LOOM HOUSE

BUSHNELL FARM

OLD SAYBROOK, CONNECTICUT

I’m not sure if this is actually called a ‘loom house,’ but that’s what it was used for, pardon the dangling preposition. The closest outbuilding to the 1678 Bushnell Farm House, it has many features that tweak my brain nicely. I only wish that I’d taken more pictures from the outside. I think I was hot on listening to a program that had already started at the  Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation’s ‘Celebration of Barns’ seminar at the Farm a month ago, and I just forgot to go back to take the rest of the pics I should of.

The first picture you aren’t seeing is the crazily tilted chimney stack that curves like a windblown sapling. But it’s what’s inside that really makes me smile.

 

The first thing I noticed was that the chimney stack stops a short distance below the ridgepole; it’s supported by some stout blocks that sit upon a flying beam below. This isn’t a mistake or a retrofit, either. The proprietor of the Farm explained that the floor space in this particular building was taken up by a large loom and the surrounding workspace was occupied with other furnishings specific to spinning and working with wool and flax, both of which were produced at Bushnell. I know that was a run-on sentence, but like Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, “Who is to be master, you or the word?”

I have seen this abbreviated flue design before, usually in schoolhouses in Arkansas. Stovepipe was cheap, brickmasons were expensive. Anyway, the folks at Bushnell Farm needed the floor space way back in 1702 or thereabouts, when this building was constructed.

So a regular fireplace wasn’t an option. I’m sure there was some sort of stove. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the flue is stuffed with paper to keep debris, squirrels or bats from getting in. If you look even closer, you can see a bent piece of sheet metal below the flue opening to catch debris that might fall out of it. I imagine it wasn’t always stuffed with paper.

Also note the 90-degree angled brace at the bottom left of the beam; it's been carved from the joint of a tree and branch. Natural grain turns at a right angle and makes a stronger brace that something pieced together.

 

The flying beam itself is an interesting feature. Instead of horizontal ceiling joists that tie the walls together (and keep the rafters from pushing them apart), the beam supports angled timbers that, in turn, support the roof. How it helps to keep the walls together, I don’t know. The building has been standing for three hundred years, so I don’t think it’s much of an issue.

But it nonetheless brings out the archaeologist in me. While admiring the beautiful broadaxe marks on the squared timbers, I noticed that the rafters on one side do not match the rafters of the other side. The closest rafters are rounded, with no broadaxe hewing, and the far rafters are squared. Closer examination shows that the far rafters were cannibalized from another structure; note the purlin notches on the sides.

So how did this happen? I’m sure the building was constructed all at one time; was the roof of a different design due to repurposing the building? Was it originally a shed roof for a simple barn, then the Farm became more prosperous and so rebuilt the roof to accommodate a loom? Could there have been a fire that destroyed the original roof and so was rebuilt from second-use wood? Why don’t we have groceries delivered anymore, or get prizes for merely buying gas at certain stations? Cheap steak knives and glass tumblers and the like. Too young to remember those days, are you? You snip of a human, you.

Okay, scratch that last inquiry; inquiring minds don’t need to tax themselves that much.

My last Vestige from this particular property is of the Interior Finish of the End Walls.

 

Being a restorationist, I have seen a lot of lath. My spell Czech didn’t like the word ‘restorationist,’ so I will change my moniker to ‘restorationary.’

Damn. It didn’t like that, either.

But I believe in Humpty Dumpty’s Rule, so we will move on.

Lath is the term for wood strips (sometimes metal in 20^th century buildings) that are nailed to the studs and joists. The purpose of lath (not ‘lathe,’ which is a machine that spins wood for turning) is to give a structural base with open spaces upon which plaster is applied. Plaster, being a plastic mixture of slaked lime or gypsum, water, and sand, needs something rigid but full of spaces that can support it as well as allowing the plaster to ooze through and help it adhere. It’s all too complicated to explain here; I suggest you go back to 9^th grade physical science to get a grip on the principals involved.

I wanted to use the spelling ‘principles,’ but the Czech once again foiled me. I’ll Czech out the proper spelling later and amend it as needs arise.

HA! The Spell Czech was wrong. The word is 'priciples.' So there. Nyah.

Back to the present, which is already in progress, according to Firesign Theater.

Anyone who has tried to hang a picture in a house with plaster should know what lath is. If not, go to my OTHER blog www.oldhousedoctor.blogspot.com to learn about it.

