One of the characteristic and frequent adjuncts to Bermuda dwellings are the butteries. These are sometimes joined to the main building, but are often detached elements, and are, I believe, in the form that they appear on the islands, peculiar to Bermuda though Sicily is said to have somewhat similar out buildings. They are small two-story buildings with thick walls and small openings, with high pyramidal roofs, built by a series of inwardly encorbled courses of heavy masonry and present a decidedly monumental appearance. They were built before the days of ice, as a place to keep perishable food cool. Elevated and pierced with small shuttered openings to catch the breezes, they had thick walls and roofs as defense against the sun's rays.
The chimneys area prominent feature, particularly in the smaller houses. Open fireplaces with hearths waist high were used for cooking, and are still in use for this purpose in some places, although oil stoves are generally replacing them.
The kitchen fireplace was accompanied by a built-in stone oven with its own flue, sometimes beside the kitchen fireplace, with independent chimney, and sometimes opening into it. The sides of these fireplaces sloped gently to a flue, so large and deep, that it carried off heat as well as the acrid smoke of burning cedar. Where the slave quarters were in the basement or cellar, there was a separate cooking fireplace for their use, so that even many of the small houses had two chimneys. In the larger houses of the more well-to-do, where slaves were owned in greater numbers, they were lodged in a separate building, and the owner's house usually had fireplaces to warm and dry the house during the colder weeks of winter. These fireplaces were of large size, with a raised hearth and no outer hearth. With the soft stone, the walls of the chimneys were necessarily thick, which gives them a prominence at first somewhat surprising for a sub-tropical climate. Chimneys projecting from the roof seemingly became a necessity to satisfy appearances, even when no real chimney existed. In many of the smallest houses, little false chimneys placed at the point of the hip are used as ornament to the roof.
Buttresses occur not infrequently and add to the character of the houses as well as having the structural function of overcoming the outward thrust of the rafters, that might otherwise be too great for the stability of the walls. These buttresses are sometimes reduced to salient pilasters on the thinner walls of the second story or pilasters of decided projection the full height of the house.
The ground plan of the smaller house presents little of great interest; in most cases a simple succession of intercommunicating rectangular rooms on the living floor; the kitchen dining room at one end distinguished by a large open cooking fireplace and built-in oven.
A greater number of rooms was obtained by adding projecting wings to the original plan. This was usually done in a rather haphazard fashion, but frequently with a distinct feeling of symmetry and order. The following diagrams show a number of such results that recur time and again with variations of gable and hip. The irregular additions were of great variety, sometimes producing by chance masses that composed in picturesque fashion. At other times the final outcome of successive additions was less fortunate with its complication of roofs and gutters. But the usual luxuriance of surrounding planting, the patina of age, and the very naïveté of arrangement makes even these acceptable.
Where the house was located on sloping ground, which was a frequent and deliberate choice of site as protection from the force of hurricanes the living floor was approximately at the higher level of the slope, necessitating a high basement wall on the lower side. This basement space, partially cut out from the natural rock, damp and almost totally dark, and with no direct connection to the floor above, was originally used for slave quarters with its own cooking fireplace, or for storage purposes. In the present day this lower part is little used. In some cases it makes shift for a stable, and more rarely, where conditions have permitted, is made into habitable rooms and connected by a stairway with the main floor.
Plate 3. Diagrams of Typical Houses.