We arrived for a visit on Saturday just as the new old bricks were being unloaded. Our builder has offered us these never-used 18th-century bricks, which he had found stacked in the basement of a colonial house in Wickford. A size and color match for the old work. Laying them will begin tomorrow or Tuesday. So for now, there are two piles of bricks in our driveway. Here, the neatly stacked new old bricks from Wickford:
And here, the still-malodorous salvage (Continued)
The problem of the fireplace stink came alongside other aesthetic and practical questions as we renovate. The fireplace is truly an enigma. I’ve already commented on the enigma of the two baking ovens. Our architect has measured and sketched the chimney system, and believes the original kitchen fireplace would have opened for the full eight-foot span of the chimney mass, with the original baking oven opening in the exact center of the firebox. At some point the right side of the firebox was boxed in and rebuilt to include the second baking oven and storage box below; both ovens are intact, and their backs can be seen from inside the smoking chamber. Here’s the system as sketched by our architect, Lombard John Pozzi of Bristol, Rhode Island:
When we bought the house the kitchen had a big paneled fireplace surround: (Continued)
Friday afternoon I arrived at the house and backed carefully up to the garage to disgorge two enormous, ponderous eight-foot slabs of beech countertops from Ikea. After wrestling them into the garage, I was greeted by a familiar smell but out of place, coming from the dumpster in the driveway: the smell of the kitchen! I knew with looking that the hearth bricks had been pulled up and put in the dumpster. I had been smelling it since April but only recently realized that the kitchen fireplace stank of urine — apparently a previous owner had many, many animals and the fireplace was a latrine. Since we took off six layers of flooring in the kitchen to get down to the original 18th-century pine, the hearth bricks were now about 3 inches proud — the hearth floor had been raised at some point to accommodate the many extra floors. The dumpster showed an astonishing broken up layer of reinforced concrete, unusual (and completely unnecessary) which had been under the hearth bricks. Unfortunately the bricks — a mixture of original 18th-century bricks and newer ones, of different sizes — were pretty firmly set in the concrete, and had to be broken up.
Or fortunately, really. Out of a sense of duty I sifted through the malodorous dumpster for an hour and rescued a few dozen bricks of various vintages. Only a half dozen fire-blackened 18th-century bricks survived intact, and thankfully they smell the least. The newer bricks will sojourn in the backyard for a year or so, for use somewhere else — if they ever stop stinking.
And the kitchen, with the hearth gone, suddenly smells clean!
I just found this story, “An habitation enforced,” in an odd volume of Kipling in the East Washington barn.
A young Gilded-Age Baltimore businessman, convalescing after nervous exhaustion, lands with his Connecticut wife for a rest-holiday on a farm in the English countryside. He regains his health as they fall in love with the place, eventually buying the decayed Georgian manor and farms, and adjusting to its slow rhythms. Only once they’ve bought the manor and are seated at the manorial pew in the parish church, do they notice a gravestone under the pew bears the wife’s mother’s maiden name, suggesting the coincidence of a blood connection. The link, mentioned precisely once by the couple, is confirmed through quiet and efficient investigation by the local tenants, while the wife’s only attempt to research the connection (a letter to a pompous DAR aunt in Meriden) comes to naught. So the whole village knows about the connection before the newcomers do.
The story is an ‘English origins tale’ par excellence, a rose-tinted paean to belonging. But what is important to the locals is not so much that the rich American newcomers turn out to have a blood tie to the manor, but that they don’t talk about it. For the English country way, as Kipling sees it, is that all that’s important to know — including this remote but crucial aspect of belonging — should be known without telling or asking. The old family’s motto, Wayte awhyle, could teach patience to a genealogist as well to a parvenu landowner.
Earlier I wrote about a 260-year-old will, signed and sealed by one of my ancestral uncles, which made its way into my possession, as an ‘instant heirloom’, through an extremely narrow form of directed marketing: a dealer in old manuscripts had researched the author of this will online, which led him to my book on the testator’s family, following which he offered to sell it (and I accepted). But there’s another way to get an instant heirloom: the sudden provision of a provenance for something which has always been around in your possession, but which hadn’t been noticed for what it was.
In the front parlor of my wife’s family’s village house in East Washington, New Hampshire, an old painted wooden box has sat on a bookcase for as long as I’ve known it — near 25 years:
Today my son was fiddling with it, observing that the key didn’t seem to work, and he couldn’t get it open. I took it in hand, worked gently with the key, and opened the box, (Continued)
They’ve been somewhat eclipsed by the eighteenth-century documents, but there is a large pile of newspapers that have come out of the floors and walls of the Allin house, mostly between layers of floors — a squeak preventative? There are a few sheets from Providence papers from the 1880s, and several full or nearly complete issues of the Saturday Evening Post from 1915. I haven’t read through them all — this will reward my leisure time if I ever have any again. They are quite supple and fresh, and will be easy to read.
But now, as I monitor the flow to the dumpster, occasional bits stuck to wood catch my eye. This one is a scrap spanning two planks of beadboard:
women and children
being sent away from
the Verdun district.
The city of Verdun was
evacuated by the en-
tire civil population …
February, whe[n the]
attack began, and
now a mass …
A little scrap speaking of one of the costliest battles in human history, the grim stretch of World War I which was the drawn-out fight over Verdun from February to December of 1916. My grandfather was in later action around Verdun (there’s a medal to show for it), but that was in 1918, once the Americans had finally arrived. By then the heroic and costly defense of 1916 was a distant memory.
I’m sorry I don’t know where this came from. Wainscoting? Subfloor?
Here is a ‘during’ shot from the Allin House: the Georgian fireplace surround from the ‘southwest great chamber’, partially buried in a later wall, has now been uncovered with the wall’s removal.
