PRESERVATION: Eastfield Village

 

Off a crooked road in East Nassau, New York, between a wooden barn and a pond, a narrow dirt lane meanders beside pasture and woods. No one breaches protocol by driving into Eastfield Village; parking is in a grassy field just short of the stone walls marking its entrance. Though just a few turns from the Lebanon Valley Speedway, this impressive, museum-quality enclave of twenty-eight post-and-beam structures, dating from 1790 to 1840, is a world all its own. And, if the United States were to consider naming living national treasures, as Japan does, Eastfield’s creator, Don Carpentier, the self-taught potter who is a preeminent expert on historic English pottery and one of the country’s leading historic preservationists, would be a prime candidate.

 

In 1977, Carpentier started a summer workshop program, now in its thirty-second year. One of its signature courses focuses on historic ceramics. In the village’s circa-1840 Greek Revival church, a rapt congregation of about forty people—museum curators, archaeologists, collectors, historic-home owners—are seated on church pews and a random assortment of antique chairs. The cognoscenti have brought cushions to soften the hard wooden seating and position themselves to catch whatever limpid, ninety-degree breeze might eke its way through the church’s large open windows. A thick, orange extension cord, run from Carpentier’s house a hundred or so feet away, supplies electricity for slide presentations. 

 

First up at this three-day symposium is David Barker, archaeologist at Stoke-on-Trent, England’s foremost eighteenth-century ceramics center. His three-hour lecture explores kiln furniture, specifically, how to date an antique piece of pottery by the marks left on the bottom by the stilts, or props, used when the pieces are stacked in the kiln. The talk is scheduled to last an hour, but no one is counting. Afterward, a long overdue break produces lengthy queues at the outhouses, water pump, and port-o-john; the only plumbing is in Carpentier’s home. No one seems to mind. In fact, this is heaven for pottery geeks—including the Smithsonian Institution’s ceramics curator, who has come not to lecture but to learn. At Eastfield, homegrown amateurs meet with world-class authorities, and there is no such thing as a dumb question: experts use the most basic inquiries to reexamine and share information on all manner of topics—historic paints, textiles, ceramics, hearth cooking, and Dutch, Federal, and Greek Revival houses.

 

At fifty-seven, Don Carpentier is a down-to-earth guy whose unassuming demeanor belies an extensive list of accomplishments. As a kid growing up on his parents’ farm in East Nassau, he started collecting old glass bottles. At fourteen, he bought his first American antique at a yard sale. “My mother had to beat me over the head to buy that grain-painted dresser in my kitchen. It was four dollars,” he recalls. At eighteen, he built a circa-1760-style building, now known as the little yellow tavern, from salvaged parts. A year later, he rescued his first whole building: a blacksmith’s shop, and followed this with a tinsmith’s shop, two dwellings, a pottery studio, a printer’s shop, and a corn crib. Saving building after threatened building over the years, he created Eastfield Village. Earning degrees in civil engineering and historic preservation, he learned restoration carpentry 

 

 

skills as he went along.

 

At age twenty-five, he established a hands-on summer workshop program in preindustrial building trades and decorative arts. To fill his buildings with period objects, he amassed a significant collection of antiques over time, taught himself how to make pottery, and reinvented long-lost techniques for making eighteenth-century engine-turned mochaware ceramics. He’s been a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and served as a consultant to museums, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and to filmmakers, working on such period pieces as The Crucible, The Bostonians, The Europeans, The Age of Innocence, Ironweed, and Master and Commander. “I had no idea what I was doing at first,” Carpentier says. “I just fumbled through it.” 

 

A whole village of historic buildings, a trade school for historic preservation, hand-crafting objects for an incredibly narrow niche market—these may sound like the effete enterprises of a man with deep pockets, but Carpentier has had more resourcefulness than money.  In 1975, he met William McMillen (then the head of restoration at Historic Richmond Town, Staten Island, New York, but now retired nearby).“That’s when I really started learning,” Carpentier says. They erected a woodworker’s shop, a shoemaker’s shop, a two-room doctor’s office, three outhouses (one an elegant three-seater with a vaulted ceiling), Carpentier’s home, a couple of barns, the 1793 Federal-era Briggs Tavern (from Hoosick, New York), the 1811 Cady & Jackson General Store (from Minaville, New York), an 1836 Greek Revival church (from Duanesburg, New York), and a church’s drive shed (from Stone Arabia, New York), which had been at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York. 

 

“Some of the buildings that I learned on, I made mistakes on. You have to learn someplace,” Carpentier says. “I finally realized that buildings are not meant to be backdrops for furniture but actual documents of the period. So I replaced some of my first buildings with very intact examples. When I taught from them, I didn’t have to apologize for them or make things up, because it was all there for real.”

 

Affording a more intimate view of the past than many museums, Carpentier’s antiques collection provides context and content for the buildings. It includes early glass; Franklin stoves, which supplanted fireplaces in the early nineteenth century; Argand lamps, which displaced candles as a light source; old documents; mochaware and other early English ceramics; and tools for blacksmithing, tinsmithing, woodcarving, printing, and other trades. It also encompasses a rare, 1830 redware coffee pot marked by Philadelphia potter Thomas Haig (a Brimfield Antique Show find); a gorgeous green Federal mantelpiece (from an Amsterdam, New York, salvage yard); and a commemorative mug inscribed “Succefs to the Squire.” (“The Squire” is what Carpentier’s familiars call him when they think he’s not listening.)

