In the spring of 1904, the shores of the Allegheny River were covered with reporters and photographers who were entranced by the spectacle of a fairly ordinary brick home being floated down the river by barge. This wasn’t just any house; it was the domestic structure that the H. J. Heinz company would position as its original factory and, as such, best suited to stand near the other factory buildings at the company plant on the North Side of Pittsburgh. The Heinz homestead, which was moved from Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania (where the horseradish was grown) to the Heinz factory complex on the shores of the Allegheny, was first called the “Where We Began House” and later the “House Where We Began” based on the bottling of a modest amount of horseradish in its kitchen in 1869. This structure, Heinz professed, was the origin point of the Heinz condiment empire, which was based on the belief that home cooks were preoccupied with the basics of meal preparation and were too busy to produce additional desirable elements, such as sauces and pickles, that improved many meals. In addition to underscoring the coherence of Heinz’s empire, the little brick structure emerged as a company icon during a period when more modern, streamlined structures characterized public edifices, especially businesses.

When it was moved to the factory complex, the little house’s role was differentiated from that of the other company buildings in terms of both scale and function. As a domestic structure, it contrasted with the much larger modern factory buildings whose role was clearly utilitarian rather than symbolic. While Marchand describes the effect as part of a “public relations” effort on Heinz’s part, it also appears that Heinz calculated that the display of the little, archaic dwelling, in the midst of the modern complex, juxtaposed a simpler age and scale of production with that of the modern era.1 Within the “architectural expression of the corporate image” constituted by the modern factory, the archaic, small-scaled, private home/factory stood out as uniquely authentic, even as it helped cement an identity for the Heinz company.2 The little home attested to a narrative of humble beginnings, for the house, down to its bricks, had been made by male family members. Kept intact during the move, the structure’s integrity was also visibly situated as a point of value. Within the factory complex, the “House Where We Began” would function as a symbolic structure within the company’s origins story; not only was the structure prominently displayed and depicted in advertising materials, but it was central to the company’s claims to its permanence, namely its capacity to highlight and preserve the most important dimensions of company history.

The preservation of such a house suggests that a company operated with its values perpetually in mind, particularly its claim to small-scale capitalism. Keeping the home intact also became something of a spectator sport in its own right. When the structure was moved five miles in 1904, the house was taken from its foundation, blocked and “trussed” with cables, and rolled downhill to the river, at times only fifty feet a day on the spring riverbank.3 From there, it was placed on a barge and floated, with numerous difficulties, to the city’s North Side. The barge (accompanied by a towboat) carrying the 169-ton house was nearly sunk on multiple occasions; it became lodged on the river bottom at other times during its journey (GP, 154). Heinz seems to have anticipated, if not encouraged, public interest in the house’s progress, for he hired a “towboat for press representatives, complete with meals,” and reporters recorded every peril to the structure (GP, 155). Accounts of the house’s journey were published nationwide, and crowds gathered to watch its movement along the riverbanks, especially in mid-April, as it approached its North Shore home (GP, 155).

A company advertisement featuring the little house, titled “Where the ‘57’ began,” a reference to the 57 varieties of pickles supposedly sold by the company, bore the subtitle “The LITTLE HOUSE that was floated down the River” and contained the following narrative, in which the “House where we began” had a central role:

When you visit the “Home of the 57” you see the little “House where we began”—surrounded, overshadowed by large modern buildings. To the visitor the little house may seem but an interesting relic—a thing of purely historical interest, signifying growth and prosperity. To us, this homely little brick building stands as a symbol—a constant reminder of the ideals established there, the principles on which the Heinz business has been built.

The text attests to Heinz’s “[l]oyalty to the standards which the little house represents,” gesturing to a recognition of the company’s origins, steady vision, and domestic context.4 Next to the “House Where We Began,” another non-factory structure was built in 1913, the Sarah Heinz House, which was a social settlement building; it was designed as a “social service center” for employees and their children, and it included a “swimming pool, gymnasium, auditorium, workshops, club rooms, and roof court on grounds,” or a gathering space dedicated to “Youth, Recreation, Character, Service,” the company attested (GP, 217). Amid these other structures, the little archaic house was positioned to elicit collective feeling, primarily a comforting familiarity.

The iconic little house, like the one at the center of the Heinz origins story, took center stage at various moments across the early twentieth century. Rustic images of small-scale living and production, connected to outdated and/or preserved structures, were recognizable as idiosyncratically unmodern, particularly by the time the New Deal helped define American modernity. Streamlined, stylistically extreme structures attuned to efficiency and access, New Deal structures borrowed heavily from Old World influences, like a New York WAP park structure that resembled a medieval fortress.5 Italianate public buildings and parks also sprang up, as did formal gardens.6 Such projects could also develop on a grandiose scale, like the public pool constructed in Queens for up to 6,000 swimmers.7 By contrast, a modest domestic structure that could be cast as stuffy and old-fashioned could appear recognizable, traditional, and unaffected. Construed as a counter to sleek modernization, the archaic little house held a special place in the American imagination, especially during the thirties. The early volumes of the wildly popular Laura Ingalls Wilder series, for example, appeared in 1932 and 1935, both of which featured picturesque little houses on their covers, while the labors of homesteading and personal choice were detailed within.

