BUSHNELL FARM

OLD SAYBROOK, CONNECTICUT

 

The Bushnell farm main house was built in 1678 near Old Saybrook, a town at the mouth of the Connecticut River on the Long Island Sound. It was the location for The Celebration of Barns, a weekend of programs and seminars put on by the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation in June of 2013. I was lucky enough to attend at the invitation of Peter Gulick of Gulick and Spradlin Renovation Contractors in Madison. Peter had the ability to get us a self-guided tour of the house an hour before it opened, so we two historic restoration guys wandered the house like a couple of kids in a candy store.

The building is so intact to its date of construction that it hurts; the steep stairway to the second floor, the enormous fireplace in the main parlor (almost ten feet across) and the smaller one on the opposite side, the paneling and furnishings of the period made me feel like I’d actually stepped back in time.

 

The house also has some interesting Vestiges that show early changes. In the second floor hallway, we found that the chimney stack had a stone staircase built into it after the chimney was built. I have no evidence as to the date of its construction, but it looks fairly recent as judged by the mortar and manner of stonecutting. It is possible that it originally had a ships’ ladder-type of wood stairs, or even an actual ladder. Or the stone staircase may be hundreds of years old.

 

But what piqued my interest most was what I found when I poked my head through the opening into the attic. Apparently the roof has gone through a major change, probably within the first fifty years of its existence. The 6 x 6 roof rafters on the front of the house (to the right in the picture) are undoubtedly original, but the rafters on the opposite side of the ridgepole have been cut off and replaced by others of similar size. These were set at a less steep angle and so enlarged the living space below; the original gable rafter at the end of the roof still remains, complete with its purlin notches. I especially like the roof sheathing above the horizontal purlins; either ancient pine or chestnut (probably the latter), many are wider than 18”.

This roof adjustment seemed to enlarge the space below only slightly; I would think so much trouble to rebuild the roof would be worth much more space gained, but the old Yankees had their reasons for everything they did, frugal as the results may be.

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I’ll be featuring a few other details from the farm buildings at Bushnell, which was run as a self-sufficient farm from 1678 through the last century.