Ocean Grove Record

From the Files of the HPC
76 Mount Tabor: Then and now
Worth the Wait
By J. Shaffer Dr. Mildred Hardeman is the kind of person who tirelessly pursues a goal, no matter how long it takes. As a girl, Mildred knew that staying in her Texas hometown wasn’t for her. So after graduating college in 1942, she saved $90 – enough for train fare and a week’s lodging – and told her parents she was moving to New York City. She arrived on a Saturday, and by Monday afternoon she had a job and was accepted as a doctoral student in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University. Later, though, when she began looking for a teaching position in New York, she found that no one would hire a female philosophy professor. She changed her field to one more “suitable” for a woman, and obtained a Ph.D. in psychology. She lived in Greenwich Village and worked as a professor at Queens College until she retired about 10 years ago. Mildred first came to Ocean Grove in 1974, intrigued by an article in the New York Times describing the town’s blue laws. She knew immediately that she wanted to buy a home here. She and a friend purchased 34-34 ½ Webb together, but when her friend wanted to “modernize” the house, Mildred was horrified. She sold her half of that property and looked for something of her own. In 1976 she bought 76 Mount Tabor for a whopping $16,000. The two-story cottage on Green Leaf Park is one of the oldest homes in town, built ca. 1874. It has been modified over the years, but Mildred has a nineteenth-century photo of the original L-shaped cottage, sheathed in board and batten, its roof steeply pitched and accented with a decorative bargeboard. The first-floor porch was close to the ground and had neither railing nor roof. The central, arched, double doors were flanked by tall, slender windows. On the second floor, rectangular double doors opened onto a narrow projecting porch with a pansy-design railing supported by openwork brackets. 76 Mt. Tabor’s original façade tied it to the larger camp meeting movement in the United States. Its small scale, symmetrical design, and balcony configuration recalled the “campground cottages” pioneered at the Wesleyan Grove Camp Meeting in Martha’s Vineyard, one of the oldest camp meetings in the country. By the time Mildred bought the house, it had acquired a one-story addition to the east and a covered porch extending across the entire facade. The front door had been altered to a simple rectangle. The balcony and upper doors – now windows – were long gone. The house was covered in asphalt shingles. The cottage was Mildred’s second home, where she spent weekends and summers, and so she focused first on the interior, which was a mess. When she became a full-time resident of Ocean Grove about a year ago, she turned her attention to the exterior. Mildred came before the Historic Preservation Commission with her contractor. While she wanted to retain as much of the cottage’s original fabric as possible, she needed to insulate the house. She proposed removing the asphalt shingle, wrapping the cottage in insulation, and sheathing the structure in cedar shakes to match a rear addition. When a historic home requires new sheathing, the Historic District Guidelines call for replacement with like materials if at all possible. Some commissioners thus questioned Mildred’s choice of shakes and spoke about the historic precedent and stylistic appropriateness of simple, vertically oriented board and batten. Her contractor said that board and batten would likely not work with the existing porch configuration, which Mildred wished to retain. Given the present state of 76 Mt. Tabor, the Board – some commissioners quite reluctantly – approved Mildred’s plans. But a seed had been planted. After the contractor removed the asphalt shingle to reveal the original board and batten, Mildred liked what she saw. Her contractor devised a way to make vertical siding work on the existing structure. Much to the Board’s delight, Mildred amended her application to board and batten. 76 Mount Tabor was wrapped with insulation and the new board and batten exterior was painted in historic colors. The original bargeboard and simple trim were scraped and painted. It is not unusual for a homeowner to change his/her mind about some aspect of work during the course of a project, or for a contractor to encounter field conditions that require changes to the approved plans. In such cases, the homeowner must amend the original application and the HPC must approve the changes. A call to the HPC office for guidance gets that ball rolling. Indeed, the more Mildred thought about it, the more she was taken with another lost aspect of the original cottage. She amended her application again, this time to replicate the lost second-floor porch as a false porch. The stunning transformation of 76 Mount Tabor is now complete. For Mildred Hardeman, it was well worth the wait. - Dr. J. Shaffer is an architectural historian. She has been on the HPC for three years.
The before shot - 76 Mt. Tabor

Read last month's From the files of the HPC" by clicking here