Colonial Homes in North Carolina

by John V. Allcott

The first floor plan at lower right shows the porch, the main block of the house, and a room of the lean-to in rear. In the main block are a larger and a smaller side room, with a hall between. The entrances at front and back of the hall are wide double doors, facilitating good ventilation during hot summer days in Raleigh. The door to the larger room is centered “as it should be”; but the corresponding door to the opposite room has necessarily been pushed forward by the stairway. It will be noted that whereas the outer framed walls of the house are fairly thick, the walls which partition the hall are extremely thin—a point which will be discussed presently.

At upper left in the page of drawings is a transverse section through the hall. We see how the stairway folds neatly within the main block of the house as it rises. The stair has a railing, but no procession of banister posts, thus bespeaking an economy and rugged plainness—but a visitor must watch his step. At the top, the stair ends in an upper hall lighted by a dormer window. At the back is a corresponding dormer. As our drawing is a section through these windows, it does not give an immediately clear notion of the gambrel roof. However, just beneath each window can be seen part of the lower plane of the roof.

[Figure 62] shows the large front room of Wakefield, as restored and furnished by the Colonial Dames. The room with one wall of plaster and the other of wood, looks almost “modern.” The wood wall showed in the plan as very thin, as we have noted. The similar wood partition on the other side of the hall shows through the open door. To have covered these partition walls with plaster would have been quite an additional expense to the builder; and so one finds that the “modern” effect is in reality a by-product of simple economy. Looking carefully at the open door on the left, one notes the small wooden pegs which lock the horizontal and vertical frame members together.

FIGURE 62. INTERIOR OF WAKEFIELD.

CHAPTER V
Interiors

The interior from Wakefield, just seen ([figure 62]), represents one idea about how the walls of a room should be treated. There were other schemes for the treatment of the main room of a house; some of these are illustrated in [figure 63] and in the following sketches.

In [figure 63] parts of the great frame of a wooden house project unashamedly through the smooth plaster walls and ceiling. Running across the middle of the ceiling is the large center beam of the house. A similar member along the outside edge of the ceiling might be expected to continue all the way around the room as a cornice, but it does not. At the floor line, however, a base board does continue around the room, but it is heavier under the window wall. The chair rail (the board or rail installed about the height of the back of chair, to protect the plaster from damage) does continue around the room, but at the corner it develops special bracing not employed where the rail joins the frame of the door.

Such irregular features suggest a skeleton of the house going beyond the present room. The builder of this dwelling was unconcerned if one wall was different from another—perhaps he felt a keen satisfaction in the wooden structure of his house and was pleased to have this framework reflected in the interior. This spirit is occasionally seen in the less important rooms of a colonial house (for example in the Palmer house), but it is rarely found in the main rooms of extant colonial homes.