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Allin House exterior, 1952

Saturday, November 27, 2010

The fourth 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

Scan of a black & white photocopy of a clipping in the file on the house at the Barrington Preservation Society, of the 1952 Providence Journal article showcasing the extensive renovations undertaken by the Burgesses, who had bought the house in 1951. The porch was removed; windows replaced and were now 6 over 6; modern shutters added; the front door pediment reconstructed; plantings taken out and a new lawn rolled. The old elm, visible in the 1898 photo at the west end of the house, still looms. This is the only photo I have of the east end of the house.

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Allin House exterior, late 1930s

Saturday, November 27, 2010

The third 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

Scan of a black & white photocopy of a clipping from the 1952 Providence Journal article, from the file on the house at the Barrington Preservation Society. Late 1930s (same or similar car as in previous photo, but the bushes are higher). This photo shows more detail, e.g. the pediment over the porch; the prominent corner board breaking up the south facade between the old house and the west wing; etc. It also shows (unlike the unclear previous photo) that the windows are 2 over 2.

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Allin House exterior, mid 1930s

Saturday, November 27, 2010

The second 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

From the mid or later 1930s (see car); this came as a framed print with the house. Subjects are either Brazees (rented the west wing) or Cordeiro/Lambs (owned the house). Note the west addition now has a raised southern roofline whose asymmetry can be seen from the west side. The facade has a long porch stretching the length of the original house, which may have been built that way before the two halves of the house were reunited under single ownership in 1924 (the house would continue to be occupied by two families until 1950). The shed-roofed porch over the entry door on the west side does not appear to have been present in the 1898 photo; the basement bulkhead entry next to it has long been walled up: possibly there was no doorway cut through the original west foundation wall until the west bulkhead was walled up. The house visible on the right side of the photo was built in 1927.

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Allin House exterior, 1898

Saturday, November 27, 2010

The first 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 printed in Bicknell’s History of the Town of Barrington (1898) and reprinted in his Sowams ten years later. Note the original roofline (now altered) of the 1857 addition at left; the roof access hatch by main chimney (still visible from inside, under modern roof); working shutters on windows and front door; lights and pediment over door (the door’s shutters are obscuring the fluted pilasters); original 6-over-6 windows visible on both main house and addition. At this time, the house was still two legally distinct properties, with the west wing (the addition) owned and occupied by General Allin’s great-grandson Thomas C. Cooke. The main house, however, had left the family in 1830.

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floor migration (Allin House)

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Some of the attic floorboards have finally been lovingly transferred from under the eaves, and installed down below, where they can show themselves off. The attic floor is a real anomaly — pine which had never been sanded or finished in any way, and, under the eaves, hardly ever walked on, since the house went up. We have used them to repair the existing old floor in our main kitchen and new back entryway. Rather than sand everything flat, we are sealing them with a tung-oil-based varnish which will follow the natural contours of the boards, especially the irregular grooves left by hand-planing over 200 years ago. The attic floorboards had been covered with a deep layer of dust and dirt, staining the top surfaces uniformly gray. After brushing out the dirt and lightly sanding the highest spots, it become apparent that a couple of the attic boards had also been painted:

This shows a marvellous floorboard now in our back mudroom, with the residual paint sealed in under the first layers of sealant. (Continued)

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in the “Hah Club” (Mrs. Allin’s garret)

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

This week the attic floor has finally been relaid — a big swath of it having been torn up weeks ago to run plumbing vent lines through the floor.

This is a vast expanse of untouched hand-planed 18th-century pine floor, nominally 1100 square feet (minus the chimney in the middle) — never sanded, never oiled. This west end, where the floor had been taken up, was the garret laid out to the use of widow Allin in 1802; the plank walls and ceiling were carefully whitewashed (the ghosting of later lath on the gable-end wall at left and the horizontal furring under the rafters behind Amelia is quite striking). This garrett could also be called the ‘Hah Club’, as that is what the Hoseason girls dubbed it in the late 1970s, as you can see from the crayon graffiti on the board-and-batten door beside Amelia. This picture celebrates the ‘Hah Club’ and the restoration of the beautiful floor! (Continued)

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the Allins in the news

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Yesterday the Providence Journal ran a fine, reflective commentary piece by editor Edward Achorn, “A little cemetery and the people who made America,” about his recent visit to the Allin family burying ground, down on Bay Spring Avenue, and the role the Allin brothers, General Thomas and Captain Matthew, and Thomas’s freedman, Scipio, played in the Revolution and the founding of the nation.

I realize with all our focus on Thomas Allin’s house, I haven’t posted photos of the Allin burying ground here, though I have visited it frequently since the Spring. There are many members of the extended family, descendants and cousins of Thomas and Matthew, buried in this ground, including many who lived in the house. Here are two photos taken this spring on one of my first visits to the graveyard. First, the general himself:

And this long view, with the grave of freed veteran Scipio Freeman in the foreground:

The dramatic setting puts Scipio at the front and center of the graveyard, with all the white folks clustered away at the back, between trees. The graveyard originally had another orientation: Bay Spring Avenue itself wasn’t laid out until October of 1802 (in the division of Thomas Allin’s farmland), and the side street, Adams Ave., didn’t exist till long after. The resting place of the people of color, meant to be something apart, is now in the place of honor, as the graves are approached past Scipio’s lone sentinel stone. (As Edward Achorn suggested, Scipio was likely buried among other slaves or free people of color, but only his stone marker survives above ground.) Many area graveyards embed subtle stories of the changing place of people of color in the community. Some time ago I posted on this in a graveyard near our current home in Rumford, with the beautiful graves of two slaves, Sherrey and Anna.

When I am able, hopefully in the fall, I will take more photos of the graves and, perhaps, work them into an annotated version of the Allin family tree.

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kitchen fireplace 5: new hearth

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Well, the new hearth is in — all eight feet across — and the marvellous new-old-stock bricks from Wickford don’t stink!

Contrast to last week’s gaping hearth pit:
(Continued)

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out of death into (young) life

Saturday, August 21, 2010

From the Huffington Post today comes something which has apparently been circulating since February: a children’s playground built within the graveyard of the Dutch Reformed Church of Rhinebeck, New York, with gravestones interspersed among the play areas & structures.

It’s getting some blog mileage in the creepy humor department, notably a fine sequence of dark puns as reader comments on digg. But I wonder what people really do think about it? Genealogists speak of it matter-of-factly, for example in one page offering transcriptions of some of the graves in the playground.

As a parent of small children, and someone who takes an interest in graves (and gravestones), I am not sure what I think.

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a near miss

Sunday, August 15, 2010

During work in the attic a couple of the papers which are pasted to the vertical plank walls have become dislodged, just as several of the planks themselves have also been dislodged. Our foreman had found a very small fragment of the 1758 farm accounts loose on the attic floor; I tucked it into my small bound notebook for safekeeping.

Imagine my distress this morning to find that my one-year-old son had despoiled the notebook, which lay on the floor, open, the fragment nowhere to be found.

A little while later I thought of another place to look. Like most one-year-olds, he is none too fastidious, but is at times fascinated with the waste process. Sure enough, I found it crumpled in the kitchen garbage. The notebook has flattened it out again:

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