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June 17, 2004
• Take the tour at the Mission House Take the tour at the Mission House Drive or walk the streets, lanes, cemetery and byways of the town of Stockbridge and you are constantly confronted by historic places, momentous memorials, significant trees, stones or statues. One such place, rather more historic, significant and momentous than the others, also tends to be somewhat overlooked. It is one of the least prepossessing houses on Main Street; it is definitely one of the most beautiful. If the uninformed notice this property at all, it is the gardens that attract the attention. The front entrance is flanked by four gardens, lushly supplied with interesting plants, surrounded by a dynamic double-level fence that appears to be quite old. These gardens were designed in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Fletcher Steele, one of the most important landscape designers this country has ever produced. The same man who created the overwhelming gardens up the hill at Naumkeag, Steele worked on this alternative to the enormous at the behest of his patron, Mabel Choate. Choate had arranged for this old house to be moved to its present location; she is responsible for Steele's work on the landscape. Keeping the what, why and how of this place alive is the mission of The Trustees of Reservations who have made this particular site their western regional office. This is the Mission House. If you don't know it, you need to stop in and take the $6 tour. Don't be down-hearted or upset at the $.25 tour sign; it is as much an artifact as anything else you'll see here. Built in 1739 by the Reverend John Sergeant, for whom the street the house now inhabits is named, it shares its history with two other major sites in town, the Berkshire Theatre Festival and the Shrine of the Divine Mercy on Eden Hill. Sergeant, born in 1710 in Newark, New Jersey, had graduated from Yale in 1729 and came to Stockbridge to establish a first mission with the Mohican Indians, principally at the request of Chiefs Konkapot and Umpachenee in 1734. Five years later, when Sergeant married Abigail Williams, the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of the four original families of Stockbridge and sister of the founder of Williams College, he built the house on the crest of the hill overlooking the town. Befitting their social status, this house was, at the time, one of the most substantial homes in the area. Sergeant died 10 years later. His Georgian-style mansion was expanded and elaborated upon by his widow and her second husband and also by his descendants. By the 1760s it was no longer the house it had once been. A new front entrance and elegant paneling had been added. An ell was appended in the early 19th century to house the 12 children of Sergeant's son, Dr. Erastus Sergeant. It remained in their possession until 1867 when David Dudley Field, Jr. bought it. The house slowly sunk into a state of disrepair until Mabel Choate took an interest in it in the 1920s. She purchased the Mission House from Mrs. Charles Meyer, who stipulated that it must be moved off of her property. Choate then purchased the Stockbridge Casino which had been primed for destruction by the town. This McKim, Mead and White building, dating from the 1880s, was moved to the eastern end of town and rebuilt as the Stockbridge Playhouse, now the Berkshire Theatre Festival. In its place, Choate had the Mission House dismantled, brought down the hill and rebuilt on its new site. The ell, added so much later, was knocked down and used as landfill on the hill. Choate then brought in Fletcher Steele to create a proper, if not historically accurate, Colonial garden setting for her new museum-to-be. Several other buildings were purchased and added to the one-acre property, including the red barn, the woodshed, now an Indian museum and a cobbler's shop. Choate also purchased most of the antiques that still grace the house, including several pieces that had belonged to the Sergeants when they occupied the house, mostly chairs and a library desk with portable bookshelves. The house was opened to the public in 1930, a perfect example of Colonial revival, with a particular glance at how people in the early 20th century perceived that earlier era. Gordon Clark, superintendent of the property, has been working with the house for seven years. "This is my eighth summer, actually," he said, "and I never get bored with it. It's different every day here, and that's what I like." Clark, as an employee of the Trustees of Reservations, also works uphill at Choate's home, Naumkeag. On any given day he can be working on projects in both houses. "I was laying sod this morning at Naumkeag, working on the new restored evergreen garden and now I'm getting to work on the new western fence at the Sergeant house, in preparation for putting back the western gardens here later this month." The new fence is cypress and the garden is principally an annuals garden with larkspur, coleus and balsam as the principal elements. The opposite side of the central path that leads from Main Street to the red barn is the orchard garden with internal access to its beds from the path and from internal pathways designed by Steele. "You get complete control of the garden from either side," Clark said. The