Spring 1988

The Baum-Taft House: AHistoriography

The Baum-Taft House

Jaync Merkel

The Taft Museum seems to be a perfectlyrestored residence from the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, but it is, in fact, a building that has been enlarged,altered, restored, and redefined over a period of 150 years toserve a series of residential and institutional purposes. Simi-larly the history of the Baum-Taft house—or any version ofit—seems to describe something fixed and certain, but thestudy of its history reveals a series of assertions, assumptions,stories, and myths uncovered or invented to explain thebuilding that the authors saw or thought they saw. Thehistoriography of the Baum-Taft residence reveals as muchabout the writing of architectural history and commentaryin the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the fabric of thehouse does about the building practices during that time.1

No original drawings or plans of the house

exist, and early documentary evidence is fragmentary. Thefirst statements made about the house in print, from the183 o's, mention the building itself only in passing. Not untilthe beginning of the twentieth century did historians men-tion its architecture. Soon after that interest centered on thearchitect who designed it, even though today it appearslikely that the original house was the work of a carpenter-builder and that a number of architects, decorators, crafts-men, and other professionals were involved in its design,remodeling, additions, and renovation over the years.

The entry on the Baum-Taft house in G.E.Kidder Smith's The Architecture of the United States, one of themost reputable guides to American architecture, typifies thecommentary made during most of this century:The Taft Museum was built as the residence of Martin Baum,

Jayne Merkel is an art historianwho works as architecturecritic of the Cincinnati Enquirerand WGUC. She also writesregularly for Art in America,Inland Architect, and Artforum.

Front (west) elevation of theBaum-Taft house (TaftMuseum), Cincinnati, Ohio.Photo by Jeff Friedman, Cin-cinnati, Ohio. The Baum-Tafthouse is one of the finest exam-ples of Federal architecture inthe state of Ohio.

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with James Hoban of Washington fame thought by some to be itsarchitect or at least a consultant. The house also recalls Jeffersonianprinciples of proportion. (Some attribute the house to Latrobe butthis is not borne out by Hamlin.)... Its architectural ambitionsattain elegance, with two-story central block and lower wings ateither side, and an unusual play of oval lights in the central section.A positively scaled, well-projected Tuscan portico marks the entry,giving a Greek Revival touch to the Federal Style building. Theentire house is of white-painted wood.2

Like most of the people who studied andwrote about the house, Kidder Smith did not base his attri-bution on visual evidence or connect it with his own descrip-tion. When the facade of the Taft Museum is compared toHoban's most famous work, the White House in Washing-ton, it is obvious that the two buildings could not have beendesigned by the same architect. They are both white houseswith flanking wings and classical colonnades but the resem-blance stops there. The roof lines, the window frames, thematerials, the scale, the degree of detail—the whole approachto the classical vocabulary—is radically different. But thosedifferences were not noted in the literature on the housewhich showed little interest in the building fabric of thehouse, what it looked like, how it was made, how it worked,and how it evolved over time.

The research on the house that has been doneover the years concentrates mainly on the builders as well as

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inhabitants and consists almost entirely of literary evidence:letters, deeds, articles, papers, and word of mouth. Hardlyanyone actually looked at the building or studied old maps,drawings, and photographs. Most of the researchers werenot art or architectural historians by training, but even thosewho were did not conduct a thorough visual analysis—researchwith a crow bar, literally digging into the walls and under thefloors — that Richard Cote, Curator of the White House ofthe Confederacy, and other scholars have been doing recent-ly on historic houses in Virginia.

Also, most of the people who worked on theBaum-Taft house in the past did not list their sources. Somedid not even include footnotes or bibliographies so theirstatements, dates, and attributions cannot be substantiated.When the same date appears again and again, it is impossibleto determine whether it was repeated because the authorfound it in a book or article or if he came to the sameconclusion on his own. Although much of the existingresearch has limited usefulness for further inquiry, it showswhat the house has meant to previous generations, enrichesthe lore of local history, and demonstrates the complexityinvolved in gathering information about even a well-preserved,existing structure.

The first document that pertains, even periph-erally, to the Baum-Taft house is the earliest map of the cityin the collection of The Cincinnati Historical Society: Israel

Illustration of the front (west) ing and the 1857 lithograph onelevation of the Baum-Taft page two of this publication.house (TaftMuseum) publishedin Harper's Weekly, July, 1858.Please note the architecturaldifferences between this draw-

Spring 1988

Ludlow's Plan of the Town of Cincinnati in 1802, which ishand-drawn in ink. Since it does not take in the area wherethe house is located, it provides only a kind of negativeevidence. It suggests that the area east of the public landingand Fort Washington had not yet been platted and developed.

On September 1, 1812, Martin Baum pur-chased the site of the Taft Museum from Daniel Symmes,and the transfer of the land is on file in the Hamilton CountyCourthouse.3 Baum had come to Cincinnati during themid-1790's. Marilyn Ott, a former Taft Museum docent,found his name in the church records of the First Presbyteri-an Church of Cincinnati as early as June 11, 1794, and in thebirth and baptismal registry of the Salem Reformed Church(now the United Church of Christ) in Hagerstown, Mary-land, where Baum was born on June 15, 1765.4 Othersources, such as H.A. Ratterman's Der Deutsche Pionier of1 878s and a 1954 Literary Club paper, "Benjamin Latrobe,Was he the Architect (?) of the Taft Museum," by librarianCarl Vitz6 maintain that Baum was born in Hagenau, Alsace,Germany. The City Directory of 182 5 lists his place of birth asPennsylvania.

When Baum arrived, Cincinnati was a villageof 500 with ninety-four cabins and ten frame houses. Hebuilt a two-story frame structure across the street fromYeatman's Tavern (the center of the city's social, political,and economic life at the time) on the northwest corner ofFront and Sycamore streets, opened a general store, andsoon became one of the city's wealthiest citizens. In 1804 hemarried Ann Sommerville Wallace and eventually becamethe brother-in-law of several prominent early citizens such asJudge Jacob Burnet, Nehemiah Wade, Samuel Perry, andMatthew Wallace, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church.After his marriage, he built a brick residence next to the storeat Front and Sycamore streets. He expanded his businessinterests, becoming a partner in as many as seven separatefirms including Cincinnati's first sugar refinery, the first ironfoundry in the West, and the first steam mill where flour,wool, cotton, and whiskey were made. In 1 803 he helpedform the Miami Exporting Company "to try to developfacilities for shipping goods," briefly became involved withcanal building and steamboats, and then turned to banking.The Miami Exporting Company became the first bank inthe West. Baum was its first president, and when the UnitedStates Bank opened a branch in Cincinnati in 1817, hebecame a director. He was also involved with the first sub-scription library, the Lancastrian School, Cincinnati Col-lege, the Western Museum, the Cincinnati Literary Society,the Gesangverein, and the Apollonian Society. Active in the

The Baum-Taft House 3 5

Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Manufacturing,and the Domestic Economy he served as a trustee of theSelect Council of the corporation of the city but declined anoffer to represent the district in the United States Congress.7

Visual evidence exists to support Baum's acqui-sition of the land where the Taft Museum is located. Itsuggests that if not by 1812, then by 181 5, the city hadgrown to encompass the site. A Plan of Cincinnati, IncludingAll the Later Additions and Subdivisions Engraved for DanielDrake's Statistical View of 1 815, in the collection of TheCincinnati Historical Society, extends about five blocks eastof Broadway along the river. The land in the newly incorpo-rated eastern area is subdivided, and a big green space appearson the side of the eventual site of the Baum-Taft house,located between Symmes and Congress (later Fourth andThird) streets east of Pike Street. And, in the memoirs ofJohn Hough James, who lived in Cincinnati from 181 3 to1826, there is a reference to a garden planted for Baum onthe west side of Deer Creek by a gardener named Schnetzsome time around i8i6or 1817.8

On another map of Cincinnati which is nextin a chronological sequence, the Plan of Cincinnati, IncludingAll the late Additions & Subdivisions Engraved for Oliver Earnsworthin 1 819, the green space is not shown. There are no lot linesaround the Baum property. But there is a house in thevicinity, one of the five large and imposing ones in the citythat were illustrated on the map. It is probably the WilliamLytle house which stood in what is now Lytle Park.

