Murphy 2009

‘‘Secure from All Intrusion’’
Heterotopia, Queer Space, and the Turn-of-the-Twentieth-

Century American Resort
Kevin D. Murphy
As turn-of-the-century American resorts became more socially stratified, historicist projects provided a refuge for men and
women who avoided participating in the courting rituals that characterized seacoast summer places. Renovated historic
houses, or new residences in the style of the old, represented an alternative to the mainstream resorts of the New England
seacoast for men and women whose loving relationships were not bound by the contemporary categories of heterosexual and
homosexual. The formal characteristics of these houses cannot be understood apart from their owners’ unique positions with
regard to the mainstream social life of the resorts.
B
UILDINGS and landscapes, among all the important to understand the historical arguments
sources of information about the past, have presented by historic sites made manifest in set-
a particular power to shape perceptions of tings, architecture, and furnishings. Just as signifi-
history. As opposed to literary texts or most works cant are the omissions, the things that are left
of art, they are three dimensional and allow the unsaid in the interpretations of historic places.
past not only to be understood intellectually but to Whatever is or is not represented by historic sites is
be experienced in powerful ways. Therefore it is the product of whomever has preserved or restored
them. Investigating several historic houses on New
England’s seacoast is a way of understanding what
Kevin D. Murphy is John Rewald Professor and Executive their original renovators or builders intended to
Officer in the PhD program in art history at the CUNY Graduate convey about early American history in built form.
Center.
Some of the material here presented was first explored in a talk
These three-dimensional historical texts also served
in a session entitled ‘‘Beyond Queer Space’’ at the 2002 annual as sanctuaries in burgeoning summer resorts for
meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, moderated by men and women who sought periodic escapes from
Gabrielle Esperdy. The author is grateful to her and to the
respondent to the session, Alice Friedman, for their assistance and
the city but who rejected the heterosexual social
insights. Later versions of the paper were presented at Swarthmore rituals of New England’s watering places.
College in a symposium honoring T. Kaori Kitao at the invitation of The examples focused on here are the Elizabeth
Paul Jaskot, at the October 2007 symposium ‘‘Leisure, Tourism
and the 19th-Century Resort’’ at Salve Regina University at the
Perkins House and Old Gaol in York, Maine; the
invitation of Catherine Zipf, and at Historic New England’s Hamilton House in South Berwick, Maine; and
Program in New England Studies in June 2008. In October 2008 Beauport in Gloucester, Massachusetts. All were
the author presented another version of the paper at the University
of Southern Maine at the invitation of Kent Ryden, where several
privately funded restorations or new construction
people, particularly Ardis Cameron, provided very helpful advice. projects undertaken around 1900, and all were im-
Sara Butler provided the initial encouragement to publish this portant parts of the landscapes of newly emergent
work. Tom Johnson, formerly curator of the Museums of Old York,
and Cynthia Young Gomes, registrar and acting curator at Old
summer resorts. Two interpretive frameworks that
York, assisted greatly with this project, as did Ken Turino and Lorna have not been widely brought to bear previously on
Condon at Historic New England. Katherine C. Grier and Amy New England’s historic houses are used to bring
Earls arranged for three insightful readings of the essay, provided
invaluable editorial guidance, and worked tirelessly to bring the
out the overlooked aspects of these buildings’ his-
article to publication. tories: the concepts of heterotopia and queer space.
B 2009 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, These terms, defined in greater detail below, make
Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2009/4323-0002$10.00 it possible to understand how renovated historic
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All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
186 Winterthur Portfolio 43:2/3
houses and new residences with an old-time longtime Atlantic Monthly editor and novelist
character provided getaways for their builders and William Dean Howells observed in his 1898 essay,
restorers, who chose to locate to the fringes of new ‘‘Confessions of a Summer Colonist,’’ the relative
resorts where they were able to construct alternative informality of life at the new Maine resort he fre-
social scenes without interference. That is not to say quented was a function of its being ‘‘in that happy
that the houses were unknown or that their owners hour when the rudeness of the first summer con-
were recluses: indeed, all of these buildings became ditions has been left far behind, and vulgar luxury
important landmarks, and in restoring or building has not yet cumbrously succeeded to a sort of syl-
them, their owners contributed in important ways van distinction.’’ Informality at his summer resort,
to the public lives of their towns and to constructing Howells predicted, ‘‘cannot last, however, and the
historical identities for some of northern New only question is how long it will last.’’ Fated to fall
England’s venerable seaports. victim to increasingly luxurious accommodations,
informality, the very thing a summer resort was
supposed to offer, was in fact soon to be abolished,
Resort Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth when ‘‘some one imagines giving an eight o’clock
Century dinner; then all the informalities will go, and the
whole train of evils which such a dinner connotes
As summer resorts developed in the northeast will rush in.’’3
United States during the nineteenth century, their The trend Howells describes, from a relatively
promoters’ claims to provide respite from the re- relaxed setting to one characterized by highly rit-
gion’s growing cities were undercut by the many ualized social interactions, had already taken place
ways in which the holiday destinations duplicated by the time of his writing at the nation’s most well-
the very social strictures from which they ostensibly known coastal resort: Newport, Rhode Island.
offered relief. The social and cultural character- Tastemaker and social observer Ward McAllister
istics of various resorts can be gleaned from period recalled of antebellum Newport that ‘‘the charm of
writings, but also from the landscapes and build- the place then was the simple way of entertaining : there
ings themselves. Although some beach and moun- were no large balls; all of the dining and dancing were
tain resorts may have provided opportunities for done by daylight and in the country.’’ Despite this
social mixing or for bourgeois ladies and gentle- informal atmosphere, a paradoxical social cachet
men to relax their standards of decorum, especially already attached to the events: ‘‘These little par-
during the antebellum period, by the turn of the ties were then and are now the stepping stone to
twentieth century many holiday locales were rigidly our best New York Society.’’4 After the Civil War,
segregated by race and class, a response to the fact however, as more members of the elite abandoned
that Americans with more modest incomes were the formerly popular Saratoga Springs, New York,
increasingly able to vacation by that point. Whereas and joined their peers at Newport, and as the
spas and resorts had previously been the purview of cottage-based social scene rigidified, the moneyed
the elite, the greater heterogeneity of vacationers summer residents of Newport rejected the aes-
at watering places led to increased efforts to seg- thetic of the earliest summerhouses. Those modest
regate holidaymakers socially and economically.1 cottages had embodied architectural responses to
At the same time, formality increasingly char- the original notion of the resort as a place of
acterized the dinners, parties, and other gather- ‘‘freedom’’ and correspondingly employed open
ings attended by the more affluent vacationers.2 As
3
William Dean Howells, ‘‘Confessions of a Summer Colonist,’’
Atlantic Monthly 82 (December 1898): 742–43. Howells echoed a
1
Theodore Corbett, The Making of American Resorts: Saratoga broader concern about formalized social activities that jeopardized
Springs, Ballston Spa, Lake George (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni- the appeal of resorts. For instance, the New York Times wrote of York
versity Press, 2001), 228–29. In the mid-nineteenth century the Harbor in 1889 that ‘‘scattered along the Atlantic coast are nu-
Virginia Springs resorts were, according to both northern and south- merous places of Summer resort, many of them being made
ern commentators, more conducive to informal sociability than specially notable by their fashionable gatherings. Such gatherings,
resorts in the North. Charlene M. Boyer Lewis writes, ‘‘Visitors and by introducing gay city habits into rural life, afford excitement, but
travel writers believed that elite society amidst the mountains re- unfortunately despoil outings of their benefits.’’ ‘‘An Old Maine
linquished its formality, though not its gentility, seeking instead an Resort: York Harbor and Its Attractive Situation and Climate,’’ New
affable, open, familial atmosphere.’’ Charlene M. Boyer Lewis, Ladies York Times, July 28, 1889.
and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790– 4
Ward McAllister, Society as I Have Found It (New York: Cassell
1860 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 115. Publishing, 1890), quoted in Roger Hale Newton, ‘‘Our Summer
2
For class divisions at Newport, see Kay Davis, ‘‘Class and Resort Architecture—an American Phenomenon and Social
Leisure at Newport, 1870–1914,’’ Newport History 26 (2007): 1–29. Document,’’ Art Quarterly 4 (Autumn 1941): 302–3.

Heterotopia, Queer Space, and the Turn-of-the-Century American Resort 187
Fig. 1. William H. Dabney Jr., architect, ‘‘Redcote, York Harbor, Maine.’’ American Architect and Building News (1882).
(Museums of Old York, York, Maine.)
plans and naturalistic materials like wood shingles Rhode Island resort had become by 1900.7 In fact,
and fieldstone. Newport’s ‘‘character of opulence as in Newport, in York Harbor the earliest cottages
and luxury’’ that was embodied in its later pala- had been modest in scale and fitted to a con-
tial and European-inspired summer residences was ception of resort life as relatively casual, whereas
an extreme example of the social pretensions certain later summerhouses of the well-off were massive
resorts took on as they drew ever larger numbers shingle-style and colonial revival extravagances that
of wealthy vacationers who eschewed the relatively accommodated a more ritualized social life among
public hotel life for ostentatious private retreats.5 the summer colonists (figs. 1–2).8 Howells’s dire
York Harbor modeled itself on Newport to
some degree, for example, by having a Cliff Walk
7
along the shore and an exclusive men’s club known Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs,
as the Reading Room.6 It too risked becoming the Newport, and Coney Island (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2001), 182–228. Sterngass argues that the ‘‘privatization’’
kind of bastion of extreme wealth—embodied in of Newport, in which private homes replaced hotels, paradoxi-
grandiose summer residences—that sections of the cally brought about a more formal social life: ‘‘In theory, private
vacation residences should have allowed for casual behavior with
self-selected company. In practice, Newport’s wealthier cottagers
often intensified the rigid decorum of summer life, using cer-
5
Newton, ‘‘Summer Resort Architecture,’’ 301–14. On the emonial ritual as an expression of class position’’ (198). Howells
transition to more opulent summer-cottage architecture at Newport, was well aware of the transformation that had taken place at
see Daniel Snydacker Jr., Michelle Christiansen, Deborah Walker, Newport, having written in An Open-Eyed Conspiracy: An Idyl of
and Elliott Caldwell, ‘‘The Business of Leisure: The Gilded Age in Saratoga (1897) that ‘‘the cottage life here [in Saratoga] hasn’t
Newport,’’ Newport History 62 (1989): 120–26. killed the hotel life, as it has at Newport and Bar Harbor,’’ quoted
6
Davis describes how in the 1890s the use of the Cliff Walk in Sterngass, 214.
8
became a source of friction between middle- and working-class ‘‘Redcote’’ in York Harbor, designed by Boston architect
Newport visitors, on the one hand, and upper-class summer William H. Dabney Jr. in 1882 and published that year in the
colonists on the other, in ‘‘Class and Leisure,’’ 22. As at Newport, in American Architect and Building News, exemplifies the earlier
York Harbor the Cliff Walk ran between the largest summer cottages. Vincent J. Scully writes of it that it ‘‘expresses a casual
cottages and the shore, and also as in Newport, in York Harbor the and appealing adjustment to function. . . . Built for the simplest
wealthy property owners eventually attempted to curtail use of the kind of living, and with complete freedom, these cottages [Redcote
path by less affluent visitors. See, e.g., ‘‘Town Wins Ruling in Cliff and the Sprague Cottage in Kennebunkport], as already noted,
Walk Case,’’ York Weekly, January 30, 2002. were thought important enough by the architects of the day to be

Fig. 2. John Russell Pope, architect, ‘‘Millbury Meadow: The summer residence of Harold C.
Richard, Esq., at York Harbor, Maine.’’ Country Life 62, nos. 2/3 ( June/July 1932): 49.

prediction notwithstanding, some middle- and heterotopias that he elaborated, two in particular
upper-class resort frequenters at ‘‘the Yorks’’ and are germane to this discussion. First, as in a theater,
elsewhere found ways of sidestepping the limita- ‘‘the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a
tions that inevitably accrued to resorts as developers single real place several spaces, several sites that are
built ever more elaborate hotels and cottages and in themselves incompatible.’’ Second, ‘‘the heter-
even created spaces at vacation spots where they otopia begins to function at full capacity when
could interact in ways that were not generally sanc- men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their
tioned elsewhere. A veneer of history disguised such traditional time.’’ In such cases, the heterotopia
places: restored historic houses—both private res- is characterized by ‘‘heterochronies,’’ instances of
idences and museums—provided alternatives to the incompatible times being folded together in a sin-
brand new cottage colonies along the shore where gle place. Thus, for Foucault museums and lib-
social conformism was the rule among the elite sum- raries exemplify the concept of heterotopia (and
mer residents. By involving themselves in commu- heterochrony) to the extent that they bring to-
nity preservation projects, or by fixing up historic gether objects that represent a diverse range of chro-
houses for use as personal retreats, men and women nological moments.10
of means created bastions in which the true escapist Summer watering places weren’t and aren’t gen-
potential of the resort was realized. Such spaces erally thought of as having outstanding museums
served as settings for activities in which the norms of and libraries. Nonetheless, some new resorts of
bourgeois society—as they had been established the late nineteenth century possessed the makings
in East Coast cities by the end of the nineteenth of notable historical societies and historic house
century—were challenged in ways that they never museums. Since many of the seacoast towns in
were on the tennis courts and golf courses of the the northeast United States that became the hubs
mainstream resorts. of summer resorts at the end of the nineteenth
century—Newport; Nantucket Island, Province-
town, and Gloucester, Massachusetts; Portsmouth,
Heterotopia, Queer Space, and the Resort New Hampshire; and others—had been busy ports
during the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
To understand the functions served by historic re- turies and had subsequently declined in economic
sidences, historic house museums, and some build- importance, they offered ample opportunities for
ings that straddled those two categories in resort restorers in the form of grand but decaying houses
towns at the end of the nineteenth century and the and other old buildings.11
beginning of the twentieth, it is useful to turn to
the concept of the ‘‘heterotopia’’ as formulated by provided a critique of the use of the term ‘‘heterotopia’’ by scholars
the French philosopher Michel Foucault and as in ‘‘Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of ‘Other’
subsequently developed in architectural history Spaces,’’ in Postmodern Cities and Spaces, ed. S. Watson and K. Gibson
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 35–46. Genocchio argues that Foucault
and criticism. In an influential 1967 lecture, pub- failed to differentiate between heterotopias or clearly place them
lished in the 1980s, Foucault defined heterotopias either within or outside of society. Moreover, he suggests that by
as spaces ‘‘which are somewhat like counter-sites, a identifying a place as a heterotopia we risk draining it of the very
kind of effectively-enacted utopia in which the real difference that was intended to mark it as such in the first place.
Steve Connor makes a similar critique in Postmodern Culture (London:
sites, all the other real sites that can be found within Blackwell, 1989), 9. For a useful methodological discussion of
the culture, are simultaneously represented, con- heterotopia, as applied to the study of Los Angeles, see Sarah
tested, and inverted.’’9 Among the characteristics of Chapin, ‘‘Heterotopia Deserta: Los Vegas and Other Spaces,’’ in
Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories, ed. Iain
Borden and Jane Rendell (London: Routledge, 2000), 203–20.
10
published as full-page illustrations in the American Architect. Foucault, ‘‘Of Other Spaces,’’ 24–25.
Certainly the simplicity and experiment which they represented 11
Historian Dona Brown has provided the most significant dis-
played an important part in the growth of the new domestic ar- cussions of this phenomenon in ‘‘Purchasing the Past: Summer
chitecture.’’ Vincent J. Scully Jr., The Shingle Style and the Stick Style: People and the Transformation of the Piscataqua Region in the
Architectural Theory and Design from Downing to the Origins of Wright, Nineteenth Century,’’ in ‘‘A Noble and Dignified Stream’’: The Piscat-
rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 89–90. aqua Region in the Colonial Revival, 1860–1930, ed. Sarah L. Giffen
9
Michel Foucault discussed the concept of heterotopia in and Kevin D. Murphy (York, ME: Old York Historical Society,
several places. Especially important for this discussion is his 1967 1992), 3–14; in her book Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in
lecture published as ‘‘Des Espaces Autres,’’ in the French journal the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution
Architecture-Mouvement-Continuité in October 1984 and in an En- Press, 1995); and in Dona Brown and Stephen Nissenbaum, ‘‘Chang-
glish translation (referred to here) as ‘‘Of Other Spaces,’’ Jay ing New England: 1865–1945,’’ in Picturing Old New England: Im-
Miskowiec, trans., Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22–27, quo- age and Memory, ed. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (New
tation from 24; also published in English as ‘‘Of Other Spaces,’’ Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Karen Christel Krahulik
Assemblage 26 (Spring 1986): 22–27. Benjamin Genocchio has makes a similar argument concerning the flourishing eighteenth- and

