ne
Restore
the Captain Abraham Knowlton House, an
important first-period home in Ipswich,
which was in disrepair and abandoned.
The restoration was a resounding success, and the house won the 2003 Mary P.
Conley Award from the Ipswich Historic
Commission. Cummings went on to do
the same for more houses in Ipswich,
sometimes saving entire streetscapes
and neighborhoods by preserving
and restoring their historic beauty.
"It's crazy, but no one else was specializing in the work in town," he says. That's especially astonishing considering that "there
Century Census
Essex County is home
to more first-period
homes than anywhere
else in the country.
are more remaining first-period houses
in Essex County, Massachusetts than
anywhere else in the country, and Ipswich
has more surviving first-period homes than
any other town," according to the Ipswich
Historic Commission's website.
"We can't wait for somebody to just
save an old building," Cummings says.
So he does it himself. More than 10 years
after restoring the Captain Abraham
Knowlton House, Cummings Architects
continues to restore historic North Shore
homes, often volunteering his time to do
so. Cummings is also acting president
of Great Marsh Preservation Advocates,
and has served as vice president, head of
buildings and grounds, and trustee of the
Ipswich Museum.
When Cummings restores a historic
building, he does it with an eye toward perfect accuracy. His team documents every
historic piece that's found in a home, numbers them, and puts those numbers in the
plans so anything that has been disassembled can be put back correctly. Cummings
dates everything, too. He and his team uses
dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, to
tell the date of a house by its wood.
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