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The Saltbox and the Chimney | |
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The Saltbox and the Chimney Saltbox or lean-to houses dwindled, not because they were no longer practical but because they were no longer fashionable. The town historian of Berlin, Massachusetts, estimated that in 1830 "one-third, perhaps" of the town's houses "were of the long back roofs of one story and two stories front." But two generations later, they had disappeared completely. "Our last," he wrote, "went down in smoke, 1886." The Cape The Cape, or Cape Cod-style house, a smaller version of the central-chimney house, was another signature of New England architecture. Timothy Dwight gave us the first full description. The far-roaming president of Yale College traveled through New England almost every summer in the 1790s and 1800s and kept a journal of what he saw, often paying close attention to the houses. While passing through the towns along the sandy hook of Massachusetts that ran from Barnstable to Provincetown, he saw buildings in a style that struck him as distinctive and called them "Cape Cod houses." They had their chimneys "in the middle immediately beyond the front door" and had "one story and four rooms on the lower floor." Upstairs were two bedchambers with steeply sloping ceilings defined by the roofline. Today we would call them "story-and-a-half" houses. Dwight liked to enumerate things, so he counted their windows: "on each side of the door" were two, with two more on the gable ends and two small ones upstairs to give light to the upstairs chambers. Actually, this was only the most typical form. There were "several varieties" of the Cape house, Dwight noted, but they were "of too little importance to be described" — the kind of offhand remark that historians find intensely frustrating. (Surviving buildings show what he didn't bother to tell us — "half-Cape" houses with a single room above and below and "two-thirds Cape" houses with unevenly divided small and large rooms.) These houses have been called "Cape houses" or "Capes" ever since, but the name is a bit misleading. True, they were almost universal along the sandy roads of the Cape, but more important, the houses he described would have been found just about all over New England, as they are today. Two Chimneys and a Central Hall Toward the middle of the 1700s, England sent a new kind of architecture to New England and to the rest of America. Later called the Georgian style after the succession of English kings of that name, the style favored symmetry, formality, and order. Builders of the earliest New England houses put windows and doors wherever they were needed. In some cases one window would be positioned above another, while a third, fourth, and more were inserted seemingly at random, almost design afterthoughts. Symmetry was either never considered or at least never considered to be that important. But the classic Georgian house had a completely symmetrical facade of doors and windows, with identical chimney stacks at both ends, two (or three) stories, each one two rooms wide and two rooms deep. Its most dramatic feature was a central passage or hallway that ran all the way through the house. All doors opened on to the hallway, and a highly visible (and highly desirable from a status point of view) staircase ascended to the next floor. This plan provided greater privacy, separating family and visitors and made entering the house a formal, rather than an intimate and neighborly, experience. New England's wealthiest were the first to build in this new way, after learning about it from relatives or business contacts in England or from books. In no time at all, the central-hallway house became a fashion statement; its different look on the landscape proclaimed its owners' wealth and their position of leadership in their communities. These houses were dramatically different in another way. Doors, windows, rooflines, and corners were decorated with elaborate designs taken from the architecture of the classical world. Doorways were capped by pediments and flanked by pilasters. Rooflines and windows were embellished with cornices and dentils. During the 1700s and up through 1820 or so, the central-hallway house was widely taken up by New England's prosperous families. Some built smaller versions, "single-pile" houses that were only one room deep. Their basic form didn't change, but details and proportions did, as architecture moved from the Georgian style to what historians now call the Federal style in the 1790s. Details of the new Federal style drew on new knowledge of Roman architecture that was emerging from pioneering excavations, but their functions remained the same. They pleased the eye, demonstrated wealth and taste, and suggested a gentleman's knowledge of the ancient world. For families that could accomplish it, this architectural transition was a step up in the world. In his autobiography, Samuel Goodrich recalled the year — 1797 — that his family in Ridgefield, Connecticut, moved out of their old "lean-to" into a new central-hallway house that his father had just had built. "It appeared to me," he wrote, "to be a stately dwelling and very beautiful." Even when New Englanders didn't adopt the central-hallway plan for their houses — and most of them didn't — their houses became more "regular" over time. Most householders and builders probably didn't think much about it, but they gradually gave up building structures with an "organic" look like the ancient 17th-century saltbox houses with their random placement of windows, dictated by function and convenience. Now they opted for a formal appearance based on architectural symmetry. Houses built after 1740 or so were much less likely to have lopsided facades and windows of different sizes. In this, they were following the example of their wealthier neighbors, the leaders of their communities, who were setting a different standard for how houses should look. Center-chimney houses long remained the most common form in New England architecture, even when fashionable taste saw them as hopelessly behind the times. All the "nice houses in the village," says a housewife in Catharine Sedgwick's novel Home, have a center passageway, "two chimneys, and a square roof to them." >>> Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum... Jack Larkin is a museum scholar and chief historian at Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Massachusetts; affiliate professor of history at Clark University in nearby Worcester; and a frequent consultant and lecturer for museums and historical organizations. A Chicago native and graduate of Harvard College and Brandeis University, Larkin is author of The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790-1840. This article is excerpted from Where We Lived by Jack Larkin, copyright © 2006, with permission of the publisher, The Taunton Press. Joint imprint with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
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