I’ve never seen lath like this. If it is indeed lath. It might have BEEN lath that lost its plaster, or it might have been intended as a substance upon which future plaster would be applied. My guess tends towards the latter explanation.

What is unusual about it is that the oldest lath I’ve ever seen (and I must admit that the earliest building upon which I’ve worked is 1810) is split from larger pieces of wood using a froe or other bladed tool. Wood lath from the mid-1800s until they stopped using it (around 1930) is sawn into 1 ½” x 3/8” strips and nailed to the structure below with 3/8” spaces between the strips. The saw kerf marks on the wood can usually be seen when the plaster is removed.

But this! Oh, my God, what hast thou wrought?

This ‘lath’ (if that’s what it is) has been cut from full-sized logs. Some sawmill back in The Day had the capability and expertise to cut thin strips of not already-split or previously-sawn wood, but to take entire log sections and slice them into strips as thin as ¼”.

Then some craftsman from the past took the time, care, and effort (this is the really cool part) to use a chisel to split those thin sections along their respective grain lines at about 1 ½” spaces. The grain never split completely, mind you; fibers of the wood still held the sections of split wood together. But the result is the same as if the wood was cut and cut and cut again, then nailed to the wall. Stronger, in fact. It creates a structural backing using the natural grain of the wood to add strength to the wall while allowing spaces for the soft plaster to ooze through, making the bond that completes a rigid, flat interior wall surface. Which, it appears, was never applied. Or disintegrated long ago.

If you look carefully, you can see the spaces between the thinly cut log specimens; the split grain lines follow the natural curve of the tree trunk's grain.

I was and still am impressed. I have also learned something from this.

Use your brain to use as little energy and gain as much result as possible, and work with Nature’s gifts. She’s given us SO many.

Follow the Yankee Way. Be frugal, work hard, live well, and pass on what you know. You can’t fail.

WE can’t fail.

HANDMADE ATRIUM WINDOW

 BUSHNELL FARM

OLD SAYBROOK, CONNECTICUT

 

This little ‘bay’ window is more of an atrium than a bay (an atrium window is a bay, but a bay is not necessarily an atrium, so don’t pay any attention to that opening sentence), and it is certainly not original to the house, which dates from 1678. I’m sure the builders grew a lot of things, but plants inside were unlikely included in their cultivars.

Though it’s not original, it is a fine piece of craftsmanship. Just making the curved horizontal muntins seems a formidable task. I like the support brackets cut to fit the clapboards and the copper roof with a copper drip cap. It was built to last. The proprietor of the Farm said it was installed in the mid-1950s, so I doubt it’s a manufactured feature. Probably built by someone local. Yes, there used to be local craftsmen in your neighborhood. I’m about the only one left, I guess.

BUSHNELL FARM PRIVY

OLD SAYBROOK, CONNECTICUT

If you remember the last post, Rocky and Bullwinkle had just taken over the Colorado mountain within which lies the NORAD defense system.

“Bullwinkle, I TOLD you not to push that button!!”

“Well, geez, Rock, it was blinkin’ so red and pretty, I just HAD to do something!”

 

Here is a little Vestige that caught my attention two weekends ago at the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation’s “Celebration of Barns” at the 1638 Bushnell Farm at the mouth of the Connecticut River (see previous post).

The picture is of a simple privy; an outhouse is the most basic, yet one of the most important pieces of architecture on the property. ANY property.

 I mean, what would you do without it?

Well, here down in Arkansaw, we hold a terrible secret of our past in our hearts, and it has to do with privies. Or the lack thereof.

 

A LITTLE HISTORY

The southern rural lifestyle is well documented and just as well parodied, but the living-on-the-land-as-an-animal lifestyle is both apocryphal and truer than you want to know.

Arkansawyers (as well as other southern rural folk) don’t like to discuss hookworms. Be careful of bringing up this particular subject in Razorback Country; they’s a bit sensitive day-own here.

Hookworms are an intestinal parasite that are more disgusting than destructive, and they have an interesting and fun life-cycle. They start as eggs in your feces ((David Byrne asks “How did they get there?!” Wait, you’ll be unhappy you asked). Once shat out (can I say that?), they hang out in loose, warm soil (can you say southern Georgia or the Arkansas Delta?) until someone comes walking along without shoes. I won’t ask the last question in parentheses again. This, um, country person is looking for a place to drop a load. Pinch a loaf. Cut a stool.

