W.A. Hiltner and the Beginnings of Modern Astronomy in Chile

Note: Though this website is primarily devoted to the history of the Veblens and Herrontown Woods, there are occasional posts about my astronomer father and Yerkes Observatory--an institution with some parallels to the Institute for Advanced Study.

This post began with a sentence that astronomer Stephen "Shec" Shectman wrote in an email to me about the role my father, W. Albert Hiltner, played in the trajectory of astronomy in the 20th century. 

"Al of course installed the first telescope on Cerro Tololo, while the administrative structure of the observatory was still being set up."

Shec's email got me wondering. How special was that first telescope? Cerro Tololo is a mountain in northern Chile, 8000 feet up in the Atacama Desert--an extremely dry stretch of the Andes where half of the world's land-based astronomical research is now conducted, with more giant telescopes under construction. Where did Cerro Tololo and that modest telescope sit in the history of astronomy? Was it the first modern telescope in Chile? In South America? In the southern hemisphere?

My brother Bill had recently sent me an old family photo of that very telescope. On one of his trips to the mountain in the 1960s, my father was evidently so excited to start observing that he got the 0.9 meter telescope up and running before a dome had been built to house it. There were no worries about rain in the desert during the dry season. 

In the mid-1960s, my father took our family along on a couple of his trips to Tololo, where telescopes were just beginning to sprout. 

60 years later, seeking to understand that telescope's place in history, I have done some research on telescopes in the southern hemisphere. Many had been built in the north, but the southern skies had gone relatively unstudied. Northern telescopes could not see the center of the galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, nor countless other celestial objects visible only from the southern hemisphere. One notable telescope in the south was a 36" telescope built in 1903 on San Cristóbal Hill in the middle of Santiago, Chile, by the University of California's Lick Observatory. This telescope would of course have become less and less useful as Santiago grew and light pollution increased. South Africa drew some interest from European and American universities as a site for telescopes, culminating in the construction of the Radcliffe Telescope in 1948. At 74", it was the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere at the time. 

During this same stretch, in the first half of the 20th century, many observatories were being built in the north. After founding Yerkes Observatory in 1897, with the world's largest refracting telescope, the great visionary George Hale moved to Caltech in California to build a 100" reflector on Mount Wilson, and the 200" at Mount Palomar. Yerkes looked to western Texas for darker skies and a larger telescope. My father would take us along on his trips to Texas to use the 80" at McDonald Observatory. 

The sleepy pace of astronomy in the southern hemisphere ended in 1958. The story begins, surprisingly, at Yerkes Observatory, on the outskirts of a little town called Williams Bay in southeastern Wisconsin, where I grew up. For the first half of the 20th century, rural Wisconsin offered an adequate escape from urban light pollution, and enough dark, clear, photometric nights to advance knowledge. Even in the 1960s, most of the University of Chicago's astronomy faculty lived at Yerkes, widely regarded as "the birthplace of astrophysics." 

My father would serve as director of Yerkes for a stretch in the 1960s, but in 1958, a prominent astronomer by the name of Gerard Kuiper was director. That was the year Yerkes also served as birthplace for what would prove to be a great blossoming of astronomy along that extraordinary stretch of desert extending north from Chile into Peru. Astronomer Frank Edmondson tells the story in his book about the evolution of AURA--a fortuitous acronym for the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. Throughout my father's career, from the 1940s through the 1980s, he participated in an ongoing search for drier, darker corners of the planet to collect light from the universe. His interest shifted from rural Wisconsin to drier parts of the country--McDonald Observatory in Texas, and Kitt Peak outside Tucson, AZ--with the desert of northern Chile beckoning as a final frontier for land-based astronomy. 

In May of 1958, a Chilean astronomer named Federico Rutllant traveled to the U.S. "seeking help to build up astronomy in Chile."  His timing was auspicious. The Russian's launch of Sputnick in 1957 had sent shockwaves through America, focusing new interest on the heavens above and greatly expanding government funding of research. Yet Rutillant aroused little interest during his visits to west coast observatories. Only when he came to Yerkes and met with Gerard Kuiper and my father did he get the response he sought.

According to my father, "The three of us, that is Kuiper and Rutllant and myself, were sitting in Kuiper's office. And Rutllant at that time, at least it was my impression, was very discouraged about getting any cooperation from American institutions to build an observatory in Chile. And I can so well recall in our discussion my remarking to Kuiper, 'Well, how about Chicago trying it?" 

It turned out that the University of Chicago was not in a position to fund it, nor was AURA, which had just formed the year before. Fortunately, just days before Rutllant's visit to Yerkes, my father's proposal for a research project entitled "Galactic Field Studies" had been submitted to the Air Force. That proposal was ultimately adapted by the Air Force to fund an astronomical research station in Chile. 