Four such projects located in resorts along the Perkins (1879–1952) led the restoration of the
New England seacoast north of Boston exemplify a Old Gaol while they also repaired, reconstructed,
more widespread practice of making heterotopic and expanded their own house (the Elizabeth
spaces from the somewhat marginal (with respect Perkins House). Mary Sowles Perkins was married
to the mainstream social life of the summer re- at the time, but her husband, the Reverend J.
treats) historic places of newly emergent resorts. Newton Perkins (1840–1915), exerted no impact
Although similar sites appeared in Boston and on the projects and was in little evidence. Similarly,
other cities, their presence at fashionable watering Emily Tyson (1846–1922) of Boston and her step-
places is of special interest. For one thing, because daughter Elise (1871–1949) renovated and ex-
resorts were increasingly characterized at the end panded Hamilton House after Emily’s husband
of the century by formality and rigid social struc- and Elise’s father, George Tyson (1831–81), died.
tures, the fact that they bred resistance in the form Beauport, finally, was the creation of the unmarried
of heterotopic spaces reveals that not all vaca- interior decorator Henry Davis Sleeper (1878–1934).
tioners felt comfortable in the new settings. The Some of these individuals created around
heterotopic spaces of resorts were particularly well themselves communities composed primarily of
developed because away from their places of em- individuals of the same gender, that is, homosocial
ployment and principal social relations, the groups, but left few indications of their sexual
denizens of such locales were freer to explore proclivities. For others ample evidence survives of
their potentials for critical inversion.12 The stories their having had intimate relationships with
of four spectacularly personal and creative projects members of their own sex, or with both men and
here open onto those larger issues: the restora- women. These individuals would not have identi-
tion of the Old Gaol in York, Maine, beginning in fied themselves as either ‘‘heterosexual,’’ ‘‘homo-
1898; the renovation of what is now known as the sexual,’’ or ‘‘bisexual’’ since those categories only
Elizabeth Perkins House, also in York and also gained currency late in their lives or after their
beginning in 1898; the renovation of the Jonathan deaths. Nor would the modern terms have cap-
Hamilton House in South Berwick, Maine, in 1898; tured how they thought about love and sexuality.
and, finally, the construction of Beauport in Indeed, the lives of the men and women discussed
Gloucester, Massachusetts, from 1907 onward. As here often manifest those early twentieth-century
newly constructed, restored, or renovated (in the conceptions of sexuality that historian George
period there was not a hard-and-fast division be- Chauncey has described in the context of working-
tween these two latter categories) structures, these class men in New York between 1890 and 1940.
buildings were to varying degrees heterotopic be- Chauncey maintains that in this period ‘‘many
cause they made palpable various historical periods men alternated between male and female sexual
and represented many cultures in their architecture partners without believing that interest in one pre-
and collections, and provided settings for the the- cluded interest in the other, or that their occasional
atrical staging of various identities. recourse to male sexual partners, in particular, in-
Further, not one of these projects was brought dicated an abnormal, ‘homosexual,’ or even ‘bisex-
to its astonishing realization by a heterosexual ual’ disposition, for they neither understood nor
couple. Rather, the animators were single women organized their sexual practices along a hetero-
and men, or women who were either widowed or homosexual axis.’’13
functioned as single because their husbands were What Chauncey says about working-class men in
absent from the scene. In the latter cases, mothers New York applies to some of the wealthy men who
and daughters teamed up to create heterotopic are central to this story of the New England sea-
spaces. Thus, Mary Sowles Perkins (1845–1929) coast and who traveled to New York and interacted
and her unmarried daughter Elizabeth Bishop with the types whom Chauncey describes. For such
individuals, the term ‘‘queer’’ as it has been de-
veloped in contemporary theoretical discussions is
nineteenth-century Cape Cod port of Provincetown, which slumped particularly apt, since it has been used to character-
economically and was then reborn as an art colony and summer
resort, in Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort (New York: ize the desires and behaviors of both men and
New York University Press, 2005). women whose lives and loves were not defined
12
Jon Sterngass maintains that, in general, in the nineteenth
century ‘‘American resorts offered a world in which participants
13
could express themselves in ways that would normally have been George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and
proscribed by external judgments or internal censors.’’ Sterngass, the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic,
First Resorts, 4. 1994), 65.

around the rigid contemporary categories to which context is the role that South Berwick, Maine, na-
Chauncey refers. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has also tive and author Sarah Orne Jewett played in what
shown how inappropriate the modern categories Fetterly and Pryse call ‘‘queering the region’’: ‘‘By
of sexual identity are when anachronistically ap- filling her fiction with queers, by so thoroughly
plied to American women of the eighteenth and queering the region [northern New England], Jewett
nineteenth centuries. Smith-Rosenberg demon- questions the existence of the ‘normal’ and indeed
strates that Victorian America was one culture that thoroughly destabilizes the concept of normal.’’
recognized—and tolerated—‘‘a wide latitude of That is not to say that Jewett’s characters are de-
emotions and sexual feelings’’ between the poles fined as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—even when they
of exclusive heterosexuality or homosexuality.14 are partnered with members of the same sex—
Nevertheless, however elastic contemporary defi- but rather they are eccentrics, isolates, widows,
nitions of love and sexuality may have been for and others with whom Jewett leads her readers to
these men and women, that tolerance did not sympathize.17
mean that differences between individuals with re- Jewett’s queer characters are, as a rule, not
spect to their sexual practices were entirely habitués of the brand new resorts of nineteenth-
eclipsed. For example, as we shall see, the Boston century coastal New England, but rather of the
men who were active in turn-of-the-century histori- region’s forgotten byways, historic but dilapidated
cist circles and who traveled to New York to engage mansions, and moldering cottages. These are the
in homosexual activities did refer to men who sorts of buildings and places to which early re-
shared their tastes as ‘‘queer,’’ suggesting that they storers were also attracted. Like Jewett’s characters,
perceived a difference between their set and other some of these real-life builders and renovators can
men who were more completely heterosexual. be retrospectively identified as queer in a clearly
Queerness has also been characterized more sexual sense; they openly discussed their same-sex
broadly to encompass all identities and practices desires and practices as ‘‘queer.’’ Others can be
that embody resistance to whatever is construed as regarded as queer to the degree that they resisted
‘‘normal’’ in society, even where gender and sex- heteronormativity, like Jewett’s single female
uality are not of immediate concern.15 Marjorie characters do, although we know little about their
Pryse and Judith Fetterly ‘‘suggest that stigmatiza- private lives. What unites these figures, despite
tion as queer in areas apparently disconnected with their different degrees of queerness, is the fact that
sexuality may in fact be so connected.’’ Given this they participated in restoration or construction
understanding of the apparent absence, but pos- projects that embodied resistance to social norms
sible suppressed presence, of sexuality in relation and expectations for bourgeois behavior, especially
to queerness, Fetterly and Pryse argue that region- at resorts.
alist literature of the late nineteenth and early Thus the heterotopias created by these individ-
twentieth centuries—which regularly used the term uals should be considered as ‘‘queer space.’’ Al-
‘‘queer’’ to denote people and places—might in- though the term is frequently equated with spaces
deed have been indirectly dealing with issues of that have specific connections with gay, lesbian, or
gender and same-sex desire.16 Interesting in this bisexual cultures or practices, in a larger sense the
phrase suggests locales that in various ways provoke
14
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender critique of normal expectations. For the purposes
in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 76. This dis- of this study, the term ‘‘queer’’ is used broadly to
cussion is contained in the chapter ‘‘The Female World of Love and refer to individuals whose identities are not con-
Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,’’
published earlier as an article of the same title in Signs: Journal of structed around the rigid modern definitions and
Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 1–29. norms of behavior associated with such categories
15
Interpretations of queerness that take this broader view as ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female,’’ ‘‘heterosexual’’ and
often refer to David M. Halperin’s Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay
Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) and par-
ticularly his statement that ‘‘queer’’ ‘‘describes a horizon of 17
Ibid., 326–27. Earlier, Sarah Way Sherman, in the context of
possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot a discussion of Jewett’s work, described New England as ‘‘feminine.’’
in principle be limited in advance’’ (65). See, e.g., Peter McNeil, She noted ‘‘Jewett’s association with a peripheral, rural world.
‘‘Crafting Queer Spaces: Privacy and Posturing,’’ 2, a paper pre- Divested of the young male population [which had sought better
sented at the symposium ‘‘Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries,’’ employment opportunities elsewhere], closer to the ‘natural’
University of Technology Sydney, February 20–21, 2007, available at world of preindustrial labor, coastal New England seemed marked
http://www.dab.uts.edu.au/conferences/queer_space/proceedings/ by continuity, not change. Clinging tenaciously to the past and tra-
index.html. dition, it was, in relation to the rest of America, ‘feminine.’’’ Sarah
16
Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place Way Sherman, Sarah Orne Jewett, an American Persephone (Hanover,
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 318–19. NH: University Press of New England, 1989), 49.

‘‘homosexual.’’ For the historical subjects under has been identified not only with exotic retreats,
consideration here, their queerness is a consequence but also with familiar environments like seashore
of their unwillingness to abide by the heteronorma- resorts and urban neighborhoods with substan-
tivity, that is to say the belief that heterosexuality tial congregations of lesbians and gays, along with
was ‘‘normal’’ or ‘‘natural,’’ and gender roles of the very networks of transportation systems that
the moment in which they lived. By extension, the brought them together.20 Thus to the extent that
spaces they made are queer in the sense that queer it identifies otherness within the everyday world
space is ‘‘a space of difference, where one realizes and in ordinary venues like houses, the concept of
that desire is not biological destiny, and neither is queer space goes some way toward redressing
our social role.’’ Moreover, as Aaron Betsky writes, McLeod’s objections. Although the buildings un-
queer space is ‘‘a doubt about our identity. In this der consideration here can hardly be characterized
form of self-criticism, in this possibility of another as ‘‘ordinary,’’ and although they were at the mar-
fantasy, lies the possibility of liberation.’’18 The gins of their resort communities, they nonetheless
four buildings here examined opened up a range of represented difference within a domestic setting.
possibilities concerning social and gender roles, as These historically flavored domestic environments
well as sexual identities, albeit to different degrees. served as havens for individuals who can be loosely
Marrying the concept of queer space to that of construed as ‘‘queer’’ in this contemporary sense.21
heterotopia makes it possible to overcome one of Two objections to interpreting these sites as
the more trenchant critiques of Foucault’s idea. queer space can be anticipated. The first potential
Architect, historian, and critic Mary McLeod ob- issue concerns the applicability of the rubric of
jects to the way that architects and critics, respond- queerness to individuals and their projects that
ing to Foucault’s writing on heterotopias in the historically antedate the development of queer
1980s and ’90s, made a fetish of creating ‘‘other’’ theory by a century. In fact, during the period ex-
spaces in architectural projects at the margins of amined here (the 1890s and early 1900s) the use
society. McLeod denounces the way that these of the term ‘‘queer’’ to denote same-sex attractions
authors accepted without question Foucault’s dis- and activities as well as a particular identity was in
qualification of ‘‘everyday’’ spaces like shopping use in upper-crust Boston social circles, which
centers, restaurants, and especially houses as included some of the individuals here discussed.22
potential sites of otherness. These exclusions, she Moreover, the term as it has been construed in con-
argues, evidence Foucault’s sexism. McLeod offers temporary queer theory also captures quite well
the countermodel of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de the relationships these historical figures established
Certeau, and others who, rather than looking to vis-à-vis societal norms of gender and sexuality. The
the margins for the demonstration of otherness, as evidence of their love interests is not consistent
Foucault did, instead examine ‘‘everyday life’’ and across the examples, but in many instances it is clear
ordinary spaces ‘‘not simply to depict the power
of disciplinary technology, but also to reveal how
society resists being reduced to it—not just in the Also see Mary McLeod, ‘‘Everyday and ‘Other’ Spaces,’’ in Architecture
unusual or removed places but in the most or- and Feminism, ed. Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol
Henderson (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).
dinary as well.’’19 In a similar sense, queer space 20
Krahulik, Provincetown; John Howard, Men Like That: A
Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Also see the review: Lisa Duggan, ‘‘Down There: The Queer South
18
Aaron Betsky, Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture, and the and the Future of History Writing,’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Construction of Sexuality (New York: William Morrow, 1995), 201, Gay Studies 8 (2002): 379–87.
21
and Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New York: William These permissive private environments functioned quite
Morrow, 1997); Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, ‘‘Guest differently from the resort towns that from the turn of the cen-
Column: What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?’’ Proceedings tury appealed to nonconformist clienteles, such as Provincetown,
of the Modern Language Association 110, no. 3 (May 1995): 343–39. Massachusetts, which Krahulik has studied. A local example of a
Whitney Davis, ‘‘‘Homosexualism,’ Gay and Lesbian Studies, and town that became known as a relatively welcoming destination for
Queer Theory in Art History,’’ in The Subjects of Art History: Historical gay and lesbian tourists was Ogunquit, Maine. Ogunquit’s history as
Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Michael a gay-friendly summer resort began with the turn-of-the-twentieth-
Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Cambridge: Cambridge University century art colony there, and especially with the art school run by
Press, 1998), 115–42. Davis considers the relationship between Brooklyn, New York, artist and publisher Hamilton Easter Field.
gay/lesbian and queer art history and the political implications of See Doreen Bolger, ‘‘Hamilton Easter Field and His Contribution
the development of a queer art history for gay and lesbian studies to American Modernism,’’ American Art Journal 20, no. 2 (1988):
(and identities), 124–31. 79–107.
19 22
Mary McLeod, ‘‘‘Other’ Spaces and ‘Others,’’’ in The Sex of David D. Doyle Jr., ‘‘‘A Very Proper Bostonian’: Rediscovering
Architecture, ed. Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Ogden Codman and his Late-Nineteenth-Century Queer World,’’
Weisman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 15–28, quote from 23. Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 4 (October 2004): 474–76.

that their affections and sexual desires were not history, in this context they can be understood as
rigidly fixed on the opposite sex. Moreover, their challenging places where gender norms were
projects challenged gendered norms of behavior. called into question and where a wide range of
Thus, these buildings served as spaces for ‘‘queer- affective relationships could be explored in safety.
ing’’ societal expectations in a variety of ways, from Betsky’s queer space and Foucault’s heteroto-
the overturning of beliefs about how women could pia both contain a liberatory potential, one that is
function in the public realm to providing venues for brought to life in the examples under consider-
same-sex encounters. ation here through particular architectural forms
A second objection to the analysis would ques- and design schemes that can be broadly charac-
tion the significance of engaging in such an inter- terized as historicist. This strategy is consistent with
pretation of these spaces at this moment, given that what at least some historians and critics have con-
the discourse on queer space erupted in the fields sidered a prominent feature of queer space: its his-
of architectural history and criticism in the 1990s, torical character. Christopher Reed characterizes
engendered a spate of publications, but seems not queer space as ‘‘renovated space.’’ Not only has an
to have progressed much further in recent years, almost parodic adoption and adaptation of historic
perhaps because the concept of queerness already spaces and objects been aligned with the concept
has been replaced by other interpretive frame- of ‘‘camp,’’ but the process of renovation—with its
works in cultural studies.23 However, as art his- images of ‘‘knocking down barriers and opening
torian Abigail Solomon-Godeau has shown in a up closets’’—is a powerful metaphor for queer iden-
very different context, the question of the trans- tity.25 Central to each case examined here is the use
parency (or not) between objects and the sexual of historical imagery. Although they are very dif-
identities of their makers has hardly been resolved.24 ferent from one another, what binds the four proj-
Moreover, the relationship between historicism and ects is the way in which each building becomes an
queerness has not been adequately investigated, opportunity to stage resistance to various norms—
which means that essential qualities of these well- social, gender, sexual, or other—in the guise of
known historic sites continue to go unrecognized. representing earlier American history and material
Bringing to the fore the queerness of these places culture.
makes it possible to interpret them in radically new This is a unique situation, for American his-
ways. Whereas they have often been seen as ma- toricist culture of the turn of the century is rarely
terial manifestations of politically conservative, if described as having offered liberation for anyone.
not reactionary, understandings of early American Quite the opposite: the Colonial Revival, that turn
toward forms and practices associated with colonial
British North America and with the early American
23
See Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, ‘‘Introduction,’’ South Republic that gathered momentum after the Civil
Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 421–32. Halley and War, is more frequently construed as oppressive. It
Parker, in their introduction to the issue on ‘‘After Sex? On Writing has been described as a politically reactionary cul-
since Queer Theory,’’ usefully describe the emergence of queer
theory in the academy in the wake of poststructuralism and discuss
tural response by terrified white Anglo-Saxon Pro-
alternative views of queer theory’s ongoing interpretive potential. testants (WASPs) to the increasing immigration of
Two publications that exemplify the emergent interest in gender nonwhites to the United States and the threatened
and sexuality in architectural history are Alice T. Friedman, Women
and the Making of the Modern House (New York: Harry N. Abrams, destabilization of Anglo-Saxon political and social
1998); and Joel Sanders, ed., Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (New hegemony. Thus, the early preservation projects
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). recalled a mythic golden age when, as Virginia
24
Abigail Solomon-Godeau provides a very sensible analysis of author and York, Maine, summer resident Thomas
this problem as well as of the relationship between gay/lesbian art
history and queer art history in her essay ‘‘Is Endymion Gay,’’ in Nelson Page put it when speaking at the restored
Sylvain Bellenger, Girodet, 1767–1824 (Paris: Gallimard and Musée
du Louvre Editions, 2005). The current state of scholarship on
25
queer space parallels the state of feminist architectural history. As Christopher Reed, ‘‘Imminent Domain: Queer Space in the
Mary McLeod has commented, ‘‘In the United States today, Built Environment,’’ Art Journal 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 67. Will
feminist architecture history—like feminism in general—has Fellows proposes that there is a fundamental connection between
nearly disappeared. The flood of publications during the early gay male identity and a propensity to renovate historic houses, in A
1990s (Sexuality and Space, The Sex of Architecture, Architecture and Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture (Madison: University
Feminism) has by now ground to a halt; few schools continue to offer of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 3–35. Fellows includes autobiograph-
classes on ‘gender and architecture’; and scholars in their twenties ical statements by numerous gay male preservationists to document
or thirties tend to find other subjects—sustainability, digitalization, what he sees as a consistent trait of gay men across time. Given this
and globalization—more compelling.’’ ‘‘Perriand: Reflections of starting assumption, he cannot deal with lesbians, nor does he
Feminism and Modern Architecture,’’ Harvard Design Magazine, adequately address the problematic projection of a twenty-first-
no. 20 (Spring/Summer 2004): 1. century conception of gay identity onto earlier periods.

