Helen Binkerd Young (1877-1959)
Helen Binkerd Young was an early female American architect, the eleventh woman to graduate from Cornell’s architecture program, in 1900. Unable to teach architecture when her husband was appointed to do so at Cornell, she joined the Department of Home Economics where she taught courses on home design and published extension bulletins for farm wives, retiring in 1922. As detailed by Historic Ithaca Preservation Associate Sara Johnson in Historic Ithaca’s Preservation Quarterly (Volume 40, winter 2008), Helen Young did not sign her name to plans but is known to have drawn them for charming revival style homes. In 1918, she and her husband George designed their own house, “Hidden Home” at 107 Overlook Road in the Village of Cayuga Heights, which was written up in American Architecture Magazine in 1927. Along with other residences in the area, according to former Cayuga Heights historian Carol Sisler, she is likely the architect of Marcham Hall, the Cayuga Heights municipal building, originally the home of Ezra Cornell’s granddaughter Dorothy Cornell. Johnson speculates that passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and societal change may have prompted Young to identify herself in the 1930 U.S. Census as architect.
Young-Designed Homes in the Village of Cayuga Heights
107 Overlook Road |
614 Wyckoff Road |
402 Cayuga Heights Road |
”Hidden Home,” 107 Overlook
Road
Helen Binkerd Young and
George Y. Young (1918-19)
Tudor Revival
|
614 Wyckoff Road
Clyde Myers and Fleda Straight
Myers (1920-21)
Tudor Revival
|
402 Cayuga Heights Road
Charles K. Burdick (1925)
|
212 Overlook Road |
330 The Parkway |
115 Cayuga Heights Road |
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Sources:
Sara Johnson, "A Pioneering Woman: Helen Binkerd Young," Historic Ithaca's Preservation News, Winter 2008, 13-14.
Carol U. Sisler, Enterprising Families, Ithaca, New York; Their Houses and Businesses (Ithaca, New York, Enterprise Publishing, 1986).
"From Domesticity to Modernity: What Was Home Economics?" Faculty Biographies: Helen Binkerd Young, Cornell Division of Rare and Manuscripts Collections online exhibit, 2001, http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/homeEc/masterlabel.html.
Noni Korf Vidal and Eileen Keating, "House Interiors, 1921-1927," Human Ecology Photos website, Cornell Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and College of Human Ecology.
Sara Johnson, "A Pioneering Woman: Helen Binkerd Young," Historic Ithaca's Preservation News, Winter 2008, 13-14.
Carol U. Sisler, Enterprising Families, Ithaca, New York; Their Houses and Businesses (Ithaca, New York, Enterprise Publishing, 1986).
"From Domesticity to Modernity: What Was Home Economics?" Faculty Biographies: Helen Binkerd Young, Cornell Division of Rare and Manuscripts Collections online exhibit, 2001, http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/homeEc/masterlabel.html.
Noni Korf Vidal and Eileen Keating, "House Interiors, 1921-1927," Human Ecology Photos website, Cornell Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and College of Human Ecology.