Now, it's one thing to find interest and secure funding, but another altogether to figure out where to site an observatory. The Atacama Desert offers many mountains to choose from. An astronomer named Jurgen Stock was sent by AURA to test the skies above and sources of all important water below. Among the many factors, a mountain must be low enough to be accessible in winter, but high enough to stand above the fog that reaches inland from the coast each night. 7-8,000 feet proved ideal.

According to a timeline of AURA, in August 1961 a 0.41-m telescope was hauled on mule back up the 8000 foot mountain, Cerro Tololo, to test the site. An article by Hilmar Duerbeck, National and International Astronomical Activities in Chile 1842-2002, says the mountain was officially chosen for the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in 1962, and the first small telescopes went into operation in 1965.

My father took the family along on a couple of his many trips. We would stay in a house called Casa Tres on a hill overlooking La Serena, the coastal town where the observatory had its headquarters, and sometimes head up to the mountain. It was a two hour trip on dirt roads with steep, breathtaking, nerve-racking dropoffs as we wound our way 8000 feet up the mountain. My brother and I would hold Kleenex over our noses in an attempt to filter out the dust seeping up through the floorboards of the van. If it was night, jack rabbits with outsized ears would scamper off the road ahead of us. A southern hemisphere's version of a saguaro cactus stood like a sentinel at the final turn before we reached the top.

My older brother Bill remembers the evolution of the observatory this way: "Dad had been making trips there for some time. I don't know the sequence of events, but at some point a road was cut (I recall Dad talking about how big the bulldozer was) and the top of the mountain was blown off and leveled. When we were there in 1966 there were already several small telescopes installed. If I remember, two 16", a 36" (probably the one in the photo), and a Schmidt camera. All were under domes. They were probably relocated from U.S. observatories, and used for final site evaluation."

That conflicts with the account in Frank Edmonson's book, which has the 36" being installed a year later:

"During Hiltner's third period as Acting Director, January-May 1967, he had the 36" telescope mounted in the open on a concrete pad in order to carry out observations while the dome was being installed. There was little risk in doing this because it never rained at this time of year."

That year my father also hired Puerto Rican astronomer Victor Blanco as the second director of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, ushering in 14 years of his highly capable leadership. Blanco oversaw installation of a 4 meter telescope that would become the most productive telescope in the southern hemisphere during that era. The telescope, sister to the 4 meter on Kitt Peak in Arizona, was later named in Victor Blanco's honor.

AURA's success in establishing the first observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile drew the interest of European nations that had previously focused their interest on South Africa. Both the climate and the political climate in South Africa were problematic, however, and in 1963, a mountain north of Tololo called La Silla was chosen for the European Southern Observatory (ESO). 

Carnegie, which had been unreceptive in 1958, also realized it needed to invest in an observatory in the desert of northern Chile to stay competitive. During our visits to Cerro Tololo in the mid-1960s, we'd sometimes drive to the next mountain over, Cerro Morado, where an astronomer named John Irwin (tall man on the left in the photo) was living with his wife. Only now, researching the story sixty years later, do I realize his job there was to find a suitable mountain for Carnegie's observatory. In 1966, he found the right mountain, named Las Campanas for the bell-like sound some of the rocks make when struck.

My research left some questions. Was that 0.9 meter telescope my father got up and running, reportedly in March of 1967, a first in some way for astronomy in the Chilean desert? ESO's timeline says their 1 meter telescope on La Silla "witnessed first light" in November of 1966, but that seems a stretch if the road to the mountain had only been completed earlier in the same year. 

Another interesting tidbit is a story of La Silla stating that Gerard Kuiper made the "first explorations of the Andes" in March of 1959. Might my father have been part of that initial expedition? 

Other great observatories have since been built in northern Chile, named for the mountains they were built upon. John Irwin participated in initial site selection for Cerro Pachon, close to Tololo and home of the Vera Rubin telescope. In the 1980s, my father was project manager for the Magellan Telescopes on Las Campanas. ESO built another observatory eight hours north at Paranal.

Astronomical facilities in northern Chile continue to grow, taking on massive dimensions. The Vera Rubin telescope is 8.4 meters across. The Giant Magellan Telescope on Las Campanas will combine seven mirrors, each 8.4 meters across. And the Extremely Large Telescope being built by ESO will have a combined diameter of 39 meters.

And it all began with a fortuitous meeting at Yerkes Observatory in 1958 of Chilean astronomer Federico Rutllant, Gerard Kuiper, and my father, W.A. Hiltner.

Fun fact: In the 1980s, the famed educator Neil deGrasse Tyson would do research for his dissertation on the 0.9 meter telescope at Tololo.