Documents from the next year indicate that ahouse was under construction on the Baum property. Therewas a financial "panic" in 1820 when the Cincinnati Branchof the U.S. Bank sent some notes to Washington that hadbeen issued against land and other collateral, and the centralU.S. Bank sent them back. A number of Cincinnati's mostprominent citizens lost their fortunes and their houses in theeconomic destabilization that followed. Martin Baum wasone of them.9

Evidence of Baum's difficulties is recorded inthe papers of William Lytle at The Cincinnati HistoricalSociety. They contain an undated list of twenty properties,which Baum offered to sell him with the owner's estimatesof their value, including:

... Three lots and the house where I live 8000.00(presumably at Pike and Congress streets).. .Nine acresland this side ofT)eerCreek andNew House 30000.00(presumably the Taft Museum)Fifty acres or thereabouts adjoining the above 2 5 000.00

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In a letter of August 22, 1820, Baum offered to sell Lytle hisBroadway property for $ 31,400 and "my Deercreek land,including the new House and all the materials thereon for$ 30,600, or both properties for a total of $62,000." The nextday, in another letter, Lytle made a counter-offer of $62,000for the two properties and seven additional ones whichBaum had valued at $155,733.33. A deal was never struckeven though more letters followed, and in one Baum said,"... I must have $ 1000 or thereabouts in advance becausewithout some money I & my Family must starve."10

They did not starve, and in 1825 they appearto have been living in the "new House" (the Baum-Tafthouse). They are listed in the City Directory as residing atPike and Symmes (Fourth) streets, instead of Pike andCongress as before, and there are several references to partiesgiven by Baum in the house. Henry Howe notes: "Hishospitable home was open to all intellectually great menwho visited Cincinnati, and German literary men wereespecially welcome."11 Charles Frederick Goss refers to agarden party in the house during the summer of 1 82 5 }2 Anaccount written after Mrs. Baum's death in 1864 says: "[itwas] for those days quite a splendid mansion. When it wasfinished he gave a party, which assembled before sunset, andseparated before the present time for assembling parties.There were present a large number of old pioneers (nowresiding with the dead). .. ,"13

Curiously, there is a similar account of a partygiven by the next owner of the house, Nicholas Longworth,during the 1830's.14 The Baum-Taft house seems to havebeen the site of great social events in the city, as it is today,but it did not remain for long in Baum's possession. He and

his wife deeded the house, its land, and other property in thecity, the county, and the state to the Bank of the U.S. onNovember 12, 1825, in payment of a debt to the bank of$50,000 plus court expenses.15 The property is described inthe deed as including about four and one-half acres insteadof the nine Baum had offered to Lytle earlier and is said toinclude the area between Third and Fifth streets, Pike, and astreet laid out at the back of the Baum property, which isnow known as Butler Street.

While the house belonged to the bank, itappears to have been leased to a Mrs. Anne Wood whooperated a "school for young ladies." Charles Greve's Centen-nial History of Cincinnati of 1904 mentions a reference in theCity Directory of 18 29 to "a respectable female school kept byMrs. Wood on Pike between Symmes and Fifth streets;" andan undated interview with Mr. Davis L. James, Sr., of theJames Book Store in the museum archives notes: "The Tafthouse was used as a school for girls by his grandmother, Mrs.Anne Wood, and was known as Belmont House. She occu-pied it for only a short time and then the Longworthsbought it."16

Indeed, Nicholas Longworth, a prominentCincinnati businessman like Baum, purchased the housefrom the Bank of the U.S. on September 10, 1829, for$28,000.17 Contemporary accounts suggest that the housereturned to the kind of existence for which it had been built,but, like those from Baum's time, the accounts reveal moreabout the life within (and outside) the walls than the wallsthemselves. In a "Retrospect of Western Travel," HarrietMartineau described the people she met and the things shesaw in this "splendid house" when she was in America in18 34 and 1835:The proprietor has a passion for gardening, and his ruling tasteseems likely to be a blessing to the city. He employs four gardeners,and toils in his grounds with his own hands. His garden is on aterrace which overlooks the canal [now Eggelston Avenue], and themostparklike eminences form the background of the view. Betweenthe garden and the hills extend his vineyards, from the produce ofwhich he has succeeded in making twelve kinds of wine, some ofwhich are highly praised by good judges. .. .In this house is West'spreposterous picture of Ophelia, the sight of which amazed me afterall I had heard of it. ... The party at this house was the largest andmost elegant of any that I attended in Cincinnati. Among manyother guests we met one of the judges of the Supreme Court, amember of Congress and his lady, two Catholic priests, Judge Hall,the popular writer, with divines, physicians, lawyers, merchants,and their families. The spirit and superiority of the conversationwere worthy of the people assembled.18

The Malta Gray Room, lookingsouthwest, the Baum-Tafthouse, c. 1925 during theresidency of Mr. and Mrs.Charles Phelps Taft. No par-ticular attempt was made totreat the house as a historic

artifact during the occupancyof the Tafts; they lived in it com-fortably, in the style of the day.

Spring 1988

Like other writers from the early years, shedoes not mention the architecture. There are contemporaryreferences to Longworth's philanthropy and to his art col-lection, which accounts for the Robert Duncanson murals,though they are not mentioned either.

The murals do not seem to have been the onlychange Longworth made. The building itself suggests thatsubstantial alterations were made around 1830. The wingsmay even have been added as they are awkwardly attached tothe central block. The windows in the wing and in thecentral block are of different sizes and do not line up. Thewoodwork on the interior has a slightly sharper profile inthe wings than in the central portion and seems to date from1 830-1 840 instead of 1 820-1 830. And some of the base-boards are not aligned with the plinths supporting the doorframes. Longworth had a large family for whom he said hebought the house, so the additions may have been made toaccommodate their needs. However, the same kind of ceil-ing joists appear in the attic over the wings as over the centralblock, and the basic configuration of the house (a tall centralblock with smaller flanking wings) is similar to that of a fewother houses of the period in the area. The wings on the

Baum-Taft house may have been planned from the begin-ning, only executed later. Certainly major interior alter-ations occurred. Hairline cracks in the plaster indicate thatdoorways once led from the main corridor to the Gray andMalta Gray galleries, and the woodwork in the central halland corridor appears to have been rearranged. There areenough inconsistencies in the physical fabric of the housethat we know that it was changed in some way, several times,but there is no written documentary evidence of the alter-ations from the 1 8 30's and 1 840's.19

