Abbott Lowell Cummings

Who is Abbott Lowell Cummings?

Abbott Lowell Cummings is a noted architectural historian and genealogist, best known for his study of New England architecture. He currently lives in South Deerfield, Massachusetts.

Cummings was born in St. Albans, Vermont, educated at the Hoosac School in New York, studied American art and architectural history at Oberlin College, and received his doctoral degree from Ohio State University in 1950. When young, he spent winters with his parents in Bennington, Vermont, and summers with his grandmother in Southington, Connecticut. In an interview with Laura Beech, Cummings reflected on his grandmother's influence: "At a personal level, my grandmother had as much influence as anyone on my life. She was a scientist by training, a Vassar graduate who had studied astronomy. She drilled into me the need to be very factual. I also fell right in with all her genealogical interests."

In his teens, Cummings joined the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, and spent hours at the town clerk's office in Southington, tracing the titles of his ancestors' colonial structures. Elmer Keith, a Wallingford, Connecticut, antiquarian and collector, taught Cummings to deconstruct a building to look behind its repairs and later additions. In graduate school, Cumming's thesis was on Seventeenth Century Massachusetts buildings, and dissertation on the Federal architect Asher Benjamin.