The author, sixty years ago, who at the time specialized mostly in throwing rocks off the side of the mountain.

Gleanings on Herrontown Woods from the Princeton Recollector

One important window into the past of Herrontown Woods and surrounding lands along the eastern Princeton ridge is through a monthly journal called the Princeton Recollector, founded by architectural historian and preservationist Elric Endersby in 1975. The stories about earlier times in Princeton collected therein are accessible through the Papers of Princeton, an online archive. As reported in TapInto Princeton, Elric died earlier this month at the age of 79. One way to honor his legacy is to highlight relevant stories his publication so fortunately preserved. But first, a little background about Elric and his Princeton Recollector.

Elric described the Recollector's mission in the first issue, May, 1975: 

“In a town which so rapidly develops, it is only by passing along these memories from one generation to another that we may understand how we have come to be as we are. Through these pages we hope to affirm the dialogue between older and younger fellow Princetonians, so that together we may preserve our perspective on the elusive qualities which make Princeton a singular place despite the teasing changes of time.”

And who do we have to thank for preserving and digitizing the Recollector so that we would all have access? Back in 2014, Elric wrote to me that the 

"Princeton History Project turned over all of our materials to the Historical Society about 10 years ago. In the meantime a family by the name of Fuchs in the Brookstone area computerized The Recollector."

Here's a wonderful quote from a profile of Elric in the July 27, 2005 Town Topics:

"No satisfaction has been quite like the work with oral history and 'The Recollector' and spending my twenties and early thirties with people who were in their eighties. I talked with 50 to 60 people in Princeton who lived here when Woodrow Wilson was in town. The whole point for me was to gain perspective. I called it 'Periscopic Princeton.' Through their eyes, I could have been a spy in Princeton in 1900."

This legacy of historical accounts, one among several legacies Elric left us, shows the difference one person can make in the world. 

Doing a keyword search of the Recollector for "herrontown" yielded seven articles that paint a picture of life up Herrontown way long ago. For instance, there were things that locals gathered from the Princeton ridge lands that are not gathered today, among them being farm crops. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, much of the ridge was farmed by small-holder farmers. The Friends of Herrontown Woods honors that heritage by growing food in May's Garden on the Veblen House grounds. We also fought successfully to save the one remaining farmhouse from that era. The structure, known now as the Veblen Cottage, has since been deemed eligible to be listed in the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places.

In addition to food crops, boulders were quarried, abundant chestnuts harvested and eagerly consumed by schoolchildren, cedar trees and a wild evergreen called ground pine (club moss) were brought home for Christmas decorations. Wildflowers teamed and drinking water sprang from the ground. An article entitled "Mount Lucas School Reunion Rekindles Old Friendships, Revives Memories" documents the memories of those who attended the schoolhouse on Mount Lucas that closed in 1920. Evidence of the small quarries remains, but the majestic chestnut trees succumbed to imported chestnut blight. The cedar trees were shaded out as larger trees took over, and the ground pine appears to have been completely consumed by the expanding deer population.

Here are some quotes from that article about farming up along the very rocky Princeton ridge:

• "This was all fields when we lived up here. We used to haul out these rocks every year when we plowed."
• "Farmer boys worked all the time. There was no time for recreation or sports."
• "Most people went through the eighth grade and that was it. The boys started school in November. Farm work came first."

About local quarries:

• As a boy I had a team of mules that hauled stone from the quarries to the crusher when they built Route 206 with convict labor. They had a convict labor camp up toward Rocky Hill. I have a watch chain the convicts made from horse hair. They wrapped the hair around sticks and made links with it."

About reaping natural bounty:

• "We used to get the water from a large spring with a large beech tree beside it with all sorts of initials. It was always called The Beech Tree Washington was supposed to have camped under it."
• "At lunchtime I used to go up in the Big Woods and pick wild flowers. I got lost once, all afternoon. How I finally found out where I was, was I heard a cowbell."
• "We used to gather chestnuts in the fall. There was a large chestnut tree in the corner of the Mount Lucas schoolyard. We'd eat them in school. There were many chestnuts along this road. We'd boil or roast them at night and eat them with salt."
• "We'd all bring our five-pound sugar bags and every recess we'd hit the woods and fill the bags with chestnuts. And you'd go home and bury them in sand in the cellar. And around Christmas time you had roasted chestnuts, and roasted apples with it."

From a 1979 edition came another story in the Recollector relevant to Herrontown Woods, an article entitled "Margerums Shared Family Christmas." The reference to coal probably makes the era pre-1940s.

