Talk:Clemuel Ricketts Mansion

Ref

NRHP nomination form Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 02:37, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Images

Per the peer review, I hope to get some more color photographs of the house soon. Since it is on a private development, I have made an appointment to see it. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 21:15, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Good luck with the photo trip, hope the weather holds. --Dincher (talk) 21:35, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

We just had a family reunion at this location on the 17th of July.....got 34 photos inside and out.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.70.201.106 (talk) 12:59, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

Sounds like a fun time. Feel free to upload images at Wikimedia:Commons - please ask here if you are unsure how to do this, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 13:30, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Clemuel Ricketts Mansion/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: –– Jezhotwells (talk) 03:26, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I shall be reviewing this article against the Good Article criteria, following its nomination for Good Article status.

Disambiguations: none found

Linkrot: I fixed one link that lead to a search page.diff

Checking against GA criteria

GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   References check out and support the cited statements, all appear RS.

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

   a Georgian style house made of stone What type of stone? It is variously referred to throughout the article as the "stone house", but it would be useful to state which type of stone was used for its construction. Y

   Thanks for fixing this. –– Jezhotwells (talk) 04:31, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

   This is pretty much there, satisfying the criteria, but ust one minor point about the construction material. On hold. –– Jezhotwells (talk) 03:53, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

   Reply Thanks very much for the review and your edits. The house is made of sandstone, which I have clarified in the lead. It was already mentioned in the Architecture section and in a photo caption there. My guess is that it is sandstone from the Pocono Formation that underlies the lake and house, but I do not have a reliable source to back that up.

   While I appreciate your helpful edits, on my computer the new link to the NPS Focus website gives an error when you click on it, and the external link checker in the toolbox above also shows the link is dead. Could you please fix it (I am not sure what to have there other than the link to the search page I had there originally). Thanks again, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:20, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

   Sorry about that. I have amended the link, with a note of the search term. I am happy to now pass this as a Good Article. Thank you and congratulations!. –– Jezhotwells (talk) 04:31, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

   Thanks very much! Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:37, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Things I know but do not have reliable sources for

Based on my recent visit, here are some things I know about the house, but do not have reliable sources for.

• The front porch has been renovated again - compare this 2010 image to this one from 1935 - notice the addition of wooden pillars against the wall to help support the porch roof? I also saw a date in the concrete of the porch floor - I think it was 1990s, but did not take a picture. Grr.
• The house once had gas lights - you could still see where the pipes had been in the living room, barely visible in this image (white wall, either side of the framed picture)
• The house had either steam heat or circulating hot water heat, but the pipes froze at some point and now it is unheated. The lack of heat has led to the paint peeling in places.
• Much of the house has been restored by the Ganoga Lake Association over the years. They use it for their meetings, picnics, and rent it out for weddings, etc.
• The furniture in the pictures is probably not original.
• There was a view to the lake from the house, but the trees have grown up so that it is no longer very visible (that lot was not sold in the development)
• There was a boardwalk from the train station to the house / hotel.
• There was an outhouse on the north side of the house that was removed. The pump in front of the house was a well that was covered.
• There was a horse barn / stable at the east end of the large cleared area southeast of the house - it has since collapsed
• There is a heliport west of the mansion (on the lawn)

Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 18:41, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

• • Struck the ones I found refs for in Tomasak's book. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:04, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

What year was it built?

I think that Tomasak probably has the right years for purchasing the lake (1853) and construction of the house (1854-1855). My guess is that R. Bruce Ricketts came up with the 1851 purchase and 1852 building completed dates without checking original records (Tomasak even quotes a brochure RBR sent out for the hotel that mentions 1852), and the other, later sources just took his word for it (William Reynolds Ricketts) or copied what earlier sources used. If the Colonel (RBR) came up with 1852 for completing the house, he could even have had it carved on the stone house at some point (1913 renovation?). It is difficult to say RBR's brochure, WRR's HABS history, the NRHP form, and the date carved into the stone of the building itself are all wrong, but if Tomasak is right about the purchase date of the lake (1853) then the house can't have been built before the land was purchased.

