On a recent July afternoon, state architectural historian Devin Colman admired the 1905 Redstone Cottage on North Avenue in Burlington. Parks, Recreation & Waterfront director Cindi Wight and restoration architect Jay White were giving Colman a tour of the newly restored city-owned structure — an adorable cottage and its 1980s addition — now home to Parks & Rec's conservation team.
"This is beautiful," Colman commented, observing the rebuilt porches anchored with redstone piers and original interior details such as green glass transom windows and prominent ceiling beams. Six and a half feet tall, Colman had to duck to take the first step upstairs. He compensates for his intimidating height with a midwesterner's friendly grin — he grew up in Minnesota from the age of 2 — and easygoing humor.
After the tour, the three sat down to review the cottage's nomination for listing on the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places. Listing is required for a Vermont Housing & Conservation Board grant that is part of the cottage's $1 million restoration budget, and students in the University of Vermont's graduate historic preservation program wrote up the 40-page document. Colman made a few suggestions for revision. Normally, he'd review and edit the final draft, too, but he won't be around to see this one. On August 12, he'll step down from his position.
After 17 years with the state, the last dozen of which he has served as architectural historian, Colman is pivoting to becoming the director of the UVM graduate historic preservation program. The job will bring him full circle: He earned his master's from the program in 2006 with a thesis on modernist residential structures in Chittenden County.
He'll be the sole faculty appointment, at the lecturer level, in a program that has been taught for the past 25 years by two faculty members, Tom Visser and retiring director Bob McCullough. (The reduction in faculty was a condition of the administration's agreement to allow the program to continue after announcing it would be cut in 2021.)
The new gig will allow Colman to turn his thesis into a book and eliminate the commute between his Burlington home and Montpelier. Meanwhile, state rules dictate that the search for Colman's replacement at the Division for Historic Preservation must wait until his departure.
The move has come as a happy surprise to many in Vermont's preservation community — a low-profile network of dedicated individuals, all of whom Colman seems to know and confer with regularly.
"You're the perfect person to take on the challenge of promoting and recruiting another generation of preservationists!" state curator David Schutz wrote in reply to Colman's Facebook announcement. "I'm only sorry that the Division will miss your prodigious knowledge and skills."
State Historic Preservation Officer Laura Trieschmann, who has worked with Colman since 2013, echoed the loss: "He's got 17 years of experience visiting with Vermonters, crawling around their houses, going through their historic buildings' plans and their archives. That connection with Vermonters and their stories is very much an oral history that we will be missing."
Over a series of recent interviews, Seven Days took stock of the knowledge, skills and stories that Colman, 48, brought to his state job and will carry on to his next position. Even as a reporter sat with him at Scout café, down the street from the Redstone Cottage, Colman couldn't turn off his preservation radar.
"Take that building across the street," he said. "It's stucco; it's got a bungalow form; it has brackets on the eaves; the windows are four over one. No matter where I am, I'm looking." He added with a laugh, "Sometimes it's hard to separate — like, Wait, am I working right now or am I on vacation?"
Often, Colman strolls neighborhoods looking for architectural gems. He said he always has his state ID tag in case concerned homeowners confront him.
The state architectural historian wears many hats. Colman determined eligibility and reviewed nominations for national and state historic register listings and maintained a survey of all the state's structures, historic or not. He was involved in state historic preservation and barn grants and helped towns find funding opportunities for their preservation projects. He also provided support to state-owned historic sites and the team in charge of regulatory reviews.
And the morning after this year's and last year's July floods, Colman emailed all 18 of Vermont's National Historic Landmarks to see if they had sustained any damage.
Colman leaves behind a record of nearly 90 National Register listings. He has heightened preservationists' awareness of the importance of documenting the modernist movement and exemplified a particularly Vermont way of using preservation to strengthen communities.
While each state has a different approach to implementing the Park Service's preservation regulations, according to McCullough, "Vermont's approach is very good. The state office has set a very high standard for protecting Vermont's historic resources and the ways those resources benefit communities." While the past emphasis was on saving buildings, the newer approach rehabs them with a plan for how the buildings will be used by a community. McCullough sees Colman as having "played an important role in that."