The grounded properties of an archaic little house held an appeal for famous modern men, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. among them. The little house that Rockefeller would purchase for his family retreat was situated in the midst of a restored colonial village in Williamsburg, Virginia. Amid what Rockefeller would term the “hallowed ground” of Williamsburg, he and his wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, purchased Bassett Hall, a colonial home that functioned as their “peaceful, restful family retreat” and an ideal vantage point for viewing the town’s restoration.8 Rockefeller, who claimed that walking up and down the streets of the colonial capitol was “one of [his] greatest delights,” attested, “I always see something that interests me particularly and thoroughly enjoy the atmosphere of the old town.”9 Living (albeit temporarily) amid the remade material world of colonial Virginia, Rockefeller treated his archaic house as more than an emblem from the past, although it was also that. There, Bassett Hall became a home in which to vacation and entertain. Rockefeller—who funded preservation in sites such as Tetons, Shenandoah, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Palisades in New York, and what would become Acadia National Park in Maine—would treat his colonial home in Williamsburg similarly. It would become a long-time project for Rockefeller, or what Joseph W. Ernst terms one of Rockefeller’s “worthwhile places.”10 Rockefeller’s interest was on a smaller scale; namely, it was a small-scaled version of his preservationist interests and one interfused with various modern appurtenances. While not precisely “ancient” by most reckonings, the town would be resurrected with Rockefeller’s substantial funding of some fifty-six million dollars.

In the midst of the reconstructed town of Williamsburg, where the labors of everyday citizens were involved in the reconstruction efforts, the archaic house stood for labors past—to the local, scaled, and pleasing blend of labor and leisure and, in this case, labor that predates the forms of corporate capitalism that would dominate the twentieth century. It was both a link to the authentic labors of home as well as a dwelling without a specific function in regard to the town’s evolving function regarding tourism. By contrast, this was a private home in the colonial area and, as such, an enduring aspect of Williamsburg’s history. Bassett Hall was also redesigned with an eye to entertaining; its position on fourteen acres of property and newly added servants’ wing only affirmed this function of the little house.11 Bassett Hall would function as an unofficial diplomatic center of sorts where the Rockefellers hosted such figures as “the Queen Mother of England, Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada, and King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece … President Lyndon B. Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Chief Justice Warren E. Berger, Secretaries of State Dean Rusk and Cyrus Vance, Emperor Hirohito of Japan, President François Mitterand of France, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.”12 In regard to such meetings, it is possible to imagine that the lines between private and public, professional and social, and labor and leisure were blurred considerably in the all-purpose little house.

Literary works also imagined little houses that were tied to scenarios of small-scaled, personally directed labor. Appearing in fictional works of the twenties and thirties, a distinctive idealism emerged amid the archaic house, which would be linked with the self-determination of the homesteader, factory owner, and even the creative writer. If much of the New Deal entailed a “demand for organization, administration, and management from a central focus,” as Richard Hofstadter has argued, the personal labors characteristic of the little house appear as focused, discretionary, and most of all pleasurable, in part because this work was invisible as labor.13 In relief to New Deal scenarios of labor, the little house was cast as imaginatively provocative in a way that new, modern, and large-scale structures did not, for the scale of the little house permitted for the unison of private materiality and personal feeling, including the satisfactions related to the little archaic house itself.

The little house as a marker of enduring ideals in modern literature was less a marker of the types of lasting satisfactions. Visible in the literature of the late 1920s and 30s, the archaic house was rooted in the past but, as a structure, was stalwart enough that it was likely to have a materially persistent future. Its literary invocation involved a sense that the site’s materiality was valuable enough to be recognized for aesthetic reasons; emotional attachments to these sites meant that representations of little old houses were infused with a set of feelings that functioned like projections, such that materiality and feeling were intermingled. An antiquated nineteenth-century house is at the center of the material imagination in Edith Wharton’s novel, Hudson River Bracketed (1929), which is named for an architectural style characteristic of the early nineteenth-century Hudson River Valley. While Wharton’s novels are typically rooted in material and architectural concern, Hudson River Bracketed pointedly stresses the allure of an old uninhabited home, The Willows, that becomes iconic for its inhabitants. A galvanizing dwelling, the unmodern, unpolished, and even inconvenient space, the home offers a respite from an unnatural, modern productivity for the novel’s protagonist, the young writer Vance Weston. As with Bassett Hall, the scale of the little house is comfortingly personal, and at a time when the personal, archaic, and modestly-scaled enterprise was distinct from modern expectations.