beds are lined with cocoa husks, a tradition that dates back to Mabel Choate's days. "She had trainloads of the stuff delivered," Clark added, "and her notes are explicit -- 'the entire trainload must be unloaded at once' -- she wrote and she meant it, too." At the northern face of the house there is an enclosed garden, facing the Indian museum. This was the working garden for the family, or would have been had they lived in it at this location. There are grapevines softening the long, stark lines of the outbuilding and a well with a classic well sweep designed and installed by Steele. A grassy garden borders the eastern face of the house allowing a lovely view of the fence. The front four gardens are sharply divided in style of planting, although many of the same patterns, flanked by a brick-walk labeled non-traditional by Clark and Historic Resource Manager Will Garrison, create a more formal sense to the look of the landscape. "The single hollyhocks you see here and out back are Steele's signature plant," Clark said. At the rear of the orchard garden the same plants can be found. "Steele had this as principally an asparagus garden, and you can still see the frail, fanlike plants here, but somehow I just can't bring myself to ever remove one of the hollyhocks." In the 1940s the care and planning of the gardens fell into the hand of Mrs. G. Douglas Krumbhaar, wife of the then rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Stockbridge, another historic building in the center of town. She aimed to restore all of Steele's original design, updating the bricks to the ones that can be seen today and replacing the older purple bricks that had survived the first twenty years of the garden's existence. In fact, according to Garrison, the ambitious amateur gardener had swerved quite far from the original intent. "We're much closer now to Steele's design than in Mrs. Krumbhaar's day," Garrison remarked. "Not that she did anything wrong, but the garden had been let go for some years and she had her work cut out for her." Steele likened his gardens to rooms, calling them garden rooms and regarding each of them as a place to be designed, furnished and maintained for their individuality, use and beauty. At the same time he was working on the Mission House he was also designing the Afternoon Garden at Naumkeag. In his writing about these garden rooms, Steele wrote, "Too often one sees some land back of the garage or beside the house or between garden and property line which is, strictly speaking, neither part of lawn or garden or put to any definite use. This is wasteful ... People who live in their gardens must be able to retire in them as to the walled-in rooms of a house. Many of us in these democratic time have forgotten this fact which was obvious to George Washington." With this concept in mind, he created the four, very different, garden rooms which border the Mission House. Those specific ideas, created more than 70 years ago and intended to show a contemporary concept of life two centuries earlier, are still evident in the layout and the care of the Stockbridge museum's gardens today. The dooryard garden, east lawn, well court and grape arbor and orchard garden are the initial draw to this, the oldest house in Stockbridge. The interior with its recently restored paint colors, all based on notes made by Mabel Choate's research, is like the dessert in an unexpectedly fine meal. "We were able to match the original brush strokes in addition to matching the colors that Mabel indicated," Garrison said. Clark, who did much of the actual work of stripping away old and discolored paint, used a casein-based paint that allowed a new depth of layered color to appear on the house's old walls. The formality of the house's interior, and its small mysteries like the u-shaped room behind the fireplace in the lady of the house's bedroom, make the balance of the tour into something very special. "We really just want people to feel the reality of life in the mid-seventeen hundreds in Berkshire County," Garrison said. "It's a large part of what this location is all about." The mission of the Trustees of Reservations is to save the Massachusetts landscape for people to enjoy. The yearly operating budget of the Mission House, barring major repairs or re-roofing, is roughly $12,000 a year, not counting salaries, management and incidentals. In historic Stockbridge, it's the best $6 you can spend for a mission into multi-leveled history. The Mission House, located at the corner of Main Street and Sergeant Street, is open daily from 10 to 5 with the last tour of the day starting at 4 until Columbus Day. The gardens can be toured independently and there is a self-guided tour of the Indian Museum. For information call 298-3239. On Saturday, July 17, from 10 to noon, Superintendent Gordon Clark will give an one-hour illustrated lecture, "Modern Gardens for Colonial Houses," on how to design a Colonial Revival garden, using the Fletcher Steele-designed gardens of Mission House as a case study. Then spend an hour in the Mission House gardens for demonstrations, a tour and a question-and-answer session. $20; $10 for members of The Trustees of Reservations. Includes a free tour of the historic house, which can be taken anytime the house is open. |
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