference between the Greek Revival style popular in the middle of the 19th century and the Neoclassical Revival style of the early 20th century. Both were influenced by earlier forms of classicism, but the later style tends to combine both Greek and Roman elements in a larger variety of forms. A more recent example of the influence of classical antecedents is the 1961 Chi Omega Sorority House in Athens (Clarke County), which is a late Colonial Revival-style building with a symmetrical brick faade and a front entrance accentuated by a fanlight and sidelights. This property is also significant for its landscape design by Hubert Bond Owens, who founded the landscape architecture program at the University of Georgia.
Historic districts to be presented for consideration include the Locust Grove Historic District and the Ansley Park Historic District (consisting of a boundary increase, boundary decrease, and additional documentation). Locust Grove (pictured, right) is a historic railroad town in southern Henry County that includes houses, businesses, churches, cemeteries, schools, and government buildings. It was first incorporated in 1893 and prospered as a center of commerce for the surrounding agriculture-based economy. The Ansley Park Historic District in Atlanta (Fulton County) was originally listed in the National Register in 1979. It is a large, planned residential neighborhood with excellent examples of early 20th-century houses, including many designed by the city's most prominent architects. It also retains its system of curvilinear streets and integral parks that reflect the naturalistic design aesthetic of many garden suburbs.
Another nomination, the Claflin School, consists of two buildings constructed in 1921 and 1948 for the education of African American children as part of the thensegregated public school system in Columbus (Muscogee County). The site had been used for education since 1868 when a four room school (not extant) was created by the Freedmen's Bureau, the Claflin Academy of Boston, and others. Constructed in an era when most schools for black students were small, inadequate, wooden buildings, the nominated buildings are rare examples of relatively large, well-built, masonry schools. The 1921 and 1948 buildings predated the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that paved the way for racial equality in public schools. The property (now vacant) is the focus of a nonprofit grass-roots campaign to raise money to repair and preserve the buildings for a community use.
Two other proposed nominations include very small boundary increases. The Toccoa Downtown Historic District in Stephens County is being extended to include the recently rehabilitated Ritz Theater (pictured, right), built in 1939 in the Streamline Moderne style. A non-historic covering has been removed to reveal the original faade. The RobertsBush-Roberts House in Gray (Jones County) has a proposed boundary increase to include additional acreage historically associated with the house. In addition to the above nominations, the Review Board program will include a presentation and discussion of cultural landscapes from the perspective of the National Park Service.
Revitalizing the Hardman Farm Bathtub, Part 1
By Josh Headlee, Senior Preservation Technician

The bathtub prior to restoration.
The Hardman Farm Historic Site near Helen, Georgia, is full of many hidden gems. Some are large such as the two-story dairy barn, and some are small such as the antique furnishings within the main house. One of these gems is a wooden rimmed bathtub from the downstairs bathroom of the main house. The bathtub has been beautifully restored.
The decision to restore the tub wasn't made lightly. First, it is important to know the difference between the preservation of an object and its restoration. To preserve an object simply means to stabilize the artifact as it currently is. Little is done to make the object "look good." It is done more to prevent its further deterioration and to keep it in its "used" condition to help convey that the historic site was "lived in." The historic house is not intended to be a static museum, but rather a real "lived in" house. Restoration, on the other hand, is taking an object back to how it was when it was new. Typically this is done in a museum where the purpose is to show a pristine example of the artifact.
Occasionally, an object is in need of restoration or at least a partial restoration in order to bring it back to an earlier time, but not necessarily when it was brand new. The period of interpretation chosen for Hardman Farm was the early 1910s. While the bathtub would not have been brand new at this time, it would have been in far better condition than it was in prior to its refurbishment.
When this project began, the tub was in pretty rough shape. While its "bones" were still good, the white paint on the tub was flaking and peeling. It was also heavily rusted and corroded and the wooden rim had pulled apart and warped at one end. After repairing the wooden rim, it was initially thought that a simple brushing of the rusted metal areas, an application of metal preserver, and some touch-up white paint would be all that was required to fully preserve the tub. This work could be done on-site in a couple of days. The first step was to remove the wooden rim from the tub body. This was done so each portion of the tub could be cleaned and repaired without damaging the other portions. Working on artifacts made up of different types of materials can pose a problem since often what is done to treat one type of material can harm the others. In this case, brushing the rusty metal and then applying a rust treatment could damage or stain the wood.
The rim of the tub is made up of a number of wooden pieces fit together by tongue-and-groove joints like a puzzle. As each piece was unscrewed from the tub, it came free from the other wooden pieces. The tub was likely manufactured without gluing the wooden joints, so that as the wood became wet from use, it could swell and shrink naturally without splitting or cracking at the joints. A few of the joints have been glued, presumably in an attempt to "fix" the tub after it was purchased. These pieces were left together rather than attempting to separate them and risk breaking or splitting the wood. One joint already has a broken tongue which is likely due to the swelling and shrinking of the wood after it was glued.
To this point, the project had gone relatively smoothly. Our initial assessment was that the tub, while in rough shape could be refurbished onsite in a couple of days. Tune in for next month's article and find out why things began to change as work progressed to the metal body and why the project went from a simple, short, on-site preservation job to a month-long restoration. Information about Hardman Farm, Georgia's newest State Historic Site, is available here.
Recent News & Announcements
Charles L. Bowden Golf Course Listed in the National Register of Historic Places - (press release - March 20)
Utoy Cemetery Listed in the National Register of Historic Places - (press release - March 19)
Upcoming Events
April 10, 2015 - Georgia National Register Review Board meeting - Atlanta The Georgia National Register Review Board will meet next on April 10, 2015 in the DNR board room at 2 Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive, S.E., Suite 1252, East Tower, Atlanta, Georgia 30334. Please RSVP to Lynn.Speno@dnr.state.ga.us if you are interested in attending.
April 10-11, 2015 - Historic Preservation Commission Training Dahlonega Held in partnership with the Georgia Alliance of Preservation Commissions. Download the registration packet here (PDF).
www.georgiashpo.org
Title image: The Charles L. Bowden Golf Course in Macon, listed in the National Register on February 23, 2015. Copyright 2015 DNR Historic Preservation Division, All rights reserved.
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