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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 38, no. 4 (Winter 1990), p. 52-55
Part II of the story about a prominent Nantucket builder who produced structures in a highly eclectic style.
Charles H. Robinson
By Clay Lancaster
Charles H. Robinson (1829-1915), the most prolific local builder of his time, was a beneficiary of Nantucket's successful transition from a leading American whaling port to a desirable summer resort and of the "cottage city" craze on the Atlantic seaboard. A native of Nantucket and son of builder Benjamin Robinson (1797-1879), Charles H. was raised in the 37 Fair Street house constructed by his father in 1831. Having learned the carpenter's trade at home during his youth, Charles H. Robinson easily emerged as a builder and contractor of structures in the eclectic style of the period which drew liberally from a variety of architectural sources.
Nantucket vital records reveal that Charles H. Robinson married Susan H. Chase in 1851, and their two children, William M. and Emily B., were born a few years later. In 1904 Charles, a septuagenarian widower, married Lydia F. Folger, the widow of Edward Butler. At the time of Robinson's death on December 20, 1915, his living kin were his daughter Emily, a brother Benjamin, and a married sister Mrs. Louise Baker, all residents of Nantucket.
Robinson must have enjoyed some success in the building line while in his twenties. The diagram of Nantucket Town on the Henry F. Walling map (1858) of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and the island shows that Robinson owned three buildings on Fair Street, south of the Martins Lane intersection, in the second block from his father's home. In the first Nantucket assessor's list of 1861, these are identified as "dwelling house" ($900), "carpenter's shop" ($100), and a second "dwelling house" ($200). The following year the last was changed to a "stone cutter's shop" ($150). It survives today as a dwelling. The residence on the comer had been purchased from Charles H. Chase for $500 on October 31, 1857. Robinson must have improved it before the assessor's listing four years later. The building may have burned or been razed, as it was not included in tax records for 1866 and 1867. The following year a new dwelling on the site was noted as worth $1,000. This structure, at the south corner of Fair Street and Martins Lane, was to remain Charles H. Robinson's residence for the next forty-eight years.
His house is clapboarded and has double-pitched roofs, bracketed eaves, dipping gables, arched dormers, complex chimneys, and bay windows. Originally it had a verandah at the entrance. In spite of lacking the characteristic mansard roof, the building is in the style of the French Second Empire and was abreast with the mode during the early post-Civil-War period in America.
The "stone cutter's shop," in existence from 1862, was the scene of a thriving business during the following decade. A billhead dated November 1,1875, called it "C. H. ROBINSON'S MARBLE WORKS" and identified him as "Manufacturer and Dealer in Foreign and Domestic Marble Monuments, Tombstones, Tablets, Mantles, and everything appertaining to the Marble Business. ALSO ALL KINDS OF GRANITE WORK EXECUTED." It cannot be ascertained how much longer Robinson continued in the stone business on Fair Street. Beginning in 18 78 his property there was assessed as one dwelling and "shops," the latter at $500.
In the late spring of 1872 the Inquirer and Mirror noted that Charles H. Robinson, Marcus Starbuck, and others were "framing a couple of pretty little cottages on Darling Street to be put on Falmouth Heights... [and] Oak Bluffs." Both areas were swept up in the cottage city "boom" of that day. Falmouth Heights is across Nantucket Sound on Cape Cod, and Oak Bluffs is on Martha's Vineyard. Darling Street in Nantucket was near Robinson's property and adjoined his father's house. The cottages, destined for off-island sites, indicate a more far-flung business than at any other time during Charles H. Robinson's career. It is ironic that, because Nantucket produced no suitably large trees, his building timbers were shipped from the mainland to be processed here for use elsewhere.
The craze for laying out vacationers' "cottage cities" also reached Nantucket. Robinson joined Charles G. and Henry Coffin and Matthew Barney in purchasing thirty-five acres on North Cliff, adjacent to town, which were divided into one hundred 50-by-75-foot lots. Soon, however, Robinson was working on the south shore and at Siasconset [see Historic Nantucket (Fall 1990)].
