Nakashima Family House
The Nakashima Family House was the second building that George Nakashima built on the property in 1946-1947. The House was continuously occupied until the 2020 passing of George’s son, Kevin, the last Family House resident and “curator” of family history and lore. Not only is the House an enduring testament to Nakashima’s midcentury Japanese folk craft, it is filled with handcrafted furniture and built-in cabinetry, books, art work, letters and memoirs, and artifacts and archives related to the family’s life and travel, as well as their incarceration at Camp Minidoka during World War II.
We launched the preservation work in 2022 with a NEH Preservation Assistance Grant for Smaller Institutions and in 2023 with the Historical and Records Care Grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, along with a Collections Assessment for Preservation (CAP) grant. Conservator Wendy Jessup and environmental engineer Michael Henry completed a CAP assessment of the House and a detailed report to help us preserve and care for the building and collections inside the historic building.
In 2024, we received matching grants from the Johanna Favrot Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Keystone Historic Preservation Planning Program. George built the House himself, by hand, and yet we have no drawings that comprehensively document the design or its change over time. This preservation project captured all that and documented our findings in a lasting way through preservation planning documents, drawings, and a historic structure report (HSR).
The project team, consisting of Mira Nakashima, President, Zoriana Siokalo, Administrator/Grants Manager, David Long, Archivist, and Lauren Griffin, Programs Coordinator and Assistant Archivist, worked with colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania Department of Historic Preservation Chair Frank Matero, Architectural Conservator John Hinchman, Research Associate Mojtaba Saffarian, Curator and Architectural Historian William Whitaker, and Environmental Engineer Michael Henry and Conservator Wendy Jessup. The team produced architectural drawings, photographs, environmental condition reports, laser scans for 3-D modeling of the House, and other planning documents assembled in the HSR that will help guide us in implementing the preservation of the House.
The architectural historian and Foundation staff conducted in-depth research in the family archives which have been largely untouched for decades and stored throughout the House. This material helped inform the writing of a detailed narrative and timeline of the Nakashima family and their move from the Pacific Northwest, the family’s incarceration at Minidoka during World War II, and their eventual move onto the New Hope property in 1946.
CAP visit, October, 2023: from left to right: Jon Yarnall, Bill Whitaker, Michael Henry, Wendy Jessup, and Mira Nakashima in the Family House
Zoriana Siokalo rehousing archives
Lauren Griffin and Bill Whitaker working with Family Archives
Mojtaba Saffarian and Jaysond Neill reviewing drawings of the House
This project is supported by a grant from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission’s Keystone Historic Preservation Grant, a program funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The project is funded in part by a grant from the Johanna Favrot Fund for Historic Preservation of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.