 

The Cady & Jackson General Store, owned by the family of suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, still boasts some of its original contents, such as wrought nails in the depths of a wooden bin and a hired man’s bed in the attic. Carpentier explains that general stores were hubs of town life in early America, their windows papered with broadsides advertising coming events and discussing political issues. He’s collected myriad documents related to the Cady store, including ledgers dating to the 1820s. As though relating the adventures of close cousins, the Squire of Eastfield recounts that storeowner “Samuel Jackson’s son, Sheldon, went to Alaska in the 1830s and forties and worked with indigenous people. He introduced the reindeer to Alaska, and he had a college named after him. Elias Brown, Cady’s son-in-law [whose portrait hangs in Carpentier’s home], was at Alexander Hamilton’s duel with Aaron Burr.”

 

The general store got another new lease on life this past summer as an antiques store, having been used for many years as a commercial showcase for Carpentier’s hand-crafted mochaware pottery. These pieces, suited for daily use and prized by collectors, include bowls, pitchers, mugs, coffee and tea pots, pepper casters, and open salts, with pinwheel, cat’s-eye, worm, and dendrite (or “seaweed”) patterns; they range in price from $60 to $425 and up. Commissioned by many museums, Carpentier’s pieces are dead ringers for the real thing; he now signs his work to prevent misrepresentation by antiques dealers, unknowing and otherwise.

 

Eastfield’s historic structures and collections provide depth and context for its summer classes. With courses ranging from timber framing to basket weaving, its past faculty totals around three hundred and fifty, a “Who’s Who” of historic craftsmanship, and many courses allow students to learn skills while restoring the village’s buildings. This sounds like a savvy strategy, rather like Tom Sawyer persuading others to pay to whitewash the fence. Hearing that comparison, Carpentier chuckles. 

 

“It sounds really good, but it’s not necessarily what it sounds like,” he says. “You can’t expect students to do anything important at first. A lot of times, I run around like a chicken with my head cut off, fixing mistakes.” Case in point: a lime plastering session in the Briggs Tavern went so wrong that the dry plaster had to be shaved off the wall and reapplied.

 

No one is more familiar with the concept of learning by trial and error than Carpentier. “David Barker calls what I did ‘experimental archaeology,’” he says. “In other words, you start with an object and work backward to figure out how it was made.” 

 

To replicate eighteenth-century mochaware, Carpentier recreated a 1768 engine lathe from one at the Wedgwood Museum in England. He refined his skills on a yard-sale potter’s wheel until he could reproduce historic forms, made his own molds and hand tools, and experimented with paint colors and glazing methods. 

 

“I found every text I could on how to make this stuff,” he says. “But the old texts are like period cookbooks—they took common knowledge for granted and didn’t include it. People back then knew it, but we don’t.” 

 

To decode lost knowledge about clays, paints, and glazes, Carpentier returned to England again and again for archaeological digs at early kiln sites. In 2006, when the Spode Museum was emptying its early buildings prior to their being bulldozed, it offered the treasure trove of contents to various institutions in the United Kingdom. Finding no takers, the chief curator called Carpentier, who made his best offer: $2,700 for all of it. Three weeks later, he was on a plane to Manchester, and after three months of going back and forth, he culled through sixty thousand objects. “If I hadn’t saved that stuff, nobody would have,” Carpentier asserts. “No one else would have known what it all was.” 

 

Carpentier returned to Eastfield with a mother lode of historic materials, including more than two hundred color jars and a thousand sprig molds for ornamental elements dating from 1790 to 1860. The molds are in his pottery studio, while some of the color jars—white porcelain underpainted in script with the name of the hue it contained—decorate a shelf in the kitchen: Florentine Green, Printing Brown, Flow Blue, Dove Coral for China. Based upon his research, Carpentier unveiled some pioneering scholarship at a recent Eastfield lecture—a typology of mochaware and its decoration that teases out the relationship between various makers and certain shapes, patterns, colors, and handles. This is a tricky enterprise, because mold-makers may have sold their wares to more than one kiln, and decorators may have moved from manufacturer to manufacturer. In the realm of arcane knowledge, Carpentier ranks as a hero. 

 

As much as people come to Eastfield to learn, they also come to experience it—sitting on old Windsor chairs, sleeping on rope beds, pumping water from the well. In the summer of 2003, a symposium on early American tavern life was organized. Lecturers came from California, Virginia, and New Hampshire. In between their talks, participants helped prepare a hearth-cooked meal, boiling potatoes on trivets set over small fires on the ample hearths, baking bread in beehive ovens, roasting chickens in hearth-side tin ovens, which Carpentier and McMillen, both accomplished tinsmiths, had made. For dinner, visitors convened in the Briggs Tavern and dined at wooden tables, danced in the ballroom as a fiddler played, and lingered long into the night, laughing and telling stories, contented faces aglow in candlelight. 

 

In 1990, the Historic Eastfield Foundation was incorporated as a nonprofit educational institution, with supporters, such as McMillen and his wife, Judy, a museum educator and accomplished hearth cook, on its board of directors. Though thoroughly private in the past, the village is now open for tours, and the antiques store is open for business, both by appointment only. On most days, the Squire of Eastfield, in his role as master and commander, is close at hand. [Jan/Feb 2010]

 

Gladys Montgomery is a contributing editor to Berkshire Living and editor of Berkshire Living Home+Garden.

THE GOODS

Eastfield Village

Mud Pond Road

East Nassau, N.Y.

www.greatamericancraftsmen.org

www.doncarpentierpottery.com