The most notable Robinson building extant on Nantucket is the Surfside lifesaving station. The type was a descendant of the "humane houses," built by insurance companies from the late eighteenth century onward along the coast where marine mishaps were likely to occur. These were storehouses containing necessities and comforts for sailors in distress. Lifesaving stations, larger than humane houses, were replete with rescue equipment and were staffed by a crew trained in extracting persons from a wrecked vessel. Charles H. Robinson was given the contract for erecting the Surfside building in 1873.
It is not clear whether the design was his own, but in all likelihood it came from the continent. The structure resembled an elaborate stable in the Swiss-chalet or "stick" style, though isolated on the flat moors of Nantucket's south shore. It had exposed wall framing and rafters, with a bracket system supporting the deep overhanging eaves, and prominent braces protruding at the corners and halfway along the sides. Carved dolphin reliefs were set in the spandrels of the gable openwork, and a small deck lookout was sunk into the roof ridge, capped by a flagpole. In 1875-76 lean-tos were added to the flanks of the building, which almost tripled its size, and the upper platform was converted into a closed cupola. The Surfside building now serves as a youth hostel. A smaller-scaled facsimile was put up in 1970 as a lifesaving museum at Shawkemo on a tidal creek linked to Nantucket Harbor.
During the mid 1870s Robinson engaged in several minor hotel projects on Nantucket. One of these was an alteration to the Springfield House. The Springfield was the hostelry of two brothers, Almon T. and Albert S. Mowry, who named it after their hometown in Massachusetts. It was conducted in several houses on North Water Street. The first (no. 21) had been purchased in 1872 and, two years later, the Mowrys leased the considerably larger building on the corner of Chester Street that Elijah H. Alley had run as a hotel for almost a decade. In December 1874 it was announced that Robinson was to make improvements to the older structure, which was to function primarily as a restaurant. When the Springfield House opened the following spring, the dining room was greatly enlarged; and thirty rooms had been added. A new main pavilion was built next to the restaurant in 1883. These were greatly altered in 1977-78 as part of the Harbor House. The Alley hotel block had been sold to the town in 1917 and removed to widen the street.
In May 1875 Robinson moved onto that most venerable tavern in Nantucket, built as the three-storied Jared Coffin mansion at the corner of Broad and Centre streets in 1845. Acquired by the Steamboat Company in 1847, and afterwards operated as the Ocean House, it was renamed the Jared Coffin House in 1961. The 1875 work consisted of "letting in new water pipes" and "closets arranged for the convenience of the guests."The phrasing sounds as though Robinson participated in the plumbing as well as the carpentry work. It is not surprising that he acquired large holdings in the Wannacomet Water Company, inaugurated five years later, and took an active interest in its promotion and development. In 1909 he became company president.
By late spring in 18 76 he had completed his latest addition to the Ocean View House in Siasconset and began the construction of a restaurant on Steamboat Wharf in town. On June 10, the braces for the restaurant's piazza were installed. This refectory was probably the Old Colony restaurant, which Calvert Handy conducted before he shifted to the guest-lodging business in the 1890s. It was located on the north side of the wharf across from, but not so far out as, the freight house.
Robinson performed a number of minor jobs during the late 1870s. At the beginning of 1878 he took down the barn at the rear of Mrs. Winnifred B. Coffin's house. Just before the county fair in the following year, he put up the band and judges stand on the Nantucket Agricultural Society's tract. The Society had acquired a ten-acre site in South Pasture during 1859 and, since 1872, had included horse races in its yearly programs. The structure Robinson added seven years later was a square, double-storied affair of exposed crisscrossed timbers and brackets, serving both for musical entertainments (below) and for race monitoring (above). The grandstand across the track must have been built about fifteen years later because in 1894 a ten-cent fee for a seat in it was added to the twenty-cent entrance charge to the grounds.
The Nantucket Journal story of August 27, 1879, announcing the fairgrounds improvement, also stated that "Mr. Charles H. Robinson is to build a cottage house on Orange Street for Mr. Charles H. Dunham on the vacant lot [north] of the Unitarian Church." Dunham bought the property in two parcels in 1863 and 1870. It included the Revolutionary-War-period Silas Jones house, a gambrel-roofed structure with brick ends. The frame "cottage house" went up over the last four months of 1879, and the town valuation list for 1880 assessed it for $3,000. The old house, by the way, was valued at $1,700, and on June 7, 1880, Dunham sold it for $700. Charles H. Robinson's building was squeezed onto its restricted site, and the bay window of the parlor and chamber above bulged out onto the side walk. By this time he had achieved a style that was characterized by Eastlakian and eclectic embellishments over and around windows, on roof crestings, and on crowning cupolas. Such buildings are sprinkled throughout Nantucket Town.
