Abbott Lowell Cummings

Abbott Cummings died on May 29, 2017. Cummings was an authority on seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century architecture in the American northeast. He was a frequent visitor to the reading room in Antiquarian Hall and author of The Framed Houses of Massachusetts (1979). In his early career he was assistant curator for the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later he was executive director of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England) and served as editor of its journal, Old-Time New England. At various points in his career he taught at Yale University as the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and at Boston University, where he worked on the development of the school’s New England Studies Program. Among many honors he received was Winterthur’s Henry Francis DuPont Award for contributions of national significance to the knowledge, preservation, and enjoyment of American decorative arts, architecture, landscape design, and gardens. He was a trustee of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the founding president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, whose highest prize for scholarship remains its Abbott Lowell Cummings Award.