Interior Features
The center first floor room has a fine mantel which is also similar in proportion to the Federal styles of Benjamin. The mantel is somewhat busy, and a little heavy, yet it has delicate detail and reeding on the sides. The mantels in the side rooms are much simpler, as might be expected in ancillary rooms. Basically, however, their proportions are the same, dateable to the early nineteenth century but with much less style involved. All four of the side mantels are of the same basic design, but each has been given an individual detail or refinement.
The second floor room has a simple mantel and moldings. It has the ovolo curve in the molding around the architraves which was common in the eighteenth century and persisted into the nineteenth.[54] This room would have been less used than downstairs rooms and the moldings are bound to be simpler, as is often found in the nineteenth century, when the upstairs was no longer as much used as in the eighteenth century. This room has a tray ceiling of the type one would expect to find beneath a hip roof, such as Huntley had in the nineteenth century.
Much of the flooring in the house is early, consisting of wide random width pine boards. The saw marks in the subflooring above the ground floor center room are vertical, but apparently from a mechanical saw. Beams under this portion of the house are hand-sawn on one side and broad-axed on the other.
Figure 13. Detail, exterior door, north facade. 1969. | Figure 14. Detail, interior of entrance door, south facade, 1969. | Figure 15. Detail, window and door, central first floor room. 1969. Photos by Wm. Edmund Barrett |
On the ground floor only the kitchen fireplace in the west side is open. There is evidence of a possible oven in the west chimney in the center room. In the east wing the front fireplace has been closed, though a balancing structural arch in the adjacent room is still open. The floor on the ground level was brick but floors in all rooms except the rear room in the east wing have been covered with concrete.
Much early hardware remains at Huntley, some of which fits stylistically into the period of construction. Most of it cannot be positively dated. The front door latch, for example, is an old Carpenter-type lock, generally common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but having no visible manufacturers mark, it cannot be positively dated.
Door and window architraves in the center first floor room, and in rooms in the east wing have corner blocks, while those in the west wing do not. Detail of the architraves throughout is early, and those with corner blocks are probably contemporary with the rest of the house. In the center room, first floor, the mantel, door and window architraves, and panelling beneath windows, all have the same molding details, indicating that all woodwork is of the same age.