DOI: 10.5176/2301-394X_ACE18.65
Authors: Daniel Joseph Whittaker
Abstract:
The locally-famous Widow Clarke home provides this research with several insights into how a village banker’s fairly pedestrian residence, typical of an uppermiddle-class Midwest pioneer residential settlement, can be catapulted into the rarefied realm of a celebrated house museum, almost solely through the virtue of its age. The Clarke house ended up being nearly the solitary survivor through the ages, becoming a contemporary conduit for the teaching of municipal history. Before this didactic endutilization, multiple other owners pursued a myriad of creative salvation and reuse options—some being far from the idiom of a traditional house museum (such as a house of worship). Many attempts at reuse occurred during an era (1940s) preceding the building preservation movement in America (which developed in the 1960s). Several decades later (in the 1980s), the concept of full public access and complete building restoration (to a specific point in time) ultimately came to fruition upon agreement by historians declaring absolute establishment of the home’s civic-alpha-status. Architectural fabric was thus found to provide necessary credence to proclaim past ephemeral history once again tangible, augmenting the declaration of municipal authoritarian power. From the 1970s onward, multiple direct, politicallymotivated initiatives (originating from both federal and local coffers) funded various preservation and restoration drives during the Clarke home’s recent history as a bona fide house museum. Savvy politicians discovered the Clarke house provided patriotic providence for the celebration of the birth (and establishment) of their Midwestern American metropolis positioned on the sand dunes of freshwater Lake Michigan, the inland port city today known as the city of Chicago.
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