I’m a lucky guy. I’m one of the docents at the Cupola House, and I get to introduce visitors to what architectural historians have called “one of the most distinctive and important dwellings of its period in the South.”
Designated as a National Landmark in 1971, the Cupola House was built in 1758 by Francis Corbin. It is something of a miracle: there are many reasons why this building may not have survived. It stands today as a national testament to local dedication and grass-roots preservation.
I’ve walked around and through this beautiful structure many times now. It is the most studied building in colonial North Carolina and the most impressive example of Jacobean architecture south of Massachusetts. The gardens I’ve already lyricized many times in this journal space, but now inside I can assure you that every gaze is breath-taking. Your eyes are drawn in wonder from the majestic Georgian moldings — stunning arches over the doors and fireplaces — to the Lancastrian roses carved on the three-story winding staircase (around which I think the entire house was designed) — to the original Wollaston portraits of Penelope and Thomas Barker and Thomas Hodgson.
And, especially, the four Corbin chairs in the dining room, so exquisitely reconstructed by my friend, master craftsman Don Jordan, with the same techniques, the same shaped gouges, the same elements of acanthus embellished knees, raven-clawed feet, and scallop-crowned back as the original master, who was most likely a carver by the name of Samuel Black.
Every time I look at those chairs I’m amazed that I actually know the carver of these, and the story of the originals dating back to over 260 years ago.
The weight of history is serious, but also beautiful and inspiring. And it obliges. Walk through the doors of the Cupola House, and wander through its gardens, and you’ll feel that weight, and you’ll hear that call. Indeed, walk through any of the gardens on the upcoming Easels Tour next Friday and Saturday, and gaze at the historic homes, including the majestic house at Hayes Farm — rightly called “the Mount Vernon of North Carolina” — and you’ll feel the same obligation.
If you live and breathe in such a historic place as this, you are obliged.
I tell visitors to the Cupola House that they are walking into a miracle. I’m serious. Time was when old buildings were simply plowed under or left to rot and fall apart. Think of the old Granville House that George Bailey threw a stone into just to impress his soaking wet girlfriend Mary. There was a moment when the Cupola House didn’t look much better, and in any other place in 1918, when the Brooklyn Museum was already at work tearing apart the interior woodwork, the Cupola House would have been razed to the ground.
The miracle occurred when private citizens in Edenton, horrified at what was being done to the aesthetic and historic heart of the town, got together and stopped Brooklyn’s appropriation from going any further than the first floor. They purchased the house and set to work at preserving and restoring — which is precisely the moral obligation that history impresses upon us.
For the next 50 years, the Cupola House became a museum and the Shepard-Pruden Memorial Library. In the first decades, a group of women operated a Tea Room in the parlor to help raise funds for the House. A 1925 ad from the Edenton Daily News advertised a menu of broiled chicken, tomato salad, stuffed potatoes, strawberry ice cream and “iced sponge squares with nuts.” The community got together to make things right.
Preservation and restoration are the work of beautification and correction. To fail or neglect this obligation, to let beauty fall into blight is to blight the human heart. To let mistakes go on, without correction and repair, is to dishonor the people who made the mistakes in the first place. If I built a chair 200 years ago (and trust me, you would not want to sit in such a structure), I would certainly want Don Jordan, 200 years later, to correct every error.
Yes, mistakes were made, as Jeb Stuart MacGruder famously said in the Watergate hearings of the summer of 1973. Injustice has been done too many times. History is riddled by sin, the Bible says, in every nation. The obligation of history is to correct and restore, which in this case, means to replace injustice with justice, to displace oppression and violence with peace.
History is the business of being honest while looking for the good, while seeking out the beautiful for recovery and restoration, to bring out into the present-day noonday sun.
Consider this a personal invitation to come on out to the Cupola House on Fridays and Saturdays and Sunday afternoons. Get your tickets at the Barker House. And I’ll prattle on interminably about architecture, history, craftsmanship, old maps and corner chairs (with mysterious uses), leeches and bloodletting and even a ghost story or two.
And the gardens, of course, if that is your thing. Which it should be. After all, beautification is an obligation.
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