Charles Barton Keen: Main Line to Tobacco Road
Well-educated and well-connected, Charles Barton Keen (1868-1931) enjoyed a 20-year career designing suburban residences and country estates on Philadelphia’s “Main Line.” Following his commission in 1912 for a country estate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for tobacco magnate Richard Joshua Reynolds and his wife Katharine, Keen relocated his practice to the South. His timing was auspicious: profits of the New South tobacco and textile industries had created substantial first-generation fortunes and a ready market for an architect experienced in country house design and élite social practices.
With the imprimatur of Katharine Reynolds, Keen and his frequent collaborator, Philadelphia landscape architect Thomas W. Sears, quickly acquired a network of interrelated and intermarried clients. Families comprising tobacco and textile dynasties, with still familiar “brand” names such as Reynolds, Hanes, and Cannon, commissioned Keen houses and Sears gardens, loyal patronage that ended only with Keen’s death in 1931. The homes and gardens created a collective identity for the newly minted social and economic oligarchs as they forged a New South mode of class thinking. Many of the new industrialists had been born on farms and were deeply immersed in a traditional kinship-based society. Yet, as their fortunes rose, they also identified with a national élite culture. In addition to designing commodious residences, Keen created the private clubs on the golf course and in the mountains that provided recreation and further nurtured class identification among the New South’s power families.
Born to a venerable Philadelphia family, educated at Penn, and an avid clubman, Keen typifies the first-generation country house architect who started his career in tandem with a real estate developer and later developed a substantial practice designing comfortable homes for upper-middle-class and wealthy clients in Middle Atlantic suburbs. He belongs to the “Philadelphia School,” comprised of Wilson Eyre, Mellor Meigs and Howe, and Brognard Okie. Like his cohort Okie, with whom he is often compared, many of his buildings represents the best of the Philadelphia country house esthetic—sensitivity to site, local materials, and vernacular traditions. For 30 years his work appeared in popular and professional publications, including a Bryn Mawr residence that was featured in the 1st article in the 1st issue of House and Garden (1901) and the widely published West Chester estate/farm (1907) for the Sharples Cream separator inventor.
Keen worked for the élite in the North and the South, hence my book will be divided into two parts: the Philadelphia years (1890-1912) and the North Carolina years (1912-1931), comparing both clients and buildings. Whereas Keen had been one of many architects on Philadelphia’s Main Line, in North Carolina, his distinctive amalgam of English cottage and Pennsylvania farmhouse—white stucco walls, green tile roofs, and heavy columns—and, later, substantial Georgian Revival ones, became identified with the state’s power families and influenced the suburban environments of industrializing piedmont towns. Keen’s designs planted national architectural values into the booming southern piedmont region and provided a direct connection with the Philadelphia country house movement at the zenith of New South prosperity.