Visualizing the past and envisioning the future are remarkably complementary activities. For more than a century, Wethersfield has been preserving or restoring its historic architecture both as a matter of civic pride and as an engine for economic growth. Advances in historical research and preservation science over that time have sharpened our view of the past, but none of our preserved buildings are time capsules. In each case, modern sensibilities have intervened to bridge the gaps in our historical knowledge, whether the end goal was to adapt a space for a new use or to present it as a museum.

Preservation in Action: Architectural Photography from Wallace Nutting to Peter Brown is a testament to the camera’s enduring ability to capture that which cannot be expressed by preservation scholarship alone. Through light, color, and composition, photographs by early-twentieth-century antiquarian Wallace Nutting and contemporary architectural photographer Peter R. Brown document Wethersfield’s preservation efforts from 1916 to the present. Beyond showing the existence and configuration of architectural elements and furnishings, they evoke moods and sensory experiences in the spaces they depict.

Feeling has long been at the center of preservation work. Nutting, a Congregationalist minister, first took to photography as a pastime to soothe the nervous disorder that eventually caused him to retire from the pulpit. Over the next two decades, he amassed a vast commercial catalogue of hand-colored prints that would popularize themes of early American domestic life at a moment when many people felt anxious and dehumanized in an increasingly industrial world. In 1916 he purchased and embellished the 1752 Joseph Webb House as the fifth and final link in his “Chain of Colonial Picture Houses,” which served as settings for his photographs and as public museums.

Brown’s contemporary images belong to a new publication by the Webb Deane Stevens Museum and Wesleyan University Press entitled Preservation in Action: Ten Stories of Stewardship. Written by the late Anne Crofoot Kuckro, the book chronicles a long-running collaboration among museums, private homeowners, shopkeepers, and public officials in Old Wethersfield, Connecticut’s largest and oldest historic district. Brown’s published and unpublished photographs remind us of the atmosphere these buildings continue to conjure up, such as in his luminous scenes from the Belden (Buttolph-Williams) House. Restored in the early 1950s, the surprisingly archaic appearance of the house and its furnishings inspired Elizabeth George Speare’s Newbery-winning novel The Witch of Blackbird Pond.