Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States by Whitney Martinko

Abstract

Reviewed by: Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States by Whitney Martinko Richard Longstreth Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States. By Whitney Martinko. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. x, 291. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5209-5.) Over the last quarter century, historic preservation has emerged as a major phenomenon in the reshaping of communities in the United States, but only much more recently has it begun to emerge as a significant factor in American intellectual thought—that is, how attitudes toward the physical past relate to a sense of identity and culture. The pioneering, and still very useful, volumes on the history of preservation in the United States written by Charles B. Hosmer Jr. are more a documentary narrative than an analytical exploration. Beginning with the remarkable studies of David Lowenthal, subsequent scholarship has begun to depart from examining preservation in a vacuum and to address its broader implications. As a result, we can begin to see how preservation entails much more than the documentary, legal, organizational, and technical frameworks established for protecting, repairing, or restoring historic buildings, structures, and landscapes. Preservation is a multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory, outlook toward how we retain things from the past that we consider significant through tangible or intangible means. Whitney Martinko's Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States is an important addition to this growing corpus of scholarly investigations. Hosmer's first book drove home the [End Page 330] fact that preservation efforts in the United States, far from being a new phenomenon, began well before the Civil War and generated a rich array of endeavors by the early twentieth century. Martinko reveals that veneration of colonial architecture was widespread by the 1820s, and active measures to protect portions of ancient Native earthworks in the Ohio River Valley were taken well before the early republic. Preservation, as she presents it, did not simply entail rescuing threatened vestiges of the past, as in the well-known case of George Washington's headquarters at Newburgh, New York, where efforts began in 1838 and were successfully consummated in 1850. Preservation could also mean keeping a country estate intact and in the family. While rebuilding the main house in a more modern vein, preservation could also entail saving fragments and undertaking visual documentation, including images in publications. While we would like to think that we are far more accomplished at saving historic properties today than two centuries ago, Martinko's investigation shows how contemporary some of the attitudes in the early republic seem today. The Native earthworks were partially saved to enhance the appeal to attract settlers to the Ohio Company's real estate venture in what became Marietta, Ohio. Some merchants in the Northeast sought to capitalize on their "ancient" buildings as preferable to the new commercial buildings of the 1830s and 1840s (p. 22). Many persons sympathetic to the past assumed a moral high ground, insisting that the most financially lucrative development was not necessarily the optimal one. Others sought to adapt old buildings as a means of remaining economically competitive. Martinko presents the many aspects of considering the historic built environment between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries in such a clear, thoughtful, and often engaging way that it can be easy for readers to lose sight of what a formidable endeavor this study represents. Some of the work discussed is well known to specialists in the history of preservation, but much of it lies in previously unexplored territory, and even finding the material was no mean feat. The result is not only a very rich investigation but also a revelatory framework for understanding how Americans have considered their physical heritage. Richard Longstreth George Washington University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association