Old Gaol in 1902, the colonists were ‘‘all of the Beach, which is the resort of people several grades
same race’’ and all shared ‘‘the same history.’’26 of gentility lower than ours: so many, in fact, that
The Old Gaol and other restorations were we never speak of the Beach without averting our
widely considered to exert an important accultur- faces, or, at the best, with a tolerant smile. It is really
ating influence on newcomers to the United States a succession of beaches, all much longer and, I am
who were familiar with neither its founding myths bound to say, more beautiful than ours, lined with
nor the stereotyped imagery of its colonial period. rows of the humbler sort of summer cottages known
Such images—which appeared in magazine and as shells, and with many hotels of corresponding
book illustrations, popular prints, expensive oil degree.’’ The cottages, Howells remarked, were
paintings, and elsewhere—proliferated after the ‘‘hired by the week or month at about two dollars a
celebration of the nation’s centennial in 1876 and day, and they are supposed to be taken by inland
featured dark houses of heavy timber construction, people of little social importance.’’27
leaded-glass windows, and wide brick hearths Although Howells described in some detail the
cluttered with such implements of daily life as iron social lives of the well-heeled vacationers, he had
kettles and spinning wheels. Such ‘‘colonial’’ ma- little to say about how the lower-class holidaymakers
terial culture was deployed conservatively in house spent their time, except to observe that he ‘‘com-
museums that showcased a more consensual past monly saw the ladies reading on their verandas,
for the education of immigrants and the reassur- books and magazines, while the gentlemen sprayed
ance of jittery WASPs, but it was also used inventively the dusty road before them with the garden hose.’’
by the makers of heterotopic and heterochronic In addition to the beach itself, the cottagers had for
spaces, as we shall see, and offered a respite from their amusement a park dedicated ‘‘to the only In-
what some critics considered the overbearingly con- dian saint I ever heard of’’ whose statue, ‘‘colossal in
formist social life of America’s turn-of-the-century sheet-lead,’’ stood guard over it. Readers familiar
watering places. with York Beach would have recognized this ref-
erence to the monumental figure of St. Aspinquid
looming over the park of the same name. It was on
Social, Gender, and Class Relations at the Resort: York Beach that Howells observed women bathing
York, Maine in the surf and actually enjoying it, despite Maine’s
notoriously cold water: ‘‘In the more active gayeties,
The flavor of life in a mainstream resort, as well as I have seen nothing so decided during the whole
its peculiar social rigidity, was remarked upon by season as the behavior of three young girls who once
William Dean Howells in 1898, the very year that came up out of the sea, and obliged me by dancing a
several of these sites were purchased. For readers measure on the smooth hard beach in their bathing-
who were familiar with the Maine resort he knew dresses.’’ Heedless or unaware of the contemporary
well, Howells’s essay was a familiar portrait of the controversy over women swimming in bathing cos-
several class-distinct districts of ‘‘the Yorks’’ at the tumes that revealed more and more skin as they
far southern end of the state. The Yorks comprised were tailored to accommodate athletic activity, the
a number of small villages: York Village, York young women flaunted their pleasure before the
Corner, York Beach, York Harbor, Cape Neddick, high-brow interloper on their middle- and working-
and others. Howells described the town (although class beach.28 How different these young women’s
without naming it): ‘‘Beyond our colony, which experience of the beach was compared to that of
calls itself the Port, there is a far more populous four other women photographed at the York Harbor
watering-place, east of the Point, known as the Beach at about the same time (fig. 3). These fash-
ionable ladies stroll the hard-packed sand fully
26
‘‘Thomas Nelson Page’s Address,’’ in Agamenticus, Bristol, dressed with parasols to protect them from the sun
Gorgeanna, York: An Oration Delivered by the Hon. James Phinney Baxter . . . and with no intention of actually going in the water.
on the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Town of York (York, ME:
Old York Historical and Improvement Society, 1904), 116–17. The Howells dwells on the social and economic dif-
politically conservative nature of American historicism has been ferences between various resorts, but has little to
addressed over the course of the last several decades. An early work say about gender relations at the various spots,
in this vein is William B. Rhoads, ‘‘The Colonial Revival and Amer-
ican Nationalism,’’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35, 27
no. 4 (December 1976): 239–54. A more recent study dealing with Howells, ‘‘Confessions,’’ 745–46.
28
the political and social impetus behind the historic preservation Ibid., 746. On the controversy over bathing suits and
movement is Michael Holleran, Boston’s Changeful Times: Origins of swimming, see James C. O’Connell, Becoming Cape Cod: Creating a
Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Seaside Resort (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England,
University Press, 1998). 2003), 32–33.

Fig. 3. York Harbor Beach, York Harbor, Maine, 1893. (Museums of Old York, York, Maine.)
although he acknowledges they were the subject of skepticism about resort life at the turn of the
great contemporary interest. Howells avows that century is summarized in a 1918 book aimed at
‘‘our fiction has made so much of our summer teachers that dryly comments, ‘‘Most summer re-
places as the mise en scène of its love stories that I sorts are rather inane and idle places where people
suppose I ought to say something of this side of our without many ideas or serious purposes go to be
colonial life. But after sixty I suspect that one’s eyes amused.’’ Although the author conceded that it
are poor for that sort of thing, and I can only say that might be worthwhile for a teacher once in his or
in its earliest and simplest epoch the Port was par- her life to spend a couple of weeks at a mountain or
ticularly famous for the good times that the young seashore resort, the latter likely had little to offer
people had.’’29 Howells might have said ‘‘infa- since in such places most people were known to
mous’’ since the fashionable summer resorts of his ‘‘loaf about upon the hotel or cottage verandas in
period were considered somewhat suspect, specif- the morning, read a few novels and play a few card
ically because they offered opportunities for the games, and in the afternoon loaf upon the beach in
mixing of the sexes far from work and other re- their bathing suits.’’ Evenings were spent at dances
sponsibilities. The social life of the summer resorts, or movies and were as suspiciously lacking in ed-
as Cindy Sondik Aron has pointed out, was or- ucational opportunities as the rest of the day was.31
chestrated by women who were ‘‘perceived to be Not only this critic, but many others also found
exercising undue autonomy there.’’30 The general vacationing to be conspicuously unproductive and
29
Howells, ‘‘Confessions,’’ 748.
30 31
Cindy Sondik Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in Henry Stoddard Curtis, Recreation for Teachers; Or, The
the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 98–100. Teacher’s Leisure Time (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 217–18.

to offer all too many opportunities for dissipation socialites, the two women chose a summerhouse
and sexual exploits. far from many members of their class who tended
Anxiety over relations between the sexes at re- to cluster around the harbor, and instead bought a
sorts, and especially over female sexuality, was ex- place upriver from most of the activity, although
pressed in books that took watering-place romance not far from the Golf and Tennis Club. Given their
and seduction as their themes. The new summer social standing, it was an unexpected choice. Ac-
resorts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cording to Howells’s description of the Yorks, the
centuries provided novel settings for old romantic Perkinses were actually beyond the spread of sum-
formulas, including the Romeo and Juliet story, mer civilization. He wrote that from the harbor,
which Hoosier writer and Kennebunkport, Maine, ‘‘An irregular line of cottages follows the shore a
summer resident Booth Tarkington deployed in little way, and then leaves the river to the schooners
his 1930 novel Mirthful Haven. There, the Capulets and barges which navigate it as far as the oldest
and the Montagues become the Cornings (WASP pile-built wooden bridge in New England [Sewall’s
summer folk) and the Pelters (uncouth natives). As Bridge, which the Perkins House overlooks], and
Howells noted, the pairing off of young summer these in their turn abandon it to the fleets of row-
resort visitors was such a common sport that it had boats and canoes in which summer youth of both
become a trope of turn-of-the-century literature. sexes explore it’’34 (figs. 4–5).
Reformer, feminist, and poet Charlotte Perkins The Perkins women, then, picked a spot at the
Gilman said as much in her 1898 book Women and far end of navigable waters, both literally and with
Economics when she wrote that ‘‘the condition of respect to the resort’s social scene. Further, both
individual economic dependence in which women women played central roles in establishing new so-
live resembles that of the savage in the forest. They cial outlets that provided alternatives to the round
obtain their economic goods by securing a male of dinners, dances, and parties that Howells and
through their individual exertions, all competing others described as features of the York Harbor
freely to this end. . . . The numerous girls at a sum- summer season. The choice of a historic house
mer resort, in their attitude toward the scant supply removed from the center of the social scene over a
of young men, bear an unconscious resemblance new cottage in the heart of the summer colony was
to the emulous savages in a too closely hunted between two clear alternatives. It was also a choice
forest.’’32 offered by other resorts such as Newport that had
been important ports in the eighteenth century.
H. T. Tuckerman noted that there the ‘‘cozy and
The Elizabeth Perkins House convivial’’ historic houses with their ‘‘low ceilings,
wainscot panels, the French plate mirrors with
Yet, even in the Yorks, and even in its conformist heavy frames’’ and a complete inventory of appeal-
upper-crust enclave at the Harbor, women found ing old-time features, from small-paned windows to
ways of avoiding that particular competitive sport broad staircases and massive chimneys, contrasted
by creating environments where the rituals of het- with new cottages with their ‘‘verandas, lawns,
erosexual pairing were eschewed in favor of other croquet grounds, French chairs, marble center-
pursuits. The mother and daughter team of Mary tables, ottomans, photograph albums, and conser-
Sowles and Elizabeth Bishop Perkins followed such vatory flowers of the modern villa.’’35 The features
a path when they adopted York as their summer of the older houses, which had been happily rented
residence. Mary was married at the time that she by Newport’s earliest summer residents, are the fa-
purchased the purportedly seventeenth-century miliar and comfortable alternatives to the social
‘‘Piggin House’’ on the York River. Yet her hus- rituals and overstuffed interiors that went with the
band, who was then nearly sixty years old, was not
listed on the deed in 1898; rather, her daughter
Elizabeth Perkins was.33 Well-heeled New York City York City and previously associated with churches on Long Island.
He had been a member of the Society of Colonial Wars in the State
of New York, so he was not without his own historical interests.
32
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of Obituaries, New York Times, April 8, 1915, and April 9, 1915. In New
the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evo- York City, the Perkins family occupied a three-story brick town-
lution (1898; Boston: Small, Maynard, 1915), 109. A. K. Sandoval- house at 61 E. 52nd Street in Manhattan as of 1913. ‘‘The Real
Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New York: Yale University Press, Estate Field,’’ New York Times, September 17, 1917.
34
2007), 259–60. Howells, ‘‘Confessions,’’ 743.
33 35
The Rev. J. Newton Perkins died at the age of seventy-five in H. T. Tuckerman, ‘‘The Graves at Newport,’’ Harper’s New
1915 and had been curate of the Church of the Incarnation in New Monthly Magazine 39 (August 1869): 382.

Fig. 4. Map of York Village and York Harbor showing the Elizabeth Perkins House.
Fig. 5. Elizabeth Perkins House, York, Maine, built ca. 1730–50 with later alterations and additions, photo 1899.
(Museums of Old York, York, Maine.)

Fig. 6. Bedroom, Elizabeth Perkins House, added 1920, photo ca. 1995. (Museums of Old York, York, Maine.)
cottages built by the new arrivals.36 Likewise at Neddick and located at the back of the second
York, the earliest summer visitors had rented story, on the river side, above the screened porch
standing houses, or hired rooms in local people’s (fig. 6). For a prolific writer, Elizabeth Perkins
homes, but later vacationers had built large was notably silent on the topic of her loves and
shingle-style cottages along the shore. For summer private desires, yet a postcard was found wedged
residents like the Perkinses, older houses offered a behind her dresser in which her female correspon-
way of opting out of some aspects of the resort’s dent spoke of sneaking up to Elizabeth’s room,
social scene and probably represented a cost perhaps by the nearby servants’ staircase, where
savings over new cottages. the two fell into one another’s arms. This could
The house that Mary and Elizabeth Perkins pur- have been an instance of the sort of intimate emo-
chased was a common New England type with four tional and physical relationship between women
major rooms in the main part of the house and an that Caroll Smith-Rosenberg has shown was com-
ell that housed a dining room and kitchen. Over mon in the nineteenth century and that cannot be
the course of time, the women enlarged the house easily categorized according to later definitions of
greatly, adding visitors’ and servants’ quarters rather romantic and platonic, sexual and asexual rela-
like what a newly constructed cottage would have tions.37 Perkins never married and enjoyed close
had. Around 1920 Elizabeth Perkins tacked on to
the house a space that was perhaps its most per- 37
The former, longtime curator of the Museums of Old York
sonal one for her: a bedroom fitted with eighteenth- described the discovery of this document to me in personal corre-
century paneling salvaged from a house in Cape spondence, January 16, 2008. However, the librarian and archivist
informed me (also in personal correspondence, January 18, 2008)
that she could not locate the postcard for my consultation. Smith-
36
McAllister writes of antebellum Newport that ‘‘it was the Rosenberg writes, ‘‘The essential question is not whether these
fashion then at Newport, to lease for the summer a farmer’s house women [whose correspondence she has studied] had genital con-
on the [Aquidneck] Island and not live in the town.’’ McAllister, tact and can therefore be defined as homosexual or heterosexual.
Society, quoted in Newton, ‘‘Summer Resort Architecture,’’ 302. The twentieth-century tendency to view human love and sexuality

