To learn more on the HABS program at the click here for the National Park Service
In the mid-1930s, America's National Park Service set up programs to being surveying and documenting a large variety of historical site and places that were considered important to our cultural heritage. The impetus was on preservation at a time when renovating Williamsburg and other historic locations became a priority. The program coincided with a need to employ architects, engineers, and photographers who were unemployed because of the Great Depression. The resulting programs were the The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), and Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS). The results were incredible.
The Stanton-Davis Homestead was selected as one of the sites for the HABS program (under the name of the Thomas Stanton House) and you cannot imagine how excited we are to have this stunning architectural survey available to us. The architect did an amazing degree of drawing not only the plans on each floor but also the outside of the house and the decorative details on the staircase, the cupboard in the parlor (shown on our Fundraising page here), the doors and windows, and elsewhere in the house. It even includes interesting notes; for example: Hearthstone is a solid slab of native stone 5'-"x2'-1"
We would like to display these drawings here as way to show off the beauty of the Stanton-Davis Homestead but the size of the images renders them impossible to show in this context. However, you can click here see the designs for the Stanton-Davis Homestead (as the Thomas Stanton House) online at the Library of Congress HABS collection. You will also see five black-and-white photographs taken at the same time.
The map to the right is the cover map on the set of drawings (here at a very small scale).
