Pioneering Woman of American Architecture

Ruth Adams (1883–1970) is a rare example of a single female practitioner who opened her own office prior to World War I. She was the architect for the summer colony Yelping Hill in Cornwall, Connecticut, where she designed nine homes in the 1920s. As an interior designer, she renovated social spaces, dormitories, and offices for Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she also designed five houses for women faculty, as well as a home for the college’s dean. Like many architects of her generation, she worked in a range of styles—Arts and Crafts, Elizabethan, Queen Anne, Georgian Revival, and Shingle Style—but as her interior renovations show, she was also open to a modern style.

Early Life and Education

Born in Beloit, Wisconsin, Adams was the daughter of George Burton Adams (1851–1925), a professor of English medieval history at Yale University, and Ida Clarke Adams (1867–1938), a homemaker. Adams grew up on Edgehill Road in New Haven, Connecticut.11According to the United States Federal Census (1910), Adams was born in Beloit, Wisconsin, like her mother. According to an emergency passport application (made in 1914 in Venice, Italy) Ruth Adams was 5’ 4” tall, with blue eyes. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College in 1904, and then worked as her father’s secretary.22As Adams wrote to her classmates: “I am living quietly at home adjusting myself to domestic pursuits and some society. As for a more formal ‘occupation,’ I am acting as my father’s secretary, which means typewriting . . . reading proof, and anything else that turns up.” She mentions aspirations for social work and volunteer work in the library of a settlement house. Vassar, 1904 Class Bulletin, March 1905, 3. Quoted in Phyllis Halpern, “Ruth Adams ’04 Architect Rediscovered,” Vassar Quarterly 74, no. 1 (Fall 1977): 17. The Class Bulletins (they go by various names) are held in Special Collections, Vassar College. At Vassar she was a member of the Current Topics Club, the Committee on General Philanthropic Work (part of the Christian Association). Vassar Miscellany 39, no. 6 (March 1, 1910): 390. While still at home, she took up weaving on a “large sized Swedish hand loom . . . which I produced on my return from a visit last fall.”33Fifth Bulletin of the Class of 1904 at Vassar College, June 1910, 4. In January 1910, she enrolled in the New York School of Applied Design for Women writing to her classmates, “I suppose it may be said that I have become one of those emancipated females who have deserted their families and are congregating in such numbers in large cities.” She concluded that she and a classmate had set up housekeeping together and were “enjoying being emancipated exceedingly.”44Fourth Bulletin of the Class of 1904 at Vassar College, May 1908, 4. So far as we know, she never received an architectural license. In a 1912 class bulletin, she reported that she was “doing interior decoration” in the office of a Smith College graduate, Amy Ferris, in New York City.55Vassar Miscellany 42, no. 4 (1 February 1913): 307. The office was in Ferris’s name. See also Bulletin of the Class of 1904 at Vassar College, December 1912, 12. In November 1913, she opened her first office “for house furnishing and interior decoration.”66Vassar Miscellany 43, no. 1 (1 November 1913): 35. The office was located at 131 East 31^st Street, New York City.

