A Mysterious Photo of a Tudor Revival House by Brown & Dawson

Earlier this morning, after I found my flat-bed scanner (underneath the futon in the guest room), I  scanned a torn black and white photograph of a stately Tudor Revival house. The photograph bears the embossed mark of the photographer, Brown & Dawson of Stamford, Connecticut. Nothing is written on the back of the image, save for the instructions on how to order duplicates on the negative.

I found the photograph tucked into an album that belong Catherine Rice King, better known as “Cousin Catherine” in my family. Cousin Catherine (whose tombstone bears no dates) traveled widely from her rural Bath County roots, including stints residing in Cuba with husband number three. There are many stories I could write about this woman I never met, but today I am just focused on this photograph.

Undated photograph of a great pile of a Tudor Revival style house by the firm Brown & Dawson.

How and why did it come to be stuck inside an album that contains many photos from the early 20th century? Annoyingly, most of the images she pasted to the pages of the album are – you guessed it – not labeled!

The album in question.

While I would like to believe that Cousin Catherine traveled to this lovely dwelling, Brown & Dawson was well known for its stock photography. Perhaps Cousin Catherine saw the photo, fell in love with the house and purchased a print?

Cousin Catherine, date and location unknown.

Adding intrigue to my curiosity is the name of the firm. Cousin Catherine came from a long line of well-off agriculturalists (I fancy some members of that branch wouldn’t call themselves farmers). The Rice and the Dawson family intermarried, so I do wonder if she knew Albert K. Dawson, the founder of the firm?

They would have been close in age- Dawson was born in 1885, and though Cousin Catherine eschewed mentioning her birth date (and I do apologize to the lady)- she was born five years later. Was there a Kentucky connection with this Dawson, who became one of the most active photographers of World War I?

Albert K. Dawson with the Bulgarian army on the eastern front, winter 1915. Image from Ron van Dopperen, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.

There appears to be a number of secondary sources about Albert K. Dawson, which I need to investigate.

But back to the photograph of the house!

A detail of the house.

Apparently, thanks to the sleuthing of a Gardens to Gables reader, this dwelling was designed by Arthur Loomis Harmon for William H. Reid in Springdale, Connecticut. The house appears in the April 9, 1919 edition of  The American Architect, vol. CXV, No 2259.

There’s no speculation needed about whether or not Cousin Catherine and William Henry Reid knew one another, for they attended the same party in Owingsville, Kentucky, in the fall of 1908, when Mrs. William Reid (Florence Lockwood Reid) of New York, and her two daughters were visiting in Kentucky.

I’m hoping someone out there in the world stumbles across this post and recognizes the house and can confirm if it still stands or if it is gone. There are many mysteries about Cousin Catherine, and pinning down just one elusive unlabeled photograph would be a triumph!