The main reason I believe Tomasak is that he tracks down all the obscure sources - he lists the two different mortgages RBR has with his father (March and November 1869), and the amounts paid for purchases and buildings. There are also things he looked at that make much more sense with an 1853 purchase date for the lake: if you bought the land and the old Long Pond Tavern in 1851, why would you wait until 1853 to get a tavern license? Why wait until 1854 for a post office? These make more sense with an 1853 purchase date, and tracking down the details of the US Post Office records for when the Post Office was active and the county records for the tavern permit, make it also seem to me like he tracked down the real estate records for the purchase date.

Unfortunately Tomasak's book does not say clearly where he got the 1853 date for the purchase or the 1854-1855 construction dates. It is more data and less explanation than most history books - I wish he wrote something like "Although these sources say the house was built in 1851-1852, these records clearly show it was actually built in 1854 to 1855. All of this is speculation on my part, so I hope presenting both dates and sources in the article works. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:25, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Additions after FAC

I got Tomasak's Biography of Colonel R Bruce Ricketts and have now added about 4 kB of prose to the article based on that - diff. I plan to ask the FAC and PR reviewers to take a second look at the article and make sure it still reads smoothly and clearly, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 02:27, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Things still look great. Dincher (talk) 14:16, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for checking - I was worried as the new source contradicted some of the old ones on the contruction dates. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 15:37, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Still smooth. I added a hyphen, two commas, and fixed a misspelling (typo). I like the new image of the North Mountain House, and the Bachelder woodcut (though it might have been there before). Here are a couple of questions or quibbles:

• A minor question involves Atherton, the architect. He is described in the "House" section as "Thomas Henry Atherton of Wilkes-Barre", then "Atherton" on second reference, but he appears again on third reference in the "Architecture" section as "Henry Atherton of Wilkes-Barre", and some of the info about him is repeated and could be shortened by a few words, perhaps.

• Thanks, I changed it to just "...; Thomas Henry Atherton was the architect". in the Architecture section (could probably drop him all together here). Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:34, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

• I'd suggest adding to the "House" section the distance of the new highway from the house. The info appears later in the "Architecture" section but would be good (or maybe better) here. It could just be tacked on "after he paid for the construction of the new highway" with a comma and "1.5 miles (2.4 km) east of the house".

• Used your suggestion, thanks, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:34, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

• I had a bit of trouble this time deciding which way the house faced because the house is described as east of the old turnpike, and the new highway is described as east of the lake. I had been for some reason imagining a house that faced the lake. Facing the road makes perfect sense, but it might help to make this explicit so that readers who are zooming along don't get it backwards. Maybe it could fit into the "Lodge and tavern" section.

• I Added this to the Lodge and tavern section and also tweaked the panorama caption. The house faces the former road, Col. Ricketts bedroom faced the lake (and that is where he is supposed to have died). Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:34, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Hope this helps. Finetooth (talk) 18:17, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Very helpful - thanks. The 1870 photo of the North Mountain House and the Bachelder woodcut are both new to the article (I added enough to History to fit in two more images), Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:34, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

You're additions look good, although ideally the conflict between the dates should be resolved. Chances are that probably won't possible without a lot research, however. Of course, the conflict could easily be fixed if anyone has a modified DeLorean by any chance ;-) ​​​​​​​​Niagara ​​^{Don't give up the ship} 00:45, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Tomasak uses a three-part newspaper series that William Reynolds Ricketts wrote in the 1940s that was published in the Bloomsburg paper (now defunct). It is on the history of his family and their house and land hoildings. I found a library that has the newspaper's archive and hope to get there this summer - from his footnotes, I am pretty sure that Tomasak gets the 1854-1855 dates from that source. I figure Petrillo's book and the NRHP form followed WRR's 1936 HABS history (mostly) - not sure if they know the 1940s WRR newspaper history. That also may help with the issue of the date for razing the wooden Ark. WRR in HABs says 1897 and Petrillo follows him, but the NRHP and Tomasak say 1903, when the hotel closed. Again Tomasak has little details about Col. Ricketts hiring new managers and doing renovations to get more guests that make much more sense with a 1903 date for razing what had to have been the vast majority of the guest rooms. Thanks again, Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:34, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

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