Without George Shattuck Morison, the world would likely have a Nicaragua Canal rather than a Panama Canal.
“He was the most important civil engineer of the 19th century in the United States,” Monadnock Center for History and Culture Director Michelle Stahl said, tasked by presidents to contribute to major national infrastructure projects and summering in his family’s ancestral home in Peterborough throughout his later career. He became active in Peterborough affairs between frequent travels and ultimately counted the design of Peterborough’s first library building, as well as one of the town’s great houses, along with his lengthy list of design projects.
“While the library and the brick house [at Upland Farms] in Peterborough are special to us, those are minor in comparison” to Morison’s greater legacy, Stahl said.
Born in Massachusetts in 1842, Morison was the descendent of the founding Smith and Morison family of Peterborough, Stahl said, although his branch of the family had left town earlier in the century. Although he studied law at Harvard, he never practiced. ”His passion was engineering,” she said, and decided at 20 years old that he would study by evenings and become a self-taught expert. He succeeded: his obituary credited him with designing five bridges across the Mississippi River and 10 over the Missouri, projects that laid the framework for transcontinental travel, Stahl said. Morison had offices in New York and Chicago. In Chicago, he worked in the Monadnock building, a proto-skyscraper named, along with its second half, the Kearsarge building, for the New Hampshire peaks. “I’ve always wondered about that,” Stahl said, how Morison’s story related to what would have been a very familiar name to him.
Morison became president of the American Civil Engineering Society and was appointed by President McKinley to head up the Isthmian Commission in 1898, a group of engineers tasked with finding a place to build a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean in Central America. Most of the other members were advocating for a route through Nicaragua, Stahl said, but Morison spoke strongly for Panama. “Because of him, it’s there,” she said, as well as its far-reaching impacts on Central American history, although Morison died before the project even started. Morison’s career papers are stored with the Smithsonian Institute.
By the 1870s, Morison’s lustrous career put him into a position to buy back his family’s ancestral home, built in 1793, “Which the family, since time immemorial, has referred to as “The Yellow House,” even though it’s white,” Stahl said. He started spending summers there afterward, naming the property “Upland Farm” after a line in a poem and inviting his parents, siblings, and their children to stay (Morison never married).
In the 1890s he designed a mansion of his own for the property, which is now referred to as the Brick House, Stahl said. Morison had it built over the course of several years for reasons unknown, she said, which provoked a number of rumors and speculation around town, including that the house was being built on a turntable so it could be turned to provide a different view for each room throughout the day. “The house is not built on a turntable,” Stahl said, but many overnight guests have been unsettled by strange, somewhat ghostly noises through the night – a result of Morison’s experiments with structural steel inside the brick sheeting, which makes noise when there are changes in temperature. “It’s pretty spectacular,” Stahl said, a 19th-century gentleman’s home full of memorabilia from his constant travels, and picture-framed views of Mount Monadnock from the west piazza. Family lore says he spent less than 30 nights in the mansion after its completion since he traveled so much, she said, and his sister Mary became the full-time resident and hostess, continuing after his death in 1903.
Morison could be very particular and sometimes rude, according to an account from Morison’s great-nephew and historian Elting Elmore Morison. If he scheduled a meeting at 3:15, “Those who arrived earlier waited; those who came at any time after 15:15 never conferred at all,” Morison said. He referred to contemporary and neighbor Edward MacDowell as “a man with whom I had absolutely nothing in common.”
“He was all business… that was his personality,” Stahl said. “But he obviously really had a tremendous amount of affection and caring for his family,” she said, inviting the whole family up to Peterborough, building a dining room large enough explicitly so the whole family could have Thanksgiving dinner together, employing his brother and doting on his namesake nephew George Abbott Morison, who wound up writing the second history of Peterborough in 1954 while living in the Brick House. “And then he left everything to them,” she said. Both homes belong to descendants of the family through a corporation and trust, Stahl said. Morison himself is buried in Peterborough’s Pine Hill cemetery.
Although Peterborough’s library was founded before Morison was even born, in 1833, it had no permanent home before Morison was commissioned to create one, in 1890. The town called on Morison to build it because of his career achievements, even though they were on scales far removed from a mere town library, Stahl said.
“When you look at the original building… it seems more like it was related to the mill buildings of New Hampshire than it did to fancier buildings” of the time, Ann Beha Architects principal Steven Gerrard said. “It had a workmanlike quality that we thought was quite handsome.” Although the library’s location on the river and its status as the first publicly funded one in the country were Gerrard’s first focuses when he got involved with the library’s ongoing renovations, he soon found out about Morison.
Morison’s design choices appeared to be very rational, Gerrard said. The building is fireproof, with a concrete roof structure rather than the wood typical for the era. There’s also a cavity designed to circulate air in the masonry exterior wall, for heating and ventilation purposes, he said. “Concepts like that spoke to somebody thinking from an engineering point of view ahead of his time,” he said.
The building was described as being built for “strength, durability and service” in the 1905 Peterborough Register. Other residents complained it was dark and austere, like a jail or prison, Stahl said. The original structure lacked the white portico that Morison’s sister Mary paid to add after his death to dress up the entrance, Stahl said. “That made all the difference,” she said, and made the whole building look more welcoming and charming.
Morison’s building is designed to feature more prominently in the renovated library, Gerrard said. The additions to the library that obscured its entire north side are being pulled away and they’re exposing the original brickwork again, he said. The historic reading room is being restored to its original aesthetics as much as possible, all the way down to returning the window fixtures to their original black, Gerrard said. The library’s new community event space is being built to mimic Morison’s brick building, so two similar structures will be connected by a glassy connector between the two. Mary Morison’s white portico is also being preserved as an entrance, he said. “It’s a very special library in an incredibly unique location,” Gerrard said. “His story made it an even more rich project for us.”