IN SEARCH OF JAMES: 

Celebrating the 250th. anniversary of 

the birth of James Hoban, 

Architect and Builder of The White House

 

from THE OLD KILKENNY REVIEW, Journal of The Kilkenny Archaeological Society, 2008

 

Denis Bergin documents the happy circumstances, co-incidences and collaborations that led to a momentous commemoration between 2006 and 2008 of the Cuffesgrange-born architect and builder of America’s White House.

 

In January 1967, as a recent arts graduate of the National University of Ireland at Maynooth, I gave a lecture to Kilkenny Archaeological Society. The subject was Fr. James Archer S.J., a priest of the circle of Hugh O’Neill, whose most famous appearance in the history books was as a member of Owney O’Moore’s delegation to a ‘parley’ near Ballyragget in 1600 at which the Duke of Ormonde was taken captive.

    I cannot remember exactly the circumstances of my precocious presentation (I was twenty years of age), except to say that it was probably arranged through my friend Frank McEvoy, and was accompanied by the usual hospitality extended to visiting speakers (I had come all the way from Durrow!): dinner and a night’s accommodation at 10 College Road, the home of the late Mrs. Margaret (Daisy) Phelan, who needs no introduction to readers of the Old Kilkenny Review.

    The conveniences in the guest bedroom at No. 10 included an electric blanket, a comfort I had not encountered before. With the usual rural aversion to interfering with a host’s generous provision, and no knowledge of how such devices were controlled, I suffered through a sleepless night, during which I read parts of a book I found on the bedside table: Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate. The postal order for seven shillings and sixpence that Maureen Hegarty (the then Treasurer) sent me for my expenses was some consolation for my ordeal.

    In the 40-odd years since then, circumstances had dictated that my path has crossed that of the Society and its officers on many occasions, mainly through voluntary involvement in events such as the commemoration of the 400th. anniversary in 1994 of the original construction of Rothe House. 

    Having spent most of my professional career as a marketing and communications consultant in rural north Kilkenny (a few miles from the location of the 1600 parley attended by Archer) and later Kilkenny City, I was aware of the many interesting connections between the county and the United States. 

    When I relocated to the Charleston area of South Carolina at the end of the 1990s, I discovered that my compatriot James Hoban, the architect of The White House, had lived there for at least five years from about 1787 onwards. This led me to a man named Stephen White, a well-known historian of the Irish presence in Charleston, and President of the Charleston Historical Society.

    Stephen advised me that a few years previously a local judge had formed a James Hoban Society to preserve the memory of the Kilkennyman’s purported involvement in the re-ordering of the South Carolina colonial statehouse as a courthouse in the early 1790s.  Judge Irvin G. Condon was the elected head of the Charleston County Probate Office and Court, a successor body of a branch of state administration that had been located in the same building (as statehouse and courthouse) since before American independence.

    In 1989 Hurricane Hugo played havoc with the building’s roof and the collection of additions and extensions erected down through the years as the need for space became greater. The decision was made to commission a completely new Judicial Services Center (at a cost of over $50 million) and to restore the Historic Courthouse to its original dimensions, layout and decor as determined by James Hoban in 1791 (although there is no documentary proof of his involvement, it is a strong probability that he was directly involved in this project, rather than the new State Capitol in Columbia which is often attributed to him).

    In the subsequent discussion about its use, the space used for probate administration was threatened by other plans and priorities and a campaign was mounted to preserve the historic connection to the registration of wills and administration of estates – and to James Hoban. When that battle was won, one of the first initiatives of the new Hoban Society was to commission a portrait of Hoban by the Charleston artist Charles DeAntonio, and to hang it on the third floor of the Historic Courthouse building, outside the entrance to the Probate Records section.

    When I met Judge Condon, he explained that he had gone to Desart to view the existing Hoban memorial (erected by the Office of Public Works in 1976), and been less than impressed by its location and condition. Charles DeAntonio had also travelled to Ireland and used his artist’s eye to gain a feeling for the shape of Irish faces. Judge and artist had then arranged to visit The White House and view the wax image of Hoban, from which the artist took a semi-forensic impression that he used in his painting and in a small bust of Hoban he created at the same time. The result is a likeness of the man that shows amazing similarities to photos of John Power, the Callan hurler.

    The James Hoban Society of Charleston was ready and willing to investigate the possibility of commemorating upcoming anniversaries in 2006 (175th. anniversary of his death in 1831) and 2008 (250th. anniversary of his birth in 1758 – a date based on information from an obituary written within days of his demise which gave his age as ‘about seventy-three’).

