Historic New England receives state grant to preserve Colonial house

JOHNSTON – Historic New England has obtained a $29,780 grant from the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission’s State Preservation Grants Program to help preserve the 1691 Clemence-Irons House.
Historic New England also received a $35,500 grant from the Champlin Foundations to fund a historic preservation/adaptive reuse project at Casey Farm in Saunderstown.
Clemence-Irons House is a rare example of a “stone-ender” and one of the oldest houses in Rhode Island. It is one of 36 historic properties owned and operated by Historic New England, a regional historic preservation organization.
The grant will support a $91,000 preservation project for the building that includes roof replacement with hand-split, re-sawn shakes; in-kind repair of the rear sill; replacement of deteriorated clapboarding; and mortar analysis and spot re-pointing of the stone end, including repair of the decorative corbeling at the top of the chimney.
The building is an important record of 20th-century restoration ideas and methods. Originally, the one-and-a-half-story house had four rooms on the ground floor, a massive stone chimney at the western end and a steep gable roof that extended over the rear lean-to. By 1938 the house had grown to 13 rooms, and Norman Isham, a noted preservation architect and authority on Colonial Rhode Island dwellings, was commissioned to remove later alterations so the house could be presented as an authentic example of a late 17th-century home.
The Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission is the state agency for historical preservation and heritage programs. It operates a statewide historical preservation program that identifies and protects historic buildings, districts, structures and archaeological sites. It also develops and carries out programs to document and celebrate the cultural heritage of Rhode Island’s people.
The grant for Casey Farm supports Historic New England’s goal of building capacity to better support the growing number of programs, partnerships and community benefits at the historic site. Funds will be used to transform the former tenant space into offices for public program and preservation activities and create a meeting space for farm and community use.
The project will preserve the historic fabric of the building, while improving the interior infrastructure to support the expanded administrative space. A southern Rhode Island site manager position will be added to continue building public engagement, creating and running new public programs and overall administration of the site. Office space will provide a base of operations for staff, the organization said.

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