The Baum-Taft House 3 7

The second half of the nineteenth century,however, produced some visual documentation. A rare hand-colored insurance map in the collection of The CincinnatiHistorical Society, the Martin Insurance Map of 1 8 5 5, depictsthe plan of the house and its outbuildings.20 Since it showsthe house with wings, the wings must have been in placeby this time. Since the house occupies a green space in themiddle of a rather intensely developed area—a different kindof place than Harriet Martineau described—the neighbor-hood must have changed between 1835 and 1855. Andbecause it faces Pike Street, rather than the river as does theKilgour house shown on the next page of the Martin Insur-ance Map, it seems to be a hybrid type—part town house, partcountry house. It has outbuildings, indicated with theRoman numerals XV, which mean "frame sheds, stables orouthouses." The stable is on the southeast corner of the lot,and there are other houses on the property nearby. The.Martin Insurance Map, like its successors published by theSanborn Map Company, is color-coded. Yellow indicatesframe construction; pink indicates brick. Many of the otherfine houses of the time, such as the Kilgour house, theLiterary Club, and the ones near the Taft Museum, werebrick. The Baum-Taft house is inscribed with an eight (VIII),which means "dwellings part brick and part frame," pre-sumably because of the foundation which is stone with somebrick arches and walls. The porch is frame (XV). And thereis a plus sign (+) on the house indicating a shingle roof.Does that mean that the standing seam roof was not originalto the house, or is the reference to shingle a mistake? Mapsof this kind are usually accurate, especially about materials,since they were made for fire insurance purposes.

A rare color lithograph of The Longworth Housein 1857 from "The Memorial of the Golden Wedding ofNicholas Longworth and Susan Longworth, Celebrated inCincinnati on Christmas Eve, 1857" provides the earliestdated image of the Baum-Taft house.21 Since it was madefrom a drawing, the artist may have simplified or altered theactual appearance of the house. No roof is shown over thecentral block, perhaps because it was not visible from theartist's perspective. The entrance door is simply a plainsemi-circular arch, different in both style and character fromthe elaborate Victorian entrance which appears in later pho-tographs and the entrance to the museum today, which isshown in the architects' drawings from the 1930's. This oneis narrower and has no windows around it. How then wasthe entrance hall lighted? Gaslight, which was instituted inthe 1840's, was available by the time this lithograph wasmade; but since some kind of natural lighting would have

W.H. Martin, Map of Cincinnati collection of The Cincinnatifor Insurance Companies and Historical Society. This hand-les/ Estate Agencies Con-taining Every Lot and Housewith Its Number ClassifiedAccording to the ReferenceBelow, 1855, Vol. II, p. 9,

colored insurance map depictsthe Baum-Taft house with itsoriginal outbuildings.

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been required earlier, this was either an alteration of theoriginal entrance or a fabrication of the artist. In the litho-graph, the portico and window sills are painted off-white,and the window entablatures are not bracketed. The stoneand brick arched openings beneath the portico extend to theground, and the stair railings are straight instead of splayedwith plain ironwork evident. The sash windows in the wingshave small nine-over-nine panes. Those in the central blockare larger with six-over-six panes, and thinner than the onesin place today. The grilles over the ground-story windowsare not punctuated with rosettes, and the ones on the ovalwindows in the attic are not shown at all. Clearly a lot ofchanges have been made. As the earliest visual resource, thelithograph was used in the 19 30's as a source of informationfor restoration, which seems to have been based on a generalbut incomplete knowledge of the Federal Style.22

Why was restoration necessary? NicholasLongworth died in 1863, and the house passed to his sonJoseph Longworth who decided not to move in. Some timearound 1866, Francis E. Suire signed a ninety-nine year leaseand began occupation of the residence. Since the Duncansonmurals, commissioned by Longworth, were covered withwallpaper when the next owner took occupancy around1870, it is assumed that the redecorating was done underSuire's tenancy. Around this time, the original wooden man-tels were replaced with elaborate Victorian ones of marbleor hand-carved oak, pine flooring in the major receptionareas was overlaid with parquetry, a large central archedopening was cut into the west wall of the Music Room, theprincipal entrance on the facade was altered, the exteriorstaircases at the ends of the corridor were removed, and baywindows were added to the ends of the house.23

A number of images describing the house inthe late nineteenth century survive. Unfortunately, very fewof them are dated, and some are highly interpretive. A sketchby A.O. Elzner, a prominent Cincinnati architect who, withhis partner, later designed the addition of a dining room forthe Tafts, shows the house in a rather disheveled state,presumably intended to make it appear romantic. The plant-ings on the grounds are overgrown with dying trees anddead branches are strewn among them. A door beneath thebay window on the north elevation seems to be sinking intothe ground. The windows have no shutters (they were in placein the 1857 lithograph), but some of them are covered withstriped awnings which are folded back, half-opened, andpulled down. Two-over-two double hung windows havereplaced the multi-paned windows shown in the earlierrendering, and an elaborate decorative arched entrance with

lights is now in place. The front staircase is hidden behindbushes, and the ironwork is barely visible.

A drawing labeled "Sinton Residence, Cincin-nati" by E.A. Lloyd and dated 1890 presents a somewhatcleaner image, with less prominent chimneys, no awnings,shutters on the windows in the wings, bracketed entabla-tures over those in the central block, and the light fixtures aswell as ornamental fencing that survive today, separating thegrounds from Pike Street. A standing seam roof is clearly inplace in this frontal view, as it is in the Elzner sketch, but theends of the house where the north and south elevations andthe bay windows are located are not visible. However, thewelcoming curved staircase and the depiction of the dooritself is very clear. It has small panels of glass in the lunette,Gothic tracery on the door, and is flanked by arched sidelights. The doorway looks wider and plainer in photographspresumed to have been taken around that time. One of themshows a bedroom wing on the north side, an addition whichwas made in 1890 by David Sinton.

Sinton, another Cincinnati industrialist, pur-chased the house from Joseph Longworth in 1869, accord-ing to historians Goss and Greve, though some sources say1870 or 1 871.24 Sinton lived in the house during the 1 870'sand remained there even after his daughter, Anna, marriedCharles Phelps Taft in 1 87 3 in the Music Room. Sinton diedon August 31, 1900.25 For obvious reasons, the Sinton andTaft reigns run together. The Tafts remained in the houseuntil they died, Charles in 1929 and Anna in 19 3 1, at whichpoint it became a museum. As stipulated in the Tafts' deed ofgift, the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts was created in1927 to administer the museum, and matching funds wereraised by the citizens of Cincinnati during the next year tohelp fund its operation. The museum opened to the publicon November 29, 1932.26

The addition of a series of north bedrooms bySinton was in place by 1 8 91, and probably by the time ofLloyd's drawing, because the residence is clearly shown onthe Insurance Maps of Cincinnati of 1 891 with the bedroomwing.27 In the Atlas of Cincinnati of 1883-1884, the baywindows are shown but the addition is not.28 In some oldnotes in the files of the museum, Louis Belmont was said tobe the architect of the bedroom addition. But he was alsolisted as the architect of the dining room extension, andhe was certainly not since the drawings for that project arein the museum archives.

