[CPProt.net] USA: Priceless Artifacts Lost In Barn Fire

[Museum Security Network / Cultural Property Protection Net (Ton Cremers)]

Priceless Artifacts Lost In Barn Fire
Historic North Stonington Structure Held 19th Century Mashantucket Pequot
Baskets
 
  
"I feel pretty badly and the town feels pretty badly, because people were
pretty fond of it."
Anna Palmer Coit, owner of the North Stonington farm where a historic barn
was ravaged in a fire Tuesday.
 
By ELAINE STOLL
Published on 4/21/2005

North Stonington -- The fire that destroyed a historic barn at 812 Pendleton
Hill Road Tuesday night also consumed a significant collection of
Mashantucket Pequot baskets stored inside.

The barn caught fire around 8 p.m. The North Stonington Volunteer Fire Co.,
with the help of departments from Voluntown, Old Mystic, Griswold, Preston
City and Ashaway, R.I., arrived in time to save a historic house on the
property, but flames felled the barn within minutes.

It was the first major structure fire here in at least a year, volunteer
firefighter and Selectman William Peterson said Wednesday.

Completed in 1891, the barn was designed by famed architect Edward Palmer
York, according to 97-year-old property owner Anna Palmer Coit. The 261-acre
farm has been in the Palmer family since 1711, said Coit, who is the eighth
generation to care for it, though she lives on a farm on Denison Hill Road
where she runs Coit's Christmas Trees.

The barn was erected behind a large, yellow farmhouse built in stages in
1721 and 1807 -- the year North Stonington split from Stonington, Coit said.

With Philip Sawyer, York founded the New York architectural firm York &
Sawyer, and the pair became known for designing banks. The Federal Reserve
Bank of New York and the Greenwich Savings Bank building in Manhattan, both
completed in 1924, are among their achievements, but York also designed the
Washington Trust building in downtown Westerly, Coit said.

The barn York designed on the farm was a large structure, about 40 feet
wide, 60 feet long and "pretty darn high," Coit said. It had a dirt-floor
cellar, a large first level and a smaller second floor built over the spot
where a buggy could be parked. The wood-shingled barn with white trim had a
gambrel roof with a cupola in the middle.

Used recently for storage, the barn once held horses, cows and sheep, Coit
said.

"I feel pretty badly and the town feels pretty badly, because people were
pretty fond of it," she said.

Coit and her tenants lost all they stored in the barn. For Coit, that
includes a kitchen range and a quaint wheelchair used by the grandparents
she never met. It includes old iron tools, old fashioned barrels and a
wooden bench made around 1720. Coit also lost 30 to 40 baskets woven by
members of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe and purchased from them by her
predecessors.

"The Indians used to come around selling baskets," Coit said. "The ladies of
the household probably bought them from about 1821 to about 1900." Coit has
kept the baskets, which had been photographed and were to be catalogued for
the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, she said.

The baskets ranged in size and design. Some storage baskets were two feet
wide, and decorated baskets featured dots, colored washes or other designs,
Coit said. A fraction of the collection remains, because Coit kept about 15
of the baskets, along with various items that characterize her family's farm
life in the 1800s, in a small section of the Pendleton Hill Road farmhouse
she has set up as a museum.

Though the barn is lost, the original plans are not, Coit said.

Neither, it was apparent Wednesday, is Coit's memory of the barn where she
used to play as a child on summer visits from her home in Montclair, N.J.

Coit, who has lived in North Stonington since 1951 and is an active member
of the historical society and the garden club as well as a former Pine Point
School teacher, has received an outpouring of support in the wake of the
fire, she said.

"A lot of people filled my kitchen last night," she said, and Wednesday she
spoke to "callers from all over." She planned to visit the farm today for
the first time since the fire, she said. 

http://www.theday.com/