NEW HAVEN – Every building in this city has a builder, and each builder has a unique life story. Knowing these stories, says Susan Godshall, is the starting point for understanding “part of our built heritage”.
The book includes biographies of 23 architects who built homes, commercial and academic buildings, monuments, and other structures in the city between 1810 and 1930, with full-color illustrations and maps of the 55 buildings featured in the book .
Godshall, a longtime city resident who is involved with the NHPT, said she stumbled upon the builders’ life stories while looking at an inventory of historical resources on different properties for the conservation trust.
She said the book started out as 28 pages, with one page for each builder, but “the deeper we got, the more we realized these builders had life stories,” she said. “They have families, they have citizenship.”
Thanks to a state grant, the NHPT was able to print 900 copies of the 200-page book for free and publish it for free access online.
“I’m very proud of that,” Godshall said. “I’ve never written a book before and never thought this would be a work. It’s comforting that you sprinkle them all over the city.”
Goldshall said two builders impressed her: William Lanson and Alice Washburn.
Ranson, a free black man, immigrated to New Haven around 1803 and was hired to extend Long Pier 1,325 feet into the shipping channel, which at the time was the longest in the United States, according to the book. He was one of New Haven’s most prominent black governors, also known as “The King of Africa.”
“The stone that he put there in 1810 is still there today,” Godshall said. “If you go out at low tide you can see them and they still support the whole of Long Wharf 212 years later.”
Washburn is the only woman among the 23 builders in the book. According to the book, the self-taught architect and builder designed nearly 90 houses in New Haven, Hamden and Cheshire. These include 30 Alston Ave, 86 Elmwood Road and 11 Alden Ave. All of this in the Westville community.
Washburn was known for closely overseeing every detail of the crew’s construction process, “which was very unusual for a woman at the time,” Godshall said.
“If you live in Alice Washburn’s house and you move and sell it, that’s a great selling point,” she said. “They’re still very desirable homes.”
Co-author Jack Tripp, a senior at Yale University, spearheaded the research process, devoting approximately 200 hours. That involved sourcing undigitized information from the New Haven Museum, New Haven Free Public Library, academic libraries, scrapbooks and city catalogs, he said.
The staff at the New Haven Museum “helped me find any book I was looking for and gave me tips when I couldn’t find what I was looking for,” Tripp said. “I’m using microfilm for the first time because we’re not used to that kind of stuff now, but museums actually have a lot of microfilm.”
Tripp’s favorite part of his research was discovering that these 23 builders were not autonomous, but interacted with each other and participated in public affairs.
“You can really see how these people are part of the same community,” he said. “They would work together on different projects, and then they would serve together in many different civic organizations,” including at the local, state and national levels.
As for the older buildings in the city, Godshall said the purpose of the book is to let people know that these buildings were built with “heart and soul”.
“It’s the starting point of looking around and saying, ‘That’s an interesting building, and I wonder who built it, who it was built for, and how it’s lasted so long,'” she said. “Awaken people’s curiosity.”
Asked if there were any projects planned to capture the stories of builders from different times, Godshall said there were none at this time. But if anything, she said it had to be a different approach because architecture and style “changed dramatically” after World War II and the Great Depression.
NHFPL will host a reading with Godshall and Tripp at the Ives Main Library on January 26th from 6pm to 7pm.