Go back and listen to Cheech and Chong, for chrissakes.

THEY GOTTA MAKE A DOO-DOO!

But there is no privy! There is only that same stand of woods that the family has used for years, even though they continually move off to the left to avoid their, um, last leavings.

But it cannot be avoided. In three generations, they are treading on the shit they expelled decades ago. But that isn’t where the little worms are. They are in Last Week’s shit. And you just walked over it.

Welll, not you, but someone that lives that way. Unless the shoe fits. Or foo shits, in this case, acuz you ain’t got no shoes.

It’s not that these people are stupid. They know enough to be able to live well off the land, to tune 1954 Chevy pickups, to dig a new well by hand or skin a groundhog. You’ll be wishing one of these guys was your friend after The Big Collapse; they will live, and service professionals like you will die. Because they know how to dress a muskrat.

But I diverge, or something that sort of sounds like that, and that usually smells bad. Back to the country.

These people didn’t always dig huge deep holes and build a little house over it (SEE??! I TOLE you I’d come back to point!), and it wasn’t because they were lazy. Well, they were and are, but that’s because of the heat. It was because the land was so poor that these hillbillies (the better class refers to themselves as Mountain Williams, of course) had no permanent homes. Often tenant farmers or dirt farmers (buy it cheap, work it hard, leave after a few seasons), they moved along often. Moved is slow circles from their, um, movements, as well.

Hey, don't send letters. I come from a long line of dirt farmers from Northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

Here’s the disgusting part. Oh, you thought you’d already READ the disgusting part, did you? HaHaHaHAHAHA!

So the state of Arkansas was pretty much infected with hookworms from the get-go; it’s rough country with rough people, and they would walk through the dropping-grounds of yesterday with bare feet. The worm larvae would get onto their feet and enter their bodies by burrowing into their skin (I'm not making this up), following the bloodstream to the heart and lungs, then in a feat worthy of Houdini, would actually migrate to the pharynx (in the throat) to be swallowed into the alimentary canal. Taking up residence in the small intestine (in numbers), they suck blood, cause anemia, and make lots of little hookworm eggs. These are, as described elsewhere, expelled to become a neighbor to their mommas and uncles and brothers. A very successful career often follows for the whole family.

“Don’t Nora Jean look kinder pale an’ sickly, Clem? Whaddaya thank?”

“Oh, I dunno, CindyLou. She’s always looked that way. So do you, an’ me too. You seen the Sears catlog? I gotta go see a man about a dog..”

The saga continues.

I can say these things because I have lived in a mountainside cabin in Carroll County, Arkansas. So there.  Nyah.

Arkansawyers hate to even acknowledge hookworms, and often deny their existence within the state’s history, but it’s all true. Probably worse than I’m telling here. But we are supposedly hookwork-free now, as a state.

Well, some of us are. I know about ME. I haven’t walked in my own less-than-fresh shit for two, maybe three weeks now.

The privy in the picture is unlikely original, but it is old. The exterior sheathing is a 1 x 6 single-bead tongue-in-groove wood, likely longleaf pine, and by the paint layering, bottom-of-the-board deterioration, and exposed stone foundation, I’m guessing that it is likely quite a bit less than two hundred years old. But it may very well be in the same location as the original from 1678. Close to the house so the homeowner could get to it easily and quickly, even in the deep snows of the old days.

Hey, when ya gotta go, ya gotta go.

Hookworms be damned.

I'd love to dig the thing out. Outhouse pits are known to give up some great historic artifacts. No, it's safe and sanitary to dig them, as long as they weren't used recently.

Look for the little glass bay in the background left in the picture. It’ll be the Next Vestige.

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.

FACADES

BLYTHEVILLE ARKANSAS

  

   These two storefronts, probably built between 1900 and 1930, are faced with concrete formed to look like stone. Often referred to as ‘stamped,’ it is easily identified from real cut stone by the repetition of the patterns. Despite the two being painted differently, the “A” pattern of cut stone is visible above both sets of windows, though the green side is more obvious.

 

   This pair of storefronts has been treated differently by paint; one has many layers peeling off and the other has one thinner layer with better adhesion.

  

   It appears that the right hand building shares only half of the cobblestone pattern on one block.

 

Tom Little would be proud that his moniker is still there; using both names on a moniker stone is quite unusual.

  

Also unusual is to build a moniker from raised brick.