Robinson is thought to have built the house at 21 Broad Street. William T. Swain bought the lot on October 13, 1876. The property was sold to Charlotte W. Pettee in 1889, then to Mary B. Nesbitt in 1895. The latter converted it into the establishment of long local renown, the Nesbitt House, or (since 1914) the Nesbitt Inn. The structure's mansard roof was perhaps added during Mrs. Pettee's regime. Superimposed bay windows, with cornices at both levels, the upper one more elaborate, are common to both Orange and Broad Street houses. It is reported that Charles H. Robinson remained constantly busy during working hours; and when bad weather kept him inside his shop, he spent his time turning out such ornaments. The lavishness of his architectural embellishments is, therefore, a testimonial to the inclemency of the Nantucket clime. The Andrew Hunt house next door was built about the same time and became part of the Nesbitt House complex in 1896. The two buildings were joined by a covered way, which later was removed.
The Nantucket railroad was built from town to a proposed cottage colony at Surfside in 1881. It was a three-foot-gauge line, three miles long. Inasmuch as the lifesaving station and a few shacks were all that existed on the south shore, a great bam-like depot was built to serve as a restaurant, dance hall, skating rink, and general assembly room. It was about 100-feet long, and a frail porch ran across the side toward the tracks where, twenty feet away, a narrow platform served for passengers to alight. The only decoration on the building was chevron stripes painted on the doors, and the name "SURFSIDE" appeared on the roof in shaded letters like those which promoted the Ocean View House at Steamboat Wharf. This and a record that Robinson later constructed a "cook's house near the restaurant" suggest that he also built the railroad depot at Surfside.
In the same year that the railroad was constructed, Charles H. Robinson and Alfred Swain launched a small development called Clifton Springs near the earlier Barney-Coffin-Robinson colony at the end of Lincoln Avenue on North Cliff. The subdivision consisted of twenty-five lots in an irregular shape, averaging 60-by-200-feet in size, arranged around a triangular greensward.
The residence of John C. Ring, a masonry engineer, on the north corner of Hussey and Liberty Streets was begun by Robinson in the summer of 1885. The front door faces neither street, but rather toward the east. It is in the angle between two gabled two-and-a-half storied pavilions, and it is sheltered by a small, bracketed pent roof. The house is plain, with evenly spaced windows of two panes per sash, and deep eaves on all sides. The house originally would have been clapboarded.
Long-awaited on the island was a large seasonal hotel on North Cliff. It had been suggested in the lnquirer and Mirror on August 15, 1868, as a match to such institutions at Niagara, Cape May, and Old Point Comfort. The location on the cliff was chosen because u[t]he view is perfect; if there is a breath of air, it blows here." Recommended facilities included a flight of stairs down to the shore; convenient bathhouses; boathouses for those desirous of sailing, fishing, and rowing; and bowling alleys, billiard salons, a baseball diamond, and croquet grounds in or near the building.
The announcement that such a hotel was planned appeared in the New Bedford Standard in the spring of 1886 and was repeated in both island newspapers. The structure was "115 feet in the front, with an extreme width in the center of 70 feet." The kitchen was to be in an existing house on North Street (now Cliff Road), and the adjoining new building was to contain an entrance hall, parlor, and dining room on the main floor, some forty sleeping rooms above, and laundry, smoking, and billiard rooms in the basement. Designed by an off-island architect, Robert H. Slade, it was built by Charles H. Robinson for Charlotte W. Pettee, later the owner of the Broad Street property that became the Nesbitt House.