The Willows serves as a galvanizing force in the development of Vance’s creative mind, for the mysteries of a small, dated space help insulate Vance from the fast-paced world of commerce. For the young mid-Westerner whose sense of the material past has been blunted by the newness of his region’s culture, the house provides a glimpse of an authentic past. The Willows will also serve a formative role in defining intellectual labors for Vance, whose transition from curious youth to successful artist—the focus of Wharton’s Künstlerroman novels, Hudson River Bracketed and its sequel, The Gods Arrive (1932)—will be linked to his autodidactic experience. As an aspiring writer with a story published to great acclaim, Vance enters a demanding contract with a literary journal—one that forces him into the regular and artificial (i.e., creatively forced) production of writing. The Willows also helps insulate Vance from the fast-paced world of commerce with its unnatural attitude toward productivity. While at The Willows, he writes out of genuine interest rather than because of contractual obligations. As an employee with a contracted amount of writing before him, an expectation that presses on him uncomfortably, Vance is overjoyed by true inspiration.

When Vance encounters the house, which is “one of the best specimens” of a local architectural style,14 he first spies the abode amid overhanging weeping willows, seeing only “a hint of a steep roof, a jutting balcony, an aspiring turret,” qualities he associates with the antiquated and mysterious (HRB, 57). Rustic and overgrown, the structure strikes Vance as an emblem of authenticity, as he remarks, “An old house—this is the way an old house looks!” (HRB, 57). Antiquated, in disrepair, and highly stylized, the dwelling fascinates the young artist. It is important that the house does not appear luxurious or a product of great wealth, though it does betray a degree of material privilege. The house is fantastically ornamented, with its “irregular” front that had “an air of irregularity unfamiliar to him” along with windows and balconies “which projected at odd angles, supported by ornate wooden brackets” (HRB, 58). Upon an “arcaded verandah,” an ancient wistaria grows,

reaching out … from bracket to bracket, from balcony to balcony, a wistaria with huge distorted branches like rheumatic arms lifted itself to the eaves, festooning, as it mounted, every projecting point with long lilac fringes—as if, Vance thought, a flock of very old monkeys had been ordered to climb up and decorate the house-front in celebration of some august arrival. He had never seen so prodigal a flowering, or a plant so crippled and ancient …. To bear so old a climber on its front, the house must be still older; and its age, its mystery, its reserve, laid a weight on his heart. (HRB, 58)

Becoming immersed in a material love affair with the house, Vance gazes upon a scene of material age, associating the structure with rheumatic arms and geriatric monkeys, and “he felt in the age and the emptiness” of the house the reminder of a “haunting” church bell, as if the dwelling, with its aged mysteriousness, is somehow sacred (HRB, 59).

What the old house offers Vance is the opportunity to gain authentic learning and to develop a mind that produces sustained creative concepts, as opposed to his learning in college, which provided him superficial knowledge, and where he was not challenged intellectually (and where he did not pursue literature). The dwelling’s center is the library of its former owner, a Miss Lorburn, a room that will supply Vance with an introduction to the world of ideas. By now, Vance finds himself invested in crafting stories, though he is hampered by limited familiarity with the kind of literature he aspires to create. Having become “accustomed to short-cuts to culture,” Vance has had few substantive conversations about art (HRB, 122). The old house’s library will supply a much-needed imaginative spark. “He had never been in a private library before,” Vance realizes, as he contemplates that “all these books … had been this Miss Lorburn’s, and she had sat among them, lived among them, died reading them—reading the very one on the table at his elbow! It all seemed part of the incomprehensible past to which she and the house belonged” (HRB, 61–62). The literary past becomes indivisible from the uninhabited dwelling as the volumes serve as “silent witnesses of an unknown and unsuspected past,” a feeling that becomes for Vance “almost more agitating than he could bear. From every side their influences streamed toward him, drawing him this way and that as if he had been in the center of magnetic circle” (HRB, 120). Rather than appearing lifeless, the room is much like the gigantic wistaria outside, old but vital, reaching out to Vance. In the open book, with Miss Lorburn’s glasses still upon the page, he spies a page “blotched with dampness” and in “queer” type, “different from any that was familiar to him,” and reads Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (HRB, 62). Astonished by the “beautiful … incredible words,” he sits and learns to read passionately, absorbedly (HRB, 62).