McCullough described Colman's thesis as "groundbreaking. No one had studied the history of midcentury-modern architecture in Vermont." Colman's ongoing specialty is "pulling us in the right direction," he said, because midcentury buildings and neighborhoods are now historic, or at least 50 years old.
Colman explained in an email that he's "drawn to the generally positive and progressive outlook of modernism and the belief that thoughtful design can improve our lives. The fact that many people are dismissive of modernism makes me want to advocate for it, because I know that eventually people will come around and appreciate it. We need to make sure there's something left when that time comes!"
Britta Fenniman Tonn is Vermont director of cultural resources at the South Burlington-based civil engineering firm VHB, where she does historic preservation regulatory review and compliance for federal government projects. She said Colman has also brought midcentury state parks and ski lodges and resorts to the fore: "We're all now more aware of Vermont's embracing of modernist aesthetics in the mid-20th century and why that's important."
Tonn authored the 400-page National Register nomination for Middlebury Village in 2022 as part of the preservation mitigation for the town's bridge and rail project. She said she has often queried Colman on thorny questions of historic status.
"There are so many gray areas in preservation; it's just not cut-and-dry, ever. A building could be historic but so altered — so where's that line? I've contacted him many times when it's tricky," Tonn said.
One instance was the midcentury Midtown Motel in downtown Burlington, which she assessed for the developer ahead of its 2021 demolition. Tonn and Colman decided it was too changed to qualify as historic.
"We both loved the building," Tonn admitted. "That's where we had to put aside feelings about how neat and cool it was."
Colman has often reached out to other preservationists for input. At a project review for the Town of Williston's Brennan Barn, he realized he'd read a paper by Huntington's Eliot Lothrop on the barn's quirky triple mortise-and-tenon joints and contacted the timber-framing expert to learn more.
Lothrop, who is currently leading restoration of the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps' East Monitor Barn in Richmond, said, "It's been this fun relationship with this guy who's seeing all the most important projects around the state, then he emails and says, 'What's this specific detail, and have you seen it before?' In other states, the state architectural historian is less involved."
Colman often went well beyond his job description, giving tours and talks for historical societies, making media appearances, finding homes for the archives of past Vermont architects, sending out notices of historic structures for sale, and nominating restored houses for out-of-state preservation awards — particularly if they were modernist. Those more outward-facing efforts, in a job he described as mostly "behind the scenes," have brought Vermont positive media attention and armed locals with knowledge.
One of the many boards Colman serves on is the New England chapter of Docomomo, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving modernist sites around the world. Colman nominated the 1961 Stockmayer House in Norwich, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright acolyte Allan J. Gelbin, for Docomomo's 2022 Modernism in America award; it won. He recently discovered the 1958 Peyton House in East Dorset, designed by Ashok Bhavnani, and wrote up its nomination. Awards will be announced in September.
New Yorker Courtia Worth, who owns the Peyton House, marveled at Colman's enthusiasm for and commitment to a project in which he had "no skin in the game." Colman learned of the house during renovation, when Worth's flooring specialist, Mike Frost of Vermont Eco-Floors, sent a photo of it to his wife, Karen Frost, who cocurates the Architecture + Design Film Series in Burlington and Brattleboro. Karen forwarded it to Colman, who had introduced previous films in the series. Colman arrived at the house a day after Worth invited him to visit.
"He had a lot more questions than I could answer," Worth recalled. "He started taking a personal interest in Bhavnani." She connected Colman and Bhavnani's son via Zoom, and when Colman learned that Bhavnani had worked under modernist giant Richard Neutra in California, "He just took it and ran with it," she said. "He said, 'How would you feel about my nominating your house?' He kind of fell out of the sky, and he didn't have any ulterior motive. And he was charming."
Lothrop and Tonn, like Colman and many others, graduated from UVM's historic preservation program and stayed in Vermont to join the preservation effort. Colman's job will be to restock those ranks, which have shrunk from a dozen in 2002 to between three and five in recent years.
Lothrop, for one, can think of no one better for the job.
"It's such a big win for the state to have Devin in the historic preservation program," he said. "He brings that close-knit community. He has such a breadth of experience. He's got that background but also a passion for the state."