The year that its first section was built is unknown but the markings of tools and its original Greek Revival elements seem to suggest the 1830s.  This small, two-story, gabled section has wide white pine floors, hand hewn beams, and plaster lath that has been split by hand.  A second section was added, tansverse to the first, sometime later in the 19th century.  This wing had machine-made Victorian ornamentation, flooring from probably three kinds of wood, and a basement that was an extention of the original, laid up with fieldstone walls and partially flooded most days of the year.  We now think that the siting of the house over a spring was intentional, a way of using reliably cool ground water to refrigerate milk.  Then, early in the 20th century, a third section was awkwardly cobbled onto the house, this time without a basement beneath it.  The fieldstone stairs that previously led to the basement from outside are now inside the house.  In fact, drainage from the relocated kitchen was not even connected to the house’s plumbing, with water simply falling on the ground in the crawlspace below the sink for decades.   

The house transitioned to being a country house for city people in the 60s, when a retired policeman bought it, added a large fireplace and carved a warren of tiny rooms with wall-to-wall carpeting into the second floor to accommodate his children and grandchildren.  After his death, a couple from the Midwest bought the house to isolate a brother and his family while he underwent addiction therapy.  They put the Victorian porch (which had been stored in tne barn) back onto the house and added a large bathroom with a fifteen-foot mirror.  This experiment only lasted about a year.  We bought the house in 1984.  Our contribution was to rearrange the bedrooms on the second floor, shrink the bathroom with the long mirror, remove the attic and add a shed dormer to bring light into the kitchen.  More recently, we completely renovated the kitchen and added a mudroom, our only alteration of the building’s footprint.

A shed a few yards away from the house serves as its safety valve, absorbing clutter and sleeping people during events when the house overflows.  The purpose of most farmstead outbuildings is pretty obvious, but the origin of the shed is somewhat mysterious.  Its dimensions and doors make it unworkable as a carriagehouse, garage or stable, the functions that first come to mind.  It wasn’t built as an root cellar, an icehouse or a chicken house but it was built, and it seems indispensible to us now.