William Sumner Appleton was founder of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) in 1910. He was the chief force behind much of the preservation of historic homes in the New England area.
Background
William Sumner Appleton was born on May 29, 1874 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States to William Sumner Appleton и Edith Ida Stuart Appleton. His father, a Unitarian, was a lawyer and an antiquarian, an authority on numismatics, heraldry, and geneaology.
Thereafter, for a decade, he felt limited in what he could do, and the decision of his father to leave the family wealth in trust seemed to Appleton an additional barrier between himself and the world of business.
The Appletons had been a prominent family in Massachusetts since the 1630's. One branch of the family moved, in about 1750, to New Ipswich, New Hampshire, whence two brothers, Samuel and Nathan, came to Boston by 1794 and established themselves as merchants. Prosperity in trade enabled the brothers to participate in financing the emergent textile industry. Nathan, William's grandfather, also served several terms as a Whig congressman. William grew up in the Beacon Street house his grandfather had built.
Education
In 1905-1906 Appleton attended the Bussey Institution, a school for agriculture attached to Harvard.
The following year he studied architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and in 1907-1908 he was a student in the department of mining and metallurgy.
Career
He pursued the rounds of the Boston gentleman, including service with several antiquarian organizations. Indecision ended abruptly in 1910 with Appleton's founding of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA). The immediate purpose of the society lay in acquiring and preserving historic buildings.
Appleton foresaw that local groups, each preoccupied with a single structure or town, would always lack the freedom and power of a regional agency. Money and members came in slowly at the start, but by 1911 the society had acquired its first building. Forty more were added in Appleton's lifetime, most of them houses that dated from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The founding of the SPNEA coincided with a general awakening of sympathy for the arts and architecture of the colonial period. Appleton was instinctively drawn to houses of this period; as he later said in explaining the origins of the SPNEA, he had never known a time when he was not interested in the New England past.
Of more specific influence on his interest were his participation in 1909 in the successful effort to save the Paul Revere house and his course in architecture with Denman Ross.
Appleton was capable of valuing old houses both for their ancestral associations and for their place in the history of architecture. His interest in agriculture played an important part in determining the choice of buildings he wanted to preserve. It led him also to emphasize the collecting of archival materials relating to the history of architecture. The archives of the SPNEA soon came to rival its list of properties in value.
Appleton was less successful in developing a point of view on restoration. He was ahead of his time in appreciating the accretions time could add to a historic house, and he detested pretentious, ill-documented restorations. Yet he also sanctioned the contemporary practice of returning old buildings to their original condition.
As preservation became a national movement and as projects on the scale of colonial Williamsburg seized attention, the SPNEA remained a personal instrument, sharing the strengths and weaknesses of its director. Appleton's single-mindedness and energy were coupled with a modesty and a zeal for thrift that at times became compulsive. Late in the fall of 1947, Appleton died of a stroke and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge.
Politics
Conservative in personal and political tastes, Appleton exemplified the narrowing relationship between certain upper-class Bostonians and the world about them.