Career

She received her first architectural commission in Poughkeepsie through her connections to Vassar College. In 1911–12, she designed a house—reputedly based on her senior thesis from the School of Applied Design—for Winifred Smith, her college classmate and a professor in Vassar’s English department.77Priscilla Smith Robertson, letter to the editor, Vassar Quarterly 74, no. 2 (January 1978): 2. Smith was an ardent campaigner for women’s voting rights and engaged in the study of advanced techniques of education. Like Adams, she remained unmarried. Located in Poughkeepsie, the house is a relatively simple two-story clapboard structure with a combined pitched and gambrel roof, sometimes called Dutch Colonial.88A one-story section to the north with corner pilasters appears to have been added later. Adams would sometimes stay with Smith on her visits to Poughkeepsie. See letters to MacCracken, May 5, 1935 and November 3, 1935, Vassar College, Special Collections, MacCracken Papers, Box 16, folder 45. Though there is no precise catalogue match for the house, its forms can be found in Sears, Standard Homes, and other sources.99See Daniel D. Reiff, Houses from Books: Treatises, Pattern Books, and Catalogs in American Architecture 1738–1950: A History and Guide (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). Then, in 1914, Adams remodeled a guest room and bathroom in the Main Building for use by Vassar alumnae, a gift of her college class.1010See the file on the room in Vassar College Special Collections, Class Box 1904, box 2, folder, “1904’s Guest Room.” These works launched her career at Vassar. In 1916, she advertised an “office for interior decorating” at 19 East 57^th Street, New York City: “Architectural Designs // Wall Papers and Furniture // Chintzes, Block Printed Linens, Rugs // Lamps and Shades.”1111Vassar Quarterly 1, no. 1 (February 1, 1916): 75.

Much of her work for Vassar involved remodeling public rooms in the dormitories (Main, 1915; Lathrop, 1916).1212Vassar Miscellany Weekly, October 1, 1915, 6; Vassar Quarterly 2, no. 2 (February 1, 1917): 124. In 1938, Adams published an article entitled “Decorating Vassar,” in which she looked back on almost a quarter of a century of work for the College.1313Ruth Adams, “Decorating Vassar,” Vassar Alumnae Magazine 24, no. 2 (December 1938): 12–13. There she conflated her many tasks over the years into a few short sentences: “dormitory parlors, and rooms, changing from message centers to card rooms, to smoking rooms and back to reception rooms. I furnished the Counsel Room in [the] Students [Building], the Men’s Reception Room in Main [Building], the Minister’s study in the Chapel Tower and other things I hardly remember.”1414Adams, “Decorating Vassar,” 12. Keeping of an inventory of the furniture was a critical part of her work, suggesting that the permanent buildings staff had yet to take on this task. She “tried to keep track of it all—a real feat in permutations and combinations, with blue, rust, green and taupe rugs, chairs, and different sofas and daybeds and ever changing personalities.” Adams, “Decorating Vassar,” 12. None of these decorative projects survive. One special undertaking was the decorative program for Alumnae House. Designed by Hunt & Hunt, this half-timbered Elizabethan-style building provided the dominant architectural character for the neighborhood.1515 “Who First Furnished Alumnae House?” Vassar Quarterly 23, no. 2 (December 1937): 32. Adams was involved in helping her class design activities for the new alumnae association. See Vassar 1904, Twelfth Class Bulletin, April 1917, 11–13. Adams wrote that she was “absorbed” in its plans for a year around 1920.1616Adams, “Decorating Vassar,” 12. She left New York City and moved back to New Haven in 1928, possibly to care for her mother following the death of her father in 1925.1717Vassar Quarterly 12, no. 1 (December 1926): 60. Adams reports spending Monday through Thursday in New York City; and the remainder of the week in New Haven. Adams to MacCracken, January 5, 1928. MacCracken Papers, Box 16, folder 45. Her letterhead address changes from New York City to New Haven after 1928. Her letterhead from New Haven at the time specifies her business as “Interior Furnishings.”1818See her letterhead in MacCracken Papers, box 16, folder 45. Adams was never registered as an architect, which during that period was not necessary for home design.