The dining room was enlarged by the Tafts in191 o by the architects Elzner & Anderson. They had designeda number of innovative early concrete buildings in Cincin-

Spring 1988 The Baum-Taft House

nati including the Ingalls Building at Fourth and Vine streets,the first concrete frame skyscraper in the world; the Ele-phant House at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens; and theAmerican Book Company Building, located next door tothe Taft Museum. They were responsible for a number ofvery handsome Georgian and Greek Revival houses in EastWalnut Hills, Clifton, and Avondale. Elzner & Andersonadded a colonnaded niche, classicizing plaster work, and anextension to the Taft dining room; and they may have addeddecoration to the ceiling of the Music Room as well. TheTafts also commissioned drawings from the firm for a two-story "gallery" to be built onto the north bedroom wingin 1917. Although the plans for the project survive in themuseum archives, they were not realized.

No particular attempt was made to treat thehouse as a historic artifact during the time the Tafts occupiedit. They lived in it comfortably, in the style of the day, ascontemporary photographs illustrate and historians of thetime have noted. The museum archives contain a wholesequence of photographs of the interior including a post-card labeled: "The Taft Residence, 4th and Pike Streets,Cincinnati" made for the "Ohio Valley Industrial Exposi-tion, Cincinnati, Aug. 29 to September 24, 1910." It notonly documents the appearance of the house, but suggeststhat it was invested with special significance at the time.

The historians' statements prove even moreconclusively that during the early twentieth century, thearchitecture of the house was noticed and appreciated. CharlesTheodore Greve described the house in stylistic terms:Later Colonial or rather of a transition period from the square

house without the door porch to the pseudo-classic when the facade

was in evolution before the stucco Greek temple was used to mask an

ordinary two-story dwelling, square windows, balconies and all.... The

main porch or center has grown half a story, lighted by two oval

openings on each side of the facade and the roof has lost some of its

pitch. It has pushed out two low wings on the front line. ... Then the

whole has risen from the ground somewhat, disclosing windows.

The cellar has become a basement. The approach has widened the

force of the door porch, which is led up to by nine stone steps. Two

wooden columns close together on each at the corners support the

pediment which crowns the portico. ...29

Greve was very conscious of the history andevolution of architectural styles, but he oversimplified theprocess that actually takes place over time. His view wasexcessively linear and progressive, and he assumed, as mostlater writers did, that the overall form of the house had beendetermined all at once, though he was aware—and evencritical—of some "alterations:"The door where the character of a house is so strongly told, has

suffered a base "alteration" and no longer holds the half-wheel

A.O. Elzner, Sketch of SintonResidence, c. 1880, Cincinnati,Ohio. Note the introduction ofthe bay window on the northelevation and the Victorianentrance.

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ence, 4U1 am: l'ike Sts., Cincinnati.OHIO • <jCINCINNATI ACO . . . - 10

transoms that once must have been the ornament of the house.30

His judgments were consistent with those ofthe architects for the restoration, but he did not explain howhe arrived at his conclusions. He mentioned the house's"good proportion," noted that it was made of "wood put onsmooth and painted white," and said that "the position anddignity are its best features."31

A few years later, another local historian, theReverend Charles Frederick Goss, discussed the house morepassionately, personally, and romantically, but with a similarregard for its history and for history in general:Down in the choicest part of town in a spot where the bugle notesfrom Ft. Washington would have sounded... stands a house whichas a home always vitally touching the most pregnant historicinterest of the city, connects the past with the present. Over threequarters of a century—well-nigh a century old, this house is perhapsthe most individual, the most symbolic, of the deepest interest andsignificance of any in Cincinnati. ...

There is a broad and cheerful garden in front. ...Alow stone wall with high old-fashioned iron fence. ... Here evenbefore the portal of the place the word "old-fashioned" pleasantlyintrudes. ... There are three sets of great stone gate-posts and youenter the middle one, turning the silver knob of its lock, and walk upthe stone flagging to the stone steps of the portico with its sets ofpillars on either side.32

However, when Goss described the way theTafts lived in the house, he praised them for not beinginhibited by its architecture:

The poetically old-fashioned house is wooden, the boards laid onflat... the front door opens to a comfortable hall carpeted deepred.— The woodwork furnishings of the library are wonderfulblack Flemish oak carvings. Opposite the front door and openinginto a transverse hall is the ballroom, a huge, airy old room with sixgreat windows giving on a porch which overlooks a back garden. ...

The house neither in its architecture, furnishings,nor decoration makes any pretence to any particular style, nor isthere any trace of that wretched thing so incompatible with the senseof home, the trail of the collector. Yet the architecture is predomi-nantly colonial and there is a notable and noted collection ofpictures numbering some seventy-five canvases hanging properlyhere and there upon the walls in all the rooms. ...

There is a sense of great wealth spent lavishly butquietly for comfort and beauty. There is perfect harmony. A nd thereis in it that best quality of all in human life or art, suggestion. Onethinks not only of all the lovely and rare things that stand beforeone's eyes now, pictures and frail vases which will so far outlast theliving eyes beholding them, but the quiet beautiful old home calls tomind vanished days when former owners lived there,...33

Similar thinking must have influenced theTafts' decision to convert their house and collection to amuseum. One of the reasons that the house "called to mindvanished days" was that its site remained bucolic long afterthe entire rest of the downtown basin was intensely developed,as illustrated by a large drawing, a Panorama of Cincinnatiby J.L. Trout from 1901, in the collection of The CincinnatiHistorical Society. In the panorama, prepared when the

Postcard of The Taft Residence,4th and Pike Streets, Cincinnati,for the "Ohio Valley IndustrialExposition, Cincinnati, August29-September 24, 1910." Thispostcard not only documentsthe appearance of the house,

but suggests that it was in-vested with special significanceat the time.

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downtown area was being transformed from a compactmixed-use nineteenth century city with houses, markets,churches, factories, offices, and business houses intermingledwith one another into a purely commercial center with talloffice buildings and stores, the Baum-Taft house and itsimmediate neighbors occupy a verdant oasis. Two years later,the houses on either side were demolished and factorieswere built next door. But the interest in history was moti-vated by more than nostalgia. The writers of the time weretrying to demonstrate the value of previous cultural achieve-ments. One of the ways they did so (perhaps not completelyintentionally) was by producing pedigrees for works of artand architecture.