Fig. 7. Dining room, Elizabeth Perkins House, ca. 1953. (Museums of Old York, York, Maine; photo, Douglas
Armsden.)
relationships with other women whom she some- the original kitchen in the ell to expose an earlier
times entertained in her summer home, which of- structure that was believed to represent the oldest
fered more privacy than a brand new cottage at part of the house (fig. 7). Elizabeth Perkins nar-
York Harbor would have. Elizabeth Perkins’s bed- rated this process in an unpublished short story
room, located in the rear ell of the house and thus entitled ‘‘The Codfish Ghost: A Biography of a
at a slight remove from its main block, also af- House from the Seventeenth Century to the Present
forded some privacy, while its old wood paneling Day,’’ written in 1933. She describes how she (fic-
and fireplace transported its inhabitants to another tionalized as an anonymous ‘‘home-hunter’’)
era. ‘‘stood by in excited ecstasy’’ as the carpenter
The heterotopic character of the Perkins House removed layers of Victorian wallpaper from the
was further enhanced by later renovation projects. kitchen, then earlier plaster beneath. Finally, as he
Near the end of Mary’s life, in 1929, Elizabeth was working on the south wall of the room, ‘‘she
Perkins embarked on a more radical expansion and grabbed the tool from his hand and commenced
alteration of the house that was intended not just to herself to hack furiously at the wall,’’ in flagrant
make it bigger but also to emphasize its historic disregard of the mason’s caution that she would
character. In particular, the finish was stripped from ‘‘break all the plaster.’’ ‘‘I want to,’’ responds home
owner Perkins, ‘‘I want to get rid of it all; don’t you
within a dichotomized universe of deviance and normality, see what’s underneath? Sheathing! Hand-beveled
genitality and platonic love, is alien to the emotions and attitudes pine boards!!’’ Soon, the ceiling plaster comes
of the nineteenth century and fundamentally distorts the nature of
these women’s emotional interaction.’’ Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly down too to reveal the heavy beams beneath. If, as
Conduct, 58–59. Christopher Reed suggests, renovation is central to

producing queer space, and the psychological re- of a Native American, as shown in a photograph
lease associated with demolition has something to taken by Perkins herself in 1924 (fig. 8). From
do with shattering social constraints, then Elizabeth Sewalls’s Bridge, the vantage point of most viewers,
Perkins’s account of her passionate attack on the the Indian was seen in profile, looking thought-
Victorian finishes of her kitchen (the future dining fully at the water beyond. The commercial gim-
room), which required her to take over the work of mick took on a kind of odd nobility and came to
a man, is unequaled as a narrative of queer space in stand for an even earlier period in York’s history:
the making. By the late 1920s, when this episode the centuries prior to settlement by whites and the
took place, Victorian interior decoration already early years of contact between the natives and
had a reputation for being dark, depressing, and the European settlers. Where Elizabeth Perkins’s
representative of a period characterized by overly dining room helped to make her house into a
formal and restrictive standards of decorum.38 In seventeenth- or eighteenth-century environment
getting back to the supposedly early wood structure in the eyes of its maker, the cigar store Indian was
beneath, Elizabeth Perkins excised from the house its imaginary inhabitant.
any traces of the Victorian period, which roughly The Indian exemplified most dramatically the
corresponded to the lifetime of her only surviving women’s antique collecting and display, both of
parent, her mother, who would soon die. She also which were similar to what their contemporaries
reclaimed a massive structure that was now con- examined here did. The Indian was part of a small
strued as essential and honest, and by revealing collection of folk art the Perkinses collected. They
what she considered the earliest part of the house, owned eighteenth-century family furniture, accu-
Perkins made it possible to represent a history of mulated antiques collections comprised of objects
the site that stretched from the seventeenth to the made of particular materials, such as brass and
twentieth century. copper luster decorated ceramics, purchased a few
Writing the ‘‘Codfish Ghost’’ was one strategy contemporary handicrafts, and grouped them in
used by Elizabeth Perkins to create a sensational ways that contributed to the house’s generally old-
history for what had originally been a fairly con- time feel. In contrast to their contemporaries, whose
ventional house. In the story she perpetuated the pioneering collections of early American fine and
myth of a man who had murdered his wife in the decorative arts ended up in major museums, the
house with a salted codfish and connected her Perkinses were not especially dedicated to the pur-
summer residence with both eighteenth-century suit of exceptional examples, perhaps because they
smuggling and the Underground Railroad of the lacked the financial means to do so but also maybe
nineteenth century. Perkins also placed a cigar because they cared more about the overall en-
store Indian on the banks of the York River, just in semble than about particular things. The collected
front of her home.39 Often photographed and objects like the cigar store Indian contributed to
widely known locally, the Indian was said to in- the dramatic historic setting they created in the
dicate the entrance to a secret tunnel from the name of historic preservation.
river to the house. He was thus a notable marker of The Elizabeth Perkins who made this hetero-
the sense of mystery that Perkins intended to in- topia for herself on the brink of the house’s be-
scribe on her house. The way that Perkins deployed coming her sole property was not the New York
the cigar store Indian was also surprisingly effective socialite who arrived in York in the late 1890s.40 By
in restoring dignity to this commercialized image the 1920s Perkins was approaching age fifty and
had not followed the path of other contemporary
38
The exposure of the structure of the kitchen/dining room
coincided with the opening of the Little Picture House in Man-
hattan, of which Elizabeth Perkins was the president. Its lobby was 40
Elizabeth Perkins’s relationship to New York society had
modeled on the interior of the historic Union Flag Tavern which always been complex, according to her biographer, for although
had stood near the site on East Fiftieth Street. The Little Picture she moved in elite circles, her personal style did not conform to
House opened in 1929 and closed in 1934. ‘‘New Little Cinema expectations of a young woman of her class: ‘‘Her [Elizabeth
Has First Showing,’’ New York Times, December 24, 1929, 18; ‘‘Little Perkins’s] manner of dress was striking, bordering on the flam-
Picture House to Close,’’ New York Times, December 3, 1934, 14. boyant. She favored costume clothing over the conservative and
Additional documentation is to be found in the Perkins Papers, in would often wear a dozen strings of bright beads or chains slung
the archives of the Museums of Old York, York, ME. around her neck years before it became fashionable to do so. Much
39
Alice N. Nash, ‘‘Elizabeth Bishop Perkins (1879–1952),’’ in to Mary Perkins’s distress, however, Elizabeth was utterly tactless, a
Giffen and Murphy, ‘‘Noble and Dignified Stream,’’ 190. The cigar characteristic which she never seemed to recognize and was never
store Indian was made by Samuel Robb of New York. ‘‘Museums of to overcome.’’ Rose H. Howe, Elizabeth Bishop Perkins of York ([York,
Old York,’’ in Folk Art in Maine: Uncommon Treasures, 1750–1925, ME:] Society for the Preservation of Historic Landmarks in York
ed. Kevin D. Murphy (Rockport, ME: Down East Books, 2008), 103. County, 1979), 22.

Fig. 8. Samuel Robb, cigar store Indian on the grounds of the Elizabeth Perkins House, 1924. (Museums of Old
York, York, Maine; photo, Elizabeth Perkins.)
socialites who by then had married and produced the elder Perkins, collaborating with a member
children. Instead, she had a well-established re- of the year-round community, Elizabeth Burleigh
putation as an unmarried woman who had devoted Davidson, galvanized ongoing efforts to preserve
herself to the cause of historic preservation. the famous Old York Gaol (fig. 9). Whereas the
Perkins House only became public after Elizabeth’s
death, the Old Gaol made the women’s concept of
York’s Old Gaol domesticity accessible to a wide audience from the
very beginning of the preservation project. Even
In its final incarnation, the Perkins House was, at though the restoration was conceived of as public, it
least in part, conceived of as a memorial to Mary was nonetheless funded by private contributions
Sowles Perkins’s pioneering work as a preserva- and reflected the personal tastes of the Perkinses
tionist in York. The elder Perkins’s work as a and the other major participants. The Old Gaol
preservationist began almost as soon as she and her restoration made private space a public concern,
daughter purchased their home on the York River. and it took a building that already had a ‘‘queer’’
As a newcomer to the summer community in 1899, history and made it a site for challenging some

Fig. 9. Old Gaol with old church spire, York, Maine, 1882. (Museums of Old York, York, Maine; photo, Emma
Coleman.)
gender expectations, albeit while remaining a so- where those who transgressed societal norms of be-
cially acceptable project for upper-class women to havior were housed.42 Before its ‘‘rescue’’ the Old
become involved in. Gaol seems to have been appreciated mainly for
Parts of the Old Gaol were thought to date back such macabre associations. For example, in ad-
to the seventeenth century, but in reality contained vocating for its preservation in 1890, the Eastern
two early eighteenth-century stone cells surrounded Star (a newspaper published in nearby Kennebunk)
by later wood-frame additions. By 1876, the build- described the Gaol as ‘‘practically unchanged [from
ing already played a central role in the historical its original condition], with its massive oaken doors,
conception of York Village, when Samuel Adams creaking hinges, and locks and mill-saw gratings
Drake highlighted it in his book Nooks and Corners of [window grates improvised from old saw blades]. A
the New England Coast. ‘‘It is a quaint old structure,’’ correspondent says:—It has held evil doers of all
Drake wrote of the Old Gaol, ‘‘a relic of barbarism’’ classes, and many true and amusing stories of in-
on the interior that ‘‘has held many culprits in cidents and escapes can be related.’’43 Popular
former times, when York was the seat of justice for writers, including Drake, who referred to the Gaol
the county, though it would not keep your modern as a ‘‘queer old barrack,’’ established the building as
burglar an hour.’’41 strange, obsolete, even barbaric. It was the very
Despite, or perhaps because of, the changes in embodiment of New England’s queerness.44 Thus,
conceptions of punishment and incarceration that
42
had taken place since the seventeenth century, Foucault, ‘‘Other Spaces,’’ 25. He is speaking here of
nineteenth-century writers became fascinated with prisons (and mental hospitals), which are a later development and
quite different from the sort of jail represented by the example in
the Old Gaol. As a jail, the building already rep- York, at least in its earlier incarnation. It was in use, however, well
resented one kind of heterotopic space, one that into the period in which prisons as such were developed.
43
Foucault called a ‘‘heterotopia of deviation,’’ Eastern Star, September 19, 1890, 2.
44
On the Old Gaol and Drake’s writing about it, see Joseph A.
Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from
41
Samuel Adams Drake, Nooks and Corners of the New England the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of
Coast (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876), 137. North Carolina Press, 2001), 245–47.

Fig. 10. Garden party, Elizabeth Perkins House, 1899. (Museums of Old York, York, Maine.)
even before any preservationist touched it, the York into the depths of old chests and trunks. The life
Gaol was already the architectural expression of a of former days has been revealed: the costumes,
particular sort of heterotopia and was widely un- books, utensils of our grandfathers, have appeared
derstood as a queer space, in one sense. as the wonder and delight of this closing nineteenth
After being ‘‘saved’’ by a group of summer and century.’’45
full-time residents, spearheaded by Mary Sowles Nor was the garden party the only historically
Perkins, the interpretation of the Gaol addressed flavored event staged by the Perkins women during
other, less sensational themes as well. The trans- that summer. In August 1899, word reached the
formation of the Old Gaol into a museum by a New York Times of two amateur theatricals presented
group of women changed its interpretation, a shift at York Harbor, one of which was a Revolution-
that it could accommodate architecturally because ary War piece entitled ‘‘The Game and Candle.’’
in addition to the cells, the building also possessed Among the actors in the drama was Miss Mildred
living quarters. These had been rented out to ten- Howells and among the patrons were her father
ants who gave tours of the building to the curious. William Dean Howells and the Rev. J. Newton
With breathtaking speed, Mary Sowles Perkins in- Perkins, the latter in a rare appearance in the record
terjected herself into the ongoing preservation of concerning his family’s Maine holidays. ‘‘The chief
the Old Gaol. In August 1899, just a year after she projector and organizer of these theatricals,’’ wrote
and Elizabeth purchased their house in York, it the Times, was Miss Elizabeth Perkins.46 Over the
was the site of a garden party for the benefit of the course of the half century that followed, she pro-
Old Gaol restoration, which the guests attended duced numerous plays, pageants, and films that cel-
in costume (fig. 10). On that occasion, two rooms ebrated the history of the Yorks.
of the Perkins House were given over to a display During the following winter the Old York His-
of borrowed portraits, books, manuscripts, glass, torical and Improvement Society was organized
ceramics, and other objects of historical interest.
The Old York Transcript commented, ‘‘For the first 45
‘‘Old York Garden Party,’’ Old York Transcript, August 17,
time all York has been infused with the spirit of 1899, 1.
research, and has for two weeks been burrowing 46
‘‘What Is Doing in Society,’’ New York Times, August 9, 1899, 7.

and incorporated and focused on the ongoing pre-

servation of the Old Gaol. Mary Sowles Perkins’s
role in the organization was emphasized at the
opening of the Old Gaol Museum the following
summer (1900) in speeches that highlighted her
important contributions. James T. Davidson, the
local banker whose wife had also been involved in
the project and who had lent money to lease the
building from the town, ‘‘laid particular stress upon
the energy and ability of Mrs. Perkins, saying that
too much praise could not be given her for the
magnificent efforts she had made in behalf of the
society in the achievement of the splendid work so
auspiciously inaugurated.’’47 Another account at-
tributed the original idea of preserving the Gaol to
Howells, although it credited the women with hav-
ing carried out the project.48 In addition to provid-
ing capital, as Davidson did, the men also gave their
imprimatur to the project.
The praise lavished on the women by Davidson,
Fig. 11. Old Gaol vignette, 1907. (Museums of Old
Thomas Nelson Page, and others also demonstrates York, York, Maine.)
how, in a period in which the organizing work of
women at resorts was looked upon skeptically, Mary captured vignettes in which women enacted the
Sowles Perkins found an effective way of making stereotypical activities of upper-crust ladies of the
public use of her managerial skills. Being a his- colonial and early national periods: spinning yarn,
torical project made the Gaol preservation accept- drinking tea, and playing music (fig. 11). As conser-
able. Furthermore, by collaborating with Davidson, vative an interpretation of early American women’s
Perkins demonstrated a unique ability to make com- lives as this was, it nevertheless featured women
mon cause with some members of the year-round acting autonomously and keeping their own com-
community, bonding through shared class interests pany. Thus, just two years after buying a house in
and giving lie to the conventional wisdom (includ- York, Mary Sowles Perkins had helped to create
ing Howells’s) that the two groups (‘‘natives’’ and an institution that would provide a place for social
summer folk) could not get along. Like other women interaction between women and a place where
museum-founders and preservationists of the pe- they could demonstrate their organizational and
riod, the Perkinses (and Davidson) were among other types of expertise. The displays of house-
the ‘‘inveterate pioneers’’ who devoted their ener- hold work and entertainment in early America,
gies to often small-scale cultural institutions, rather staged in settings of tasteful antique furnishings,
than to the larger nonprofit organizations such as also served to connect the Old Gaol project with
major art museums with which men were typically contemporary domestic reform efforts. The mu-
involved.49 seum was consonant with turn-of-the-century claims
Once the Old Gaol Museum was up and run- for the importance of the domestic environment in
ning, it was staffed by women. Because the Old preserving American culture in the face of man-
Gaol was a house as much as it was a jail—a private ifest social and political challenges. Domesticity
building to the same degree as a public one—it was also championed as an appropriate arena of
was easy enough to create domestic tableaux that female activity by conservatives who were threat-
emphasized genteel domesticity, rather than the ened by women’s increasing public involvement
brutality of eighteenth-century punishment. For in Progressive reform movements as well as in the
instance, a series of photographs staged in 1907 struggle for suffrage. The Old Gaol made the very
public work of women like Mary Sowles Perkins
47
‘‘The Old Jail Museum,’’ Old York Transcript, July 5, 1900, 1. palatable through its appeal to traditional domes-
tic images.50
48
Pauline Carrington Bouvé, ‘‘Women Welcome Visitors
Where Witches Were Confined,’’ Sunday Herald [Boston], August
25, 1901, 37.
49 50
Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy Patricia West writes very persuasively of the connection
and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xiv. between the Progressive movement, domestic reform, suffrage,

Originally a heterotopia of colonial social de- Arthur Little. Emily Tyson evidently provided the
viants, the Old Gaol became a different sort of major ideas for the project, and Little and Browne
heterotopia for its rescuers who, at least in this brought experience of professional practice and a
context, acted progressively by establishing an insti- special knowledge of period architecture to the
tution in which they could function independently renovation. Little had trained at the Massachusetts
and authoritatively, albeit while shielding them- Institute of Technology and in the offices of his-
selves from criticism by presenting a very conser- toricist architects in Boston (principally, Peabody
vative picture of domestic life and by shying away and Stearns) and in 1890 partnered with Browne,
from larger cultural institutions in which men were who shared his interest in early American architec-
involved. Although the representation of gender ture. In fact, Little and Browne, along with ar-
roles in the Gaol did not trouble reigning stereo- chitect Ogden Codman Jr. (author, with Edith
types, the space nonetheless possessed a kind of Wharton, of The Decoration of Houses, 1898), were
queerness as a result of its macabre history. The known as the ‘‘Colonial Trinity’’ in Boston circles.52
dark stone-walled cells with their fearsome window Hamilton House was architecturally and his-
grates invited the visitors to occupy the position of torically distinguished but something of a white
a deviant, and the thrill of doing so is what had elephant to its local owners, and it was easily
generated interest in the Old Gaol to begin with. remodeled to become a place to entertain and
The Old Gaol allowed for inversions of social and escape from the city. The Tysons had ample capital
gender roles that made law-abiding tourists into at hand to make those changes since George Tyson
criminals and society women into historians and had acquired a large fortune working for the com-
managers. mercial firm of Russell and Company in Boston
and later in Shanghai. Elise (Elizabeth) was born in
1871 to George and his first wife, Sarah, who died
Hamilton House, South Berwick, Maine shortly thereafter. George soon married Emily
Davis, but he too died, in 1881 at the age of fifty,
A nearly contemporary project takes this discus- leaving his much younger second wife with three
sion of heterotopias and queer spaces at New small stepchildren. The family spent winters in
England resorts to a new level, in this case to a Boston’s fashionable Back Bay neighborhood and
point of contact with the queer world of Boston at also owned a summer residence at Pride’s Cross-
the turn of the twentieth century.51 At just the same ing, on the North Shore of Boston. Emily Tyson did
moment that the two Perkins women were renovat- not shy away from building projects: she built the
ing their house and the Old Gaol, Emily and Elise large house at Pride’s not long after her husband’s
Tyson were at work on the 1787 Jonathan death, and in the following decade undertook the
Hamilton House in nearby South Berwick, Maine renovation of Hamilton House.53
(fig. 12). They expanded and repaired it to serve The Tysons were led to South Berwick by their
as their summer residence with the assistance of friend Sarah Orne Jewett, who had described
Boston architect Herbert Browne, who likely Hamilton House in her 1881 Atlantic Monthly story
worked on the house with his architect partner ‘‘River Driftwood’’ as a ‘‘quiet place, that the
destroying left hand of progress had failed to
and historic house museums in her chapter on ‘‘Gender Politics touch.’’ She attributed one quality of a heterotopia
and the Orchard House Museum,’’ in Domesticating History: The to it—temporal separateness—when she observed
Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington, DC: that ‘‘its whole aspect is so remote from the spirit of
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), 78–91. The Old Gaol
preservation project coincided with what Beverly Gordon considers the present.’’54 In fact, the house had been recently
the historical moment at which the association between women transformed into a two-unit tenement, probably for
and the domestic interior was emphasized most emphatically. She
writes, ‘‘Roughly between the middle of the nineteenth and the 52
middle of the twentieth centuries, and most strongly between 1875 The basic source on Peabody and Stearns is still Wheaton A.
and 1925, the connection between women and their houses in Holden, ‘‘The Peabody Touch: Peabody and Stearns of Boston,
Western middle-class culture was so strong that it helped shape the 1870–1917,’’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 32, no. 2
perception of both.’’ Beverly Gordon, ‘‘Woman’s Domestic Body: (May 1973): 114–31; Richard C. Nylander, ‘‘Hamilton House,’’ in
The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Indus- Giffen and Murphy, ‘‘A Noble and Dignified Stream,’’ 70–71, 74 n. 5;
trial Age,’’ Winterthur Portfolio 31, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 281–301, Kevin D. Murphy, Colonial Revival Maine (New York: Princeton
quote at 282. Architectural Press, 2004), 136–39.
53
51
That world is most compellingly described by Douglass Alan Emmet, So Fine a Prospect: Historic New England Gardens
Shand-Tucci in Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture, vol. 1: Boston (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996), 180.
54
Bohemia, 1881–1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, Sarah Orne Jewett, ‘‘River Driftwood,’’ Atlantic Monthly 48
1995). (October 1881): 504–5.

