What should an architect’s new house look like in a historic neighborhood? This is the question that Margaret B. Kelly and J. Peter Geddes had to address when designing 29 Manning Street in the 1930s. The small, two-story brick house was modern in many ways, but it was also cleverly designed to fit in with its much older architectural neighbors. Many of the historic homes in Providence are noted for their elaborately carved architectural details, but Geddes & Kelly did not include moldings around the windows and doors in order to create a simplified, more modern facade. The windows on the Manning Street front are arranged in a traditional, symmetrical way, but the windows themselves are casement windows (they swing out), unlike the windows of most of the neighborhood’s earlier homes. The interior had innovative features that made use of the limited space, like a custom-designed kitchen table that could unfold to add workspace and built-in benches with storage. Service areas like the kitchen were in the front of the house, and the main living areas were in the rear, where a wall of large windows and a door connected the living room to a patio and walled back yard.
The house is significant not only as an early example of domestic modernism in Providence, but also for being designed by Margaret B. Kelly (1907–1995), one of the few women architects working in Rhode Island in the first half of the twentieth century. Kelly’s family moved to Providence when she was a teenager and she attended the Wheeler School and Vassar College before receiving her degree in architecture from MIT in 1933. This Manning Street house by Geddes & Kelly was built in 1939 and was featured in the March 1941 issue of Architectural Forum, an important architectural publication. Margaret Kelly married Peter Geddes in 1942 and lived in the house from then until her death in 1995. Margaret Geddes was very active in the community and her Manning Street home served as a meeting place for the League of Women Voters of Providence and the Rhode Island Vassar Alumnae Association.
Margaret Geddes gave the house to Brown University and it served as the headquarters of the Urban Studies Program for over 20 years. The university chose to demolish this structure to make way for a new Engineering Research Center designed by the award-winning architecture firm KieranTimberlake and completed in October 2017. Before the house was demolished, Dietrich Neumann, director of the Urban Studies Program, and Stefano Bloch, a postdoctoral fellow, organized a public art “Paint Out” of the facade with local artist Gregory Pennisten (see video). Another house designed by Geddes & Kelly, also built in 1939, survives nearby at 47 Manning Street. Though much larger, this private residence shares many features with the demolished building like a minimally-adorned brick facade, low hip roof, casement windows, and an attached garage.
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]]>The Chace-Cory House, built around 1730 by Benjamin or Abner Chace, witnessed the passing of many Tiverton generations by its front door. Once a lonely house, it has seen nearly 300 years of change at Four Corners. Its floorboards are well-worn by the pacing of more than 100 years of anxious wives, widowed by the sea, if only temporarily.
In 1816, Andrew Cory and his school teacher wife, Jane Gray Seabury, bought the house. Jane had lived here with her parents as a young woman, running a school in the “old chamber,” which extends intact over the kitchen pantry. Andrew Cory lived a life at sea, eventually taking command of the New Bedford Whaler Isaac Howland in 1845 at the age of fifty-five. Despite his time at sea, Andrew and Jane managed to have nine children, although only seven survived childhood.
Andrew and Jane’s eldest child, Edward, followed in his father’s wake. He shipped from New Bedford on whalers that took him as far as Australia where, in 1842, he met Mary Ann Bamford, an orphaned 19-year-old woman sent from England as a child upon the death of her parents. The two wed in Australia, shipping back to Tiverton where they raised a large family of their own. Edward inherited the house from his father in 1866.
Late in his career as a whaler, Edward Cory went missing during a planned two-year voyage. Three years passed with no word of him, then four and five. The orphaned Mary must have passed many anguished hours wondering about Edward’s fate, finally preparing for life as a widow.
But six years after sailing from New Bedford, Edward returned. While pursuing a whale, it dealt him a near-fatal injury, and Edward spent three years convalescing in China before regaining enough strength for the long voyage home.
Edward and Mary Ann’s eldest son, Edward Joseph Cory, inherited the house, and he too tried his hand at whaling, until the industry died out in the early twentieth-century. He turned to fishing the local waters, shipping his fresh catch from Newport to New York aboard the Fall River Line steamships.
In 1962, Edward Joseph Cory, Jr., sold the old house to another man of the sea, J. William Middendorf. A veteran of the United States Navy, Middendorf served as Ambassador to the Netherlands in 1973 and Secretary of the Navy from 1974 to 1977. In 1964, Middendorf donated the house to the Tiverton Historical Society, which moved here from its original headquarters at Whitridge Hall.
Carlton Brownell, a Little Compton resident and history teacher in the Tiverton Public Schools, led the restoration effort. The grounds of the Chase-Cory House contain an unusual 19th-century washhouse, a corncrib reassembled here in 1976, original stonewalls, and a privy. Brownell, who dedicated his long life to the preservation of local history, died at age 95 in February 2013.
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