Why would some people willingly spend decades — and hundreds of thousands of dollars — renovating houses they will never own? For a small but growing number of so-called resident curators living in old and cherished state-owned houses up and down the East Coast, the answers include the pleasure of bringing an abandoned landmark back to life, freedom from mortgage payments and the chance to live in the kind of home that would otherwise be out of reach.
“We’re people of modest means,” said Darrold Endres, a nursing home administrator who has been living in and restoring an 1860 farmhouse near Boston with his family for 12 years. “We could not afford to live in an incredible spot like this, in a town with wonderful public schools for the girls, if not for the curatorship program.”
Programs like the one in Massachusetts have come about because many state governments own more houses of historical interest houses than they can afford to maintain, mainly on farms acquired decades ago and converted to parkland. In recent years a few states have begun turning these properties over to live-in curators, who take on restoration responsibilities in lieu of paying rent or taxes.
Now more states are looking to resident curator programs as a way to hold onto history, especially since a more familiar approach — opening historic houses to the public as museums — is on the wane, mostly because of a decline in visitors.
The houses mostly date to the 19th Century, and have often sat vacant for years in remote forested areas; their tenants — typically married couples — often perform much of the renovation themselves. Many have professional experience in construction as well as “creative skills that are especially good for dealing with the finer details in the house,” said Kevin M. Allen, who oversees the 28 properties in the Massachusetts Historic Curatorship Program, founded in 1994.
Maryland started the first network of 40 house curatorships in 1982, and Delaware began its program, with three properties, in 2004. In the last year, Vermont has offered the first three of what it expects will be several houses, and Pennsylvania parks officials are meeting next month to discuss the establishment of the park system’s first curatorship, in an 18th-Century farmhouse outside Philadelphia.
As part of the arduous application process, potential resident curators are asked to submit detailed restoration plans and budgets (usually at least $150,000), and to sign long leases (in Massachusetts, typically for 25 years, with options to renew; in Maryland and Delaware, for the life of the leaseholder). A state inspector visits each site at least once a year to monitor the work — exteriors have to be brought back to their historic look, and vintage interior features cannot be drastically altered — and the projects can last many years.
The resident curator system appeals to some preservationists as an alternative to selling properties off, or to maintaining them as museums at a time of “low visitorship, no endowments and aging board members,” said Donna Ann Harris, the author of the recent book “New Solutions for House Museums” (AltaMira Press). Resident curator arrangements, she said, “are an option that would serve these institutions well, in a business situation that’s pretty grim.”
For the curators themselves, though, the attraction is more basic.
Echoes of farm life in Maryland
Gale Johnson is a bridal shop owner turned interior decorator and self-described perfectionist, and her husband, T.J., is a retired Air Force flight engineer turned historic preservation projects manager specializing in federal buildings. They’re both highly focused on keeping chaos at bay, or trying to.
Almost all of the 16 rooms at their 1815 farmhouse in Annapolis, Md., are serene: The fringed valances swoop just so and the crystal chandeliers, inlaid wood furniture and gilt picture frames glisten dust-free. But in several rooms on the ground floor, the temporary ceilings are lumpy gray plastic and the shattered brick walls are smeared with cement.
“We’ve tried to finish, completely finish, a room at a time, and that sense of accomplishment has kept us plugging away,” said Gale Johnson, 58. When they took on the resident curatorship of the house in 1991, she said, “we figured we’d be done in two years,” adding, “We didn’t realize how bad things really were.”
T.J. Johnson, 59, discovered the gabled brick house while serving as a preservation consultant to the state’s resident curatorship program. “I evaluated about 40 houses statewide, to see if they were suitable for curatorships, and a dozen of them were really just too far gone,” he said. The Annapolis farmhouse they live in had been abandoned in the 1940s, when the surrounding coastal property, now 786 acres, became Sandy Point State Park.
Johnson persuaded his wife to look past the decay — vines were growing through the roof and raccoons had chewed the window frames — to the backyard views of Chesapeake Bay, miles of steel suspension bridge and a red-brick lighthouse.
The farmhouse had no heat or functioning shower when the Johnsons moved there from their tidy 1970s Cape Cod in Columbia, Md. “We basically camped out in one room for two years, with everything but our bed in storage,” Johnson said. They estimated that restoration would cost $285,000, but have so far spent $400,000. Johnson rebuilt almost everything himself.
“This place is fancier now than it ever was — it was a very simple farmhouse,” Gale Johnson said.
At home in a tavern
No one but Richard and Hedy Stewart and their daughter Hattie applied to live in the 1820s Buck Tavern in Bear, Del., just southwest of Wilmington, when the state called for curators three years ago. The gabled brick building’s boarded-up windows and missing interior walls may have scared away everyone else. But Richard Stewart, 58, who runs a building restoration company in Dayton, Md., could tell that the tavern’s problems were more aesthetic than structural.
Hedy Stewart, 56, a retired insurance executive, was skeptical. “There was stuff growing on the tavern floor, and moving around, too,” she said. “And I’m still scared to go down to the basement.”
But she fell for the charming arched dormers, the winding staircase and the location, on the edge of a 200-acre lake in Lums Pond State Park.
Hedy Stewart is an avid family genealogist and practitioner of traditional crafts: she quilts, braids rugs and weaves baskets.
Hattie, 27, the youngest of the couple’s four children, is a legal secretary who is learning her mother’s skills.