"Dad and some of the older boys would go up to Grandpop Margerum’s wood lot in Herrontown to cut down a cedar tree. They would also gather some kind of an evergreen vine that grew there. I do not know what that vine was it was not standing pine but a trailing evergreen vine with lacy, fan-shaped leaves. [Ground pine.] They would gather two large burlap bags full. After they came home Dad would cut some switches from the privet hedge and tie them into rings so that in the evening all the family could work to make wreaths. The younger children pulled the leaves from the vines and placed them in piles on the table. The older ones gathered little bunches of these leaves and tied them around the privet rings. We must have made a dozen wreaths each year. We put one on the front door and one in each of the windows on the first floor. We never trimmed our tree ahead of time because Santa Claus always did that. The day before Christmas we would set it up in a corner of the living room sometimes it would be propped up in a bucket of coal and sometimes Dad would make a wooden stand for it."

And then there's Jac Weller's article in the Recollector about farming the rocky lands along the ridge, entitled Farming Small in Herringtown. Though it makes claims about "Herringtown" that we have been unable to substantiate, we are grateful for the information it provides about the lives of small-holder farmers, such as those who built and lived in what we now call the Veblen Cottage. That article will be explored in a separate post.

Related posts: 

Who Put the Herring in Herringtown? 

Nature Stories Preserved in Elric Endersby's Princeton Recollector

Einstein, Veblen, and Einstein Begonias--Upcoming Events at the Library

The first week of September, 2025, the Friends of Herrontown Woods will be co-sponsoring two events at the Princeton Public Library related to Albert Einstein and Oswald Veblen. One is a talk entitled "How Oswald Veblen Quietly Created Einstein's Princeton." The other is a performance of songs from a new musical called "Einstein's Begonia." The presentation is on Thursday, Sept. 4 at 7pm and the musical is Sunday, Sept. 7 at 3pm. The two events are featured in an article in the Town Topics. 

"How Oswald Veblen Quietly Created Einstein's Princeton" -- Sept. 4, 7pm

This photo from 1921, found in the Veblen House after Elizabeth Veblen passed in 1974, captures the budding friendship between Einstein and Veblen as they walked on Princeton University campus, the day Einstein arrived to receive an honorary degree and deliver a week of lectures on his theory of relativity. 

Most if not all biographies of Einstein barely mention Oswald Veblen, and yet since 1905 Veblen--mathematician, visionary, humanitarian--had been working quietly, behind the scenes, to lift up American mathematics and scholarship generally. The features that drew Einstein to Princeton--its first rate math department, the new Institute for Advanced Study, the marvelous facilities at the original Fine Hall--were to a considerable extent shaped by Veblen's vision and efforts.

We're so fortunate to have historian Cindy Srnka assisting with this presentation. She discovered Veblen while doing research for the history/nature walks she leads at the Institute Woods for the Historical Society of Princeton. It was Veblen who persuaded the IAS to acquire the 700 acres of open space now known as the Institute Woods, back in the 1930s and 40s.

Einstein's Begonia -- a Musical

When Albert Einstein died in 1955, among the items he left behind, along with the theory of relativity and other great discoveries, was a beloved angel wing begonia. Einstein's secretary began making cuttings of the plant to distribute to Einstein's physics and math friends. 

The offspring of that one plant have since spread near and far. Prompted by Kim Dorman of the public library, I tracked one down and published my research and impressions in a couple blogposts that attracted considerable attention on the web. One day, Rebecca Pronsky contacted me. Not only did she have an Einstein begonia, she was also well along in writing a musical about it. How many musicals are written about a plant? 

She sent me recordings of the wonderful songs she had written for the musical, and I put her in touch with the Princeton Public Library to arrange a performance. That performance will be on Sept. 7, from 3-4:30. 

Veblen a "Towering Figure" in Mathematics

It's gratifying to see Oswald Veblen being more widely recognized on the internet for his contributions to American mathematics. There are still many tellings of history in which Veblen remains hidden, however. Meeting a retired Princeton-based physicist/violinist recently, I naturally thought of Einstein and told him I was researching Oswald Veblen's influence in bringing Einstein to Princeton. He said emphatically that it was the Bambergers who brought Einstein instead, through their funding of the Institute for Advanced Study. He then mentioned Richard Courant, and gave credit to New York University for bringing this great jewish mathematician to America after he was displaced from Gottingen by the Nazis. 

But behind both of these stories of brilliant and impactful immigration is Oswald Veblen, who was quietly instrumental in bringing many displaced mathematicians and physicists to America. A succinct, attractively rendered telling of the story, called "Collaboration and Companionship," repeatedly mentions Veblen's involvement in bringing Einstein, Hermann Weyl, Emmy Noether, John von Neumann, Kurt Godel, and Richard Courant to the U.S.