Fig. 12. G. E. Kidder Smith, photographer, Hamilton House, South Berwick, Maine, ca. 1787 with later alterations
and additions. (Kidder Smith Collection, Rotch Visual Collections, M.I.T.)
the use of workers in the local mills. When the ‘‘loving relationships’’ of New Women ‘‘as sexually
house later became available for purchase around perverted’’ made it shameful in the eyes of some. In
1896, Jewett began canvassing her wealthy friends 1909, for instance, when Fields edited Jewett’s let-
for a potential buyer. ters for publication after her death, she was ad-
Jewett herself was partnered with a woman, vised to excise their pet names for one another and
Annie Fields, the widow of publisher James T. other tender passages that were by then deemed
Fields, and it is noteworthy that she sought out a suspect.55
pair of women as potential purchasers. Jewett had It was at this transitional moment in the per-
met Fields through Boston literary circles around ception of women’s relationships that Jewett went
1877, and the two women enjoyed a passionate looking for a buyer for Hamilton House. When
emotional attachment for the rest of Jewett’s life, she informed the Tysons of its availability, they
more than thirty years. Their relationship was immediately bought it, practically sight unseen.
deemed a ‘‘Boston marriage,’’ and it was primary in Although the Tysons did not turn Hamilton House
each of their lives, although hardly exclusive. into a homosocial, women-only enclave, when they
Indeed, Jewett had a large circle of close friends were ensconced there they did establish a close
and a wide-ranging correspondence. A member of relationship with Jewett and her circle in South
the first generation of New Women whom Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg describes, Jewett had, like her 55
Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 270–83; Sherman,
cohorts, eschewed heterosexual marriage and en- Sarah Orne Jewett, 74–75, 80–81. From another perspective, the
joyed personal autonomy and professional success. invention of lesbian identity also provided a means for some
There had been no stigma attached to Jewett’s re- women to express their desires positively. See Lisa Duggan, ‘‘The
Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian
lationship with Fields, although after 1900 a mount- Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America,’’ Signs: Journal of Women in
ing male discourse on lesbianism that construed the Culture and Society 18 (1993): 791–93.

Fig. 13. Elise Tyson Vaughan, Emily Tyson and Sarah Orne Jewett, 1905. (Historic New England.)
Berwick. The closeness of Jewett and Emily Tyson is watering place since Emily built a house there after
attested by a photo of them taken at Hamilton her husband’s death in 1881. Nearly twenty years
House by Elise, showing the two standing in a door- later, with Emily’s stepdaughter Elise in her late
way into one of the trellised additions that had twenties, the two single women purchased Hamil-
been made to the building (fig. 13). And their en- ton House.56 Thus, to an even greater degree than
tertaining at Hamilton House, which took place did Mary and Elizabeth Perkins, the Tysons found a
year-round, included many members of Boston’s historic spot off the social map where they could
queer community. create their own heterotopia. The Tysons’ social
The town of South Berwick, located on the motivations were made clear by their friend Thomas
Salmon Falls River, just inland from the beach Nelson Page in his lightly fictionalized account
resorts along the southern Maine coast, provided of their purchase of Hamilton House, the short
the environmental benefits of the northern New story ‘‘Miss Godwin’s Inheritance’’ (1904). There,
England coast at the same time that it offered se- Emily Tyson (in the guise of the wealthy widow
clusion from the organized social activities that Mrs. Davison, cousin of the narrator) declares her-
Howells and his upper-crust contemporaries enjoyed self to be ‘‘completely worn out’’ by the demands
nearby at York Harbor and Kittery Point (fig. 14). of her social life, which includes a nearly constant
South Berwick was also a far cry from the summer round of visits from gossiping upper-class women.
scene at Pride’s Crossing, which was a favorite ‘‘I am so tired of this strenuous life,’’ exclaims
haunt of wealthy Bostonians, including the Tysons
themselves, who had spent time at the North Shore 56
Emmet, So Fine a Prospect, 180.

Fig. 14. Map of the Piscataqua region of New Hampshire and Maine showing location of
Hamilton House. (Museums of Old York, York, Maine; map, Lisa Blinn.)
Mrs. Davison, ‘‘that I feel that if I do not get out of House it became a space that simultaneously
it and go back to something that is calm and nat- represented a number of different times and places.
ural I shall die. It is all so hollow and unreal.’’57 Her The Tysons were aware of their house’s own storied
connection to authentic experience is provided by history (storied in part as a result of Jewett’s having
Hamilton House, the project of its ‘‘restoration,’’ written about it in ‘‘River Driftwood’’ and because
and the reconstruction of the surrounding grounds. she set her 1901 novel, The Tory Lover, there), the
As the Tysons renovated it, Hamilton House way it connected with the larger history of early
functioned as a dramatic setting for social inter- America, and the extent to which the neoclassical
actions in which bourgeois norms were challenged, building and its gardens made reference to the ar-
at least to a modest degree, and like the Perkins chitectural and landscape traditions of Italy. Where
Jewett established the ways that Hamilton House
57
Thomas Nelson Page, ‘‘Miss Godwin’s Inheritance,’’ in The offered the reader or visitor an immersion in an-
Novels, Stories, Sketches and Poems of Thomas Nelson Page (1904; New other time, Page connected it with the queer vision
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 5–6. The use of ‘‘Godwin’’ in
the story was a play on the surname—‘‘Goodwin’’—of the family of northern New England, and particularly of York
from whom the Tysons bought Hamilton House. County, Maine, which Jewett had also established in

Fig. 15. Elise Tyson, photographer, Hamilton House, additions by Little and Browne 1899, photo May 30, 1901.
(Historic New England.)
her earlier writing. In ‘‘Miss Godwin’s Inheritance’’ of the Tysons construed Hamilton House as both a
Page gives Hamilton House its very own peculiar old heterotopia and a queer space.
maid whose inheritance is the one thing she has As with many early houses ‘‘saved’’ at the end of
ever owned: a withering rose bush planted next to the nineteenth century, Hamilton House had been
Hamilton House. When Miss Godwin learns that preserved as a consequence of the poverty of its
Mrs. Davison plans to rip out all the old plantings, rural owners who hadn’t been able to afford the
she hesitatingly asks if she may have the rose shrub. addition of modern domestic conveniences. Thus
Davison suggests that rather than transplant the the house required, for the use of affluent summer
rose, Godwin care for it in situ, and a warm friend- residents, new service areas as well as sunrooms and
ship blossoms between the two women. The wealthy sleeping porches. These new elements were blended
summer resident gives the widow—a marginal with the old through the use of ‘‘Chippendale’’-
member of the year-round community—a make- style balustrades around their low roofs, and with
over that sees Godwin exchange her worn out, old- trellises on the walls that allowed vines to be trained
fashioned dress for a fine new one and assume the over the additions, making them transitional ele-
prestigious role of tea pourer at a party Davison ments between the house and the extensive gardens
holds to christen her restored house. Page empha- (fig. 15).58
sizes Davison’s lack of pretensions and her laud- In ‘‘Miss Godwin’s Inheritance,’’ Thomas Nelson
able concern for the locals, but what is interesting in Page described how, while the renovations were
this context is the way that he brings together the ongoing, Mrs. Davison (Tyson) was ‘‘rummaging
figure of the wealthy socialite who eschews urban around through the countryside picking up old
social conventions with the image of the strange and furniture and articles’’ with which to furnish the
‘‘flighty’’ unmarried woman whose queerness is
signaled by her dilapidated house, which she has
chosen over the poor house, her outmoded dress, 58
Richard M. Candee, ‘‘The New Colonials: Restoration and
her regional dialect, and her separation from the Remodeling of Old Buildings Along the Piscataqua,’’ in Giffen and
institution of heterosexual marriage. Thus friends Murphy, ‘‘A Noble and Dignified Stream,’’ 41–43.

place.59 The Tysons brought these objects, along invoked the spatially and temporally incompatible
with some of their own family possessions, together moments of classical Italy and early America.
in an environment united by a strong palette of In the garden at Hamilton House, the Tysons
blues and greens that brought the landscape in- added a one-room cottage that also reflected the
doors. The property included 110 acres of land in contemporary interest in colonial architecture
both fields and woods. The house itself stood on a (fig. 17). Just as Elizabeth Perkins would make
high point that was terraced down to the river. her bedroom out of materials from a disused his-
Originally, it had overlooked docks that played an toric building, so the Tysons’ garden cottage incor-
important role in Jonathan Hamilton’s commer- porated the fabric of several old houses nearby.
cial activities, although those were gone by the time As Elise Tyson recalled in 1934, ‘‘In these days of
that the Tysons arrived in South Berwick. Visiting more careful correctness in detail, especially in early
in 1928, Kennebunk architect and antiquarian American affairs, it, probably, would have been
William E. Barry described the setting: ‘‘Passing planned differently. But that was the year 1907
out from the door [on the river side] one finds the before the early American had fully come into his
house to be situated on a green lawn, secure from kingdom.’’62 On the interior, eighteenth-century
all intrusion, raised upon a moderate terrace, paneling, doors, and shutters were combined to
besides being elevated upon the steep and high produce the effect of a fully paneled chimney wall.
river bank, with cove below, insomuch that great However incongruous was the open, beamed ceil-
elm trees growing upon the lower level were with ing that provided space for a balcony on the wall
their stalwart limbs viewed at the front lawn level: a opposite the fireplace, the building was considered
novel view indeed—while beyond extended the ‘‘a particularly good expression of the best in the
wide tide-water river: a superb view: here in the cottage architecture of the earliest New England
early days packets and other craft were to be seen settlements.’’63 Arched windows of various sizes on
close at hand upon the river.’’60 the side walls referred to similar windows on the
The antique furnishings that the Tysons accu- main house. Although the furnishings were orig-
mulated over time complemented the fine original inally both English and Continental, eventually early
woodwork of the interior, as well as the grand American tables and chairs predominated after
proportions of the stairhall and major rooms. The the cottage was expanded by several more small
Tysons clearly reveled in the local history of the rooms. The ‘‘brooding spirit of age’’ conveyed by
place and made changes to emphasize that historic the cottage’s paneling and other period features
character, but they also made manifest what Jewett, made it an important component of the overall
and presumably they as well, perceived as its sim- historicist environment.64
ultaneous invocation of classical Europe. As Jewett The cottage was just one ‘‘room’’ among several
wrote, looking at Hamilton House was like having in the garden as it was developed over time. Barry
‘‘a glimpse of sunshiny, idle Italy.’’61 The murals observed that the garden was composed of ‘‘quite
painted in the parlor and dining room by George three enclosures, ornamented and separated by
Porter Fernald in 1905–6 emphasized that associ- parterres of bright phlox of pink or white.’’ The
ation (fig. 16). Painted on top of wallpaper that fea- closest to the house had a sundial on a pedestal as
tured trees and leaves, the murals blended classical its center, which was the crossing point of the ma-
Italian scenes and local architectural landmarks, jor axes of the formally planned garden; the sec-
thereby connecting the New England colonial ver- ond had a basin that sat on a columnar support;
nacular and neoclassical style of the early national and the third ‘‘yet another white shaft with elab-
period with the classical tradition. Further, the de- orately modeled pine-apple atop it.’’65 The gardens
pictions of the local buildings in the murals implied have been described elsewhere in detail, and their
that they were worthy of the study, preservation,
and even veneration to which classical antiquities
62
had been subject for centuries. Here was Foucault’s [Elise Tyson Vaughan], ‘‘The Story of Hamilton House,’’ ca.
1934, 5, typescript of paper delivered to the Garden Club of
heterotopia: a house that simultaneously and palpably America, South Berwick, ME, Historic New England, quoted in
Philip A. Hayden, ‘‘Hamilton House Garden Cottage,’’ in Giffen
and Murphy, ‘‘A Noble and Dignified Stream,’’ 100.
59 63
Page, ‘‘Miss Godwin’s Inheritance,’’ 23. Hildegarde Hawthorne, ‘‘A Garden of Romance: Mrs. Tyson’s
60
William E. Barry, ‘‘Old Houses in South Berwick’’ [type- at Hamilton House, South Berwick, Maine,’’ Century Magazine 80
script], 1928, 7, Barry Papers, coll. 29, folder 16, box 1, Brick Store (September 1910): 786.
64
Museum, Kennebunk, Maine. Ibid.
61 65
Jewett, ‘‘River Driftwood,’’ 505. Barry, ‘‘Old Houses in South Berwick,’’ 8.

Fig. 16. Parlor, Hamilton House, with painted murals by George Porter Fernald, photo 1923. (Historic New
England; photo, George Brayton.)
connection to the contemporary revival of interest Hamilton House. Unlike the owners of other Maine
in classicizing Italian gardens has been emphasized.66 ‘‘summer’’ places, the Tysons actually used theirs all
In this context, however, what is most interesting year, Elise in particular bringing members of her
about the gardens and the cottage is that they pro- ‘‘crowd’’ for house parties in all seasons. Among the
vided many distinct and secluded spaces that visitors were William Sumner Appleton, the bach-
would have provided privacy, if not secrecy, for elor founder in 1910 of the Society for the Pre-
whatever activities took place within them. Some, servation of New England Antiquities (now known
like the garden cottage with its balcony at one end, as Historic New England),67 and Henry Davis
invited dramatic performances that only height- Sleeper. The journals and letters of the Tysons’
ened the sense of distance from ‘‘real’’ life that visitors further emphasize the predominance of
visitors experienced at Hamilton House. single men and women among guests at Hamilton
The use of the landscape by the Tysons and their House. Together, the friends enjoyed the landscape,
friends has also been discussed by Alan Emmet from making excursions across the river to the adjoining
the evidence of the many photographs Elise took at woods and picnicking on the grounds.
66 67
See, in particular, Lucinda A. Brockway, ‘‘Hamilton House Emmet, So Fine a Prospect, 186. Appleton’s unmarried status
Gardens,’’ in Giffen and Murphy, ‘‘A Noble and Dignified Stream ,’’ has been discussed by biographers as one aspect of his larger failure
97–100; Emmet, So Fine a Prospect, 177–90. A major indication of to thrive in the roles that were conventional for men of his class, for
American interest in Italian gardens was the publication of Edith instance, in his family’s real estate business. Holleran, Boston’s
Wharton’s second book in 1904, Italian Villas and Their Gardens. Changeful Times, 220–22.