In 1908 Montgomery Schuyler, the most in-fluential architecture critic of the day and one of the firstto appreciate American architecture, wrote in the Archi-tectural Record:

... there is at least one piece of evidence that in theCincinnati of 1827 there was a refinement incompatible withthe notion that the "Domestic Manners" which the English critic[Mrs. Trollope] depicted were all-pervading... the house whichMartin Baum built in Cincinnati in 1817, and for which hewas well inspired to choose for his architect Benjamin H. Latrobe,then fulfilling the last year of his service as architect of the Capitolat Washington. It is quite unmistakenly Latrobe}s, to those whoknow the work that he was doing in Baltimore and elsewhere inthose years, and who remember his insistence, in design as well asin words, upon "simplicity" as the first of architectural qualities.... It was this preference that induced him to revert from the Renais-sance to the models of classical Athenian antiquity as soon as hewas able to do so, and long before any other American architect

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The Baum-Taft House 41

had done so. ... The Baum house exemplifies this preference. It hasthe air... of a country seat, rather than of a town house, recallingthe "seats" of the Virginia and Maryland magnates of its periodin its lateral extension and in its vertical restriction, as well asin the amplitude of its grounds. ... The reduction of the portico toa porch shows a willingness to sacrifice to practicality, of which theresults are architecturally rather unfortunate. A tetrastyle "order"seems to be indicated, or if not that, a distyle of much less attenu-ated columns, even with pedestals, if necessary to bring them intoclassical proportions. On the other hand, the sacrifice of classicalityto practicality in the attic of the central block, apparently requiredfor servants' quarters or other subordinate uses and lighted from itsown "ox-eyes," ignoring the requirement of some dividing memberbetween it and its substructure, is architecturally effective, waivingconvention and precedent, which Latrobe always took a pleasure inwaiving, provided there was anything to be gained by a waiver.The central block is signalized, the "composition" is attained. Itis only a pity that the porch should be so excrescential.34

Schuyler was not the first to attribute thehouse to Latrobe. As early as 1887, an anonymous editorlabeled a picture of it in the Inland Architect and News Record:"Old colonial residence, Cincinnati, O.; Benjamin HenryLatrobe, architect."35 But because of his reputation, Schuyler'sopinions were echoed by a host of other writers. The Baum-Taft house was attributed to Latrobe in Thieme-Becker's arthistorical dictionary and by the art historian Fiske Kimball;and even though Kimball worded his attribution carefullyand refuted it later, it lived on in the literature. In 1919Kimball wrote:... there are in Ohio, in Michigan, and elsewhere beyond theAlleghenies, many most interesting houses in which the traditionsof the Colonial style and of the classical revival were continueddown to the Civil War. Notable among these is the old MartinBaum house in Cincinnati, now lovingly preserved, in spite of theencroachments of industry, as the residence of Mr. Charles P.Taft. ... The house itself with its smooth wall surfaces, its slender,dignified columns, its delicate cornices and window caps, hassuffered but little in its century of existence. The original doorway,to be sure, was replaced by one of Victorian pattern, and the lampswith their heavy pedestals mere additions of the period. ...

Always admired, the house attracted the attentionof the late Montgomery Schuyler, a leader in the study of A mericanarchitecture, who ascribed the authorship of its design to BenjaminLatrobe... the most highly trained and gifted architect of his day inAmerica. The attribution is indeed a tempting one, especially asLatrobe was in Pittsburgh from 1811 to 1 814, and is reported byhis son to have furnished designs for several houses along the Ohio.Although no preserved examples of domestic buildings surely designed

E. Robinson and R.H. Pidgeon,Civil and Topographical Engi-neers Atlas of the City ofCincinnati, Ohio from OfficialRecords and Actual Surveys,1883-1884, PI. 4, collection ofThe Cincinnati Historical

Society. By comparing variousfire insurance maps, we knowthat the bay windows on thenorth and south elevationswere in place by 1883-1884.

42

by him, which might serve as reliable terms of comparison, havebeen identified, there is a certain affinity in the window treatmentand other features of the Cincinnati house with details in some ofLatrobe }s public buildings.36

This is a much more cautious and non-committal attribution than Schuyler's, but it was repeatedcarelessly even after Kimball changed his mind. As late as1970, in Early Homes of Ohio, I.T. Frary wrote: "Local tradi-tion names as the architect James Hoban, who designed theWhite House at Washington, but... better grounds exist forattributing it to Benjamin Henry Latrobe."37 Kimball's even-tual reservations were not widely known, but even thosewho were aware of them did not always acknowledge them.In a June 14, 1940, letter to Miss Margaret Kremers at theTaft Museum Kimball said:You have tracked down one of my youthful hypotheses, one of thevery few I ever advanced without a definite documentary basis. Iknew that Latrobe had been in Pittsburgh about 1813 -17... thathe had designed Ashland for Henry Clay and a house in Newport,Kentucky and this led me to venture the idea that the MartinBaum (Taft) house might be by him. But when Walter Siple wasrestoring the Taft house, he wrote me, sending me what informa-tion he had, and I answered him then that I had abandoned anybelief that Latrobe was concerned.38

However, in a brochure published by the TaftMuseum soon after it opened, Siple (who was also director ofthe Cincinnati Art Museum) said: "The name of BenjaminHenry Latrobe, designer of the White House porticos, hasbeen associated with the Taft residence by both MontgomerySchuyler and Fiske Kimball"39 and went on to quote theearlier attribution. Of course, he may not have receivedKimball's disclaimer when the brochure went to press, andhe did say that "it has not been possible to establish thisattribution."40 But then he reprinted a passage from theJournal of Latrobe, which supported it:While at Pittsburgh, he designed several private buildings thatwere erected there or in the immediate vicinity. Also for other places.Among these last were the residences of Henry Clay at Lexingtonand Governor Taylor at Newport.41

Those houses were later destroyed by fire andwere not available for comparison, as Siple noted, but he didnot compare the Baum-Taft house with any of the docu-mented existing Latrobe buildings that were available, suchas the Thomas Worthington house, "Adena," in nearbyChillicothe, Ohio.

Siple's brochure is most useful for its descrip-tion of the methodology used during the restoration. Thebuilding was both "restored" and converted to a museum:

Queen City Heritage

two tasks which are somewhat incompatible, though no oneseems to have sensed so at the time. The architects wereGarber & Woodward of Cincinnati who had worked withCass Gilbert of New York on the Union Central Building,with John Russell Pope on the Cincinnati Gas & ElectricCompany Building, and who had designed the CincinnatiClub; the Dixie Terminal Building; and Withrow, WalnutHills, and Western Hills high schools. Garber's son, Woodie,a student at Cornell University at the time and later aprominent local modern architect, assisted on the project.He wrote a thorough paper on the effort which supplementsSiple's brochure and derives from the same point of viewwhich was very typical of the time.

The Taft restoration began in 1929 at almostexactly the same moment as the restoration of ColonialWilliamsburg. Although until recently historians of archi-tecture have tended to think of that time as the beginning ofthe era of modern architecture, or at least as the heyday ofArt Deco, it was also a period of enthusiastic classical revival,as Garber & Woodward's buildings attest. Since Americanarchitects of the 1920's and 1930's were trained in thetradition of the French Beaux Arts, they studied architectur-al .history, but it was a very selective history, romantic incharacter, and weak in its understanding of American work.Yet architects were becoming interested in Americana.Although Garber & Woodward's earlier commercial build-ings had been based on Italian Renaissance or Greco-Romanprototypes, Withrow High School drew its inspiration fromthe Georgian Colonial, and Walnut Hills was a tribute toJefferson, representing a free and eclectic cross between theUniversity of Virginia and Monticello.

Historians of the period were romantic, too.At Williamsburg they painted a pretty picture of life ineighteenth century America with everything clean and spar-kling, no animal smells or slaves' quarters; and all the build-ings were restored—as well as they could be in 1929—to thesame moment in time. (They have subsequently been alteredas new information was accumulated.) The 1988 view of aliving, changing, messy, confusing, overlapping history wassimply not in vogue at the time.