An old house, as it turns out, offers Vance an opportunity to succeed. It steadies his impulses and heightens his creative discipline, principally by tying Vance’s work to classic literature’s foundational ideas, something Wharton always advocated. When Vance arrives at The Willows, he is an aspiring but frustrated author, prone to scribbling on scraps of paper in crowded settings. Later, when he makes a hasty marriage and plans to support a young, helpless wife, the attendant pressures will disrupt his focus as he writes continually for a low salary. His inspirations (thoughts, impressions, fleeting insights) soon escape him. Such occurrences are part of a chaotic unfolding of ideas within spaces that are hardly conducive to any type of artistic labor, as when

[h]e scribbled on in the stuffy untidy room, beside his tumbled bed, the flies banging across the window-pane, the bar of hot sunlight wheeling slowly across the wall, scribbled on oblivious of time and place …. Words for one poem, then for another, continued to surge up, mingling, confused and exciting, in his half-awakened brain. Sometimes he lingered on one for the sake of its own beauty, and suddenly a new poem would bud from it, as if the word had been a seed plunged into the heated atmosphere of his imagination. (HRB, 47)

Nonlinear and ever-expanding, his writing is part of a “confused and exciting” experience that alternates between stimulation and frustration. The balance between the inspiration necessary for artistic experience and the comforting stability that grounds an artistic career will be difficult for Vance to locate. Only a site conducive to imaginative work, Wharton’s novel suggests, will satisfy Vance, for there his labor can be inspired and concentrated.

In its depiction of Vance’s writing, the novel ties his most significant productivity to the enduring work in Miss Lorburn’s library. Not only will his reading in the library at The Willows alleviate the “suffocating” weight of his ignorance, but he also takes the original owner’s scene of study as an inspiration (HRB, 121). He examines “the books—the books that had sufficed her” and which will, in turn, sustain him as well (HRB, 332). He will return again and again to work in the unoccupied home, amid a difficult period, for in the little archaic house, he discovers a “strange and overwhelming element had entered into his imagination in the guise of these funny turrets and balconies, turbid upholsteries and dangling crystals,” or the elements that, for him, make Miss Lorburn’s home the equivalent of “Chartres, the Parthenon, the Pyramids,” or elements of an elevated cultural history (HRB, 354). There he writes the novel that makes him famous, a narrative focused on a fictional account of Miss Lorburn’s life choices. Amid long spells of frustration and writer’s block, in the midst of a perpetual search for sustained inspiration, Vance’s career continues, largely in places other than The Willows, as he settles in a series of rented apartments, restaurants, bars, gardens, and historical sites across Europe. His best work, however, will be drafted at The Willows, where he finds an ideal combination of novelty and stability and where, “for the first time,” he discovers “a sort of equilibrium between the rush of his words and images and the subject they were to clothe” (HRB, 334).

This is a creative process that depends upon occupying a small, specialized space that enables the growth of an individuated vision. Part of the story of the archaic house is about productive personal labor, as in the narratives surrounding the “House Where We Began,” which positioned a private dwelling as a domestic factory. The work that took place in the little house, moreover, was focused and idiosyncratic, functioning in regard to individual preferences. Those guidelines dissolve, however, when Vance works outside the boundaries of the little house. Wandering alone across Europe, initiating and encountering heartbreak, Vance eventually steadies himself in another little remote house. This lonely cabin in the midwestern woods allows him to work productively for the first time in years. In the remote woods, he feels as if “his nerves grew steadier … that something precise and productive must come out of each step in his life.”15 With few pieces of paper, he begins a new project “in a mood of deep spiritual ardour such as his restless intelligence had never before attained” and feels “the magic power of continuity” for the first time.16 Eventually, he returns to the Hudson River Valley and to his lover, who now, miraculously, owns The Willows; in one of the Wharton’s few hopeful endings, Vance enters the archaic home, now owned by his lover to whom he hopes to return, and back to the fortifying library that allowed him to create his best work. This trajectory from peripatetic wandering to productive work, from tourism to a sense of material grounding, suggests Wharton’s antidote for Vance’s romantic and compositional difficulties. His time in a rustic cabin, then his return to an antiquated nineteenth-century house, places his work within a material self-enveloping that promises to grant him both self-direction and deep personal satisfaction as well.

As a setting for intellectual work in both the distant and more recent pasts, Vance’s experiences at The Willows suggest that modern labor can best be performed in pre-modern contexts, apart from the kinds of qualities of New Deal materiality: large-scale building projects, glistening newness, and cooperative labor. The little house’s association with focused, concentrated study and rewarding personal visions are cast as the most pleasing labor, as voluntary, as organized only by the self, and as inured to personal interests. If Vance’s imbrication in the traditions of classical literature and edifying materiality offers him a peculiarly privileged experience apart from modernity, other antiquated homes also lay the groundwork for a satisfying reciprocity between materiality and positive feeling.