I yesterday received yours of 16th July and am very glad to hear that your Cape Cod trip has carried you in such good condition so far through the summer. But I am afraid a July & August scout in New York & the Jersies is not the best way you could contrive to establish it. I wish very much I could help you in the Committee duty, as I think my experience might enable me to if I was with you. I am not an architect nor a confident & well-fitted judge in Architecture, but I am well-fitted & trained in just your duty.

The first thing to be considered is that you & your associates are not Architects or Superintendents of Architectural constructions and that [243]you are not commissioned to please yourselves alone or even to please the uneducated fancies of those who commission you, but to secure, at a certain price, an essentially good and worthy thing—worthy of its high nominal purpose, which is not to gratify anybody’s whims or pride, or love of cheapness or of novelty or of oddity or merely of convenience. It should be a thing honorable in itself—positively honorable & which will be honored by healthy souls after you all [are] gone. A mere servile copying of something else that strikes your fancy after a day or two’s looking at it & sitting in it, is not that, can’t be that, on the contrary it will be for ever something cheap and nasty like second hand clothes. For brick, stone, mortar & paint are not honorable; it is the brain and heart work by which they are arranged that is so. And on the plan you suggest this work is all to be second hand—somebody else’s old clothes to be worn on Sunday by your churchgoers—that to me, at least, is most detestable. I for one shall never honor such a church & I believe it will not be honored, however it may satisfy the present demand, or may be thought to.

Not being architects, but merely sensible men without special training in church building, you should at once do what you do to get better preaching or doctoring or legal information than you can supply yourselves with from yourselves. Make use of a man who has given years of study to the questions you have before you, who has already spent many thousand dollars toward the meeting of just such a demand as is made on you. That is just what every architect has done. Your duty is—knowing the habits & character of the congregation & all the circumstances of the case as well as you do, to interpret the demand to the architect, and as business men to take the ordinary precautions against getting poor goods for your money. This will be almost wholly secured if your choice of an architect is a good one—for it is the essential duty of an architect to watch & guard against his clients being imposed upon either by ignorance, carelessness or fraud.

Now as to that, you can get a low-pric’d architect—such an one as Thomas whom Mr Astor employs, for instance. Why should you, any more than you should employ a quack instead of a physician or a shallow pettifogger instead of a sound lawyer? You want good, honorable workmanship. You never get that below the market-price. You get what Mr Astor gets, cheap, slop-shop stuff, that will do to sell but soon becomes in use, a nuisance, to be repaired & repaired & made over & turned and after it has cost you three times as much as first rate special custom-work, to be thrown away, dishonored & hated. There are none of Thomas’s Fifth Avenue houses that you can look at, in passing, twice a day for a few months that don’t make you ache by some misproportion, something out of keeping—something untrue & incomplete—I don’t care how un-educated you may be in Architecture. The reason is simply that Thomas [244]

[245] [246]works cheaply, that is without careful, faithful, honorable, earnest purpose to do the best he can—to do a good honorable & worthy thing. Probably this is his natural disposition, perhaps it is merely because he has not had a good architectural education & training.

All I can advise then, is that you begin by selecting an architect as you would select a clergyman or a lawyer, & then deal with him as you would with a lawyer—making him master of your circumstances & your wants—let him study how to meet them—remember this is his business & he has his head full of materials & tools for the purpose which he has been storing there for years. If he don’t suit you at once, keep at him till he does—till you are satisfied he can. Be frank and free with your objections. It is his business not to persuade you out of your objections but to find something which will obviate your objections. If one thing don’t suit, another will; keep at him till you are satisfied he is going to suit you—that the result will suit you, which, if he is a good architect, it will do at no expense of good taste or of honor or that which is honorable. I do not know Hallet & have no favorable impression of him. I don’t like Upjohn. I don’t think his work is well-studied. It has a commonplace, stencilled look. I am prejudiced in Vaux’s favor by a trying experience of his unwearied pertinacity in overcoming difficulties, in turning & turning & turning—never careing how much it costs him, until he gets something that entirely suits his own convictions of what is honorable architecture & his client’s crude demands. No man will give you so much for your money. But Vaux has not built many churches & your Committee will want to begin with something already done, I suppose, as a starting point—and as I said, I must be supposed to be prejudiced, & you might be. But at any rate, read the opening chapters of Vaux’s Country Houses, & including what is said on churches. Withers, Vaux’s partner, has built two or three country (town) churches. He is a patient, amiable accommodating young man, & I like his church architecture very much. Idlitz, is, I think, the most unquestionably successful church-builder in New York. I like him very much. St. George’s, (Dr Tyng’s) is his oldest work, so far as I know, but there are others in New York (the latest is “the Tabernacle”, I believe) & in the country. Cabot of Boston, has an excellent reputation.