That webpage links to another entitled "Towering Figures," in which brief stories are told of four "key individuals in pioneering and continuing the growth of the American Mathematical community": J.J. Sylvester, Felix Klein, E.H. Moore, and Oswald Veblen. 

Veblen had a connection to each of the three other "towering figures" who preceded him. His father, Andrew, would surely have studied with J.J. Sylvester at Johns Hopkins before moving to the University of Iowa in 1883 to teach physics and math--the same year Sylvester returned to Europe. And surely his father would have taken a 13 year old Oswald to hear Felix Klein speak in 1893 at the International Mathematical Congress held as part of the Chicago World's Fair. Oswald went on to study with E. H. Moore in Chicago, before moving to Princeton. 

A couple asides: Biographies of Sylvester and Klein mention their work to encourage women to pursue careers in mathematics, as did Veblen.

On a more autobiographical note, I expect the Veblens would also have witnessed the 40 inch refracting telescope on display at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. When I was growing up 70 years later, my father, W. Albert Hiltner, was director of Yerkes Observatory, where that largest of refracting telescopes still functions beneath the big dome. The Collaboration and Companionship story also describes how the Manhattan Project convinced President Hutchins of the University of Chicago to "throw massive resources into the reorganization" of the physics and math departments near the end of World War II. That funding and resources may be why I grew up where I did, as my father was hired by the U. of Chicago astronomy department around that time. 

Veblen House and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life

What are Donna Reed and James Stewart looking at in this scene from director Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life? What could elicit such looks of wonder and endearment?

Why, it's their dream home--a major fixer upper that hasn't been lived in for decades. The broken windows are reminiscent of what happened to Veblen House over decades of neglect, as is the love that the main characters George Bailey and especially Mary later apply to fixing it up as the movie progresses. And, as with George's guardian angel, who mingles with humanity seeking to earn his wings, the ways people contribute to the project at Herrontown Woods can make one feel like there are angels in our midst. But there's something else we noticed that the movie's fixer upper has in common with Veblen House: 

Zoom in and check out the balusters. 

I went back through photos of Veblen House from around 2008, when it had already been abandoned for ten years, and found a photo of the outdoor staircase we plan to rebuild. 

Was this architectural detail added by the Russian woodworker, said to have customized the house after it was moved to Princeton from Morristown, and where does its style hearken from?

Veblen House is no ordinary house, and Frank Capra was no ordinary movie director. Arriving in America from Italy at the age of six, he became the first in his family to go to college, earning a degree from Caltech in engineering in 1918. The engineering background gave him an advantage over other directors during the transition from silent movies to talkies. A recurring theme in his most well-known movies is the power of an individual to bring out the best in people. It takes a hero--someone endowed with steadfast love, courage, and a deep belief in community and human dignity--to overcome the worst impulses of humanity and mobilize our innate generosity towards one another. 

Writing this post, I realized that It's a Wonderful Life is an inverted form of Dickens' Christmas Carol. In Christmas Carol, it is the good will of the community that, along with major interventions by ghosts, ultimately releases the generosity latent behind Scrooge's entrenched greed. In Wonderful Life, it is the main character's devotion to giving and sacrifice that ultimately brings the community together in an outpouring of generosity. 

Oswald Veblen's life reads like a Capra movie. Through the first half of the 20th century, he devoted himself to bringing out the best in mathematicians and other scholars, by creating the circumstances--organizational, physical, and financial--within which they would have the freedom and resources to follow their curiosity and do their best work.

Political freedom is another key element in bringing out the best in people, so it's not surprising that Veblen and Capra sought to serve their country. In WWI, while Oswald Veblen was helping the war effort by applying mathematics to the improvement of artillery at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, second lieutenant Capra was teaching mathematics to artillerymen in San Francisco. 

In WWII, while Veblen was again in the military, coordinating scientific work to improve the accuracy of weaponry, Frank Capra also reenlisted, this time to work for Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. It was Marshall's vision to create films to explain to the troops "why we are fighting, and the principles for which we are fighting." Capra created the series of films called "Why We Fight," which provided the philosophical foundation for the vast collective effort to defeat totalitarianism. 

Scientists like Veblen, and artists like Capra--patriots and heroes through the first half of the century--came under suspicion in post-war America, as the fear and repression they had long fought against took hold here at home. Both came under scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee, because of the people they knew. The film industry and cultural mores were also changing, in ways Capra refused to accept and adapt to. He described the new paradigm as "Kill for thrill—shock! Shock! To hell with the good in man, Dredge up his evil—shock! Shock!" Meanwhile, prosperity-fueled development was consuming the rural lands in Princeton that the Veblens loved.