Fig. 17. Paul J. Weber, photographer, garden cottage, Hamilton House. Published in House Beautiful, 1929.
(Historic New England.)
Spatially and temporally rich, Hamilton House England. It was also amenable, by virtue of its iso-
and its gardens offered its visitors a simultaneous lation, to functioning as a place where gender and
immersion in both eighteenth-century America sexual relations were constructed more loosely
and classical Italy. The concept of a space apart than in York Harbor and other upper-class resorts.
from everyday life, where one could experience a Might Hamilton House have provided a haven for
variety of times and places at once, is clearly what upper-crust men and women whose intimate
critics found appealing about Hamilton House as it relations were not strictly bounded by heterosexual
was transformed by the Tysons. Writing about expectations? Elise Tyson did not marry her lawyer
Hamilton House and its setting in 1910, Hildegarde and fox-hunter husband, Henry Goodwin Vaughan,
Hawthorne observed that ‘‘a dozen miles or more until 1915, when she was forty-four years old, an
distant is old Portsmouth, quaintest and most un- event that caused Sleeper to exclaim in a letter,
disturbed of New England towns. That is as close ‘‘Funny what!’’69 Sleeper’s surprise may have
to the world as Hamilton House comes.’’68
Recall again that this was a space brought into 69
being by single women—Jewett and the Tysons— Henry Davis Sleeper to A. Piatt Andrew, April 21, 1915, in
Beauport Chronicle: The Intimate Letters of Henry Davis Sleeper to Abram
and largely enjoyed by single people. As a nearly Piatt Andrew, Jr., 1906–1915, ed. E. Parker Hayden Jr. and Andrew
forgotten relic of a long-gone prosperity, Hamilton L. Gray (1991; Boston: Historic New England, 2005), 91. Henry
House was a monument to Jewett’s queer New Goodwin Vaughan (b. 1868) was nearly forty when he married
Elise Tyson. His family were among the early Anglo-American
settlers of Hallowell, Maine. ‘‘Vaughan, Henry Goodwin,’’ in Who’s
Who in New England, ed. Albert Nelson Marquis, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
68
Hawthorne, ‘‘A Garden of Romance,’’ 779. A. N. Marquis, 1916), 1093.

Fig. 18. Beauport (Sleeper-McCann House), Gloucester, MA, begun 1907, photo ca. 1917 showing the belfry
tower. (Historic New England; photo, T. E. Marr.)
arisen from their shared participation in a social not want to participate in the hunt for spouses at
circle of unmarried people whose affections were the nearby watering places.
occasionally or even predominantly with members
of the same sex. In 1923, her mother having re-
cently died, Elise wrote to Appleton indicating her Beauport, Gloucester, Massachusetts
intention to sell Hamilton House. He responded,
imploring her to hold onto it and leave it to his Beauport and Hamilton House were on the same
Society for the Preservation of New England An- upper-class social circuit, although Beauport, un-
tiquities, which she eventually did, ‘‘as a home for like Hamilton House, was an entirely new residence,
decayed antiquarians, especially such as have the but one built by Sleeper in a variety of historical
misfortune to be bachelors as a result of mental styles (fig. 18). Sleeper began the project in 1907
paralysis at the critical moments of their lives.’’70 with the assistance of a local architect named Halfdan
However facetious the comment was, it under- M. Hanson using his independent means; then, as
scored the role of Hamilton House under the the fame of the house spread and it contributed to
Tysons’ ownership as a haven for singles who did his desirability as a society decorator, he plowed
the profits from his business into Beauport until
70 his death in 1934. The location chosen by Sleeper
William Sumner Appleton to Elise Tyson (Mrs. Henry)
Vaughan, June 2, 1923, Historic New England Archives, quoted in for his dream house was Eastern Point in Gloucester,
Nylander, ‘‘Hamilton House,’’ 73. Massachusetts, a city on Cape Ann that had been

Fig. 19. Eastern Point, Gloucester, with Beauport to left, Caroline Sinkler’s ‘‘Wrong Roof ’’ at center, and
Red Roof at right, photo 1908. (A. Piatt Andrew Archive, Historic New England.)
dominated economically throughout the nineteenth immigrants who worked in the port (fig. 20).71 Like
century by the fishing industry (fig. 19). The city grew other New England port towns and cities, Gloucester
rapidly during the second half of the century. Its
population more than doubled between 1865 and 71
The population grew from 11,937 to 24,651 in the period.
1890, in part as a result of the influx of Portuguese Horace G. Wadlin, ‘‘The Growth of Cities in Massachusetts,’’

style cottages were constructed, but development

never met the investors’ expectations. The con-
struction of a grand resort hotel, for example, did
not come about until the 300-room Colonial Arms
was completed in 1904. It stood next to Sleeper’s
Beauport only until New Year’s Day, 1908, when it
burned to the ground.73 Nonetheless, Eastern Point
did eventually attract a loyal following of summer
residents, many of them upper-class artists, writers,
and intellectuals.
Sleeper was well versed in the possibilities that
the North Shore and Cape Ann offered for sum-
mer residences (fig. 21). His father, whose own
father had built a family fortune through textile
production and real estate speculation, had built a
Fig. 20. Arthur Rothstein, fishing boats, Gloucester, cottage at Marblehead Neck that was designed by
MA, September 1937. (LC-USF34-025941-D DLC, Prints
and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration—
Arthur Little and completed by 1888, when draw-
Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library ings of it by George Porter Fernald were published
of Congress.) in the November issue of The Art Age.74 Sleeper was
twenty-eight years old and had already spent some
became a favored summer resort and artists’ colony time studying architecture in Paris when he was led
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. And as to Eastern Point, where he would buy a one-acre
in York, Maine, the landscape of Gloucester regis- plot of land for his house, by his friend A. Piatt
tered the class distinctions between its inhabitants Andrew in 1906. Andrew was a Princeton-educated
and visitors. The working-class residents lived in older economist with a Harvard PhD and had built his
residences clustered near the harbor or in one or own house at Eastern Point, known as ‘‘Red Roof,’’
another of the small outlying villages along the shore, in 1902.75 Historian Douglass Shand-Tucci describes
and the wealthy summer folks retreated to Eastern Red Roof as the center of Eastern Point’s bohemian
Point, where they built large houses on relatively ex- community and of a larger group of Harvard-
pansive properties.72 educated gay men and their women friends, which
The development of a summer resort on the included John Hayes Hammond, who started his
peninsula on the eastern side of Gloucester Harbor own medieval castle on the other side of Gloucester
began with the establishment of the Eastern Point harbor in 1925 (fig. 22).76 It was en route to visit the
Associates, a group of investors who purchased al- Tysons at Hamilton House that Andrew pointed out
most the entire spit of land for $100,000 in 1887. to Sleeper the possibilities that the dilapidated
They laid out 250 small cottage lots, as well as a eighteenth-century Cogswell House—found along
hotel property, which were to have formed the the way in nearby Essex, Massachusetts—presented
basis of an exclusive watering place to rival Newport. in the form of salvageable materials for Sleeper’s
Within two years, eleven Queen Anne and shingle- own building.77 The relationship between the two
73
Garland, Eastern Point, 144–60, 224–31.
Publications of the American Statistical Association 2, no. 13 (March 74
1891): 164. When the Church of Our Lady of Good Voyage, whose Walter Knight Sturges, ‘‘Arthur Little and the Colonial
Portuguese parishioners were Gloucester fishermen who had Revival,’’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 32, no. 2 (May
brought its furnishings from Portugal, burned in 1914, Henry 1973): 159.
75
Davis Sleeper, A. Piatt Andrew, and Isabella Stewart Gardner led Paul Hollister, ‘‘The Building of Beauport, 1907–1924,’’
the fund-raising campaign that made its reconstruction possible. American Art Journal 13, no. 1 (Winter 1981): 69–70. Also see Judith
See Hayden and Gray, Beauport Chronicle, 76. B. Tankard, ‘‘Henry Davis Sleeper’s Gardens at Beauport,’’ Journal
72
Joseph E. Garland, Eastern Point: A Nautical, Rustical, and of New England Garden History Society 10 (2002): 30–43.
76
Social Chronicle of Gloucester’s Outer Shield and Inner Sanctum, 1606– Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homo-
1950 (Peterborough, NH: Noone House, 1971). For the dynamic sexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (New York: Macmillan,
relationship between the traditional Gloucester fishing industry 2003), 117–20.
77
and tourism in the early twentieth century, see Michael Wayne Santos, Sleeper wrote to Andrew: ‘‘Mrs. Tyson is at Miss Beaux
‘‘Class and Community in Gloucester: Sources of Anti-Industrialism in [Cecilia Beaux, an Eastern Point neighbor]—& dines Sunday at
the New England Fishing Town,’’ American Neptune 59, no. 2 (1999): Beauport. It was going to her house, you remember, that you
115–24. The demographic makeup of Gloucester was similar to discovered the possibilities of the Cogswell house—therefore she is
Provincetown, with both its Portuguese fishing fleet and Anglo - much interested.’’ Sleeper to Andrew, August 28, 1908, in Hayden
American summer community. See Krahulik, Provincetown. and Gray, Beauport Chronicle, 38.

Fig. 21. Wallace Bryant, Henry Davis Sleeper, 1906. Oil on canvas. (Historic New England.)
men became the generating force in Sleeper’s con- purpose hall that was a feature of English manor
struction of Beauport. houses, was wood paneled and filled with ‘‘Gothic-
Like the garden cottage at Hamilton House in style furnishings.’’ On the occasion of a concert in
South Berwick that inspired him, Sleeper’s house 1908, Sleeper described the room as looking ‘‘mys-
didn’t start out to be American at all. The draw- terious in the twilight with just two candles at the
ings for the original portion of the house called for piano.’’78 In 1924 the hall was entirely replaced by a
diamond-paned windows and a stucco exterior, both new Chinese room, the impetus for which was
features consistent with a Tudor or Queen Anne aes- Sleeper’s discovery of some landscape wallpaper
thetic. At the core of the original building was the that had been ordered from China in the eigh-
Cogswell Room, in which salvaged paneling was teenth century but never installed in a Marblehead,
rigged up to fit the spaces Sleeper intended to serve Massachusetts, house.79
as an entrance and dining room, but the older, early
American materials were not completely in harmony
with the house’s English-inspired style at that point. 78
Sleeper to Andrew, August 17, 1908, in Hayden and Gray,
The adjoining two-story hall (labeled the ‘‘living Beauport Chronicle, 29.
room’’ on the original plans), modeled on the all- 79
Hollister, ‘‘Building of Beauport,’’ 74.

visitors whose attention he cultivated but whose

presence he sometimes reviled. The public nature
of Strawberry Hill led to its becoming an important
part of Walpole’s reputation, being understood by
some as a ridiculously self-indulgent ‘‘bauble’’ and
by others as a serious effort at reviving medieval ar-
chitecture. After his death, Walpole was ridiculed
in the mid-nineteenth century, but in its last de-
cade his reputation as a charming protobohemian
was rehabilitated by a number of serious publica-
tions, beginning with a biography by Austin Dobson,
Horace Walpole: A Memoir, published in England in
1890.82 A positive reassessment of the cultural im-
portance of Strawberry Hill came about at approx-
imately the same time. It was expressed in, among
Fig. 22. A. Piatt Andrew and friends at Red Roof. (Red other places, an 1886 article in the New York Times,
Roof Archive.) which wondered, ‘‘Who would think to see in the
dilettante [Walpole] the harbinger of the coming
The Book Tower, completed around 1908, ex- romantic revival in literature or the revival in archi-
tended the European flavor of Beauport in that it tecture, of which the beginning and end are almost
was conceived of as an evocation of a Norman tower within living memory?’’ At about the same time, how-
(fig. 23).80 Its diamond-paned, pointed-arched ever, other articles in the Times referred to the
windows were ‘‘hung’’ with carved wood curtains builder of Strawberry Hill variously as ‘‘foppish
that Sleeper salvaged from a house in Charlestown, Horace’’ and ‘‘Dandy Walpole.’’83 By affiliating
Massachusetts. The multistory space harked back his project with Strawberry Hill, Sleeper was at once
to the sublime interiors of two well-known English attaching his project to what was then seen by some
eighteenth-century gothic revival houses: William as Walpole’s serious revival effort, but also to the
Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, with its astounding cen- work of a man who carried connotations of effem-
tral tower, and Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. inacy and homosexuality by the turn of the century.
The latter Sleeper described in 1911 as ‘‘the house Indeed, just after Sleeper began his house, in 1910 a
which inspired so many details of Beauport.’’ group of male antique collectors formed the Walpole
Sleeper completed another room paying tribute to Society, its name reflecting (argues Will Fellows)
Walpole, the Strawberry Hill Room, which he used their identification with both the Englishman’s his-
as a bedroom. Presumably the diamond-paned win- toricist and sexual proclivities.84
dows, dark woodwork, and wallpaper—which was Like the Hamilton House garden cottage,
reported (erroneously) to have come from the Beauport became more self-consciously American
original Strawberry Hill—were intended to invoke as time went by. Sleeper’s 1911 visits to some fa-
the ‘‘gloomth’’ (to borrow Walpole’s term) of the mous Virginia houses—Monticello, Mount Vernon,
English model.81 and Westover among them—have been considered
Among Sleeper’s original sources of inspira-
tion, then, was what may be regarded as the pro- 82
Sabor, Horace Walpole, xiii, 16–39. According to Sabor, there
genitor of all queer spaces. Walpole’s extravaganza exists no study of Walpole’s reception in the United States (26,
had been both praised and vilified starting in its n. 39). Dobson also had an American edition: Austin Dobson,
builder’s own lifetime, when he allowed groups of Horace Walpole (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1890), followed by many
other editions. Also see W. S. Lewis, ‘‘The Genesis of Strawberry
Hill,’’ Metropolitan Museum Studies 5, pt. 1 (1934): 57–92.
80 83
Ibid. (76) gives the date of the Book Tower as 1908 based on ‘‘Strawberry Hill,’’ New York Times, April 18, 1886; ‘‘Was It a
archival evidence, although Nancy Curtis and Richard C. Nylander Good Old Time?’’ New York Times, November 15, 1891; ‘‘New
date it to around 1911 in Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House (Boston: Publications: The Literature of Gardening,’’ New York Times,
David R. Godine in association with the Society for the Preservation August 21, 1887.
of New England Antiquities, 1990), 55. 84
Will Fellows, A Passion to Preserve, 39. McNeil observes that
81
Sleeper to Helen Andrew Patch, December 26, 1911, ‘‘Walpole’s man loving man status was ignored and even rebuffed
quoted in Paul Hollister, ‘‘Beauport,’’ 21, in Curtis and Nylander, until the 1960s,’’ including by W. S. Lewis. The recent biography by
Beauport. Walpole wrote in 1753 that ‘‘one has a satisfaction in Timothy Mowl has redressed this failure to acknowledge Walpole’s
imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals on one’s house.’’ sexuality and interprets his taste in the context of his queer iden-
Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, April 27, 1753, in Peter Sabor, tity. Timothy Mowl, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (London:
Horace Walpole (1987; London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 239. John Murray, 1996); McNeil, ‘‘Crafting Queer Space,’’ 2.

Fig. 23. Book Tower, Beauport, photo ca. 1990. (Historic New England; photo, David Bohl.)
instrumental in this transformation. Thus, in 1917 and museum. ‘‘Dimly lit by a few windows,’’ the
Sleeper built the Pembroke Room, or Pine Kitchen, Pembroke Room was claimed to be ‘‘unequaled
which was named for its paneling cobbled together anywhere as a dreamy reinterpretation of hearth
out of doors from a circa 1650 house in Pembroke, and home in early American life.’’86
Massachusetts, which had been in his mother’s By the time of his death, Sleeper had built a
family (fig. 24). The room was, in one sense, a me- maze of more than forty rooms of astonishing va-
morial to his mother, with whom he lived for many riety (fig. 25). Despite their different themes, sev-
years and who had recently died. Tradition main- eral qualities united them: specific historical and
tains that the contents of the Pembroke house had literary referents, spatial and atmospheric variety,
been sold at auction just prior to Sleeper’s decision and consistent color palettes that tied the objects
to create his memorial. He thus tracked down the together visually. Two adjoining rooms completed
purchasers of the objects and bought them back: on the ocean side in 1921, the Octagon Room and
‘‘He then summoned an ancient kinswoman with a the Golden Step Room, exhibit these qualities. The
camera eye, who as a girl had often visited the an- Octagon Room was paneled and painted a dark
cient homestead and knew where every object had purple brown to serve as a background to curly
stood. Sleeper was now ready to build onto maple furniture and red toleware. Originally, the
Beauport his ancestral hearth, with everything in awnings outside were lined with red to transform
its proper place.’’85 As Elizabeth Perkins had with the minimal light that entered. Leaving the Oc-
her York house, Sleeper conceived of his house in tagon Room, one moved through a triangular pas-
a variety of ways: as residence, maternal memorial, sage where amethyst-colored glass was displayed in
85 86
Paul Hollister, Beauport at Gloucester: The Most Fascinating Curtis and Nylander, Beauport, 39–46; Hollister, ‘‘Beauport,’’
House in America (New York: Hastings House, 1951), 8. 23.

