All Roads Lead to NPS

The National Park Service (NPS) celebrates its centennial anniversary in the month of August! NPS has served as a valuable resource for many of our authors, both professionally and recreationally. To commemorate the occasion, our authors have taken to the blog to pay homage to “America’s best idea”! Check back with us throughout the month of August for more #JHUPressOnNPS! (Series photo credit: Wikimedia)

            It is difficult to write a book about American architecture before the Civil War without making contact with the National Park Service.  Especially is this true when the subject is colonial architecture in Philadelphia, long one of the headquarters of the Park Service and the site of one of the most visited parks in the nation, Independence National Historic Park (INHP).  Our book, The Philadelphia Country House: Architecture and Landscape in Colonial America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), tangentially involved several buildings in INHP (such as Independence Hall and Carpenters’ Hall) as comparative examples.  It also included in a more significant role the Park Service’s Deshler-Morris House in Germantown, famous as the country retreat of Georgia Washington while president of the new United States in its temporary capital of Philadelphia.  National Park Service archives, available on-line, include several extensive and well-researched reports on the history and architecture of this house.

            But far and away the most important role the National Park Service played in the creation of the book was through the Historic American Building Survey (HABS).  HABS, along with its compatriots the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) and the Historic American Landscape Survey (HALS) is the official American record of historic structures and sites.  HABS was founded in 1933 within the National Park Service to record important American buildings as well as employing architects out of work because of the Great Depression.  It remains an active and growing archive, its records lodged in the Library of Congress and its management in the hands of the Park Service in Washington.  HABS records include the following elements, the mix of which varies from building to building.  Data Sheets include written descriptions and histories of buildings.  Photographs are mostly large-format black and white and can include interiors and exteriors and details.  Measured Drawings, the most labor-intensive element, are generally exquisite and highly detailed productions that record floor plans, elevations, interiors, and sometimes analytical renderings of complex components of a building, such as machinery or its evolution.

            For our book Data Sheets on specific country houses often contained vital information, and references to them can be found in significant numbers in the notes.  Examples include Port Royal, long gone but recorded by HABS prior to its demolition, one of the most valuable aspects of HABS, and The Cliffs, destroyed by fire and so surviving only in its HABS survey.  John Bartram’s House and Garden was extensively researched and recorded by HALS, and its Data Sheets consist of publishable quality reports on Bartram, his plants, and his property.  HABS Drawings were even more valuable to the book as they formed the basis for our discussion of plan (one of the most important aspects of architecture) and were often published as they are in the Library of Congress or were the foundation for re-drawings that we published.  Three original HABS plans appear in the book, as do eight other plans re-drawn after HABS plans.  HABS     Photos were used even more extensively, as sixteen were reproduced in the book.

            In short, The Philadelphia Country House could not have been written, or at the least it would have been significantly impoverished, were it not for the National Park Service and especially its HABS branch.  On a technical level, the fact that all HABS material is available on-line and copyright free made authors’ and publisher’s work easier, and HABS images are uniformly of a high quality.  Should the occasion arise, all historians of the American built environment should search the HABS archive and consider using well-researched National Park Service sites when constructing their projects.

Mark Reinberger is a professor of architecture at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Utility and Beauty: Robert Wellford and Composition Ornament in America in addition to his latest book, The Philadelphia Country House: Architecture and Landscape in Colonial America.