The mere commerce with your architect is very simple. All respectable architects have a regular scale of charges for their work. It is the same with all, and they never vary from it. Never at least go below it. The question is not what you shall pay but what they shall give, & this wholly depends on the quality of each individual as an architect and his character as a man—as it would with a physician. I suppose the charge for church-work is 2½ per ct on cost for the design & working drawings. 5 per cent for design & superintendence. Recollect that an architect is a trained superintendent—trained & practiced to secure economical work. It often happens that to save the price of superintendence, the cost of a [247]church is increased one half, or it is spoil’d by use of poor materials or mean workmanship. By all means have an architect help you to the end.

(I have run out of letter paper).

You heard from us while we were on the South Fork went back to the Estate last of July—stayed a fortnight. Brought Mary, John, Owen, baby & our cook (a colored man) up here day before yesterday—the rest, with the Ashburners, are to follow today. We are camped near the middle of the chasm on the bank of the Merced, which is here a stream meandering through a meadow, like the Hockanum—or like the Avon at Stratford—a trout stream with rushes & ferns, willows & poplars. The walls of the chasm are a quarter of a mile distant, each side—nearly a mile in height—half a mile of perpendicular or overhanging rock in some places. Of course it is awfully grand, but it is not frightful or fearful. It is sublimely beautiful, much more beautiful than I had supposed. The valley is as sweet & peaceful as the meadows of the Avon, and the sides are in many parts lovely with foliage & color. There is little water in the Cascades at this season, but that is [but a trifling] circumstance. We have what is infinitly more valuable—a full moon & a soft hazy smokey atmosphere with rolling towering & white fleecy clouds.

We are all gaining in health—the weather is warm but not sultry. We bivouacked for a night on the way here from South Fork, at an elevation of 8000 feet. With a good camp-fire we did not suffer at all from cold. We found the trail much easier than it had been described to be. We are about forty miles from the nearest wheel-road—all our blankets & kettles having been brought over by pack-mules. We think Fitz Ludlow’s article an abomination—disgraceful to the Atlantic.

I can’t think how you can be spending $100,000 on a mere tabernacle, with the war where it is. It is all right if you are sure there will be no grumbling with the taxes & that you can send all the men that will be wanted in the next three years. But if not, I think God would prefer you worshipped him by cheerful and generous liberality in the latter way. Are the people patient & resolute & prepared for any further necessary sacrifice? That is the dreadful question always before me. I don’t believe they are building churches [. . .] & the whole question rests [. . .] who will give [. . .] the longest?

I am very glad to hear that Bertha’s boy is in such good health & that Mr Niles’s prospects of promotion are so good. I hope he will take the Professorship.

Marion is growing bravely. She has become quite brown in camp—almost ruddy.

John & Owen are sturdier than ever before. Charlotte grows womanly—Miss Tompkins, daughter of Minthorne Tompkins of New York, is of our party—(rear detachment) a nice, reserved quiet girl like Mary Olmsted. She was a pupil & friend of Miss Errington. Reverend [248]

Mr Twining (of the New Haven Twinings) came up with her from San Francisco. He staid with us on South Fork a few days. We have also had Clarence King—formerly in Hartford, (at school)—now of the State Geological Survey. We hope to be joined here by Profr Brewer, & others of the corps. They have lately found the highest mountain yet known on the continent, below here, in the Sierra Nevada. I believe it is 16.500. King has been heroic in his explorations. I think that I shall push on to the summit ridge, before I return. We came close on a grizzly the other day & lost our guide & the baby for several hours, but have had no serious adventures. How is the garden this summer?