Gimme That Old-Time New England

While looking up stuff about the Brattle Street Meeting-House that Deacon Timothy Newell was struggling to preserve from the British military, I stumbled across Historic New England’s online, searchable library of Old-Time New England articles. O.T.N.E. was the organization’s main periodical back when it was called the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. The issues available online now extend back to 1950, though there were thirty-nine volumes preceding that.

All the articles come in PDF form for downloading, rather than for reading online. Here are direct links to some about eighteenth-century matters that caught my eye:

• “Thomas Dawes’s Church in Brattle Square”, Frederic C. Detwiller
• “The Early History and Federalization of the Codman House”, R. Curtis Chapman
• “Drawn and Published: The Craft of Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century New England”, Anne M. Fuhrman
• “‘To Promote My Countrys Good’: Joseph Whipple and the Oliver Evans Flour Mill in New Hampshire, 1788-1802”, Richard M. Candee
• “The Province House and the Preservation Movement”, Fay Campbell Kaynor
• “The Old South: The Meetinghouse and the American Preservation Movement”, Michael Holleran
• “An Eighteenth-Century Century Collection of Contra Dances”
• “The Foster-Hutchinson House”, Abbott Lowell Cummings
  

The Province House (shown above in the 1830s) was the mansion in central Boston provided for Massachusetts’s governor if he didn’t have a Boston home of his own. The Foster-Hutchinson House was the mansion in the North End owned by one particular governor, Thomas Hutchinson. The Codman House in Lincoln doesn’t have the same political significance, but is the only one of these three that still exists and can be visited, thanks to S.P.N.E.A.—whoops, to Historic New England.