Home Life in Colonial Days | Page 6

the lanes of
fire-buckets, except in rare cases.

By the year 1670 wooden chimneys and log houses of the Plymouth
and Bay colonies were replaced by more sightly houses of two stories,
which were frequently built with the second story jutting out a foot or
two over the first, and sometimes with the attic story still further
extending over the second story. A few of these are still standing: The
White-Ellery House, at Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1707, is here
shown. This "overhang" is popularly supposed to have been built for
the purpose of affording a convenient shooting-place from which to
repel the Indians. This is, however, an historic fable. The overhanging
second story was a common form of building in England in the time of
Queen Elizabeth, and the Massachusetts and Rhode Island settlers
simply and naturally copied their old homes.
The roofs of many of these new houses were steep, and were shingled
with hand-riven shingles. The walls between the rooms were of clay
mixed with chopped straw. Sometimes the walls were whitened with a
wash made of powdered clam-shells. The ground floors were
occasionally of earth, but puncheon floors were common in the better
houses. The well-smoothed timbers were sanded in careful designs with
cleanly beach sand.
By 1676 the Royal Commissioners wrote of Boston that the streets
were crooked, and the houses usually wooden, with a few of brick and
stone. It is a favorite tradition of brick houses in all the colonies that the
brick for them was brought from England. As excellent brick was made
here, I cannot believe all these tales that are told. Occasionally a house,
such as the splendid Warner Mansion, still standing in Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, is proved to be of imported brick by the bills which
are still existing for the purchase and transportation of the brick. A later
form of many houses was two stories or two stories and a half in front,
with a peaked roof that sloped down nearly to the ground in the back
over an ell covering the kitchen, added in the shape known as a lean-to,
or, as it was called by country folk, the linter. This sloping roof gave
the one element of unconscious picturesqueness which redeemed the
prosaic ugliness of these bare-walled houses. Many lean-to houses are
still standing in New England. The Boardman Hill House, built at
North Saugus, Massachusetts, two centuries and a half ago, and the two

houses of lean-to form, the birthplaces of President John Adams and of
President John Quincy Adams, are typical examples.
The next roof-form, built from early colonial days, and popular a
century ago, was what was known as the gambrel roof. This resembled,
on two sides, the mansard roof of France in the seventeenth century,
but was also gabled at two ends. The gambrel roof had a certain grace
of outline, especially when joined with lean-tos and other additions.
The house partly built in 1636 in Dedham, Massachusetts, by my
far-away grandfather, and known as the Fairbanks House, is the oldest
gambrel-roofed house now standing. It is still occupied by one of his
descendants in the eighth generation. The rear view of it, here given,
shows the picturesqueness of roof outlines and the quaintness which
comes simply from variety. The front of the main building, with its
eight windows, all of different sizes and set at different heights, shows
equal diversity. Within, the boards in the wall-panelling vary from two
to twenty-five inches in width.
The windows of the first houses had oiled paper to admit light. A
colonist wrote back to England to a friend who was soon to follow,
"Bring oiled paper for your windows." The minister, Higginson, sent
promptly in 1629 for glass for windows. This glass was set in the
windows with nails; the sashes were often narrow and oblong, of
diamond-shaped panes set in lead, and opening up and down the middle
on hinges. Long after the large towns and cities had glass windows,
frontier settlements still had heavy wooden shutters. They were a safer
protection against Indian assault, as well as cheaper. It is asserted that
in the province of Kennebec, which is now the state of Maine, there
was not, even as late as 1745, a house that had a square of glass in it.
Oiled paper was used until this century in pioneer houses for windows
wherever it was difficult to transport glass.
Few of the early houses in New England were painted, or colored, as it
was called, either without or within. Painters do not appear in any of
the early lists of workmen. A Salem citizen, just previous to the
Revolution, had the woodwork of one of the rooms of his house painted.
One of a group of friends, discussing this extravagance a few days