Langdon House

nt to the pervasive influence of John Ruskin. At the time of application, the Miami Purchase Association actually owned the structure. In the brief papers of application prepared by then MPA director R.Daniel Reif in 1968, the building's ornamented style was referred to as "steamboat gothic.” The verge boards or bargeboards that once trimmed the second-story central gable give evident reason for that designation in period photographs. The ornamentation rose steeply under the eaves in a series of S-curves broken by an outline of darts, giving the effect of fern- forms. Unfortunately, the boards were removed when the building stood vacant, and according to current accounts of the situation, were lost in storage. The land on which the house stands was bought in 1854 by Dr.Wesley P.Elstner from George w.Holmes, and the structure was completed in 1855. Dr.Henry Archer Langdon, who served with Sherman in the Georgia campaign, mustered out of the 79th Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, in 1 865 at the age of 26 and joined Elstner in practice. The following year Elstner retired and sold his house to Langdon for about $8,000. Langdon married Emeline Corbly in 1867. They had five children of whom all but the youngest died in an outbreak of diptheria, along with Emeline, in 1874. Langdon remarried in 1875 and died in 1876 at the age of 37 of a brain hemorrhage. The house continued to remain in the Langdon family by various means until 1956, then passed through two other owners to the MPA in 1966. The original office of the doctors, a small outbuilding in front of the main house, was removed and re­ stored as part of the Sharon Woods Village historical village, preserving the artifacts of a nineteenth century physician.3
The Langdon House is wood frame with vertical boards and batten siding, detailed to emphasize the height of the building. The current owners, in an attempt to follow the principles of Downing, have painted the exterior two shades of "fawn," light and darker browns. Downing, a landscape gardener and evangelist of the American Gothic movement, wrote his work on the architecture of country houses in a language reminiscent of the movement's patriarch, John Ruskin. Rather than celebrate the victory of man over his environment, Downing urged his adherents to work with the lines and concerns of the natural. - Americans used the Gothic influence to allow themselves fanciful decorative embellishments and to assert a character removed from the conventional and mundane. The houses would be harmonious with nature and would place more emphasis on the com­ fort of the interior than on the facade.4
Because of its pitched roof, the Langdon House is properly in harmony with the large black walnut trees that stand before the south elevation, the eaves vaulting as the limbs of the tree, a notion of continuity with nature evident at least as far back as Leonardo 's decoration of the vaults of the Sala dalle Asse in Milan. The house was not intended to sit on its purchase of hill as the Greek Revival house did, a white temple consecrated to man 's victory and success. Early photographs indicate that the divided brick path that approaches the house from the avenue below was once planted with a thick bed of bearded iris that was more pleasing than formal, an aspect that perhaps would have metwith Downing's approval. Such an aspect of harmony with the surroundings would have an additional psychological benefit in that it would appear, because of the settled appearance of the house in the landscape, that the residence had been long established. That effect would be the result of plantings and their benign neglect, allowing natural growth to soften the edges of the structure and give it the appearance of a more solid footing in history. Such notions were in harmony with the romantic novels and ballads of the period. Their influence was pervasive in America. Even the struggling Cincinnati painter Robert Duncanson, imbued with the romances of Sir Walter Scott, undertook a series of paintings influenced by the novels. As a mid-century cultural center, the Gothic influence came quickly to the region.5
But Downing based his work on the notion of the useful, and connected the nature of shelter with the mechanical principles of building to make the understructure of architecture. In a sense, he fuses the technical skills of what Morris had termed the "lesser arts" with the "greater art" of architecture in a typically pragmatic, quite American vision that dovetailed neatly with Morris' concerns.6
Downing considers the principles of artisanship and connects the goal of utility to the practical aspect of afford­ ability. He proposes a practical understanding of the intention of the structure and the costs likely to be incurred as a necessary initial step in a building project. He ties that concern to the quality of workmanship and material that should be integrated from the outset in the building of simple housing or grander structure. He considers that if walls are not perpendicular, roofs not sealed, chimney faulty, foundation infirm, gravity and atmosphere will destroy the utility of the building, violating first principles. The Langdon House required much renovation, but that it still stood after years of neglect during a period when it was occupied as a tenement suggests adherence to first principles. The basement itself is solidly paved with brick,and seems a marvel of solidity and firmness. The stone walls of the foundation have been covered with cement, but are sound and the basement is dry. Perhaps due to some natural effect of a fifty-foot cistern below what would at one time have been the summer kitchen, the floor had to be replaced in that section. The room it­ self seems to have been an integral part of the original structure. From the north or rear elevation, a door appears to hang in the siding midway toward the second floor, and would have been reached by an external stairway allowing access to the rear rooms of the house's second floor without passing through any of the common or service rooms of the first. The floors in the remainder of the house are narrow hardwood and were refreshed by sanding, according to the Keily notes on restoration. The boards are noticeably well fitted, and although there is some sloping due to settling, there is little creaking or give under foot. The Keily restoration also involved the removal of layers of wallpaper and so on, but the original lath and plaster walls are solid. Similarly, well built are the formal windows that face the avenue on the first floor. They begin at the floor to rise impressively to about nine feet, not including the molding. They slide easily in their sashes. Care to the comfort of the resident is obvious in the Langdon House . The many windows provide an opportunity for air circulation, and at a time when the staircase was open and the central hall of the first floor was open from the front porch to the back porch, the house must have responded to breezes off the river to the south. A sitting room and parlor give off the central hall on either side, and although access to the stairs has been made private by the installation of double. doors that fill the wide passage, and a closet blocks the hall towards the back, the front and rear porch doors are quite similar, wide, with panels of glass and transoms above. The fenestration was designed for both formality and practicality. As the front and rear parlor windows are tucked far beneath the roof overhang, because of the porches, the long high windows allow light to pe*****te the rooms so affected. The side windows are more conventional, mullioned sash windows, some six-plus-six, others, as in the library, six below with nine lights above. The small library, now used as a dining room, is fifteen by ten feet and admits light from two walls. The far window wall on the west side is broken into three planes by the addition of a closet in the right corner of this room and the corresponding corner in the room adjacent. The Italianate house on the next lot - the Langdon property the larger of the two copious allocations - includes a room for dining similarly cut by closets for china, but in all ·four corners. The doors are rounded, concave, and the room takes on the illusion of being .oval. I designate the Langdon room as library for such rooms figure often in the pattern books and are so called, but intended to be adapted and used for the needs of the inhabitant. Perhaps in some way akin to that adaptability, the Langdon House has been made into two apartments, up and down, with at least some degree of success. The moldings on the doors and windows are similar on the interior and exterior, pediments bordered in various degrees of detail with moldings that form a sort of ribbon­ pattern and drape from the pediment down the sides of door or window. such pediments in the rear hallway are unornamented, and those over the doors and windows that are detailed are only modestly so in less prominently visible areas, as the rear porch. The three columns of the rear porch, in contrast to the stylized Gothic columns of the front but in keeping with the ribbon-drape moldings, are Tuscan-like, with simple capital, shaft and base. The present fireplace in the first floor parlor duplicates the more ornate classical molding, but is clearly not original. The rooms of the second floor are articulated much the same as those of the first, but would have been intended primarily as bedrooms. The central room sits above the first floor hallway and comma