The revealed corner of this pilaster and crown shows the thickness of the encrustation of paint, with peeks at earlier cream and blue colors, though we are sticking, for now, with a modern latex gloss white. (Continued)
With kids out of school for the summer my opportunities for further deed research on the house are curtailed, but I did compile a full agnatic pedigree of the Barrington Allins, based on the deeds and wills, extant Barrington church records, the gravestones in the Allin Burying ground, and not least the 1947 typescript by Devere Allen, Some Prudence Island Allens. Click the image for a full-size pdf.
OK, here’s an amazing find, as selective demolition peels back layers of the Allin House. I have already blogged some of the scrap papers — farm accounts, legal memoranda, navigational trigonometry, surveying — pasted down to the vertical plank walls which survived in the ‘West Garret’ in our attic. This week, removal of the modern lath & plaster in the one finished attic room which unfortunately unseated the remaining vertical planks which had been reused as studs, also uncovered several other papers pasted down to vertical planks. The most spectacular find is this (sorry for the size):
This is bizarrely self-referential: it is a page of the original tax assessment schedules for the town of Barrington (Rhode Island), compiled for the direct federal tax of October 1, 1798. This page lists this house: Owner Thomas Allin, one dwelling, two outhouses, 255 acres.
A finding aid at the Rhode Island Historical Society tell us that these assessments do not survive for most of Rhode Island: only one page of one schedule for Barrington (listing slaves held by four property owners) survives.
The whole page (click the above for a full-size photo) is unfortunately too abraded to show the valuation of the property, or most of the words of its the textual description. And I can’t tell whether this was the top of a sheet which might have listed other properties, or merely a draft for this house alone. And how on earth did it end up as wallpaper in the garret?
Adjacent to this page are two copies of blank forms used by the assessor to collect data:
Presumably these would only by lying around in the home of the tax assessor himself, a role which Thomas Allin may have played (among his other hats) in 1798.
While other documents had dates going back to the 1750s and even 1740s, these 1798 tax assessment forms give us a terminus for the papering of the garrett. I’m guessing this was done in the time just after Thomas Allin’s death in 1800, when the house was reorganized and someone like Amy Allin’s maid might have lived up here, papering the garrett with scraps from the general’s papers.
Over the last month I’ve continued to burrow into the history of the General Allin house. The 1930 census had showed two families living in it, and deeds going back to the 1871 plat with a division line transecting the house showed that the west wing was separately owned. Now the ownership of the house has been fleshed back from the 20th century, and forward from the division of General Allin’s estate in 1802. Meeting in the middle has delivered a surprise and further complication — on the death of widow Amy Bicknell Allin in 1827, the portion of the house and farm property she held in dower (which had for some reason not been assigned residuary legatees under the General’s own probate), were subject to dispute by the heirs. “Allin et al. v. Carpenter et al.” reached the Court of Common Pleas of Bristol County, Rhode Island, which appointed a commission to divide the dower property in the winter following Amy’s death. Barrington land evidences do not include a copy of the outcome, but the commissioners’ report and division, with beautiful plat, are engrossed in the act book of the court, now at the Rhode Island Judicial Records Center.
The upshot is that the house (which appears as the little X’d-in chunk at the left of this plat detail) was at that point divided into three legal parcels. Two-thirds of the house had been set off to General Allin’s son William Allin back in 1802, who sold it to his brother-in-law Joseph Rawson, who still held it in 1828. Widow Amy Allin’s dower, including the other one-third of the house and some eighty acres of farmland, was subdivided into over a dozen carefully apportioned shares, including two shares which included rooms in the house and strips of adjacent land. Amy’s daughter, widow Nancy (Allin) Drown, received, as part of her one-sixteenth share of the whole dower property, “the South West Great Room on the lower floor of the Mansion House and Bedroom adjoining, and all that part of the Cellar under the Front Entry and Great room, lying South of a line drawn from the South side of the West Cellar window to the South side of the foundation of the Chimney,” with an adjoining strip of land (no. 15 on the plat). Nancy’s sister, Elizabeth Allin, spinster, was given, as a part of her one-sixteenth share, “the South West Great Chamber and Bedroom adjoining, the Garret West of the Garret stairs, and that part of the Cellar under the Great room lying North of a line drawn from the South side of the West Cellar Window to the South side of the foundation of the chimney,” with a bigger adjoining bit of land (no. 16 on the plat). Elizabeth Allin would go on to recover her sister Nancy’s part of the house and adjacent strip of property, though I haven’t found the instrument for this. Elizabeth then, in the 1850s, built a new west wing onto her part of the house. There may have been a handshake by which she passed her rooms in the old part of the house to the then owner of the remaining 2/3 of the old house after she built the west wing, because it seems that the house more naturally is divided into ‘old house’ and ‘new wing’ units (separated by a single doorway on both floors). This seems to be the division which would persist until 1950, rather than a more elaborate division which reflected 2/3 and 1/3 shares within the old house itself. But the floor plan west of the chimney mass in the old house has been somewhat altered on both floors, so it is hard to tell where the property line would have been understood to go. Only this year, for example, are we finally planning to restore daughter Elizabeth’s ‘southwest great chamber’ to its original proportions. Our own daughter, who is getting that room, will hopefully appreciate the restored symmetry of the great Georgian fireplace surround, with built-in cabinets — the finest original woodwork in the house, of which Amy and Elizabeth must have been proud:
(In this photo, imagine the wall on the left removed, and the room widened to include a matching cabinet left of the fireplace, which is now buried behind a cedar closet. Feel free to imagine the ceiling fan gone too…)
