“Ancient and Ordinary” Archaeology and Changing Perceptions of Connecticut’s 18th-Century Architecture
By
Ross K. Harper
While
traveling through Branford in 1800, Yale president and early Connecticut
historian Timothy Dwight wrote: “The town of Branford is destitute of beauty.
The situation is unpleasant, and the houses are chiefly ancient and ordinary.” For
the most part, the homes that Dwight saw are now gone. Some small houses were
incorporated into larger ones and are no longer visible, though architectural
historians can sometimes find these early structures enveloped in later
expansions. Archaeologists can also recover evidence of early houses, but in
the ground rather than in building fabric. Archaeological excavations are
discovering that the center-chimney cape and saltbox houses often thought to be
typical 18th-century dwellings are not an accurate representation of
the period architectural landscape.
At
the c.1737 - c.1797 Goodsell homestead site in North Branford, excavations
found what is believed to be the remains of the “new house” mentioned in Samuel
Goodsell’s 1752 probate record (see CPN May/June 2008). The remains included a
filled-in, stone-lined cellar and a mortared stone fireplace base. Because no
foundation stones remained, the size of the new house was projected from these
surviving features, and is estimated to have been about 16' x 28'. Based on the archaeological evidence and
references to “the chamber” in Samuel’s probate, the house was likely a
one-over-one, what architectural historians Norman Isham and Albert Brown
termed the “one-room end-chimney type.” Such small houses, with a single
first-floor room (the “hall”) and perhaps a smaller room with stairs next to
the fireplace (the “porch”), were usually abandoned for better houses as they
became old or were added onto as families increased in size and more space was
needed. Samuel died young, however, leaving a widow and daughter who never
married, and perhaps this was the reason that the new house was never expanded.
Excavations
at the 1712 - c.1770s homestead of Thomas Daniels in Waterford found the
remains of a stone-lined cellar, a stone fireplace base, and a dense refuse
midden. The house was built with foundation stones laid directly on the ground
surface, which had long since been removed. Measuring approximately 16' x 24',
the house appears to have started as a small one-room end-chimney type like
Goodsell’s new house, but was expanded after Daniels’ widow Hannah died in 1744.
An approximately 16'-x-19' addition off the west end of the house made a basic
hall and parlor house plan. A blacksmith shop lean-to was also attached to the
back of the house. The addition and lean-to were built using earthfast or
post-in-ground construction, in which the framing members of the house were set
into holes directly in the ground. Because the posts would eventually rot,
earthfast houses were by their very nature impermanent. Archaeological evidence
for earthfast architecture has been found in northern New England and
throughout the Chesapeake region, but as far as can be determined, it previously
had been undocumented for Connecticut.
Archaeological
investigations at the c.1705 Ephraim Sprague homestead in Andover also found a
house plan that is quite different from standing colonial-period houses.
Sprague was from Duxbury, Massachusetts, and rose to distinction as a militia
captain, deacon, town selectman and member of the Connecticut General Assembly.
Based on the distribution of datable artifacts such as ceramics and tobacco
pipes, the first phase of the Sprague house likely started as a basic one-room
end-chimney-type plan with a dug cellar underneath measuring 16' x 16'. The
fireplace was built into the extreme northwest corner of the house. Soon after,
the house was expanded to 64' x 16', with a stone-lined cellar at the opposite
end of the house and a large central fireplace. A series of “sauce” or root vegetable
storage pits were found in the floor of the south cellar. Again, the foundation
stones had been laid directly on the ground surface and had been removed after
the house burned down in the 1750s and the homelot converted to an agricultural
field.
The
long and narrow plan resembles cross-passage houses of the British Isles, which
had a narrow passage that cut through the house separating work space (kitchen)
from social space (parlor). Such hybrid house forms selected various aspects of
lowland and highland architecture, and were once common throughout Britain. New
evidence is suggesting that they were widespread in the American colonies as
well. Archaeologists have found similar house plans in northern New England and
in the Chesapeake region, but to our knowledge no standing cross-passage houses
have survived in North America. The Sprague house is also similar to the c.1651
plan of the Samuel Desborough house of Guilford which had a
parlor-hall-kitchen-pantry plan with a cross-passage. A heated parlor at the
“head” of the cross-passage houses would have provided a place for men of
distinction, such as Captain Sprague, to meet privately with church elders,
militia officers and other guests.
These
examples demonstrate that Connecticut’s architectural past is far more complex
and dynamic than what we can see in standing houses today. Archaeological
evidence adds a new dimension to architectural historian Abbott Lowell
Cummings’ observations on Connecticut architectural traditions when he wrote:
...the surprising range and variety of framing
alternatives in the early houses of Connecticut stand in marked contrast to the
greater uniformity of forms in other regions of New England where strong
respect for inherited customs is very much in evidence. The diversity found in
Connecticut, as we have suggested, provides for the state a unique status among
the original thirteen colonies. The richness of texture is owing almost
entirely to the contributory strains of different European vernacular building
traditions, and their distinctive intermingling in this cohesive corner of the
New World, poised significantly between two major urban axes of the colonial
northeast.
There
is no doubt that many more examples of buried “lost” architecture lie hidden in
farm fields and empty lots, and even on the immediate edges of early roads (a
c.1713 house site was recently found in Wilton). It is noteworthy that each of
the houses discussed here was found in archaeological surveys preceding Connecticut
DOT road-improvement projects. The surveys were mandated under federal and
state law; without such laws, important information about Connecticut’s
architectural history never would have been found.
Ross K. Harper Ph.D. is a senior archaeologist with
the Public Archaeology Survey Team, in Storrs.
