Post-Medieval Houses

By OHJ Staff

	Jackson House, Portsmouth, N.H.A post-medieval house with a projecting second storey. Note the small leaded windows and shed addition on the left.

Before they learned to adapt to the materials and climate of North America, the first generation of colonists from England built houses with the construction methods and forms they knew in the British Isles. While the groups settling the tidewater regions of Virginia and the Carolinas favored one-storey brick houses flanked by chimneys at either end, the pioneers of Massachusetts and Connecticut erected austere steep-roofed houses with heavy wooden frames, wood cladding, and a single central chimney--the post-medieval houses of New England.
Of the thousands of houses believed to have been built before 1700 only a couple hundred survive in near-original form, representing a remarkable bridge between building traditions of the old and new world. Typically two storeys high, one room deep, and covered in wood clapboards or shingles, these houses are American versions of the vernacular common man's dwelling found in England in the 1600s. Their heavy timber frames support a large gable roof with a steep pitch--one designed for thatch, but soon switched to wood shingles that stood up better in bitter New England winters. Rear lean-to additions were common in later years to extend the roof to a saltbox form.

Faades are symmetrical and all but unbroken except for the center door and small window openings. For a period, however, some builders extended the timber frame so that the second storey projected a foot or more beyond the foundation in an overhang or jetty, perhaps to protect the entrance from water runoff. Whatever its purpose, in well-to-do houses this projection was occasionally fitted with carved pendants--the sparest of decorations in an otherwise severe elevation.

Already an old building type in their country of origin, post-medieval houses were soon surpassed on these shores by the Georgian styles and improved construction methods of 18th-century Americans. Most examples were razed, radically altered or, at best, forgotten until after 1900 when early preservationists, such as William Sumner Appleton of Massachusetts and Norman Isham of Rhode Island, recognized their importance as rare historic records, rather than mere Colonial Revival icons. Architects of the 1920s--particularly Boston's Royal Barry Wills--studied them as models for a single-family house with a modern, compact room layout, but a traditional, regionally rooted appearance. However, post-medieval houses were probably most admired for their cozy interiors of wood paneling and pronounced ceiling beams, the wellspring of the Early American design fashion.



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