The Many Chapters of History at Cloverfields

The Cloverfields house was originally built in 1705. We are restoring it to the year 1784, when Colonel William Hemsley lived in the house.

Although we choose to take the house back to the eighteenth century, the historians working at Cloverfields are going to great lengths to document other chapters of its history as well.

The twentieth century is one of these remarkable periods. During this era, the house was owned by the Callahan family. Thomas Callahan acquired the property in 1897, and the Callahan family owned it for more than a century.

Unknown date. Image provided by the Pippin Family

In the video above, historian Sherri Marsh Johns, of Retrospect LLC, discusses the legacy of the Callahans, and their “preservationist ethic”:

This is a major transition for Cloverfields. You know, the Callahans, Thomas Callahan and his descendants they owned it for 120 years, so this is a major period in Cloverfields’ history. They made a remarkably late footprint on the property.

They seemed to have a preservationist' ethic from the very beginning. You know, a family at the turn of the twentieth century would have a lot of different needs than the eighteenth century, but instead of redoing the Colonel’s dining room into modern taste they added a hyphen. They took down kind of a deteriorated 15-by-20 brick section that had been already altered and put a new frame addition where they had their dining room and bedroom upstairs, and a water closet. And so the house remained remarkably unaltered during the Callahans’ period.

This preservationist spirit is even more remarkable when we consider that the Callahans’ did not buy a well preserved house, but one that had been neglected for years. As Marsh Johns explains:

From the moment the house was built to Colonel Hemsley, this was a showplace. It was one of the most fashionable houses on the [Eastern] Shore and it represented the wealth and status of the family. But a lot of that had changed by the time the Callahans come around.

Colonel Hemsley; he dies in 1812, and if there’s ever a good time to die that was probably it, because his world was about to fall apart. You know, we have the War of 1812, and then we have the economic panic that followed that: collapsing grain prices that bankrupted many of the Eastern Shore and regional farmers. Many of his friends went bankrupt; his sons went bankrupt. So, this was a very difficult time. There were a couple of more panics and of course the Civil War, so the loss of an enslaved labor force just changed the whole social dynamic on the Eastern Shore. So we have these whole national circumstances going around that made it difficult for even the most successful and astute farmers to survive.

But on top of that, Cloverfields for probably 40 years, maybe even 50 years of the nineteenth century, was in tenancy; it was rented out because it had been inherited by young children. So there’s this prolonged period of neglect that caused this great showplace to turn into a dilapidated farmhouse.

So by the time the Callahans came around they were on a campaign of repair and addition to the back of the house, but again as we were saying before remarkably did it maintaining the original house. They put in the hyphen with the dining room; they enclosed the modillion block cornice but they retained it; new roof, rebuilt the porch. Things like that but nothing substantial.

The most substantial change the Callahans made was a renovation and addition to the back of the house. Because this addition was occupying the space of an eighteenth century back building, we had to demolish it. The demolition took place three months ago, on February 14th of 2020.

This addition had to be demolished as part of the preservation process. In 1784, the back of the house had a hyphen connected to a back building. This eighteenth-century back addition was completely demolished and rebuilt at least twice during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When we got to the house at the turn of the twentieth century only remnants of the eighteenth century structure could be found.

Photo taken after 1897. Image provided by the Pippin Family

Marsh Johns concludes by highlighting why this demolition had to be done. Still, she notes, it is hard to let go of layers of history:

It’s a difficult choice you make when you are trying to determine what you are going to take a house back to because, you know, a house evolves and other material goes on that that is significant. But you know in this case we consider that Colonel Hemsley is the most illustrative of the height of eighteenth-century fashion and power, and that his activity had the most influence and the most decorative features survived from his period and that we wanted to determine the look it would have had when he lived there.

It is hard to see layers of history go. Marsh Johns reasons:

So it’s difficult peeling off this one layer because the Callahan dining room was very nice, was very fashionable in its own right, it was very typical woodwork, and this lowly stenciling, and this classic green aesthetic paint that you see from the period. And I guess the carpenter was quite proud of it; he signed his name to it so we know who built it, which is not always the case-- rarely the case in fact.

Photo taken before 1897. Image provided by the Pippin Family

Photo showing 1898 hyphen addition taken before 1897. Image provided by the Pippin Family

Photo taken in 1958. Image provided by the Pippin Family

We are then transported to the site where John Gaver tells us about the removal of the Callahan addition. Gaver, of Lynbrook of Annapolis, is the project superintendent at Cloverfields. He was the one who coordinated the removal of the Callahan addition, Below he explains how the removal exposed a rebuilt hyphen:

When we first arrived at Cloverfields the building had a nineteenth-century two-story structure connecting the two buildings. Through archaeology and historic research we discovered the hyphen which had been covered by the floor of the nineteenth-century structure. Archaeology and us …I couldn’t understand what John says here.. we found the remains of the original eighteenth-century structure. That’s the period we are going to, so we are rebuilding it to that.

Cloverfields in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s. Photo provided by Jim Barton

Gaver then shows us the different layers of the back building.

So you can see the new construction here to the right of what we call the back building which was the kitchen when we arrived. We tied in the corner that had been removed to make more room for living space in the nineteenth-century structure.

So with winter coming down, bearing down there’s archaeology to do, lots of masonry work. We discovered that we could build the new structure within the old structure by just removing the floor and doing some bracing. So we gutted it, did all of our construction on the inside, and then removed the remains of the nineteenth-century structure.

By: Devin S. Kimmel, of Kimmel Studio Architects

For: Cloverfields Preservation Foundation

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Cloverfields as of April 2020: The 1890's Structure

The Many Chapters of History at Cloverfields