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12/23/2012 11:00 PMIt was unanimous-Clinton residents approved the appropriation of $20,000 from the undesignated fund balance for a Historic Structures Report on one of the town's most valued antique treasures: the Adam Stanton House and General Store.
"I was very surprised and pleased that not a single person opposed," said Stanton House Curator David Perrelli, who believes the expenditure will be well worth it. "There are many things that we don't know or understand about the building and doing this report is an amazing way to find out some of that stuff."
The museum received a $20,000 grant from the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, but the town also had to provide a fund match in order to proceed with the comprehensive review.
"It's very important and it lays a road map for a structured, coherent campaign of restoration," Perrelli said. "It's going to create a sequence of projects and list out a budget and a capital improvement plan that we're going to be adhering to."
The Essex Savings Bank took over as trustee of the facility in May; the bank manages the house with an endowment that was left by the last surviving Stanton family member, Louis Stanton, in the early 1900s. Prior to this, the house was closed for more than two years before residents, including Perrelli, helped bring the house back to its current state.
Attendees at the special town meeting had high praise for the Stanton House and the value of the proposed study.
"For a century, our town of Clinton has benefited from the Stanton house?This is one of the major museums in New England. The trust fund is depleted," said resident Joann Dolan. "If the Stanton House is capable of applying for grants it needs, it requires that they have these historical architectural drawings and a survey?I would say that we owe it to future generations to preserve the Stanton House and provide the seed money that they can go and be able to maintain this house for the next generation."
Now that the match is secure, a team of architects and consultants are in place to perform the Historic Structures Report, which has three components: an architectural survey, a paint analysis, and a records research component.
An architectural drawing, or a survey, of the house will be conducted by a team of consultants in New York. Brian Powell, an architectural conservator of Building Conservation Associates in Massachusetts, will be working closely on this project, performing a comparative paint-layer analysis.
"He's going to go into a given room and take paint scrapings from various architectural components, like moulding around doors and fireplaces around paneling, and compare those various layers of paint," said Perrelli. "By doing that, he can figure out if all of these components are original-and try to figure out the way in which the interior of the house evolved."
Perrelli stated that Powell has already done some initial scrapings, and one aspect of the interior that baffles them is that the house, which was built in 1789, "looks like a home that would have been built a generation earlier," with more of a Federal style. He is hoping the report will help answer such questions.
There is also a research component to the report, with the museum working with a consultant in Fairfield County. One aspect that Perrelli hopes to uncover is the possibly of a probate inventory.
"The probate inventory would have been a list of all [Adam Stanton's] possessions that would have been given to the tax assessor...After Adam Stanton died in 1834 somebody came through the house and made a list of all the taxable possessions room by room, which would be amazing for us to have because it would tell us which articles were in which room and what room was being used for what and stuff like that, and we'd love to find that," Perrelli said.
Other mysteries he is hoping to uncover include why Adam's son John reportedly went bankrupt in the 1850s.
Work on the Historic Structures Report will begin early in 2013. To learn more about the Historic Structures Report, call David Perrelli at 860-664-0018 or 860-669-2132.