Preservation of Historic Winchester

By 1962, the pressure to raze the Conrad House was mounting, with the Winchester Retail Merchants Association urging City Council to clear and level the lot. The Association even offered to pay half of the expected costs of demolition and construction – a hefty $45,000.00 (approximately $345,000.00 in today’s inflation) if the City would match the amount. The plan to raze the house for parking was officially endorsed by Winchester-Frederick County Chamber of Commerce in October of 1962.

On the other side, proponents of history, both individuals and organizations including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, were offering alternative sites for a parking lot and other potential uses for the historic building.(1) Petitions and letter campaigns to save the house were circulating, council members were polled in the newspaper on their sentiments, garden clubs and individuals were speaking at public hearings or writing in to City Council against the rising tide of demolitions. The unrest culminated with the Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society asking City Council for the Conrad House to be put to the voters in a referendum.

The issue reached a spirited climax in the January 1963 City Council meeting with two important items on the agenda. The vote to match the Winchester Retail Merchants Association funds to raze the house was tied at 6-6, with the 13th tie-breaking member of Council out of town and unavailable to cast a vote. It seemed that with the passing of the second important item, a 90 day grace period for preservationists to submit alternative plans for the Conrad House, that the prospects to retain the building were improving. City Council eventually voted the Conrad House off its agenda in September of 1963, seemingly dropping the issue without public fanfare.

The reprieve was to be short-lived. In 1964, City Council created the Winchester Parking Authority (WPA) with the directive to increase off-street parking facilities downtown. One of the City-owned properties leased to the WPA was the Conrad House. The WPA continued to operate the Conrad House as apartments until announcing plans in January 1969 to demolish the Conrad House and create two parking lots on the site.

“The Hill” was not left friendless in this second fight against impending demolition. The same group of determined citizens who stood against the plan in 1963 had continued their association under the name Winchester Committee for Historic Preservation. They were ready to rally the public outcry once again for Winchester’s second oldest building.

Synopsis of the timeline of the issue found in May 2, 1969 Winchester Evening Star story “A House, a Hill, and a Controversy” by Pat Robinson, C-8.

When discussing Winchester’s historic buildings, several times I’ve been asked, “What’s the second oldest building in town?” In the 1960s, the answer would likely have been the small northern portion to the rear of the Conrad House, with an estimated construction date of early 1750s, making it a contemporary of Abrams Delight and George Washington’s Headquarters. As you can imagine, the house had a long and colorful history with the Conrad family, which will only briefly be touched upon here.

The property, originally consisting of four lots for a total of two and a half acres, has a somewhat complicated deed trail according the local historians Garland Quarles and W. W. Glass. Frederick Conrad, the progenitor of the Conrad line in Winchester, allegedly acquired the property from his father-in-law, Dr. Stephen Ley. The chain of title is, however, unclear, and the possession of the property was disputed several times, but ultimately stayed in the Conrad family’s control. Frederick Conrad’s will from 1794 indicates a building, likely the small northern wing, was existing on the Conrad property at the time of his death, yet his will left instructions for another house to be built on the property.

This task fell to Frederick’s son, Dr. Daniel Conrad. The familiar front façade was constructed reportedly from plans obtained in Scotland, where Daniel Conrad received his medical training. The interior, also, boasted at least three mantels and two doorways hand-carved from Adams Brothers designs and imported from England. (1)(2)(3)

After Dr. Daniel Conrad’s death in 1806, his widow and heirs remained in residence at the mansion for approximately six more years until the upkeep became too onerous. The house was leased to the Farmer’s Bank from 1812-1820, according to William Greenway Russell’s memoirs. By 1836, Daniel’s remaining heirs had consolidated their shares of interest to Robert Y. Conrad. He took up residence in the house with his new bride, and eventually nine children. After Robert’s death in 1875, the house passed to Major Holmes Conrad (1840-1915). Major Conrad had seven children, and in 1928 the heirs decided to sell the property to someone outside of the Conrad family.

