As curator of the Clarke House, the oldest building in Chicago, Ed Maldonado understands the value of items placed in storage or simply tucked away, forgotten.
Over the years, Maldonado and other Clarke officials have used old diaries, letters, yellowed newspaper clippings, furniture remnants and even fallen plaster under floorboards to guide them in restoring the historic house, built in 1836, and re-creating its appearance as a middle-class family home of the time.
Just such a piece of the past has emerged to help launch a major Clarke House addition, Maldonado said. Restorers have determined the house once featured a twin to the distinctive four-column portico on the home’s east side. The owners apparently added a second portico to serve as a new front entrance after city planners extended Michigan Avenue past the house. The clue to the missing portico was a hand-drawn city plat from the 1850s showing Michigan Avenue, where Clarke House was built. The map is so detailed, Maldonado said, that it outlines the buildings on the street.
“This told us that when Michigan Avenue was extended past the Clarke House after it had been built for a number of years, the west side became the front of the home,” he said.
“If you look close at the map, you can see the structure has a marking indicating a portico facing the street. To me, this meant it was added.”
How an entire portico can be lost — and found again — is another colorful detail in the history of a home that survived epidemics, financial panics, the Great Fire of 1871 and two moves on the city’s South Side.
Henry Clarke, a merchant, and his wife, Caroline, built their house on land south of the area that eventually was incorporated as the City of Chicago. According to the Chicago Office of Cultural Affairs, the Clarkes lost their money in an 1837 financial panic, and the inside of the house was only half completed. Clarke worked at a succession of jobs and died during a cholera epidemic in 1849. His widow sold some of her land to support the family and to finally finish the house at 1700 S. Michigan Ave.
In 1872 the Clarke children sold the house to a local tailor, John Chrimes, who moved the structure south to 4526 S. Wabash Ave.
Restorers are confident that’s when the west portico got left behind. Decades later, the house was sold to a church to be used as a parsonage and office.
The structure remained in various states of repair until the city acquired the home in 1977 at the behest of preservationists and moved it to the present location at 1827 S. Indiana Ave. There, only a few blocks from its original site, the Widow Clarke’s House is now part of the Prairie Avenue Historic District. The house sat virtually untouched for several years at this site.
“When we first started poking around, I used to get a boost up a ladder so I could go in through a window,” said Elaine Harrington, who was involved with the project at the time.
An authority on historical architecture, Harrington points out the standard Greek Revival blueprint used when the Clarkes built their home had porticoes on two sides. But she also noted that during this era in America, often only a single portico was constructed.
However, her effort in writing the initial landmark proposal for the house in the 1970s uncovered old newspaper clippings hinting a second portico may have existed, which, combined with the city map, strengthened the case for Maldonado that one existed.
Even more evidence came from the attic. Robert Furhoff, a restoration expert, inspected the house’s upper woodwork and paint, both inside and out, and determined some materials on the west side matched a cupola known to have been added in the 1850s — clues that a west portico was built at the same time.
A costly restoration
The restoration of the portico will cost approximately $750,000 and will be unded by grants from The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency of The Illinois Department of Natural Resources and the City of Chicago’s Near South Loop Tax Increment Finance Program.
The overall goal is to return the house to what it looked like in 1860, when Clarke’s widow, Caroline, died 11 years after her husband succumbed to cholera. The only known image of the home in this period is a daguerreotype showing the east and north sides from the outside.
Maldonado says he used computer imaging to study the profiles and proportions of window moldings and sills shown in the 1855 daguerreotype and later photographs of the house. He discovered that the moldings shown in the early images differ from the present moldings.
As part of its restoration, Clarke House will get new moldings to replicate the originals, plus a face-lift involving window and door cornices; frieze window shutters; pilaster capitals and bases; clapboard siding; and window glass. UV-filtered storm windows also will be added to protect the interior of the house.
“It’s a scavenger hunt,” said the curator. “Little things keep turning up, and soon they add up to a better idea of the way things were. Sometimes it’s circumstantial, but the more evidence you accumulate, the more informed your speculation is.”
The current Clarke House project is overseen by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the Chicago Department of General Services and the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, Landmarks Division. The architect is McClier Corp.
It’s certainly not the first time Clarke House has been worked on. Not long after the city’s acquisition of the house and its landmark status was established, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America got involved with restoration of the furnishings. All of the original furniture had disappeared; their target period was 1836-1860.
At the same time, the city provided major infrastructure repair and added steel reinforcements to the Clarke House floors and staircase. Public conveniences such as air conditioning, restrooms, museum galleries and an elevator were added.
Good fortune
Numerous discoveries have proven to be major assets for Clarke restorers. One was a letter written by the Clarke’s widow to relatives in New York in which she gave many details of her new home. This is now in the CHS archives.
Another is a diary kept by Alice Barnard, a pioneer female school teacher in Chicago and a boarder taken in by the widow after her husband died. In it, Barnard made numerous references to the house’s decor and layout and, just as important, noted that the house had not been finished when Clarke died in 1849.
“As the house was worked on, various things came to light,” recalled Harrington. “There was part of a chair that had fallen down in a window well, the space under the window, as if it had been used to prop up a window and somehow had fallen down inside.
“That was waiting there for someone to find, and it was an important clue as to what kind of furniture was used,” she added. “There was also a sort of flat, turned piece of wood that generally was always part of a table that had spooled legs. That was another clue as to the kind of furniture in the house.”
Other items that have been helpful in piecing together the Clarke House’s history include a geography book from the 1830s-40s, a sales brochure from a Chicago piano company, shards of an early cultural magazine and an American Express belt.
“At the time, the piano brochure was significant,” Harrington said, “because pianos were considered sort of an all-purpose instrument. In my research I found that about the first five or six pianos to be installed in the city were actually noted in the newspaper.”
Many discoveries in the Clarke House were made simply by pulling up floor boards and looking in cracks of the walls, as well as poking in the attics and basement.
At the same time, old plaster, wallpaper and paint served as clues for Furhoff, whose specialty is authenticating building materials.
Now that the portico is well on its way to being restored, Maldonado is not sure if anything else remains to be discovered — at least on the premises. “Something like this is an adventure,” he said.