Home Life in Colonial Days | Page 6

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 later, said: "Well! Archer has set us a fine example of expense,--he has laid one of his rooms in oil." This sentence shows both the wording and ideas of the times.
There was one external and suggestive adjunct of the earliest pioneer's home which was found in nearly all the settlements which were built in the midst of threatening Indians. Some strong houses were