New at Old York
What history do we preserve?
By Scott Stevens
Executive Director
The grounds of the Old Gaol, and many buildings in the center of York Village, did not look quite so neat and tidy in the early years of their history as they do today.
Courtesy photo
Most York residents treasure the character of our town. Visible history is a vital element of that wonderful character. A poll taken to determine citizens' priorities for town planning would likely find "preserving historical character" high on the list. But getting down to specifics can be tricky.
To York's first settlers, the forest was a source of potential wealth; a barrier to agriculture, and a dark realm of threatening animals and unfamiliar native people. These transplanted English people felled, used and sold the trees as fast as possible. The first photographs of York show great stretches of the town almost bare of trees.
By the 1890s and early 1900s, people who cared about York's character lamented the naked landscape, and encouraged planting trees and flowerbeds to make our streets more attractive. This urge to beautify went hand-in-hand with the first efforts to save historic buildings. The Old York Historical and Improvement Society, founded in 1896, had, as its name suggests, the dual mission of historic preservation and a prettier town. Its members seem to have missed the irony that the trees they planted were changing the historic landscape created by the builders and occupants of the houses they were preserving. The long views of open fields relished by colonists gave way to the different aesthetics of a new generation.
We still hold conflicting desires for history and attractiveness, and often impose our current standards on the past. Early records reveal the Old Gaol to have been chronically in disrepair (taxpayers didn't like public spending back then, either). Old photographs show tall grass and weeds around it. Yet the Old York Historical Society maintains the building and lawn carefully. Who wants the historic landmark to be an eyesore, after all? One might ask though, if what we do is historic preservation, reinvention, or a bit of both.
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the First Parish Church was an ochre color similar to the present color of the Emerson-Wilcox House across the street. Town Hall was gray with olive trim and dark green shutters as late as the 1880s. Eventually, both were painted white, and we are quite used to them that way. I suspect a public outcry would meet any effort to restore their original appearance. The "historic" character we value reflects the taste of fairly recent generations.
In the mid-1700s, there was a blacksmith shop and a store on the narrow road between the Old Gaol and the Emerson-Wilcox House. Further down Lindsay Road were a cooper's shop, a woodworker's shop and a tannery (a smelly and polluting activity), with each tradesman's dwelling beside his shop. For most of our history, many streets in town were similarly lined with both shops and homes. Today, many people wanting to preserve York's historic character prefer to live in exclusively residential neighborhoods, and fight to keep them that way, with commerce limited to specific zones at a comfortable distance. This kind of community is a development of the late 20th century with little historical precedent.
My purpose is not to discredit any approach to preservation, but to point out that what each of us really seeks is his or her particular mixture of history and current taste. The choices we make as a community trying to reconcile all these individual mixtures into zoning and permitting decisions are not simple ones. Occasionally, proponents of a particular position will label their stance as "preservation" and opposing ones as "destruction." But it isn't always so black-and-white. As in so many issues today, we need to tone down our rhetoric and focus on our common goals and interests as well as our differences.