    During my stay in Ireland in the summer of 2002 I canvassed opinion on their behalf at local and national level. I met local councillor Tom Maher at the Hoban homestead site on the borders of the townslands of Desart and Riesk, and we identified an island site of about .75 of an acre nearby as a possible location for a memorial park or arbor. The site had been isolated by the creation of a new roadway in the 1950s, and was in exceptional condition with some trees already in place. 

    The matter was discussed with Kilkenny County Council, and with their encouragement initial approaches were made to the various interested parties. Within a few months, the support of Tom Parlon, then Minister of State at the Office of Public Works, had been secured, and his professional staff had surveyed the site. Judge Condon came from the U.S. to provide a start-up grant for a small James Hoban Society of Ireland based in Callan and headed by local solicitor (and qualified archaeologist!) Laurie Grace. 

Bodies such as the Irish Georgian Society, the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland, the Irish Architectural Archive, the Heritage Council and the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government all agreed to provide whatever support they could and various ideas for conferences, publications and celebratory events were discussed at planning meetings in Dublin and Kilkenny. 

    In the US, a similar approach yielded early results: the American Institute of Architects, the Office of the Chief Architect, the Society of Architectural Historians, the National Parks Service, the First Federal Lodge of the Freemasons and the Committee of 100 of the Federal City were all contacted, and in every case a sympathetic ear was found (in some cases the connection seemed positively providential, bordering on the magical).

    One of the earliest calls I made was on the Staff Historian of the White House Historical Association, a body set up in the early 1960s by Jacqueline Kennedy. Bill Bushong saw me without appointment and provided a list of helpful contacts; it was the beginning of an amazing relationship that was to bring a new dimension of research and support to the entire Hoban commemoration effort.

    With funding to cover expenses from the James Hoban Society of Charleston and an initial  development grant from Kilkenny County Council, the planning of an arbor layout continued, with Council architect Evelyn Graham providing co-ordination and liaison. A submission on the entire project was made to the Council’s Strategic Policy Committee for Arts, Culture, Heritage and Tourism, headed by Councillor Ann Phelan, and annual meetings of the local James Hoban Societies in Callan and Charleston were briefed on progress. Local councillor Matt Doran joined Councillors Maher and Phelan as part of the informal supervisory committee, and Dr. Pat Crowley also became involved.

    An application for funding from the Commemoration Initiatives Fund operated by the Department of the Taoiseach resulted in an allocation of €30,000 in 2006 and a further €20,000 in 2008, all of it required to be applied to programme activities rather than administration. 

    In 2006 Donal Enright, a principal officer in the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government and a member of The Heritage Council, approved the department’s sponsorship of a Hoban conference to take place in Kilkenny. Organised by the department’s staff architectural historian Dr. Freddie O’Dwyer, it featured speakers from Ireland and the United States in a day long programme at the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle.  

    A U.S. delegation, comprising representatives of the James Hoban Society of Charleston, the White House Historical Association, and the Office of the Chief Architect, was joined by speakers William Seale, the foremost historian of The White House, and Meg McAleer from the U.S. Library of Congress. Visits were made to the Hoban birthplace site, Dublin City Hall, other Dublin sites associated with Hoban, and the headquarters of the Office of Public Works.

    In June 2007 a return visit was made by a Kilkenny delegation to Washington DC and the American Institute of Architects generously provided their conference facilities for the sedentary part of the proceedings. The programme included a tour of The White House conducted by the curator, Bill Allman (though in the true tradition of Kilkenny rivalry, it was noted that he had already conducted a Thomastown man around the building a few months before – he was Dr. John Stapleton of the University of Limerick, who was researching presidential portraits).

    With all the necessary introductions completed, the scene was set for the making of final plans. The proposals for the Hoban memorial at Desart had run in to legal, technical and financial difficulties, and it was now felt that a less ambitious approach was called for. The White House Historical Association presented plans for a one-day conference on Hoban in Washington in March 2008, as well as a special Hoban issue of their publication White House History. 

    Background research by WHHA staffers Bill Bushong, Sally Stokes and Keith McKay continued to turn up new illustrations and factual material relating to James Hoban; an illustration of his house; a photograph of his son James, a lawyer and orator; a copy of the page in the registry of Holy Trinity Church that records his marriage to Susana Sewall.