Attempts were made to be accurate but manyof the examination techniques available today were notknown. Siple explained: "In two rooms and the hall wefound traces of the original tinting of the walls—powderblue, lemon yellow, grey green. Here these colors have beenused," in other rooms, "colors popular in the 1820's—grey,violet, and light blue."42 He noted: "With the exception ofthe mantels and chair rails, all of the original woodwork has

Spring 1988 The Baum-Taft House

remained intact."43 He assumed that if it was there, it wasoriginal. Charles Brownell and Richard Cote, two of thescholars who came to Cincinnati for a symposium in June1987, found woodwork from four or five different periodsand noticed inconsistencies in its use. They noticed peculiarjunctures between mouldings as well as other irregularitiesproving that the house must have changed over time. But inthe early 1930's, the "authorities" assumed it was from oneor two building periods, and they took—or mistook—what-ever they found for "original."

The restorers also felt free to add new ele-ments that resembled the "original" ones they found. Theyremoved the Victorian mantels because they did not see theVictorian era as part of the house's "history," and they put in"new" ones salvaged or taken from other early nineteenthcentury houses or designed to "match" existing trim. Noneof the mantels in the house today are original. Even moreshocking by modern standards, they added new museum

casework in the Federal Style. In the 1980's it is standardpractice to insert display cases which are obviously modernso that no one is given the impression that they were part ofthe original building. The U.S. Department of Interior'sStandards require rehabilitators to do so, even on commer-cial buildings, whenever historic preservation tax incentivesare used. But in the early 1930's, it was thought moreappropriate to make the cabinetry "fit in" in order to createthe illusion of an early nineteenth century house.

The Baum-Taft house restoration was by nomeans an unsophisticated one for its time. The architectsand administrators made a serious attempt to be accurate,and they published information about the effort, explainingwhat was new and what was old and why they had made thedecisions they did. The brochure is especially valuable nowsince all of the paint samples and most of the other docu-mentary materials were lost when a garage in which theywere stored suffered a massive leak. The brochure explains:

Portico, the Baum-Taft House(TaftMuseum), c. 1900, collec-tion of The Cincinnati HistoricalSociety. This elaborate Vic-torian entrance and the laterlight fixtures were removed in1931 during the conversion ofthe house to a museum.

44

An effort was made to restore the interior as nearly as possible to itsoriginal condition. A careful inspection of the woodwork provedthat the original color was a pure white. ...In addition to the colorsdiscussed above, wall paper borders of the first quarter of thenineteenth century have been used in several rooms. The dressing ofthe windows was based on plates from Mcubles et Objets de Goutpublished from 1819 to 1820. The overdraperies are, with theexception of those in the offices, of materials dating from approxi-mately 1820. We know from advertisements in the early papersand directories that wealthy people of Cincinnati were buyingmany things manufactured in France and England, and theywere in contact with such fashionable centers as Philadelphiaand Alexandria. .. .44

Our idea with regard to the installation was toprovide a dignified background for the Toft collections—this back-ground to reflect the feeling of a home of the first quarter of thenineteenth century. ... We were fortunate in obtaining severalpieces of furniture from the workshop of Duncan Phyfe which wereformerly in the Louis Guerineau Myers collection. These have beensupplemented by old chairs which harmonize with the DuncanPhyfe style and provide visitors with seating accommodations whichdo not destroy the spirit of the rooms. ...45

Even though there was general agreement onthis approach, there was one area where the architects andthe director did not see eye-to-eye. That was on the preserva-tion of the Duncanson murals. Siple, being an art historian,decided to restore them. The architects who were primarilyconcerned with the restoration of the house wanted to havethem removed and replaced with wall coverings typical ofthe 1820's. Siple's position was less consistent, but it wasmore in keeping with museum philosophy and later restora-tion policy.

In the brochure Siple touches on some of theproblems of converting the building to a museum butdoes not mention some of the ones that created the mostdramatic changes, such as the new visitors' entry on thenorth elevation and the staircase to the second floor whichradically alters the impression one would have received inthe nineteenth century. Architects' drawings in the museumarchives show that they labored over the design for theentrance, perhaps in an attempt to distinguish the newpublic entrance from the original private one facing PikeStreet while preserving the illusion of an historic house.They produced three schemes before one was finally approved.Even so, the final scheme, like the new Pike Street entrance,which Garber & Woodward also designed, resembles stockneo-Federal details of the period. These insertions havenone of the rough quirky charm of the original woodwork,

Queen City Heritage

a, b, and c. Garber & WoodwardArchitects, Three RevisedPlans for North Entrance toBaum-Tafthouse (TaftMuseum), 1931, Cincinnati,Ohio. The architects producedthree schemes for the north

(visitor's) entrance before thethird (c) was finally accepted.

Spring 1988

and most of the "matching" details no longer seem tomatch. The baseboards in the President's Room have astreamlined Art Deco quality, and the cabinetry with itsanachronistic movable modern shelving hovers awkwardlybetween reproduction and functionalism. A certain amountof detailing is unavoidably dated, even today when we have amuch more complete understanding of historic Americanarchitecture.

The paper Woodie Garber prepared duringthe restoration is valuable for the insights it provides aboutarchitectural thinking on the subject at the time. Althoughyoung Garber drew heavily on Siple's brochure, repeatingverbatim many of its passages, he also surveyed and quotedheavily from the literature on the Baum-Taft house: Schuyler,Kimball's initial positive attribution to Latrobe, Trollope,The Journal of Latrobe, the Lytle-Baum correspondence, Law-rence MendenhalPs Baum's Folly, Clara Longworth deChambrun's The Making of Nicholas Longworth, Cist's Cincin-nati in 1 8 51, Martineau, Goss, Great Georgian Houses ofAmerica, Meubles et Objets de Gout, Liberty Hall, the DailyGazette, the Cincinnati Directory of 1 8 3 6-18 3 7, papers in theTaft Museum library, and the United States Department ofInterior's Historic American Buildings Survey. His paper wasamply illustrated, containing even a rare print found onbook ends owned by the Comtesse de Chambrun, which hesaid was "the earliest known drawing of the Taft Museum"though it showed double hung windows instead of ones withsmall panes and the present curving front steps. He spokewith confidence and clearly believed that "the house as itstands today, with the exception of the wing addition andfew slight changes, is as near as it has been possible to restore,the same as originally constructed."46 Yet, it is obvious thathis knowledge of American architectural history was, by1980's standards, sketchy. Like most writers of the timeand earlier, he attributed the house to Latrobe:

In researching and exploring the Taft Museum for restoration, myfather, Frederick W. Garber, Architect, and I, separately thenjointly, concluded that, though no documentation has yet substan-tiated it, the Architect was certainly Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Itcannot be justly ascribed to Hoban as it contradicts his recordedwork in its more English tradition and formality. Latrobe, whoseimagination roved more freely yet as surely in his own creativity,expresses a more French flair in his personal departures from rigidtradition. This is indeed a residence in the grand manner, but it isnot wood posing as stone, but wood expressed in its classic self withinventive freedom. The sophistication of proportion, the devices sosurely and uniquely applied here are indeed a signature of Latrobe,

The Baum-Taft House 45

the only man of this nature and capability at that time and whowas designing residences in this immediate area.47

Although Garber placed greater weight onsupposed similarities between Latrobe's work and the fabricof the museum than other writers had, his attribution rests ongeneralizations rather than observations based on compara-tive visual analysis. And he emphasized the fact that Latrobewas in Cincinnati around the time the house was built.

