Report on 19th-century concealed shoes and Cape Houses

Houses. Architectural and folk history. This updated 2018 report of investigation summarizes 2013-2017 research into nine Cape-style houses spawned by the 2013 discovery and repatriation of four ca. 1820-1830s shoes concealed in the chimney wall of the parsonage house of the Great Cranberry Congregational Church. The 2014 and 2018 revised report was submitted to the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Acadia NPS, and GCIHS. Revised version is twenty-two pages with photos and bibliography as of January 18, 2018, and includes findings of a 2015 dendrochronology project. This study of the parsonage Cape-style house with its neighboring Cape-style houses and the separate 2013 study of the nearby ca. 1826 Preble house documents a cluster of historic island houses on the verge of becoming unrecognizable through remodeling. Research reveals folk practices, the oeuvre of local 19th-century house builders; Cape-style design innovations; granite and lumber sources; dendrochronology study; and early 19th-century Bulger and Spurling family histories. One of the cape houses was the birthplace of Civil War Medal of Honor General Andrew Barclay Spurling.; the Preble House was his boyhood home. See also concealed shoe research: 2013.252.1979. See 2018 Chebacco Magazine article, Concealed Shoes and Cape Houses: Artifacts as Agents of the Past by Anne Grulich