From 1932 to 1942, Adams served Vassar College as “consulting interior designer,” with a 200 dollar annual retainer fee plus a 10 percent commission on purchases. She continued working on the renovation of public rooms in the dormitories.1919“Corridors and Parlor of Main Redone During Summer,” Vassar Miscellany News (October 2, 1935) no. 1: 8. Adams was also responsible for rooms in the Student Center (now Gordon Commons), a men’s reception room in Main Building, the minister’s study in the Chapel tower (dates unknown). In addition, she oversaw the decoration of rooms around the Office of Admissions. At one point she was asked to teach interior decoration along with John McAndrew, who taught architectural design, and was grateful not to have to take on that responsibility. Letter from Adams to MacCracken, 13 March 1932. MacCracken Papers, Box 16, folder 45. The largest and most significant project in this period involved remodeling the old gymnasium in Ely Hall to make what was called the Aula, a social and workspace for the faculty (1937).2020“The New Faculty Aula,” Vassar Quarterly 23 (December 1937): 17. Photographs show a combination of informal and upright chairs, desks, tables, and sofas. She lengthened the windows to create more light. Brick walls and exposed wooden truss work in the ceiling gave a modernized monastic quality to the space. Venetian blinds and coarse, meshed Indian-onion bagging screened strong sun or closed off the windows at night.

Adams reported on some of the particular difficulties of working in a woman’s college. In her early years at Vassar, she was required to provide sofas with extra shallow seats “so that the students should have no temptation ‘to loll’ in the parlors.” Rooms also had to be arranged “so no student should be able to find a seat in a secluded corner with her guest.” Later funds would not stretch to provide seating for students in public spaces, and her solution was wall-to-wall carpeting. “Those of you who have seen these rooms after dinner when coffee is being served know how well this plan has worked,” she wrote.

A contemporary cartoon shows “the entire floor space . . . covered with girls with their coffee cups and ash trays.”2121Adams, “Decorating Vassar,” 13. By the end of the 1930s Adams felt her compensation from the college was insufficient.2222In 1932, while completing work on the dean’s house, she badly sprained her ankle and was on crutches. The same year, she had been thrown from a horse and had broken her ankle. Vassar Quarterly 17, no. 4 (November 1932): 402. She protested in letters to the president in October 1940 and April 1942, and Vassar terminated her contract, pleading that wartime economies were necessary.

Prior to World War II, Adams’s most substantial architectural work was in Arlington, a neighborhood close to Vassar College. Many of her commissions came from women faculty, who apparently felt at ease working with a woman architect. In 1915–16, Vassar professors Edith Fahnestock and Rose Jeffries Peebles commissioned a Tudor-style house from Adams on a rocky outcrop on the north side of College Avenue. The two-story house with dormers at the upper story and small-paned windows has an unfolding plan that enables views out over the street. The dominant materials are wood half-timbering, stone, and stucco—the timbering is wide, giving the relatively small house a striking monumentality.

A few years later, in 1922, Adams designed a house for Violet Barbour (1884–1968), a Vassar history professor and her mother, Elizabeth. It is a relatively conventional two-story shingle house, though the wooden shingles are now painted white, giving the house a somewhat neo-colonial character. The design includes three porches, one at the side entrance, one at the rear ground level, and a third off the second story, again in the rear. The proximity of the design to those of the National Plan Service Company suggests, as proposed by Daniel Reiff, that Adams, like others, may have taken the company’s plans and adapted them to her taste and that of her client.2323Reiff, Houses from Books, 243.

In 1931, Adams undertook the design of a house for the dean of the College, Mildred Thompson, which became the College dean’s official residence.2424Noted in The New York Times, October 25, 1931, N4. The brick two-story Georgian house is set away from the road overlooking the old Arboretum and a small lake.2525Later additions nearby are tragically ordinary and the landscaping by Norman Newton has been effaced. A wood overdoor and pediment define the entrance, the latter providing a somewhat surprising element of grandeur to the rather small house. The interior combines public and private functions—with a bookcase-lined study and large reception parlor.2626Barbara Swain, “164 College Avenue,” Vassar Quarterly 18, no. 3 (July 1933): 224–26. There too, the conventional nature of the Georgian design suggests the likely existence of a model, possibly Delano & Aldrich’s Peterloon in Indian Hills, Ohio (1930).

