Treatment Approach

There are four primary treatment approaches for cultural landscapes. Generally, the amount of physical intervention allowed in a landscape increases from the preservation treatment, through rehabilitation and restoration to the reconstruction treatment.3 The level of documentation and knowledge needed to support these treatments also increases between preservation and reconstruction. The treatment approaches include:4

• Preservation: the act or process of applying measures necessary to sustain the existing form, integrity, and material of a historic property. Includes initial stabilization work, where necessary, as well as ongoing preservation maintenance and repair of historic materials and features.

• Rehabilitation: the act or process of making possible a compatible use for a property through repair, alterations, and additions while preserving those portions or features which convey its historical, cultural, or architectural values.

• Restoration: the act or process of accurately depicting the form, features, and character of a property as it appeared at a particular period by removing features from other periods in its history and reconstructing missing features from the restoration period.

• Reconstruction: the act or process of depicting, by means of new construction, the form, features, and detailing of a non-surviving site, landscape building, structure, or object for the purpose of replicating its appearance at a specific period and in its historic location.

3 Page, Robert, Cathy Gilbert, and Susan Dolan. A Guide to Cultural Landscape Reports, 82.

4 Definitions excerpted from The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, 1995.

Rehabilitation is the recommended treatment approach for the Bassett Farms cultural landscape. This treatment supports the goal of preserving the historic character of the agricultural and domestic landscape while allowing for modest needed changes to support the educational mission of Preservation Texas for this property. Rehabilitation also supports key activities such as preservation and conservation education, historical research and education, appropriately scaled and conceived public visitation and events, creative arts residencies, and fundraising activities.

The intent of the primary treatment approach is to maintain the landscape’s character as close as possible to its condition at the height of historic use and activity as possible, allowing for some degree of change to address contemporary needs. While it is not the vision of Preservation Texas nor this cultural landscape report to bring back all historic activities and use, the goal is to infuse the landscape with more life and active management reflective of the stewardship of the Bassett Family and their tenants.

While much has changed and evolved at Bassett Farms during the period of significance (18711967), the location, setting, feeling, association, and design of the core facilities still reflect the essence of the property at the end of its period of significance.

The established baseline standards for a rehabilitation approach as outlined in The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties with Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes are listed below. All decisions about future changes to the design or management of Bassett Farms should follow these standards at a minimum. The Preservation Treatment Recommendations and Design Guidelines that follow are meant to build upon these baseline standards.

1. A property will be used as it was historically or be given a new use that requires minimal change to its distinctive materials, features, spaces, and spatial relationships.

2. The historic character of a property will be retained and preserved. The removal of distinctive materials or alteration of features, spaces, and spatial relationships that characterize a property will be avoided.

3. Each property will be recognized as a physical record of its time, place, and use. Changes that create a false sense of historical development, such as adding conjectural features or elements from other historic properties, will not be undertaken.

4. Changes to a property that have acquired historic significance in their own right shall be retained and preserved.

5. Distinctive materials, features, finishes, and construction techniques or examples of craftsmanship that characterize a property will be preserved.

6. Deteriorated historic features will be repaired rather than replaced. Where the severity of deterioration requires replacement of a distinctive feature, the new feature will match the old in design, color, texture, and, where possible, materials. Replacement of missing features will be substantiated by documentary and physical evidence.

7. Chemical or physical treatments, if appropriate, will be undertaken using the gentlest means possible. Treatments that cause damage to historic materials will not be used.

8. Archeological resources will be protected and preserved in place. If such resources must be disturbed, mitigation measures will be undertaken.

9. New additions, exterior alterations, or related new construction will not destroy historic materials, features, and spatial relationships that characterize the property. The new work will be differentiated from the old and will be compatible with the historic materials, features, size, scale and proportion, and massing to protect the integrity of the property and its environment.

10. New additions and adjacent or related new construction will be undertaken in a such a manner that, if removed in the future, the essential form and integrity of the historic property and its environment would be unimpaired.