News
New England & Beyond

Finishing Touch
Working with Chief Curator Richard Nylander, SPNEA Council member and long-time Codman House volunteer Nancy Barnard has completed reproducing and installing the lace curtains in the drawing room at the Codman House in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The exact copies add just the right element of softness to the room, bringing it close to the way it looked in the 1930s.

Homeward Bound
A Huguenot No.1 Steam Pumper, a fire engine that served the town of Oxford, Massachusetts, from the late nineteenth century until 1923, has recently been sold by SPNEA to the town's fire department. The Oxford Fire Association is currently restoring the old fire station and hopes to display the engine there. The steamer is one of several fire engines deaccessioned by SPNEA over the last decade because they fall outside the scope of SPNEA's collecting focus.

Attic Treasures Last February, over 800 people toting antiques and family heirlooms showed up at Skinner's headquarters in Bolton, Massachusetts, for an appraisal day. Experts in everything from furniture to paintings to twentieth-century design identified treasures for satisfied collectors, with the proceeds benefitting SPNEA.

Recording New England Today Library and Archives volunteer and prolific photographer Robert B. Severy has been documenting the built environment of New England for the past thirty-five years. The Severy Collection at SPNEA, which now comprises over 50,000 images, is a superb record of the ever-changing face of New England. In 2001, Severy donated more than 2,000 photographs to SPNEA, including this 1967 view of West-borough, Massachusetts.

Major Maintenance
Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, is one of the most challenging of SPNEA's properties to maintain, due to persistent problems resulting from both its design and its shore location. Last fall, SPNEA's Property Care Department oversaw the repainting of the harbor faade and the installation of a new roof with lead-coated copper panels over the Pine Kitchen. Repairs to the exterior walls of Cogswell Hall, the Pine Kitchen, and the Franklin Game Room involved removing three feet of brick veneer, replacing decayed wood sheathing and framing, fumigating, and then replacing the brickwork.