The Homes

Mabel Osgood Wright, Odgen House, c. 1900

Mabel Osgood Wright, Bulkley-Hobart House, Beach Road, c. 1900

Mabel Osgood Wright, Rowland House (Miss White’s House), c. 1900

Mabel Osgood Wright, Osborn House with Woman in Colonial Costume, c. 1900

Mabel Osgood Wright, Burr Homestead, c. 1900

Mabel Osgood Wright, George Brett Estate Pool, Brett Road, c. 1900

Mabel Osgood Wright, 205 Beach Road, c. 1900

Wright’s photographs of Fairfield’s colonial houses are indicative of her interest in preserving the town’s history, but they also exemplify the turn-of-the-century suburban ideal—the image of a tasteful country home set within a handsome garden. Influenced by the writing of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52), who popularized the suburban house as the ideal American house type, Wright enthusiastically embraced suburban life in her writing.

She admired country homes, and especially colonial ones, for their virtue, simplicity, and beauty, qualities that many architects and writers believed could be passed on to the homes’ residents and were absent from urban dwellings. “With the thought of Colonial houses,” she wrote in 1905, “comes the vision of the simple and therefore refining influence of the best Colonial manners.”