The Architecture of Colonial America

by Harold Donaldson Eberlein

Copyright, Detroit Publishing Co.

PAUL REVERE HOUSE. GREAT ROOM, GROUND FLOOR.

The old wall paper is not coeval with the house.

the fireplace, through a “courting-stick,” a wooden tube six or eight feet long with mouth and ear pieces at each end.

In houses sufficiently spacious to admit of a living room or a “keeping-room” separate from the kitchen—such a room was analogous to the old English “hall”—the kitchen was still a cheerful room of great importance and the scene of many domestic fireside industries. It was a common thing to make lean-to additions to the original structure and the kitchen was often put in such an addition or in an ell extension. It was only the houses of the affluent, like that of Governour Theophilus Eaton at New Haven, built about 1640, that could boast what we should nowadays consider a very moderate number of rooms on the ground floor. Besides the great hall or living room in Governour Eaton’s house, there seem to have been a large kitchen and a pantry or buttery on one side, and on the other a parlour and a counting-house or library. Of the appointments of these rooms we may gain some idea from the inventory of Governour Eaton’s effects at the time of his death in 1657. In the hall or living room there were “a drawing Table and a round table; a cubberd & 2 long formes; a cubberd cloth & cushions; 4 setwork cushions, 6 greene cushions; a greate chaire with needleworke; 2 high chaires set work; 4 high stooles set worke; 4 low chaires set worke; 2 low stooles set work; 2 Turkey Carpette; 6 high joyne stooles; a pewter cistern & candlestick; a pr of small andirons; a pr of doggs; a pr of tongues fire pan & bellowes.” The other rooms were furnished in a comparable manner. Living rooms in less pretentious houses had similar equipment though, it is scarcely necessary to add, they were not usually so complete nor so elegant.

The very plan, or rather plans for there were several, of early New England houses proclaimed an English origin. The house of Governour Eaton, just mentioned, is said to have been built in the form of a capital E. The “E” plan was a very common form in the manor houses and even in the larger cottages of the England of Eaton’s time. It was also a very old form, “dating from the thirteenth century, if not from the twelfth, or even earlier, and it had, in its long career, come to be the expression of a regular and well-recognised arrangement.” “Other houses of this plan were built in different parts of New England for men of consequence and substance.”

“The common houses,” according to Edward E. Lambert, the antiquary, “at first were small, of one storey with sharp roofs, and heavy stone chimneys and small diamond windows.” Many of the early dwellings also had two floors. One type of these small houses commonly found in Massachusetts and Connecticut consisted of two rooms with a chimney between them. The house door opened into a small entry containing the staircase, opposite the door and carried up beside the chimney. The chimney was the core around which the house was built and projected above the middle of the ridgepole. Each room had a fireplace. To this type of house was frequently added a lean-to across the whole rear and this addition usually accommodated the kitchen. Sometimes the lean-to was incorporated in the plan when the house was built. In either case, the long, narrow lean-to room contained a fireplace which generally had a flue in the central chimney. When dwellings of this description had two rooms on the ground floor, one would be the kitchen and general living room and the other the parlour containing the “best bed,” an arrangement alluded to in a previous paragraph; where there was the additional lean-to room for the kitchen, the two other rooms would be living room and parlour.

In northern Rhode Island there was another common type that contained one room, at the end of which “was a vast stone chimney which appeared on the outside of the house.” Beside the fireplace and in the offset made by the chimney jamb, was a winding staircase—in the earliest houses it was sometimes a ladder—leading to the upper room or loft, as the case might be. An amplification of this “stone-end” type of house was occasionally found with two rooms placed side by side and a fireplace in each room in relatively the same position. That these types of floor plan were part of the common English architectural heritage we shall presently see by comparison with subsequent chapters. The position of the chimney served to all intents as an exterior indication of the internal plan of the house. Of course, many departures from these two original plans are to be met with in the early Colonial houses of New England but it will usually be found that such departures are due to later additions to a structure based, in the first instance, on one or the other of them.