If Garber, an architect, supported his case withbiographical coincidence, it should not be surprising thatCarl Vitz, a librarian, made it the primary basis of his argu-ment. In a 19 5 4 Literary Club paper titled, "Benjamin Hen-ry Latrobe, Was He the Architect (?) of the Taft Museum,"Vitz stressed the factors that could have led Baum to com-mission Latrobe:Many reasons can begiven why Latrobe might have been sought outby Baum. To him, a banker, Latrobe's first important commission,the Bank of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, would have beenknown. ... The residence of Worthington and Clay and of GeneralTaylor just across the river, could not have been unknown to him.Similarity of interests could have brought them together. Baum wasGerman born, and Latrobe's mother was German and he hadspent his years of youth and early manhood in German schools andcontinental travel. Both men were interested in Ohio and Missis-sippi River navigation. ... Because ofBaum's interest in trade withNew Orleans, he would have known that Latrobe had been engagedto build its light house and waterworks. Both were interested ingardens. Baum's enterprises had to do with machinery and wefind Latrobe often occupied with mechanical engineeringproblems. ... He was well off financially. Baum would want thebest and Latrobe was tops and available. This would all seem veryobvious, could we only find one clear documentary reference, oralmost equally so, if Latrobe had left few or no records.48

In fact he left voluminous records, and there isno mention of the Baum house in them. There are lettersfrom Latrobe's wife and daughter which substantiate thefact that the family had a ten-day unplanned stop in Cincin-nati in March 1820, but they make no mention of a commis-sion. Still, Vitz pointed out a number of ways Latrobe mighthave made contact with Baum at the time. He pinned hishopes on circumstantial evidence, and hopes they were. Hevery obviously wanted to be able to prove that Latrobe wasthe architect of the Taft Museum. When he found positiveattributions, like Schuyler's and Kimball's, he used them tosupport his argument. But when he wrote to Talbot Hamlin,the leading Latrobe scholar of the time, and was discour-aged, he decided to "cease theorizing about architectural

40

styles and think of it only in terms of the conditions andsituations at the time and of the two men who either were orwere not associated in the building." (italics his)49 In this wayhis paper is typical of the commentaries on the Baum-Tafthouse—and probably of human nature as well. It shows thatthe writer heard what he wanted to hear and that he trustedwhat he heard (or read) more than what he saw.

Talbot Hamlin's response to his letter con-tains the first serious attempt to consider the authorship ofthe house on visual evidence. In it Hamlin said:This brings us to the Sinton-Taft house. There is not a mention ortrace of Martin Baum or of any Cincinnati work in the existingLatrobe papers. Furthermore, stylistically the house seems to me tohave nothing whatsoever to do with the kind of architecture Latrobestood for. If one compares it, for instance, with the Van Ness house,the plans and elevations of which are in Fiske KimbalPs DomesticArchitecture of the American Colonies and the Early Repub-lic, the difference in basic ideals becomes obvious. The interior trimis quite different from anything I could attribute to Latrobe, andthe whole design and its detail seem to me a harmonious expressionof the kind of "Late Colonial" or Federal work, against whichLatrobe was always protesting. Moreover, the dates are against anypossibility of his connection with it, for he was much too busy inBaltimore and too much worried about the completion of the NewOrleans waterworks to make it probable that he was doing thishouse at the same time. Surely there would have been some mentionof it in the account ofLatrobe}s visit to Cincinnati given in his

Queen City Heritage

journal or in Mrs. Latrobe's letter, both published in the Wilsonbook, if such an important job from his designs had been underconstruction at the time.50

Hamlin's comments, of course, were cursory, and they werenot published, so it is not surprising that the earlier attribu-tions survived. It is largely because misinformation contin-ued to be repeated that Ruth K. Meyer, director of the TaftMuseum, and its staff decided to invite specialists in thefield to convene for a symposium, comment on the attri-butions, and study the Baum-Taft house at first hand.

William Seale, the foremost authority on JamesHoban and author of The President's House: A History51,began his presentation by remarking: "I had hoped that bytonight I could tell you with absolute certainty that JamesHoban designed and built the Taft Museum 160 or moreyears ago. Alas, I can't."52 He explained that there was littledocumentary evidence to connect Hoban with any buildingbesides the White House and described what was knownabout his life and work. He ended: "There is really not muchto go on. I think the most concrete thing that can be said,in conclusion, is that the elusive architect of the Baum-Tafthouse had much in common with James Hoban, if only inhis remarkable ability to evade history."53

Charles Brownell, the leading BenjaminLatrobe scholar, announced more confidently: "The ascrip-tion does not have a leg to stand on, either in the form ofwritten sources, primary and secondary, or in the form of

Spring 1988 The Baum-Taft House 47

architectural evidence."54 He pointed out that, quite unlikeHoban, there is a wealth of material on Latrobe: "13 vol-umes of Latrobe journals, 14 sketchbooks by Latrobe, and,most important, 19 volumes of Latrobe's copies of outgoingletters" as well as "roughly 45 o architectural and engineeringdrawings... and records written not by Latrobe, such asinstitutional minutes and newspaper articles."55 He notedthat "in the thousands of pages assembled at the Latrobepapers, as well as all of the evidence carefully compiled byHeather Hallenberg from Cincinnati sources, there doesnot exist so much as one recognizable phrase written byLatrobe or a contemporary of his to link him to MartinBaum's villa in any way, however tangential."56 Brownellexplained that the Baum-Taft house typifies a Renaissance-inspired Adamesque style against which Latrobe's austereearly Greek Revival work was very consciously reacting.After conducting a complete and precise visual analysis ofthe Adamesque manner, the Baum-Taft house, and build-ings certainly attributed to Latrobe, he concluded:The architectural evidence offers no support for any hypothesis thatthe building incorporates ideas from a Latrobe design that thebuilders adapted into something of their own. This circumstance,though, should not make anyone grieve. The Baum-Taft house canstand on its own architectural merits.57

Richard Cote, an architectural historian with

a considerable knowledge of the carpenter-builder tradition,concurred with Seale and Brownell. He suggested: "The TaftMuseum may NOT, in fact, have been designed by an archi-tect. Rather... (it was) constructed under the direction of acarpenter-builder who, more than likely, migrated to Cin-cinnati during the early 19th century and practiced hisprofession in the city at the time that the Taft Museum wasbuilt."58 He pointed out that in 1819 Cincinnati had apopulaton of just over 10,000, and that the City Directorylisted "between 80 and 100 principal house carpenters andjoiners employing about 400 journey men and apprentices,2 5 brick yards employing, during the season of makingbrick, about 200 workmen, 100 bricklayers, 30 plasterers,and 15 stonemasons. In a city of over 10,000 citizens, therewere 800 individuals engaged in the building trade. More-over, the 1819 directory did NOT list one architect in a citythat by March 1819 had 1,890 buildings, of which 1,003were dwelling houses."59 He explained how carpenter-buildersworked and showed, convincingly, how the Baum-Taft housecould have belonged to their tradition.

The symposium organized to find out "Whowas the architect of the Taft Museum?" concluded with theimpression that the answer was "no one." The research showedthat the question was infinitely more complicated than any-one had assumed, and the event produced a fuller history, aswell as a richer historiography, of the Baum-Taft house.

