Here’s a photo of my current obsession: This man outlived his leg almost 47 years, and is buried far away. I’m putting together an essay on the man, the leg, and what it all means. I’ve been asking around: does anyone know of other similar stones?
A fine Father’s Day gift was time to putter in the attic, pulling down pine planks (some flooring and some wall planks) that had been repurposed as ceiling furring, being nailed to the underside of the tie beams to support a modern lath & plaster ceiling in the west end. Above the tie beams lay […]
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Here’s something that seems to have flown under the radar. A 1993 book, Historical and Architectural Resources of Barrington, Rhode Island, reproduced two fine old maps, from 1851 and 1870, demonstrating the growth of this town, especially since a railway station was put in at West Barrington in 1868 and development of farmland into bayside […]
Prudence Island: our Allins came to Barrington from there before 1680; and the story goes that in the winter of 1682, Narragansett Bay froze solid enough for William1 Allin to haul his house over it (presumably minus the stone-end chimney), a few miles up the bay from Prudence to Annawomscutt in West Barrington. Now it’s […]
One update after last Wednesday’s talk. The night before, fleshing out a slide show, I went back up to the attic to look at the 1798 Federal direct property tax valuation page pasted on the partition wall under the eaves, and took a closeup of what I realize is Thomas Allin’s signature, since it is […]
Part of the long process of settling into any house seems to be the endless shifting of stuff in basements, attics and garages. This sunny weekend I extracted from the basement an enormous pile of old storm windows — full height wooden sashes, mostly two over two, the style of the ‘modern’ replacement windows which […]
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Christmas Eve I heaved a toilet into the dumpster, reducing our backyard ‘pottio’ from two holes to one. Yesterday’s blizzard put a hat on our hardy remainder: Happy New Year, from the Allin House!
Saturday, November 27, 2010
The seventh and last of a meager set of exterior photos dating back to 1898. Jump to the other photos: 1898 | mid 1930s | late 1930s | 1952 | c. 1980 | 1992 | 2010 I took this photo in April 2010. In contrast with previous photo, note the size of the holly and […]
Saturday, November 27, 2010
The sixth of a meager set of exterior photos dating back to 1898. Jump to the other photos: 1898 | mid 1930s | late 1930s | 1952 | c. 1980 | 1992 | 2010 This was published in Historical and Architectural Resources of Barrington, Rhode Island (1993). Note that the shutters are gone and triple-track […]
Saturday, November 27, 2010
The fifth of a meager set of exterior photos dating back to 1898. Jump to the other photos: 1898 | mid 1930s | late 1930s | 1952 | c. 1980 | 1992 | 2010 This is a scan of a color photocopy of an undated snapshot in the Barrington Preservation Society file on the house. […]