    Meanwhile I was working on Hoban’s religious connections. Belfast-born Lynn Conway, archivist at Georgetown University, turned up a photograph of his son Henry, a Jesuit priest; Sr. Mada-Ann Gell of the Convent of the Visitation showed me around a school building that existed in Hoban’s time, when the new foundation was headed by Ballyragget-born Sr. Teresa Lalor; and Pam Scott, a renowned architectural historian, provided me with material on Hoban’s connection to early administrative buildings such as the first Department of the Treasury.

    In August 2007, Kathleen Lane, a senior executive of the American Institute of Architects and a post-graduate architecture student of the Catholic University of America, visited Ireland, where she has family connections in Laois and Kilkenny. She visited the Hoban birthplace site and also a heritage site in the centre of Callan that was earmarked for development as a sensitive and evocative representation of the town’s 800-year history.

In November Kathleen returned with Travis Price, an architect and associate professor at CUA, and two other post-graduate students. They visited the various Hoban-related sites and met with local interests before putting forward a plan for a ‘Spirit of Place’ installation at the Callan site with a smaller ‘echo’ installation at Desart. 

‘Spirit of Place’ is a concept developed and implemented by Travis at locations across the world to express the spiritual significance of a location in a sculptural form; it has already been carried out at three locations in Co. Mayo. The process involves a group of 20-25 students who develop their interpretation in words and small sculpted representations before moving on to full-scale planning and documentation for an intense construction phase, which takes place over a period of 10 days.

    The idea was further discussed in Washington in March 2008, when a Kilkenny delegation headed by County Council chairman Tom Maher and including county manager Joe Crockett, representatives of the Callan and Danesfort communities, and of the James Hoban Societies of Ireland and Charleston, visited CUA and heard presentations on the design of the ‘Spirit of Place’ installation from Travis Price and the student group. 

    The delegation also toured The White House, attended the one-day Hoban conference organised by the White House Historical Association, and were guests at a reception to mark the opening of the Hoban exhibit at the White House Visitors Center, where it was mounted for almost six months (to early November 2008) and seen by most of the half-a-million visitors to the Center during that time.

    Meanwhile, after some turbulence in regard to the appropriateness of the proposed CUA installation for the Callan site, the entire project was switched to Desart, where, with legal and other difficulties now surmounted (if only just!), a group of 25 students set to work in the first week of August 2008 and completed well within the deadline a striking monument to the White House architect who was born just a stone’s throw away.

    This symbolic return of architectural skills to Desart from Washington had a special meaning for those who gathered at the dedication of the installation, particularly as Catholic University of America has many Kilkenny connections in other spheres: Mooncoin-born Bishop William McDonald was a senior staff member and later President from 1948 to 1967, and the university has provided post-graduate education for many Ossory priests as well as for the present bishop, Dr. Seamus Freeman.

    A glimpse of some television coverage of the Washington events in March led to an enquiry from the Royal Dublin Society to the U.S. Embassy in Dublin about the possibility of hosting the exhibit there when it had finished its exposure in the U.S. As the one-time operators of the drawing school where Hoban was educated, the RDS had a natural interest in the commemoration of a distinguished alumnus, and, as it happened, the White House Historical Association had offered to subsidise a duplicate of the exhibit for display in Ireland, if interest was expressed in such a development. Now it was! 

    With the support of RDS vice-president, the Castlecomer antiquarian Fonsie Mealy, plans were soon in hand for an all-day colloquium on Hoban to feature speakers from Ireland the the U.S., led by the Hon. Desmond Guinness, a renowned expert on American colonial and early Federal architecture of the Georgian period. 

Co-sponsored by the White House Historical Association, the well-attended event on Friday October 3rd. was followed by a reception to mark the opening of the Hoban exhibit in the RDS Library (the design and production of the Irish version was carried out by the south Kilkenny firm of Signiatec Ltd.). Here, as on many other occasions throughout the week-end, the principal guest was Bill Allman, Curator of The White House.

    On the following day, some of the U.S. speakers travelled to Kilkenny, where they addressed a smaller gathering convened in the Parade Tower under the auspices of the National University of Ireland Maynooth (Kilkenny Campus). The proceedings were chaired by local historian and Maynooth academic John Bradley, and one of the presentations (on Hoban’s Charleston) was given by Stephen White, who had provided the first link in the chain seven years before.

    This was followed by a reception at Rothe House hosted by the Kilkenny Archaeological Society and the Rothe House Trust, at which the guests heard a short presentation by archaeologist Coilín O’Drisceoil on the Rothe House garden, which they also visited as twilight fell.