My respect and awe for Capra deepened when I found out he had produced a prescient film in 1958 called "The Unchained Goddess." About weather, it included a one minute synopsis of the threat posed by climate change. The movie uses animation reminiscent of his Why We Fight films. Instead of a map showing the U.S. being invaded by Nazis, the new invader is rising sea levels that could ultimately drown large swaths of the nation. America, having defeated totalitarianism abroad, was now threatened by a new invasion, partly self-inflicted, by "unwittingly changing the climate through the waste products of civilization." 

Unlike the great collective mobilization that brought victory in WWII, the country has shrugged off Capra's warnings about climate change, choosing instead to fight battles against other enemies, within or beyond our borders, real or illusory. Though It's a Wonderful Life has been described as "a saccharine apotheosis of private life and small town nostalgia," Capra's depiction of people as often their own worst enemy has relevance to the mounting political and environmental crises we now face. 

The movie's fixer-upper speaks as well to what we've found at Herrontown Woods, that a spirit of repair, whether of a traumatized nature or a neglected house, can lead to good things. 

Demarest & Co: More Writings Discovered Inside Veblen House

 One of the curiosities to be found on the newly exposed walls inside Veblen House are these slats. 

Stacked tightly, one on top of another, they were nailed primarily but not exclusively to the walls that enclose bathrooms. This is the wall between the master bedroom and master bath.

and this is the wall between the upstairs hallway and another bathroom. Their function is another mystery to be solved. Soundproofing, perhaps? But suffice it to say that each slat, if I can call them that, looked to us pretty much like all the others. 

But one day our carpenter, Robb Geores, came by, and Scott Sillars and I passed a couple fascinating hours with him scrutinizing the newly exposed guts of the house. Many a clue was found that may shed light on the house's multiple lives. 

We were upstairs in the study when Robb announced, "I found some more writing!" He was scrutinizing a single stack of those slats running along the edge of the chimney. 

There, you see it? Neither did we, but a really close look reveals that one of the slats is larger than the others.

And on it is some writing, revealing that it had once been the top of a packing crate, with the shadow of a stamp on the upper right. 

The crate was addressed to J.P.W. Stuart in Bedford, NY. That would be Jesse Paulmier Whiton-Stuart. He and his wife Mary moved the house from Morristown to Princeton, and lived in it for ten years before selling it to the Veblens. Bedford was and is an upscale town that had not come up previously in our research of the itinerant Whiton-Stuarts, who had lived in Manhattan, Greenwich, CT, Prescott, AZ, Morristown, and allegedly in Tuxedo Park, before moving to Princeton. Can we conclude that he was well-known in Bedford, if a package could find him without a street address? (Note: Evelyne Ryan of the Bedford Historical Society wrote me that "it wasn’t until the implementation of 911 that many Bedford addresses had numbers – roads, yes, but not numbers." That would have been the late 1960s)

The return address on the crate's top left is 543 Madison Ave, New York City. We couldn't make out the name, though, until I showed it to Clifford Zink. "Demarest," he said without pause. He also pointed out the tiny "&" symbol after Demarest. "Demarest & Cook?", I ventured, before later settling on "Demarest & Co." 

Demarest proved to be J.C. Demarest, later fleshed out to James Cleveland Demarest, president and treasurer of an interior decorating firm. His ads appeared in these 1925-26 issues of Arts and Decorations, alongside articles about anything from bathroom adornments to the latest in literature, music, and art. A sophisticated critique of Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln rubbed shoulders with Demarest's conception for a well appointed dining room.

This Nov, 1925 issue had lots for the wealthy to contemplate, admire, and buy. Articles come in quick succession, with "The Hard Brilliance of Earnest Hemmingway" (also Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson) on p. 57, followed by some American triumphalism about skyscrapers in "The New Architecture of a Flamboyant Civilization", "Painted Doors are the Final Distinction for the Handsome Room", and "Great Modern Hotels of America." The magazine captures the world the Whiton-Stuarts seem to have inhabited, at least until the crash of 1929. Beginning around 1900, Whiton-Stuart owned a prosperous real estate company that specialized in high-end properties on Madison Ave. in Manhattan. Society pages tracked the Whiton-Stuart's visits to elite locales and later the seven or so marriages of their son and daughter.

Jesse grew up on Park Avenue, and collected photographs later compiled in a book entitled "Views and Maps of Old New York."

Another article in Arts and Decorations featured the home of prominent architect Grosvenor Atterbury, who in 1909 designed sophisticated prefab homes for Forest Hills in Queens. According to wikipedia, "each house was built from approximately 170 standardized precast concrete panels, fabricated off-site and assembled by crane." Whiton-Stuart would have been up on the latest trends in architecture--an engagement that may have led to his experimenting with the prefab construction now fully on display at Veblen House. 