The president of the college, Henry Noble MacCracken, must have been pleased with Adams’s work for the College. In 1918, he proposed that she become “executive agent for Red Cross House Furnishings,” and she provided “furnishing for over sixty Red Cross Houses for Convalescents and forty Rest Home for Nurses, besides several odd Guest Houses.”2727Vassar 1904, Thirteenth Class Bulletin, April 1919, 7. It was also probably MacCracken who recommended her in 1921 to a group of New-York area intellectuals and business people for the construction of a private summer colony, Yelping Hill, in Cornwall, Connecticut, which was founded by Henry Seidel Canby (editor of Saturday Review). Canby was influenced by feminist proposals for collective domestic work and kitchenless houses, and he persuaded a group of his friends to purchase land that was to be collectively owned.2828On Yelping Hill, see Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 261–63. Other members of the colony included playwright Lee Wilson Dodd, scientist Beverly Kunkel, musician and composer David Smith, corporate lawyer Mason Trowbridge, and MacCracken himself.

Adams herself was an active member of the community. One of the first projects she undertook was the remodeling of an old barn at the entrance of the community to create a public meeting space with guest quarters, kitchen, and dining room. Here residents had their meals, served by undergraduates. A library and a communal living room (that doubled as a lecture room) compensated for the relatively small size of the houses and created a collective social space.

Adams designed nine houses for the residents (seven of which, though extensively remodeled, survive); she closely supervised house construction, so much so that she sometimes irritated workmen.2929This friction is recalled by current residents of Yelping Hill and noted by Halpern, “Ruth Adams,” 20. Each of the houses was carefully located in the forested areas along a new loop road so they would be hidden from each other during the summer. The houses were not insulated and had no (or very small) kitchens. Typically, they had nearby writing huts for the men.

Though community events took place in the barn, the provision of hall-like living rooms with low stair approaches from doors and corridors in some of the houses suggest staging areas for private performances. Overall, the houses have an improvised handmade Arts-and-Crafts character, with many details unrefined. House profiles are often vertical (like Alpine cottages) with steep “fairy tale” roofs or, as the comparison is often made, like “Ginger Bread” houses (notably, the Trowbridge House). Tile decorations on the floor of the MacCracken house are reminiscent of those from the Moravian pottery in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Many of the houses have been renovated, winterized, or extended for modern comfort. The practice of communal dining died out during World War II.

Many of Adams’s houses at Yelping Hill have eccentric characteristics. Both the fairy-tale look of the houses and their spatial organization are occasionally idiosyncratic, with short stair flights to create an interior topography (Barbour, Peebles-Fahnestock, Trowbridge). The MacCracken house, Fridstol, has two bedrooms at the end of a ground-floor corridor; to provide light and air, Adams split the bedroom block like the tail feathers of a bird. An upstairs bedroom barely has room for a bed. There were, according to current residents, plans to put in a full second story on the house, which MacCracken decided against at the last minute, leaving the underside of the roof exposed. Adams’s own first house, Cliff House (or Rocky Cliffe House), required her to go outside in order to reach the second floor. Details, too, are often peculiar: windows or fireplaces abut walls awkwardly or are truncated unexpectedly. It is consciously rustic architecture without the self-control of the Picturesque. Some of these apparent eccentricities may have been caused by last-minute decisions or her own lack of experience. At one point the contractors at the Dean’s house where the contractors complained of elevations and ground plans not coinciding—revealing a missing four inches, for which Adams had to take responsibility.3030Dean’s House 17:19, Ruth Adams to Buildings & Grounds, April 21, 1932.

Possibly the most successful of Adams’s Connecticut houses, certainly the one that has absorbed renovation most effectively, is Treetop (1928) built for the Scoville family in Cornwall. While the houses on Yelping Hill, even those that have been renovated, have a cramped or improvised quality, due to their low cost or role as a vacation home, Treetop has generous interior spaces, and the view over Cream Hill Lake is organized effectively. Though Adams seems not to have visited Scandinavia, the placement of the house on a rock outcropping overlooking the lake recalls Swedish architecture of a similar period and function. Adams was also able to use a variety of woods on Treetop: birch, pine, and oak—even so, the uninsulated interior walls were originally faced with unpainted brown fiberboard.

