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

Abstract

Whitney Martinko's Historic Real Estate explores the intersection of multiple historiographic trends for the early republic, among them analysis of market revolution ambivalence, charting of the slow disentangling of “public” and “private,” examination of material culture, consideration of the built environment, and illuminating collective memory. Americans contested what to do with old buildings and landmarks—or whether to do away with them. Martinko examines these struggles over the difference between how, for a given site, Americans weighed its social value against its market value. Those differences could become complicated. From the 1780s, Martinko argues, promotion was more often linked to preservation, as an acceptable way to tout a property's attractiveness. However, by the late 1820s, attitudes toward such sites became more politicized. As an example, Martinko offers the Carpenters' Company, which, in 1829, kept Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, the first building where the Continental Congress met. The author notes that the company could be praised for maintaining the location, however, upkeep funding was raised by renting space in the building to an auctioneer—perhaps the personification of a crass market economy. Jacksonians, pressing for a morally regulated economy, could then turn their opprobrium toward what they portrayed as the snooty proprietors of private sites who surrendered to market pressures to tear down or sell houses that were architecturally or historically significant. By these standards, the owners of estates such as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello or Henry Clay's Ashland were saddled by the costs of upkeep and loss of privacy if they kept their properties intact but were excoriated when they tried to modify or sell such sites of public significance—even though neither states nor the federal government were willing to step in.