Called the Sea Cliff and completed in May 1887, the building was three stories with a garret and in the Queen Anne style. It was covered by clapboards and shingles and sported bay windows, gables, dormers, tall chimneys, and roof crestings, with piazzas front and back. The old house, serving as kitchen at the south end, was brought up to date by an elaborate hood over its entrance and by a gabled dormer above the cornice. A larger structure was built alongside Robinson's pavilion in 1892-93, making the Sea Cliff the largest hostelry ever built on Nantucket. The addition was put up by E. T. Carpenter of Foxboro. Both structures subsequently were enlarged, and the entire complex was demolished in 1972.
A wealthy Bostonian, R, Gardner Chase, had purchased a sizable tract beyond the Sea Cliff lot in 1883 from artist Eastman Johnson. Chase engaged Cummings and Sons to design buildings. At the beginning of the following year, a huge stable was begun at the lower end of the property near North Beach Street. It was largely of stone, and masons came from the Hub for the construction work. Charles H. Robinson was responsible for the carpentry work. The building, measuring 120-by-43 1/2-feet, was longer than the Sea Cliff, but not as deep. The stable walls were of boulders and exposed timbers, and its massing combined wide gables, a square tower with hipped roof, and various overhangs. No residence was built, and Chase disposed of the property in 1894. The building that was erected, now called the Stone Barn Inn, served as a caravansary. Its former, ample carriage doors have been filled with shingled siding and the necessary fenestration.
In 1891 Robinson built a large bowling alley at Surfside, "containing two alleys, with room for a third if required." The structure supplemented the Surfside Hotel, which had been brought over from the Providence River and re-erected about a mile from the railroad station in 1883. The hotel accommodated many of the functions of the depot. As soon as the bowling alley was completed, a plank walk was laid, presumably by Robinson, from the hotel group to the lifesaving station beyond the depot.
Charles H. Robinson's involvement in the hotel business surfaced again when he purchased the American House at the north corner of Orange Street and Martins Lane in the spring of 1895. The early-nineteenth-century, two-storied frame residence had been a boardinghouse at least since the Great Fire of 1846, when devastation of the nucleus of the community prompted many homeowners to offer accommodations. Robinson modernized the building, which became three-storied: he added an entrance porch with balcony above and a projection at the top between a pair of bay windows which carried through the three floors. The cornice of a cupola was barely visible between the chimney tops. Ornament was supplied by horizontal bands of clapboards, dark-stained, overlapping shakes, and painted shingles, with some turned parts, banisters, and bracketing only at the entrance. A piazza was added on the north flank in 1904. Robinson changed the name to Holiday Inn, which persevered as a hostelry through World War I. It was razed in 1921, and a small domicile was built on the site.
Owner Robinson did not run the Holiday Inn any more than he had the Ocean View House; this left him free to continue building. At the outset of 1897 he was engaged to construct a home for W. B. Marden on the north corner of Milk and Risdale (now New Dollar Lane) streets. It was on the order of the John C. Ring house. Subsequently, it has undergone changes, such as acquiring shingles, and its entrance has been moved from the front to a side addition. In March 1899 Harrison Gardner contracted with Robinson to build his house on the site of the old town house at the west corner of Main and Milk streets. With bracketed eaves, gabled pavilions on front and sides, bracketed porch, and bay window, the new structure was larger than the Ring or Marden residences. On the east flank the verandah with classic columns on pedestals is modern.
As the turn of the century approached, Robinson, then seventy, was not ready to retire. At the beginning of 1902 he moved the old Sherburne House, a hostel on Orange Street across from his Holiday Inn, back from the sidewalk to the edge of Quanaty Bank overlooking the Great Harbor. The building had been purchased by William Barnes Jr., to serve as a private residence and was altered in the Colonial Revival style. Wyer and Company performed the carpentry work. In 1911 Robinson again worked for George Brinton to make extensive improvements on the Beach House farm property in Polpis, including new fences and an addition to the dwelling. The remarkable thing about this last job is that the builder was in his eighty-second year and still active.
Soon after his work at Polpis, however, Robinson's health began to decline. According to his obituary, his condition was not "thought serious, as he was able to be out on Main street up to a week or so before his death." He died at the age of eighty-six and was recognized as "one of the leading citizens of the town." Charles H. Robinson was more builder than architect. His handiwork will not be remembered for any great design innovations, but his buildings and renovations are representative of a period, of a place, and of a life-style proper to the inhabitants of and visitors to his native island.