At the age of 64, in 1950, Adams designed her last house in Poughkeepsie, once again for a Vassar faculty member, Barbara Swain in the English Department. The design can be compared to a model house published earlier by the National Plan Service Company.3131Reiff, Houses from Books, 295, fig. 678. A single-story house, similar to other Colonial Revival houses of the same period with second-story dormers, it stands on a hilly site and has a striking slate roof.

Of Adams’s architectural preferences there can be little doubt: she was raised and lived much of her life on Edgehill Road in New Haven, what is today part of the Prospect Hill Historic District. Its Arts and Crafts houses, built around 1900, provided the elements for her own taste. Her dedication to craftwork and her oversight of construction further confirms her broad affection for the Arts and Crafts.3232According to Halpern, “Ruth Adams,” 20. Late in life, Adams was noted for Beowulf, a horse she rode around Yelping Hill. Her one known planning proposal was for a group of homes for “elderly alumnae and retired members of the faculty, or for alumnae who wish to stay at Vassar longer than the Alumnae House can accommodate them.” She conceived of the design (1928) as “a street, with rows of houses on either side” patterned after Bishop’s Close at Wells Cathedral.3333Vassar Quarterly 13, no. 3 (July 1928): 196. At an Alumnae Council Meeting in 1929, the proposal for a “Vassar Close” was put on hold, due to difficulties, “financial and otherwise.” Vassar Quarterly 14, no. 2 (May 1929): 107. Adams traveled to Europe at least three times. Her reference to travel to Sweden, see above n. 3, is undocumented elsewhere. She apparently spent 1914–15 in England and her trips to Italy are recorded on ships returning to the United States from England, in April 1915 and June 1927. On both these trips, she traveled with her mother. She spent the summer of 1919 in Wyoming and Colorado. Vassar Quarterly 5, no. 1, (November 1919): 75. It is not clear when she gave up her New York office. In 1920, she is recorded as offering to let “one room in a studio apartment” at 19 East 57^th Street. Vassar Miscellany News 4, no. 57 (17 June 1920): 11.

Though interior decoration was a more accepted profession for women in the early twentieth century, Adams’s transition from interior design to architecture makes her a rarity for her time. It was Vassar College, and its women faculty, that provided the opportunity for her practice to develop.3434 “I have searched and found no symptoms of regret that matrimony has become a possibility of the past, and that I am not responsible for the production of my husband’s ‘favorite dish.’” In the same letter, Adams informed her classmates that she expected to vote for Herbert Hoover “or to vote for the Socialist ticket in protest against the action of the legislature in Albany.” 1904 Class Bulletin, A Year Book of the Class of 1904 at Vassar College, June 1920, 7. She used catalogues and standard house plans effectively; more intensive study would be required to establish the degree of her invention.

The houses at Yelping Hill confound our picture of her practice. Here she seems to have been allowed greater freedom, building for a summer colony that tolerated, perhaps even encouraged, her eccentricity in the rural isolation of the Connecticut woods. In comparison with the Poughkeepsie houses that adhere to well-accepted models, the Yelping Hill houses offer an unexpected degree of imaginative whimsy, albeit one that sometimes spills over into inefficiency or awkwardness. In a note to her Vassar class in 1928, she wrote: “I am still crazy about furnishing houses, but I like to plan and build them even better.”3535Quoted in Halpern, “Ruth Adams,” 17.

The author is grateful to Ann Trowbridge, granddaughter of one of the founders of Yelping Hill for a rich and well-structured tour of the houses. She introduced me to other residents of Yelping Hill, notably Jeremy Brecher, who were helpful. Roxana Robinson generously discussed Adams’s career with me at Treetop.