The Music Room, the TaftMuseum, Cincinnati, Ohio. TheTaft restoration began in 1929at almost exactly the samemoment as the restoration ofColonial Williamsburg. Therewas a great fervor to take

houses back to their originalperiod.

James Hoban, Design for thePresident's House, collectionof the Maryland HistoricalSociety, Baltimore, Maryland.At the June 1987 symposium,"Who was the architect of theTaft Museum?" William Seale

dispelled once and for all theattribution that James Hobandesigned the Baum-Taft house.

Dining Room, the Taft Museum,Cincinnati, Ohio. Federal man-tels salvaged from periodhouses in the region replacedones from the Victorian eraduring the restoration of thehouse in 1931. The display

cases were designed by thefirm of Garber and Woodwardin the Federal style.

Spring 1988 The Baum-Taft House 49

1. This paper is an edited version of the introductory presentation at thesymposium, "Who was the architect of the Taft Museum?" which tookplace in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 1 1 and 12, 1987, at the Taft Museum.The symposium was conceived by Dr. Ruth K. Meyer, Taft Museumdirector. The preliminary research for this paper and the other lectures atthe symposium was carefully and lovingly prepared by Heather Hallenberg,an art and architectural historian on the Taft Museum staff.2. G.E. Kidder Smith, The Architecture of the United States, Vol. II, "TheSouth and Midwest, An Illustrated Guide to Notable Buildings, Open tothe Public" (New York, 1 98 1 with an introduction by Frederick D. Nicholsand Frederick Koeper), p. 463.3. Transfer of land from Daniel Symmes to Martin Baum, September 1,1 812, Deed Book S., p. 284, on file at the Hamilton County Courthouse.4. Marilyn Ott, "Martin Baum," a paper prepared for the Taft MuseumIn-School Program, March 1975 with a bibliography from 1977, unpub-lished, p. 1.5. H.A. Ratterman, DerDeutschePionier(Cincinnati, May 1 878),p. 42. Theinformation recorded here was derived from interviews with Baum'sdescendants.6. Carl Vitz, "Benjamin Latrobe, Was He the Architect (?) of The TaftMuseum," a paper presented to the Cincinnati Literary Club on March 1 5,1954, unpublished.7. Ott, pp. 1-4.8. Ibid., p. 4.9. Ibid.10. Ibid., p. 5.11. Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio, Vol. I, from a treatise of 1 8 8 8published by the State of Ohio in 1904, p. 817.1 2. Charles Frederick Goss, Cincinnati, the Queen City, 1 788-1912, Vol. I(Chicago and Cincinnati, 191 2), p. 444.13. Ott, p. 5.14. Harriet Martineau, "A Retrospective of Western Travel," 1838, pub-lished in abbreviated form in The Taft Museum, a brochure by Walter Siple

reprinted from an article in The Bulletin of the Cincinnati Art Museum,January 1933, pp. 6-7.15. The transaction is recorded in Deed Book 24, p. 61 8 at the HamiltonCounty Courthouse.16. Charles Theodore Greve, Centennial History of Cincinnati, Vol. I (Chica-go, 1904), P- 545-17. The transaction is recorded in Deed Book 34, p. 34, at the HamiltonCounty Courthouse.1 8. Martineau, p. 6.19. Richard Cote observed all of these inconsistencies during a careful tourof the building when he was in Cincinnati for the symposium in June 1987.20. W.H. Martin, Map of Cincinnati for Insurance Companies and Real EstateAgents Containing Every Lot and House with Its Number Classified According tothe Reference Below, Vol. II (Cincinnati, 1 8 5 5), p. 9.21. A copy of this rare edition is in the archives of the Taft Museum.22. Walter Siple, The Taft Museum, a brochure reprinted from an article inThe Bulletin of the Cincinnati Art Museum, January 193 3, p. 14. Siple wasdirector of the Art Museum and of the Taft Museum during the restoration.23. Woodward Garber, "The Taft Museum," an unpublished paper, Decem-ber 21, 1934, written by the son of the architect on the restoration of theTaft Museum while he was a student in architecture at Cornell Universityand working with his father on the remodeling, p. 16.24. Goss, p. 444; Greve, p. 572.2 5. Greve, Vol. II, p. 170.26. Siple, p. 2.27. Insurance Maps of 1 891, Cincinnati, Ohio, Vol. I (Chicago, 1 891), pp.1 1-12.

28. E. Robinson and R.H. Pidgeon, Civil and Topographical Engineers,Atlas of the City of Cincinnati, Ohio from Official Records, Private Plans andActual Surveys (New York, 1883-18 84), pi. 4.

29. Greve, Vol. I, p. 5 79.

30. Ibid.

31 . Ibid.

THE MUSEUM NEWSPUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF MUSEUMS

VOL. VJ1I MARCH .15, 1931 No, 18

The Taft Residence in Cincin-nati, The Museum News, pub-lished by the AmericanAssociation of Museums, Vol.VIM, No. 18, March 15, 1931,the porte cochere (1910-1911) and the bay dormer

windows were removed fromthe exterior.

Queen City Heritage

32. Goss, p. 444.3 3. Ibid.

34. Montgomery Schuy\cr, Architectural Record, Vol. 23 , 1908,pp. 341-346.

3 5. Inland Architect and News Record, photogravure ed., Vol. 1 o, November1 887, 70 and p. 1. This reference was discovered by Thomas J. Holleman, astudent of Charles Brownell, in 1974 and brought to my attention duringBrownell's lecture.36. Fiske Kimball, "Masterpieces of Early American Art," Artand Archaeol-ogy, September/October 1919, p. 297.37. I.T. Frary, Early Homes of Ohio (New York, 1970, reprint of 1936edition), p. 155.38. This letter is in the Taft Museum archives.39-Siple, p. 4.40. Ibid.41. Ibid.42. Ibid., p. 5.43. Ibid., p. 7.44. Ibid., p. 1 1.45. Ibid., p. 14.46. Woodie Garber, "The Taft Museum," p. 5. It was recently discoveredthat this drawing was first published in Harper's Weekly, July, 1858.

47. Ibid., preface.48. Carl Vitz, pp. 345-346.49. Ibid., p. 345.50. Talbot Hamlin, response to a letter from Carl Vitz, director of theCincinnati Public Library, from Columbia University, New York City,March 3, 1954, p. 2. The letter is now in the archives of the Taft Museum.51. William Seale, The President's House, A History, White House HistoricalAssociation, Washington, D.C., 1986.52. William Seale, "James Hoban—The Man and His Taste," Who was thearchitect of the Taft Museum? Symposium, June 1 1 and 12, 1987 (Cincinnati,1988), p. 1.5 3. Ibid., p. 11.54. Charles Brownell, "Neoclassicism, B.H. Latrobe's Domestic Architec-ture and the Baum-Taft House," Who was the architect of the Taft Museum?Symposium, p. 44.5 5. Ibid., p. 48.56. Ibid., pp. 48-49.$7.Ibid.,p. 56.58. Richard Cote, "Building Practices in 19th Century America," Who wasthe architect of the Taft Museum ? Symposium, p. 62.59. Ibid., p. 63.

.. ^

E.A. Lloyd, Sketch ofSintonResidence, 1890, Cincinnati,Ohio. The Victorian entryway,which was probably installed inthe mid-nineteenth century,shows small panels of glass in

the lunette and is flanked byarched side lights.