Fig. 24. Samuel Chamberlain, photographer, Pine Kitchen (Pembroke Room), Beauport. Published in Paul
Hollister, Beauport at Gloucester: The Most Fascinating House in America (New York: Hastings House, 1951). (Samuel
Chamberlain Negative Collection, Peabody Essex Museum.)
a pointed-arched window. From there one passed The concept of collecting has been subject to a body
into the dramatically brighter Golden Step Room, of critical writing that began with Jean Baudrillard’s
where the green paint and majolica echoed the well-known essay on the topic in his book Le Système
tones of the sea beyond (fig. 26).87 The Golden des objets of 1968. Baudrillard treats collecting as a
Step Room became one of Sleeper’s favorite rooms substitute for actual human interactions and
for entertaining, one visitor recalling a game of particularly as the expression of displaced sexual
musical chairs that took place there at the sug- energy. For the collector, the objects form a realm
gestion of poet Amy Lowell, ‘‘not smoking her cigar of symbolic control. As Baudrillard contends, ‘‘the
this night.’’88 collector is driven to construct an alternative dis-
Sleeper’s building was motivated by the same course that is for him entirely amenable, insofar as
passion that drove his collecting, and indeed rooms he is the one who dictates its signifiers—the ul-
were added and configured with his collections in timate signified being, in the final analysis, none
mind. Rather than think of him as having ‘‘added’’ other than himself.’’89 Other theorists have devel-
rooms, it might be said that he collected them. In oped this concept of the collection as a narcissistic
all of the projects under consideration here, but projection of the self, and have described how col-
especially with Beauport, collections play crucial lections can signify national, political, ethnic, class,
roles in establishing their historicist characters, and other identities. At its worst, collecting validates
and their queerness comes, at least in part, from the
idiosyncratic object choices made by their owners.
89
Jean Baudrillard, Le Système des objets as ‘‘The System of
87
Collecting,’’ trans. Roger Cardinal, in John Elsner and Roger
Curtis and Nylander, Beauport, 61–73. Cardinal, The Cultures of Collecting (1968; London: Reaktion Books,
88
Hollister, Beauport at Gloucester, 7. 1994), 24.

Fig. 25. Plan of ground floor, Beauport. (Historic New England.)
existing social and economic hierarchies and associated with an exclusive history of the United
enables psychological dysfunction.90 States, he simultaneously undermined any utility
Some of these characterizations may apply to they may have had as deadpan illustrations of the
Sleeper’s collecting, but if Beauport were only enduring authority of the colonial elite through the
about the pathological desire to acquire objects, or techniques that he used to display them. Sleeper’s
the material expression of WASP hegemony in presentation of objects bordered on parody and
architecture and collections, it would be a lot less sometimes effectively removed them from circula-
interesting as a space than it is. Although Sleeper tion within the collecting economy. For instance, in
used objects that by the turn of the century were the stair hall at Beauport, Sleeper used nineteenth-
century pressed glass cup plates, which were hot
collectibles in his day, as elements in the window of
90
See Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting a display case (fig. 27).91 Having been soldered in
in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1999); Susan M.
Pearce, Alexandra Bounia, and Paul Martin, eds., The Collector’s
91
Voice: Critical Readings in the Practice of Collecting (Burlington, VT: Alice Van Leer Carrick, a popular early twentieth-century
Ashgate, 2000). writer on antiques, discusses her collection of pressed-glass cup

Fig. 26. Samuel Chamberlain, Golden Step Room, Beauport. Published in Paul Hollister, Beauport at Gloucester: The
Most Fascinating House in America (New York: Hastings House, 1951). (Samuel Chamberlain Negative Collection,
Peabody Essex Museum.)
place, they could no longer be bought and sold and in pink and Vaseline yellow and violet and amber and
their value as antique objects was essentially lost, but amethyst, which would be so rare as to be unheard-of.
their visual, even emotional, impact was enhanced The lady is reported to have fainted once more, uttering
to an incredible degree. One author recalled ‘‘a the thin, distant whimper of a gull over Norman’s Woe
[a rock and reef in Gloucester Harbor].92
legend that a lady from San Francisco, who fancies
such glass, once swooned here, and was restored These plates, and other objects such as the
with aromatic salts’’: George Washington cast-iron stove that Sleeper
When she was revived she noticed, let into a nearby playfully installed in a niche like a piece of classical
wall, also with an illuminated glass backing, a smaller sculpture, unquestionably projected the owner’s
Connecticut front-doorway, complete with fanlight and fondness for the things of earlier times and perhaps
leaded side-lights. As her focus returned, she observed also for the social order that they were seen to
that the conventional bull’s-eyes of the side-lights of represent. But their placement undermined any
both doorways were not bottle-bottom bull’s-eyes at all. soberly didactic restrictions that their incorporation
Instead, they were pressed Sandwich clear-glass cup- into a conservative narrative of American history
plates, some bearing a historical medallion. Behind may have saddled them with, even for casual visitors.
each, the back-lighting filtering through the texture of Sleeper’s collections were incorporated into a series
the cup-plate, stood a bit of glassware in various soft
of theatrical settings that were the backdrops for
colours, so the illusion became that of Sandwich cup-plates
costume parties, dinners, and other events of the
distinctive social life of his inner circle.
plates in Collector’s Luck; or A Repository of Pleasant and Profitable
Discourses Descriptive of the Household Furniture and Ornaments of Olden
92
Time (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1919), 32–41. Hollister, Beauport at Gloucester, 5.

Fig. 27. Samuel Chamberlain, exhibit cabinet with pressed-glass cup plates reused in the door, Beauport.
Published in Paul Hollister, Beauport at Gloucester: The Most Fascinating House in America (New York: Hastings House,
1951). (Samuel Chamberlain Negative Collection, Peabody Essex Museum.)
Historicism was a critical component of this that Sleeper has often been credited with having
queer space, and the queerness of Beauport was pioneered a historic decorating style that had a
confirmed by the fact that it was the work of a well- pervasive influence on the development of an aes-
known interior designer (or ‘‘decorator’’ in the thetically and politically conservative ‘‘early Amer-
period), whose projects eventually ranged from ican’’ idiom, at the same time his work was
film sets to interiors for Henry Francis Du Pont, the susceptible to the identical criticism as was Ogden
founder of the Winterthur Museum.93 As women Codman’s historicist aesthetic, namely, that it was
came increasingly to dominate the field of interior decorative, hence effeminate. A review of Codman’s
design in the twentieth century, the men who prac- work as a decorator published just before Beauport
ticed it were more and more commonly suspected was begun, for example, charged the designer with
of effeminacy. Gay men played important roles in creating in his interiors ‘‘variety at the expense of
the establishment of a distinct professional iden- virility.’’94
tity for the interior designer. Despite the fact If Beauport’s own incredible ‘‘variety’’ made it
suspect to some observers, that quality signaled for
93
McNeil writes of a visit to Winterthur that ‘‘as I stood that others precisely the freedom and pleasure that
winter day in du Pont’s principle [sic] dining room, one of dozens insiders found in its interiors. Indeed, it seems to
strewn throughout a two hundred room house, I realized that I was
not standing in a private museum but rather a queer space. The
94
room, although furnished with ‘correct’ furniture and objects, was ‘‘Some Recent Works by Ogden Codman, Jr.,’’ Architectural
emphatically theatrical and hyperbolic.’’ He goes on to say, ‘‘It was Record ( July 1905), 51, quoted in Joel Sanders, ‘‘Curtain Wars:
more movie lot than residence.’’ The comparison is apt since Architects, Decorators, and the 20th-Century Domestic Interior,’’
although McNeil does not discuss Sleeper’s involvement in the Harvard Design Magazine, no. 16 (Winter/Spring 2002). Reed also
Winterthur project, Sleeper was also involved in film work. McNeil, discusses ‘‘that quintessentially gay figure, the interior decorator,’’
‘‘Crafting Queer Spaces,’’ 4. in ‘‘Imminent Domain,’’ 69.

have been a place where its upper-class inhabitants Although Little and Codman were habitués of
were all in tacit agreement about the acceptability the queer world of Boston, New York, and Italy,
of same-sex desire, and where they were shielded their avowed interest in women—as both sexual
from potential criticism or persecution for holding partners and intimate companions—was not a ques-
such views. In the elite social circle that gathered at tion of disguising their authentic orientations. Both
Beauport, which overlapped to some degree with men discussed their sexual conquests of women
Elise Tyson’s crowd, rigid sexual categories either in ways that mirrored the terms in which they dis-
did not exist or were transgressed with some reg- cussed their relationships to younger men. Little
ularity. Arthur Little’s correspondence with Ogden perhaps summarized his sexual orientation when
Codman Jr. provides the most candid view of the he wrote to Codman that a certain group of ‘‘boys
situation. Little, the Tysons, and Henry Davis Sleeper would be much more fun in a sexual way than girls!
moved in interconnected social circles. For instance, Girls have such an inconvenient way of wanting to
on August 14, 1908, Sleeper reported from Beauport be virgins whereas boys are never virgins when they
that ‘‘the Arthur Littles got home Tuesday—& have a right hand.’’ Little also discussed relation-
are coming over here next Wednesday. I expect I ships with men and women as being basically of
shall hear some wild things.’’95 Little also sup- equivalent value when he wrote to Codman from
ported Sleeper professionally, offering the help of London that ‘‘you would be charmed with the little
his draftsmen on future decorating projects after house we live in: two rooms on each floor but mine
having visited Beauport in 1908.96 where there are three! The one which makes mine
Beginning in 1892 and continuing up until the so small is I think about 7 11! But everything is
time of their marriages just after 1900, Little and clearly painted and papered, and with the man or
Codman corresponded frequently, detailing their woman of your heart temporarily, or for a honey-
exploits in such well-known ‘‘queer spaces’’ as the moon, would be very attractive.’’99 A decade later,
Turkish baths they visited in Boston, New York, and Little made clear that his queer identity could ac-
Italy, as well as ‘‘The Slide,’’ a notorious Manhattan commodate marriage to a woman when in 1903 he
club with a predominantly homosexual clientele.97 married Jessie Whitman, ‘‘a very beautiful young
Moreover, Little described in detail the mementos widow’’ with five children. As one of Jessie’s chil-
of his European sexual tourism, his collections of dren’s children (Little’s step-grandchild) later re-
‘‘smutty’’ prints of ‘‘Johnnies feeling girls’’ and called, ‘‘apparently he [Little] loved them all and
volumes of erotic images of ‘‘Italian boys.’’98 they adored him.’’100
Interchangeability with respect to male and
female partners was common in the queer world of
95
Sleeper to Andrew, August 17, 1908, in Hayden and Gray, Little, Codman, and their circle. Little took it for
Beauport Chronicle, 28. granted that many of his friends who were also
96
Sleeper wrote to Andrew on September 3, 1908: ‘‘I know professional colleagues experienced sexual inti-
you’ll be glad to hear a nice thing that has just happened to me. I
wrote you that Arthur Little came to spend the day last week. He has
macy with both men and women. George Porter
just written me a very laudatory letter—offering me the services of Fernald is a case in point. In 1894 Little had to
his draughtsmen, superintendents, contractors, etc. if I should camouflage some Italian flower pots that Fernald
want to build a house for anyone else! (you remember one or two
people asked me to), & adds that if it turned out as well as this
had painted on his own initiative ‘‘with boys c—ks
house has in every detail, he should be only too glad to have his and all holding up a swag of laurels!’’ but in 1915
office affiliated with the making of it. It was flattering—& I haven’t he reported that Fernald had seduced a woman he
mentioned it to anyone (even to mother, yet).’’ In Hayden and
Gray, Beauport Chronicle, 28.
97
For example, in 1894 Little wrote to Codman: ‘‘I had a
Turkish bath this p.m. no fights [a reference to an earlier letter was a ‘‘bugger,’’ as were ‘‘all rich Germans’’: ‘‘when ever any rich
detailing a fight there]. Frank was there he is looking well and was young German went to Italy the police watched him all the time.’’
very lusty!!’’ Arthur Little to Ogden Codman Jr., March 7, 1894, Arthur Little to Ogden Codman Jr., March 9, 1918, Codman
Codman Papers, Historic New England, Boston (hereafter, ‘‘Codman Papers, HNE. Italy already had this reputation in England by the
Papers, HNE’’). The correspondence of the two men is discussed eighteenth century, having been characterized in the anonymous
by Doyle, ‘‘ ‘A Very Proper Bostonian,’ ’’ 446–76. The Slide and pamphlet Satan’s Harvest Home in 1749 as ‘‘the Mother and Nurse of
the baths are discussed on pages 458–63. Chauncey also dis- Sodomy’’ (55), quoted and discussed in George E. Haggerty, Men in
cussed these institutions earlier in Gay New York, 37–40, 207–25. Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York:
98
Arthur Little to Ogden Codman Jr., May 14, 1892, and Columbia University Press, 1999), 150.
99
January 12, 1894, Codman Papers, HNE. Little was well aware of Arthur Little to Ogden Codman, May 20, 1892, Codman
the extent to which northern Europeans and North Americans Papers, HNE, quoted in Doyle, ‘‘‘A Very Proper Bostonian’,’’ 472.
100
saw Italy as a place where homosexual passions could be freely Susan Noble in personal correspondence to the author,
indulged. As Little wrote to Codman in 1918, the Kaiser Wilhelm January 15, 1985.

had met at Mrs. Tyson’s.101 Like the working-class Foucault’s sense, including as it does a number of
men George Chauncey discussed, Fernald, Little, period rooms invoking other times and spaces and
and others in their circle did not define their iden- being generally based on a Venetian palace).104 A
tities around an exclusive sexual interest in either frequent guest at Dabsville, Gardner once implored
men or women. Andrew in a letter, ‘‘Your village is Fogland with the
Fernald, Codman, Herbert Browne, and the sea’s white arms about you all. Don’t let outsiders
other men to whose homosexual activities Little crawl in—only me! For I care. I love its rich, strange
refers were, along with Sleeper, Andrew, and others, people, so far away.’’105
part of the population of bachelors in Boston that Sleeper embarked on the construction of his
reached an all-time high in 1890. Historian Howard own Dabsville enclave following the death of poet
P. Chudacoff argues that the correct explanation and humorist Guy Wetmore Carryl (1873–1904),
for this efflorescence is neither demographic nor with whom he seems to have been intimately in-
economic, but rather cultural. Boarding houses and volved. Carryl’s book Far from the Maddening Girls,
institutions such as men’s clubs made being a bach- published posthumously in 1904, chronicled the
elor an attractive alternative to being a husband. construction of a bachelor’s home (‘‘Sans Souci’’),
Further, these settings provided spaces where sex- perhaps inspired by the building of his own
ual intimacy between men could be explored house—‘‘Single Blessedness’’—at Swampscott,
safely.102 Although Chudacoff deals primarily with Massachusetts, on the North Shore. (Carryl died
men, partnerships between women were also a shortly after having unsuccessfully fought the fire
significant cultural phenomenon at this moment, that destroyed the house.) In the book, which was
especially in the extended social network observed dedicated to Sleeper, Carryl wrote that a bachelor
through the renovation and building projects con- ‘‘must have a house, and equip and order this in
sidered in this essay. As we have seen, Elise Tyson such a fashion that all the married couples for ten
counted both bachelors and single women in her miles around will fall down with one accord and
social set, as did Little and Sleeper. What is striking grovel.’’106 Although the confirmed bachelor in
is the degree to which the members of these elite the book eventually succumbs to marriage, Carryl
circles devoted time to, and made emotional and never did. His relationship with Sleeper seems to
financial investments in, such elaborate, dramati- have been deep and loving, since a few years after
cally historicized refuges.103 Carryl’s death, Sleeper wrote to A. Piatt Andrew
Beauport was part of a group of summer re- that ‘‘I was thinking, the other day, that I had never
sidences on the Eastern Point that was called expected the good fortune of again finding anyone
variously ‘‘Dabsville’’ or the ‘‘She-Coast’’: Dabsville possessing so many of the characteristics that made
for the first letters of the last names of the ad- Guy Carryl what he was. Which was so sincere a
joining cottagers Joanna Davidge, Piatt Andrew, tribute, on my part, that I rather wanted to tell you
Cecilia Beaux, Sleeper, and Caroline Sinkler. None of it.’’107
of the group was married until 1911, when Davidge Andrew replaced the late Carryl in Sleeper’s
wed a British archaeologist thirteen years her affections, although his passionate devotion to the
junior. The moniker ‘‘She-Coast’’ was used because man may not to have been entirely reciprocated.
Sleeper and Andrew were the only permanent male Sleeper clearly loved the handsome and charismatic
fixtures in the Eastern Point group, which usually Andrew, who in turn kept him at an emotional dis-
also included Isabella Stewart Gardner, creator of tance, even proposing marriage to heiress Dorothy
the Boston art museum that bears her name (and
which might also be considered a heterotopia in
104
Joseph E. Garland, ‘‘Dabsville,’’ in Curtis and Nylander,
Beauport, 15–16. Historian Douglass Shand-Tucci describes Dabs-
101
Arthur Little to Ogden Codman Jr., January 22, 1894, and ville as ‘‘a discreet gay colony in Gloucester’’ in The Art of Scandal:
March 19, 1915, Codman Papers, HNE. The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: Harper
102
Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an Collins, 1997), 245.
105
American Subculture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Isabella Stewart Gardner to A. Piatt Andrew, September 12,
1999). 1907, quoted in Garland, ‘‘Dabsville,’’ 16. Eastern Point was also
103
At one point, Little contemplated building a residence guarded by a gate lodge that prevented uninvited guests from
entering. Hayden and Gray, Beauport Chronicle, 43.
appropriate to his marital status at Bar Harbor, Maine, as the New 106
York Times reported: ‘‘Mr. Arthur Little, a well known Boston Guy Wetmore Carryl, Far from the Maddening Girls (New
architect and society man, has purchased himself a handsome lot of York: McClure, Phillips, 1904), 8; Hayden and Gray, Beauport
land opposite the Louisburg Hotel and will build himself a house— Chronicle, 1.
107
a bachelor’s hall—before next season.’’ ‘‘Autumn at Bar Harbor,’’ Sleeper to Andrew, January 28, 1907, in Hayden and Gray,
New York Times, September 8, 1889. Beauport Chronicle, 3.

