January 2011

The article in your April issue by Peter Andrews entitled “Links With History” was read with much pleasure, I’m sure, by thousands of golf fans. It particularly emphasized the fascinating facts and traditions that surround our game, and the colorful photographs depicting several of our greatest courses underscored golf’s intricate relationship with its surrounding environment.

The USGA invites all members of the public to visit our library and museum, Golf House, in Far Hills, New Jersey. Like Mr. Andrews, I feel our collection is “extensive and well ordered, tracing the evolution of the game from the earliest days to the present.”

Pastures of Plenty On Broadway

When it comes to owning old houses, some people have all the luck. They discover polished oak floors beneath a ragged shag carpet or turn up a missing chandelier in a shed behind the garage. They can even answer a knock at the door one day and find the first owner’s daughter—spry as a schoolgirl and full of old stories—standing on their front porch. That happened to Andrew Ward, who wrote in the July 1990 issue about his historic Northwest house.

If it happens to you, count your blessings. The rest of us need patience and the skills of a private detective to piece together the history of whatever house we call home. When my husband and I first moved into our 1920 bungalow, a few blocks from the state capital in Olympia, Washington, we cursed everyone who had lived there before us: the jerks who had wallpapered (repeatedly) over the sandfinish plaster, the fools who had “fixed” termite damage with masking tape and paint.

City Historian or Preservation Board

Is there a historic preservation program in your town? The office may have a list of local research resources.

Date of Construction

If you don’t know when your house was built, you might be able to deduce the date from tax records. A sudden, dramatic increase in value between one year and the next could mean that an empty lot acquired a house at that time.

Property Records

Tax records, deeds, and grantee and grantor indexes can help you establish a chain of title. These are public records, usually stored at the county seat. It helps to know the legal description of your property (the official location, distinct from your street address, as described in the property title) and the tax parcel number (from your local property tax statement) before you start.

State Archives

I’m sure Gerald Carson’s article on city nicknames in the April American Heritage will generate a lot of comment. My own favorite is the rural community of Tillamook on the northern coast of Oregon. Located on a large bay with a backdrop of dairy farms and the finest timber-growing land in the Coast Range, it is widely known as the “City of Cheese, Trees, and the Ocean Breeze.”

What we have here isn’t the seat of governance of a Ruritanian duchy but the Milwaukee Grain Exchange, seen below in its first splendor and then opposite in its recent exuberant restoration.

The Chamber of Commerce building, which houses the exchange, rose in 1879, a time when the nation’s largest wheat market traded in Milwaukee. The city’s Farm Belt location was one reason; equally important was the system of honest measure—inspecting, weighing, and grading the grains— that carried Milwaukee’s reputation as a trustworthy commercial partner as far as the markets of Europe.

Among Lee’s biographies, Douglas Southall Freeman’s R. E. Lee (Scribner’s, 1934-35, four vols.) is unsurpassed; a one-volume abridgement was published in 1961. The best of the rest is Clifford Dowdey’s Lee (Little, Brown, 1965). Special studies include Thomas L. Connelly’s The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (Knopf, 1977) and Paul C. Nagel’s The Lees of Virginia (Oxford, 1990). The general’s military thought is expressed in The Wartime Papers of R E. Lee (Little, Brown, 1961), edited by Clifford Dowdey.

— S.W.S.

In 1932, while Scarface, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Shanghai Express filled the screens of movie theaters across America, another film, for which entertainment was only a secondary goal, was germinating far away from Hollywood. “The American Negro has never been portrayed on screen or stage in his true character,” wrote the black activist W. A. Domingo, “and this film … will be the first departure from the traditional pattern. It will trace the development of the Negro people in America, their work, their play, their progress, their difficulties—devoid of sentimentality as well as of buffoonery.”

Famous for tearing down the old and for being oblivious of its past, New York City would hardly seem to be the kind of place in which to find a distinguished collection of fine old houses. Yet a surprising number do exist—sentinels from another era, survivors that stand quietly and incongruously in the midst of the city’s endless cycle of growth and obliteration. Among the most remarkable are sixteen properties that have recently been awarded special attention by the city and that provide an unexampled look at architectural styles, craftsmen’s skills, and social customs in the New York area over two and a half centuries. They range all the way from the serene, elegant, and nobly situated Gracie Mansion, home of New York’s mayors, down to the humble little Wyckoff House in the far reaches of Brooklyn, which, dating from about 1652, is the city’s oldest dwelling. Many have been home to personages like Aaron Burr and Edgar Allan Poe; one was the temporary residence of George Washington. Others have been the sites of great events. A 1776 meeting in Staten Island’s Conference House affected the course of the American Revolution.