Also found in the Arts and Decorations magazine was a full page color ad for Johns-Manville's asbestos shingles. Yes, hard to believe now, but asbestos was big in the 1920s, and the 30s and 40s, on up to the 1970s. The Johns-Manville company supplied some of the materials for Veblen House, as will be explored in another post. 

The March, 1926 issue has an article singing the praises of gumwood for paneling. Gumwood? Turns out they're talking about sweetgum, a native tree of which there are many in Herrontown Woods. I lived in a house in Michigan that had beautiful sweetgum paneling, but have not seen it anywhere since. There's no "gumwood" in Veblen House, but it does have two rooms creatively and expertly paneled with plywood parquet--a material that caught the eye and interest of an architectural historian at the NJ Historic Trust. That, too, is material for another post. 

You can see how finding the words "Demarest & Co" on a wall in Veblen House has set off a whole google-powered adventure into the life and times of the Whiton-Stuarts, but why would Whiton-Stuart, or his carpenter, have embedded that particular piece of a packing crate in one of the walls? Robb raised the possibility that the carpenter was simply using whatever wood was on hand. But every other slat nailed to the walls is generic and uniform in size. 

J.C. Demarest died in 1932. One story handed down about Veblen House is that a cabinet maker worked for two years customizing the interior. If the house went up in 1931, that would mean that Demarest died while the house was being worked on. The piece of packing crate was placed next to a hearth, upside down. A hearth represents importance. Might upside down have some symbolism for loss? More about any connection and friendship between Demarest and Whiton-Stuart may ultimately be found in the detailed accounts on society pages back then of who was seen where with whom. 

Origins of the Wallboard in Veblen House

We've been very fortunate to find labels on the various materials that went into the construction of the Veblen House. The housewrap was called Sisalkraft. The wood sheathing appears to have been shipped by the Weyerhauser company from the west coast. The insulation--all one or two inches of it--was a Weyerhauser product out of Minnesota called Balsam Wool. 

Though the kitchen and bathrooms in Veblen House are coated with traditional plaster, the walls in other rooms were made of wallboard containing wood fibers pressed tightly together. Until now, the origin of the wallboard has been a mystery. Various kinds of wallboard offered a cheaper, lighter alternative to plaster for indoor walls and ceilings. Most homes now use drywall, also known as plasterboard or sheetrock, made with a combination of paperboard and fireproof gypsum. But though drywall was invented in 1916, it didn't come into widespread use until the 1940s, ten years after Veblen House was built.

Homasote is another kind of wallboard, and that name has come up occasionally in walkthroughs of the house. But though Homasote was manufactured in nearby Trenton, it was comprised of paper fibers rather than wood, and according to the wikipedia entry was not marketed until the 1940s. 

While most of the wallboard in the house was hauled to a landfill as part of the asbestos removal, we were able to save some. Fortuitously, the asbestos had been found not in the wallboard but in the skincoat applied thereon, presumably to make the wallboard look more like plaster. Since no skincoat was applied in closets, we convinced the town to save those sections of the house's "fabric."

And there, between the studs on the back of the wallboard in the vestibule closet, was a label, upside down near the floor. 

 

The label calls the material Insulating Board, to be used outside or inside the frame to provide some measure of insulation and draft reduction. 

This quote, believed to come from a book entitled Twentieth Century Building Materials: History and Conservation, serves as a good description:

"Fiberboard is a composite hardboard material made from pressure molded wood fibers. It had early precedents in the late 18th century, but was first manufactured in large quantities in the 1920s, with its use expanding in the 1930s and 40s. Fiberboard (or wallboard, as it is commonly known) was marketed by various companies, such as Masonite. It was used as sheathing for roofing and siding on the exterior, for insulation, and for interior walls."

Another excellent online source comes from the U.S. Forest service, entitled Early 20th-Century Building Materials: Fiberboard and Plywood. It describes what at that time were innovative products just beginning to come into widespread use. 

At the bottom of the partially torn label on the Veblen House fiberboard was just enough information to track down the manufacturer, Oswego Board Corp, NY. That name in turn stirred up a few fragments on the internet about that company, which had just formed a few years earlier, with its newly elected president, Floyd L. Carlisle.

Another snippet, from Poors publication, fills in the missing letters on the other name at the bottom of the label: Johns-Manville, which, according to the NY Times, in 1927 teamed with Oswego Board Corporation to manufacture and distribute "a new type of sheathing and insulating board." 

If construction of the plant began in 1927, our 1931 prefab must have been one of the first to be built with this new product.

Without that one label exposed and left undisturbed during asbestos removal, the story of the Veblen House wallboard might have been lost.