“The Hill,” as the house was also known, was purchased by H.B. McCormack, Sr. He announced plans in the Star on April 23, 1929 that he would convert the mansion to apartments and also cut down the hill facing Cameron Street and erect modern shop and office space, to be connected to the house through the mansion’s existing basement. The plan obviously progressed no farther than converting the mansion to apartments, though no reason was publicly given for the change. In 1959, the City of Winchester purchased the Conrad House and lot from H.B. McCormack’s heirs and continued operating the building as apartments. As one can imagine, the City had no long-term interest in being a landlord; plans were afoot for the demolition of Winchester’s second oldest building for a parking lot. That saga will be chronicled next Friday – stay tuned!

For further reading on the Conrad family:
Daniel Conrad Family Papers at Stewart Bell Jr. Archives Room, Handley Regional Library
Holmes Conrad Papers at Stewart Bell Jr. Archives Room, Handley Regional Library
Holmes Conrad biography on Wikipedia
Three generations of Conrads from Winchester

Welcome to the first installment of a weekly series on the history of Preservation of Historic Winchester to celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2014. Be sure to visit the PHW blog each Friday for the next installment.

Winchester is a remarkable town for its abundance of historically significant architecture in a relatively small area, highlighting building styles from the late Colonial period to the modern day. The styles are modest for the most part, vernacular adaptations of the high-end construction found in larger cities, though that makes them no less valuable an historic asset. Winchester has been compared architecturally more than once to our southern neighbor Williamsburg, Virginia; however, we have a clear advantage in that much of our building stock has survived and did not require reconstruction to showcase the town’s charms and history. (1) (2)

This evolution from Winchester as a rough frontier town to a modern city is easily sensed through our buildings and often commented on with delight by tourists visiting Winchester for the first time. More than one visitor who has stopped in the PHW office has commented with evident enthusiasm, “You have so many old buildings downtown!” But this sense of wonder and value in our historic buildings – and by extension the very history of the city – has only come to be thanks to the untold hours of effort by advocates for historic preservation over the last fifty years.

Historic preservation, or the field of study pertaining to the conservation, interpretation, and reuse of the historic built environment, has its roots in the United States with efforts to preserve sites of national significance in the early 1850s, like Mount Vernon. (3) But these early preservation efforts concentrated almost entirely on landmark properties with national significance, leaving humbler construction, like the majority of Winchester’s buildings, without a strong advocate for retention. There were, after all, so many other old buildings . . . and if a parking lot would work just as well in that location, what was the harm in a little demolition? This need for modernization reached a fever pitch in Winchester around the 1950s. Instead of adapting still useful older buildings to new uses, demolition to provide access and parking for cars was seen as de rigueur.

The hardest-hit street in Winchester is almost undoubtedly North Cameron Street. In the late 1940s through the 1970s, this area was seen as ripe for demolition to add parking lots and drive-through lanes to service the growing population of automobiles descending upon the commercial downtown. An astonishing and horrifying number of architecturally and historically significant properties were carelessly leveled to make way for parking lots or other “car friendly” drive-through services, including:
107-111 North Cameron St., Empire (later Capitol) Theatre (4)
115 North Cameron St., Miss Portia Baker House (5)
118 North Cameron St., Holliday/Robinson House
119 North Cameron St., Baker/Snider House (6)
120 North Cameron St.
121 North Cameron St., Bantz Residence
126 North Cameron St., Barton Residence/Lutheran Parsonage (7)
130 North Cameron St., Harry Miller Residence
133 North Cameron St., Scott Affleck House (8)
200 North Cameron St., The Colonial/Baker-Jolliffe House (9)
218 North Cameron St., Winchester Seed Company
225 North Cameron St., Hart Hotel/Graichen Glove Factory (10)
12 North Cameron St., Conrad House (11)

See some of these, as well as other demolished buildings of Winchester, at our Picasa album:

Vanished Winchester

The Conrad House was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Next week, we will learn more about this house and why its proposed destruction sparked the formation of Preservation of Historic Winchester.