Payne Whitney, although he was rejected.108 Per- ship I have known—& more of confidence &
haps she knew of Andrew’s proclivities; many peo- contentment.’’112
ple apparently did. As Gardner’s biographer, For Sleeper the passionate builder, houses
Louise Hall Tharp, commented, ‘‘Gossip had it embodied their owners and concretized human
that often [at Andrew’s ‘‘Red Roof ’’] all the guests relationships. The failure to acknowledge this has
were men, their pastimes peculiar.’’109 Sleeper’s made Beauport a mystery for historians. A major
and Andrew’s correspondence documents dates monograph on Beauport observes that the house’s
and overnight visits, and certainly depicts a loving ‘‘maze-like shape has always suggested secrets, and
relationship between the two men, although the mysteries cling to the house like the vines that once
letters stop short of the detailed descriptions of shrouded its walls.’’ The mystery that is the most
sexual activities that Little’s and Codman’s included. resistant to resolution, we are told, is the extent to
Indeed, ‘‘Dabsville was no less discreet than debo- which the house represents the ideas and iden-
nair,’’ writes its historian Joseph E. Garland: ‘‘Some tity of its builder/owner, because ‘‘most of his per-
trifling unconventionalities of libidinous expres- sonal correspondence and all his business records
sion . . . have been attributed to one or another have vanished.’’113 Joseph E. Garland has also been
subdivision of Dabsville. But we are well advised to stymied in his attempt to find Sleeper at Beauport:
let delicacy prevail; nothing is so helpless before ‘‘Sadly—or rather, mysteriously—the Sleeper leg-
hearsay, or so private where public offense is neither acy is all what, with only hints of how, and almost no
meant nor made.’’110 why at all. He scarcely left a fingerprint.’’114 But
Beauport deserves to be counted among the hidden in plain sight is the house’s campy his-
queer spaces of northern New England’s resorts toricist aesthetic that is the key to understanding
for the reason that it stemmed directly from their Sleeper’s elusive ‘‘why.’’ Furthermore, Sleeper’s as-
love, at least as Sleeper saw it. Andrew’s encourage- sociation with the builders of other exotic summer-
ment of Sleeper’s project and the strong feelings of houses confirms the fact that Beauport was part of
the latter are what drove the building of Beauport. a group of very particular turn-of-the-twentieth-
As Sleeper wrote to Andrew, ‘‘I should never have century retreats, spread out among the emerging
taken the pains I did—nor would Beauport have resorts north of Boston. These queer spaces, fash-
existed—but for you.’’111 Conversely, spending ioned out of old houses or built new somewhat in
time in ‘‘Red Roof’’ was a consolation for Sleeper the style of the old, served as heterotopias in rela-
when Andrew, who served various government tion to the watering places they skirted.
posts before World War I and who organized an
ambulance corps in France in 1914, was away. For
instance, Sleeper wrote to Andrew in 1915, ‘‘The Conclusion
remembrance of each room at [Red Roof ] holds
as much happiness as that of any other friend- To demand archival confirmation of what the
buildings themselves tell us, as other scholars have
done repeatedly, is to devalue the architectural
108
A feeling for the ways that the two men approached their evidence itself. The location and access to Elizabeth
relationship is conveyed by a comparison between their writing
about Andrew’s departure for a trip to England in August 1908. Perkins’s bedroom, one recalls, was one indication
Sleeper wrote to Andrew: ‘‘Now that the hour of your sailing has of its potentially clandestine use. The many garden
come, I have a keen longing to be there—on the pier—among the rooms at Hamilton House may have lent them-
multitude. Yet I’m glad I haven’t got to watch the steamer slip
silently away, down the harbor, toward the open sea. The train was selves to secret activities. The Dabsville cottages may
enough, yesterday. After you had disappeared I stood looking at
the cars growing smaller in perspective, until a curve swallowed
them up.’’ Andrew wrote to his parents on the occasion, ‘‘H.D.S. 112
Sleeper to Andrew, March 7, 1915, in Hayden and Gray,
wanted to come over to New York to see me off but I objected. As it Beauport Chronicle, 78.
was he came first to Boston, & then to Providence, then decided to 113
Curtis and Nylander, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Beauport, 7.
go on to New London and finally got off at New Haven, a few Sleeper’s papers were either lost or willfully destroyed. Hayden
moments ago.’’ Sleeper to Andrew, August 4, 1908, and Andrew to and Gray report that ‘‘memorandum books, pocket books, per-
his parents, August 3, 1908, both in Hayden and Gray, Beauport sonal correspondence, family photographs, family trees, family
Chronicle, 18–19. documents, family Bibles, family records, diplomas and medals—
109
Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart all inventoried among the contents of Beauport after [Sleeper’s]
Gardner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), quoted in Shand-Tucci, death—are nowhere to be found.’’ ‘‘Introduction’’ to Beauport
Boston Bohemia, 224. Chronicle, v.
110
Garland, Eastern Point, 283. 114
Garland, ‘‘Dabsville,’’ 17. Shand-Tucci also cites this pas-
111
Sleeper to Andrew, September 3, 1908, in Hayden and sage in connection with a passing mention of Beauport as queer
Gray, Beauport Chronicle, 41. space in Boston Bohemia, 224.

the Perkinses, the Tysons, Sleeper, and others in

their social circle—all independently wealthy, upper-
class Anglo-Americans—promoted an interest in
early American history and culture that for many
members of their class was a cover for profound
xenophobia, it must be acknowledged that they also
created places where certain bourgeois norms were
resisted, be they expectations for women’s public
roles or for exclusive heterosexual pairings at sum-
mer resorts. Restoring their queerness to these
places opens up new possibilities for understand-
ing how historicism functioned in turn-of-the-
twentieth-century resorts in specific and America
in general, not just as an oppressive stop-gap placed
on a society in the throes of dramatic change, but
also as a means of liberation. For men and women
Fig. 28. Garden Room, Red Roof, photo ca. 1915. who ‘‘loved in ways that exposed their desire to
(Red Roof Archive.) resist the position into which culture had placed
them,’’118 doing extraordinary things with historic
similarly have been designed to accommodate spaces and objects served various needs. In some
queer goings-on. One description of Red Roof, for instances, historical projects provided an avenue
example, enumerated the many and varied elements for public recognition for women at a moment
of its queer space: ‘‘tucked-away window seats, more when there were relatively few means of obtaining
nooks, steps and stairs and hidden rooms, cloisters, it. In other cases, renovating a historic house off
clever closets, trap doors, sliding panels and secret the beaten path could produce a spectacularly
passages’’ (fig. 28).115 Some of these features were individualistic space with security from intrusion by
considered by contemporaries as very private places potentially disapproving observers.
of enjoyment and of seduction: ‘‘Andrew had an As much as queerness and queer space have
organ installed in the passage between the living been linked theoretically to a wide-ranging cri-
room and a recently added study. Here, Isabella tique of the ‘‘normal,’’ it is true that in this instance
[Stewart Gardner] sat on the couch . . . to listen to his the oppositional possibilities of the places were
music. She was probably unaware of the hidden space
above the books—too low to stand up in but equipped Massachusetts, now owned and operated by the Society for the
with mattress and covers where . . . guests could listen Preservation of New England Antiquities. There’s no doubt that
in still greater comfort.’’116 At Beauport, Gardner and Sleeper was a major decorating queen: he single-handedly defined
the look of interiors decorated with American antiques. Yet on my
Sleeper’s other guests would have found quirky recent tour of Beauport it was never mentioned that Henry Sleeper,
spaces similar to those found at Red Roof—tiny who’s been dead for decades, was gay. Why would the truth be
rooms, ‘‘secret’’ passages, stairs leading nowhere, and considered invasive or irrelevant?’’ Mark Sammons quoted in
sundry other areas that resulted from the house’s Fellows, A Passion to Preserve, 55. Although Historic New England
has worked against the elitist interpretation of Beauport by
piecemeal construction over a long period of time. showcasing the lives and workspaces of Sleeper’s household staff
Such spaces added to the queerness of the environ- (see ‘‘Backstage at Beauport,’’ Historic New England: The Magazine of
ment as a whole, where anything might happen. the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities 5, no. 1
[Summer 2004]: 2–7), the organization has not foregrounded its
If our revisionist treatments of historic houses radicalism as a space where gender norms were challenged. In the
like Beauport and Hamilton House have been very 2008 season, Sleeper’s gayness was acknowledged in tours of
Beauport for the first time. For a discussion of how sites with queer
good at unmasking the ideologically suspect his- histories have been interpreted in the United Kingdom, see Robert
torical narratives the buildings embody, they have Mills, ‘‘Queer Is Here? Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender
not adequately acknowledged the aristocratic Histories and Public Culture,’’ History Workshop Journal, no. 62
queer culture that produced and used them, what- (Autumn 2006): 253–63. Gail Lee Dubrow discusses the inter-
pretation of U.S. sites related to gay and lesbian history in ‘‘Blazing
ever its political implications.117 Even granted that Trails with Pink Triangles and Rainbow Flags: Improving the
Preservation and Interpretation of Gay and Lesbian Heritage,’’ in
115
Restoring Women’s History through Historic Preservation, ed. Gail Lee
Garland, Eastern Point, 245. Dubrow and Jennifer B. Goodman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
116
Tharp, Mrs. Jack, quoted in Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 224. University Press, 2002), 281–302.
117 118
New England preservationist Mark Sammons writes, ‘‘Con- Haggerty, Men in Love, 174. Haggerty uses this phrase in a
sider Beauport, Henry Davis Sleeper’s house in Gloucester, very different historic context, but it seems apt here.

limited.119 This qualification notwithstanding, The preservation and restoration of early houses
each of the projects had an important impact on was a central aspect of what single women and
how the resort community in which it was located men did to shape the environments of the summer
developed. Every one of these buildings contrib- watering places where they settled. Those residen-
uted to the formation of a particularly historical ces became summer homes as well as house mu-
identity for its town, in contrast to other resorts that seums. An analysis of how some of these spaces
were simply focused on beaches and other amuse- were made allows us to see how Foucault’s concept
ments. Gloucester, York, and South Berwick all of heterotopia—which he sketched out in general
became known for their historic atmospheres and terms—can help us to understand the unique role
for their preserved old buildings, and they at- these cherished places represented in their origi-
tracted visitors and residents who were interested nal historical context. Far from ordinary, they are
in such things. These towns also offered a variety of nonetheless domestic environments. They demon-
activities that surpassed those of other resorts that strate some ways in which ‘‘otherness’’ was achieved
lacked developed historical identities, and they in the realm of the everyday, albeit with extraordi-
presented opportunities for social interaction and nary resources brought to bear upon the projects.
community involvement through the institutions As these well-published buildings grew familiar
founded by the pioneer restorers. Other New to the readers of popular magazines in the early
England communities were also transformed into twentieth century, they undoubtedly spawned more
historically minded resorts through the efforts of modest imitations. For this reason, these hetero-
single men and women. Deerfield, Massachusetts— topias of northern New England’s coastal resorts
where the pioneering preservationist C. Alice Baker point the way toward the discovery of more spaces of
(1833–1909) and the photographer Emma Lewis otherness, in the domestic settings previously
Coleman (1853–1942), who were also active in devalued by Foucault’s followers.
southern Maine, played leading roles in the town’s Queer theory—as joined here to the concept of
historical and cultural institutions—grew in histor- heterotopia—provides a new way of viewing fa-
ical stature through the women’s efforts from the miliar spaces, of understanding better the ways
1870s onward.120 Edith Cleaves Barry (1883– they looked and functioned. In an influential
1969), a New York artist with family roots in south- essay, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner posed
ern Maine, later exerted a similar impact in the question, ‘‘What Does Queer Theory Teach Us
Kennebunk, Maine, where she founded the Brick About X?’’ Fetterly and Pryse responded by
Store Museum in 1936. In the postwar period, artist arguing not only that regionalist literature could
and preservationist Mildred Burrage (1890–1983), be understood through the lens of queer theory,
the daughter of renowned state historian Henry S. but also that regionalism led to ‘‘a more complicated
Burrage, worked with her younger sister Madeleine understanding of what constitutes queer theory.’’122
(‘‘Bob’’) to enhance the cultural life of the port Just as regionalist literature offers an expanded view
town of Wiscasset, Maine, where she founded and of how queerness was constructed at the turn of the
directed the Lincoln County Cultural and Histor- twentieth century, the spaces considered here enable
ical Association from 1954 to 1969.121 Many other us to see how a loosely connected group of elite men
examples doubtless could be added to this list. and women brought into being places that deepen
our understanding of the same process. These
119
The case here is similar to that of Sarah Orne Jewett, the houses reveal that queerness—in its several varieties
oppositional force of whose literature has been considered by explicated here—was a spatial phenomenon. It was
some critics to be marred by what they consider her classism,
racism, and nationalism. See Marjorie Pryse, ‘‘Sex, Class and expressed in architectural settings, and it relied upon
‘Category Crisis’: Reading Jewett’s Transivity,’’ American Literature these places for its enactment.
70, no. 3 (September 1998): 517–26; Jaqueline Shea Murphy, Although heterotopias and queer spaces were
‘‘Replacing Regionalism: Abenaki Tales and ‘Jewett’s’ Coastal
Maine,’’ American Literary History 10, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 665–67. not exclusively found in resort towns, the fact of
120
Marla R. Miller and Anne Diggan Lanning, ‘‘‘Common these examples having appeared at turn-of-the-
Parlors’: Women and the Recreation of Community Identity in century watering places is significant. Historian
Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1870–1920,’’ Gender and History 6, no. 3
(1994): 435–55; Robben McAdam, ‘‘‘Sea Hill’: C. Alice Baker
Cottage,’’ in Giffen and Murphy, ‘‘A Noble and Dignified Stream,’’ 151. 122
Fetterly and Pryse, Writing Out of Place, 320–21. They also
121
A large collection of works by Mildred Burrage is in the connect their project to Michael Warner’s call to engage in ‘‘ac-
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. Collections of corre- tively imagining a necessarily and desirably queer world’’ in his
spondence between Mildred and Bob Burrage and the art historian introduction to Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer
Erwin Panofsky are in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Institution, Washington, DC, and the Princeton University Library. Press, 1993), xvi.

Theodore Corbett has observed that the emer- Knowing more about the houses discussed here
gence of resort life is an underexamined historical complicates all of these stories. On the one hand,
transformation of the nineteenth century with far- we learn that historicism can be more than a mar-
reaching implications.123 Recent scholarship has keting strategy or a means of excluding nonwhite
attended to many aspects of the emergence of the vacationers; on the other, we find out that some old
resort in North American culture, including the places became refuges for those who resisted the
dynamics of race, class, and gender relations at rigidity of social roles at the resorts, that they were
the new watering places, as well as the importance venues for staging identities that went well beyond
of historical identity in the promotion of various the polarities of heterosexual and homosexual and
vacation spots. At the same time, sexuality has been were properly ‘‘queer.’’ Although they shared
treated in the history of resorts in relation to both certain characteristics with artist colonies and gay-
the prominent role of heterosexual courtship in friendly resorts, the towns examined here were
the social lives of many such places, as well as in the distinguished from them by their overriding
context of the relatively few get-away spots that historical characters. Those identities were first
catered increasingly to gay and lesbian tourists established by the queer and heterotopic spaces
from the turn of the twentieth century onward. constructed out of old buildings or from whole
cloth by men and women whose projects at the
margins of their watering places eventually became
123
Corbett, First Resorts, 1. their defining elements.


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‘‘Secure from All Intrusion’’

Heterotopia, Queer Space, and the Turn-of-the-Twentieth-

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and incorporated and focused on the ongoing pre-

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style cottages were constructed, but development

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visitors whose attention he cultivated but whose

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Fig. 25. Plan of ground floor, Beauport. (Historic New England.)

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the Perkinses, the Tysons, Sleeper, and others in

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