    Later that evening, Kilkenny County and Borough Councils held a formal dinner in the Drawing Room and Library of Kilkenny Castle, where the visiting delegations were welcomed by the Mayor of Kilkenny, Ald. Pat Crotty. Presentations were made to Bill Allman, Irv Condon and Dennis Blaschke, a 37-year-old Charleston architect who is a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of James Hoban. 

    At Desart on the following day, in the brilliant sunshine for which Cuffesgrange has become famous in its hosting of important events (the Ploughing Match had been held there in the previous week), an official opening of the Hoban Memorial Arbor took place at which the Chairman of Kilkenny County Council, Cllr. Tomás Breathnach, restated that body’s commitment to continuing its investment in the development of the site in conjunction with the James Hoban Societies.

    This will mean that the arbor will be properly landscaped to include Irish and American species, and also to reflect the wider connections between Kilkenny and the U.S. These include the local origins of people like Archbishop John Ireland, the Danesfort-born Archbishop of St. Paul; Thomastown-born Fr. Andrew Morrissey, President of Notre Dame at the turn of the 20th. century; and Callan-born William Hoyne, Founding Dean of the Notre Dame Law Faculty at the same period. 

    Further afield, there is need for more detailed research on pioneers like Richard Den, the Mullinavat-born founding father of Los Angeles; Thomas Walsh, a Kilkenny-born architect in St. Louis in the mid 19th. century; and Fr. James Wallace S.J., also from Kilkenny, who was an important figure in the early history of the church in Charleston and of the University of South Carolina in Columbia SC between 1817 and 1835.

    Fr. Wallace will feature – with other Kilkenny-born clerics such as Richard Swinton Baker and Michael McGrath – in a proposed seminar on Kilkenny influences in the Carolinas which is scheduled for Spring 2009, when it is hoped to mount the Hoban exhibit in Charleston SC. It is also hoped that this will once again bring together the interests from both sides of the Atlantic who have made the Hoban Commemoration such a success to date.

    To Irv Condon and Harry Cale at the James Hoban Society of Charleston; Laurie Grace, Pat Crowley and all of the ‘Friends of the Hoban Commemoration’ in Callan; Joe Crockett, Tony Walsh, Evelyn Graham, Claire Murphy and Adrian Waldron at Kilkenny County Council; Máire Downey, Peter McQuillan, Mary Flood and Roisin McQuillan at Kilkenny Archaeological Society; Christopher Reid and Maeve O’Byrne at NUIM Kilkenny Campus and all of those who helped in one way or another, a debt of sincere gratitude is due.

    Meanwhile, there is still much that we do not know about Hoban. Research will continue towards the production of a film documentary and a book, scheduled for launching in 2010. This will involve serious further investigation of the context and content of Hoban’s life and achievement in Philadelphia, Charleston, Washington – and his early life in Ireland, where even the names of his parents are now disputed (Edward and Martha, nee Bayne? or Pierce and Judith, both of whom died in 1793?)

    The connections of Hoban the architect to a number of buildings in the Kells and Kilmoganny area of Kilkenny also deserves further study. The recent National Inventory of Historic Builidings for Kilkenny adds three houses in Kells to the one that has often associated with Hoban down through the years.

Rossenara House was most famously documented by a man who owned it for a decade or so in the 1970s, and who was so traumatised by his attempts to repair and restore it that he wrote a book miscehviously entitled ‘And So We Came to Rossenara’.

    His name? Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate.

    Somewhere along the way, we also hope to find out a little more about Kilkenny-connected Hoban precursors in the U.S. (Christopher Colles, profiled in Deborah Popper’s contribution to the Kilkenny seminar and the 2008 edition of the Old Kilkenny Review, is a good example).

    One that intrigues me is a Kilkenny-born military engineer who lived and worked in Virginia in the early 1700s. His father had been a surveyor in the employ of the Duke of Ormonde in the middle of the 17th. century, working on repairs and enhancements at Kilkenny Castle and at various houses on the Ormonde estate as well as on miltary fortifications elsewhere (he was Royal Engineer for a period, supervising projects in the Channel Islands). He was also used by the Duke in secret dealings with France, where the Kilkennyman spent fifteen years as a local governor.

    Three of his five children became engineers. The one who emigrated to America bore, like his father, a fateful name: James Archer. 

    Which is, I think, where we came in.

 

Denis Bergin, a native and former long-time resident of the Kilkenny area, was Hon. International Programme Co-ordinator and Executive Director of the James Hoban Commemoration. He lives in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina and in Co. Offaly.