Clues on the Walls of Veblen House

In the process of removing asbestos from the Veblen House, the town's contractors have exposed some clues to the Veblen House's past. Most of the wallboard and ceilings contained a skincoat of asbestos-containing material, and were hauled away, revealing here and there a few words and labels on the underlying framing. All of this would have been covered up and "lost to history" if the contractors had painted all exposed surfaces white, as is the usual post-removal procedure. Fortunately, we convinced the town and contractor to apply for a permit to use clear sealant on the walls and ceiling instead. 

One signature on the south wall of the second floor looks like S. Hanlee.

From another angle, it looks more like S.S. Hanlee, so I googled "S.S. Hanlee" ship, and up popped the S.S. Hanley, acquired by Weyerhaeuser in 1923 as an ocean lumber cargo ship. The Hanley and the SS Pomona took lumber to the East Coast. Given that the Balsam Wool insulation in the house was made by Weyerhaeuser, and the house was built in 1931, it's not too farfetched to speculate that some of the lumber for the house, perhaps even the prefab panels themselves, came from that same company.

According to wikipedia, Weyerhaeuser moved its shipping operation from Seattle to Newark, NJ in 1933. The S.S. Hanley and other ships were later put to use for the war effort in WWII. It's conceivable that the S.S. Hanley was named after John Hanley, the only child to be rescued from the S.S. Atlantic, which sank off the coast of England in 1873.

Note: Thanks to a reader of this blog who anonymously sent a link to a photo of the SS Hanley in the Willamette River in Portland, OR. The photo was taken by Minor White, who moved to Oregon in 1937.

Exploring whether Weyerhaeuser ever built prefab houses, the University of Washington has information on a prefab built in 1932, back when the company was "interested in finding new outlets for its lumber." They did not pursue prefabs any further, however, beyond that one demonstration, according to this text:

Historic New England has information about Weyerhaeuser "4 Square Homes", based in St. Paul, MN. But it looks like "4-square" referred only to lumber used for kiln dried sheathing. The board with the S.S. Hanley inscription looked to be part of the house's sheathing.

Another inscription is less scrutible. "Gellning," maybe? Or Gellnig? Maybe that's a "C"? Nothing popped for those. Note: We have since figured out that this word is likely "Ceiling," since it occurs on boards at either end of the second floor, with one preceded by "N", the other by "S", suggesting north and south.

Another inscription was a misspelling of J.P.W. Stuart's name, on slats in the ceiling that hold up insulation between the first and second floors. One conclusion is that, whatever business supplied the slats, they didn't know Stuart well enough to spell his name correctly. 

Another item we found inside the walls is metal tags to mark the panels. Each panel is approximately 10' square and bolted together to make the walls. 

Some labels were found on the wallboard and the roof shingles that is helping identify those materials, but that will be taken up in a separate post.

More Vignettes from the Whiton-Stuarts' Days in Prescott, AZ

Removal of asbestos-containing wallboard in the Veblen House revealed this misspelling of the original owner's name. Jesse's name was J.P.W. Stuart, not Stewart. Still, if someone supplying wood for the Whiton-Stuarts' house didn't get the spelling right, maybe others made the same mistake. 

Mary and Jesse Whiton-Stuart brought the prefab house to Princeton from Morristown, NJ, lived in it for ten years, then sold it to the Veblens in 1941. Being wealthy, at least until the crash in 1929, they were frequently mentioned in society columns. Their children's lives too can be tracked in this way. Mary and Jesse married for life, but the son and daughter had seven marriages between them. 

I decided to google J.P.W. Stewart, and got some interesting results. One was a page from a newspaper called the Weekly Journal-Miner, dated Feb. 12, 1913 This dates back to the Whiton-Stuarts' time in Prescott, AZ, when their two kids were young and Jesse left his real estate business in Manhattan to spend his days on a horse, herding cattle in Arizona. 

I love newspapers, which used to cause problems back when I'd save them, to read another day. Now that they are digital, the love can be unfettered by matters of storage. 

Page 5 of the newspaper offers glimpses of their time in Arizona. Here they are, attending a "most attractive and elaborate dinner." This was back when accounts of high society included long lists of who attended. 

Jesse also attended another function, described at length in the "Social Mirror" section of the newspaper. 

That event included amusements for the "misses" who wished to sew. 

Perhaps sewing was not Mary Whiton-Stuart's thing, as she did not attend. 

It can be fun to see what other news appeared on the same newspaper page. Here's an eye-catching headline: the bones of a "giant type of humanity" were found while doing some grading work for the railroad. The bones provide "indisputable" evidence of people who were at least 8 feet tall and dated back to the Toltec period. Similar stories were told of early encounters with a giant race of indigenous peoples in Patagonia. 

The page's politics section also includes mention of George Babbitt, who was likely one of the ancestors of former presidential candidate and environmentalist Bruce Babbitt.