Saltbox

The Dutch Colonial post, which closed the previous entry, ended by promising that the series would at last leave the revivals and turn to the thing they had been reaching back to imitate — the seventeenth-century New England houses that stand behind the whole colonial-revival enterprise, the genuine vernacular the Cape Cod and the Dutch Colonial together kept pointing at over their shoulders. The series has spent twenty-one posts among the imitations; it named the original at the close of two of them. This post pays that debt.

This is the twenty-second post in Reading the American House. It takes up the oldest surviving American domestic architecture — the First Period house of New England, built roughly between the 1620s and the 1720s — and a qualification must be made at once, because the qualification is the one the whole post turns on. “Saltbox” is not the name of a style. It is the name of a roof seen from one particular angle. The First Period house was a plain two-storey timber-framed house built around a great central chimney; the saltbox is what that house became when a lean-to was added across its rear and the back roof was carried down, in one long unbroken slope, to cover the addition. From the street such a house is an ordinary steep-gabled colonial and gives no sign of itself at all. It is from the side that the saltbox declares what it is: the front roof slope short and steep, the rear slope long and low, the whole describing the profile of the wooden lidded box in which a household kept its salt. That asymmetry, and the fact that it is most often something the house grew rather than something it was given, is the load-bearing distinction of this post.

The Specimen

If one is to identify a saltbox — and the genuine seventeenth-century examples survive only in scattered hundreds across eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut, though the twentieth century copied the form freely — the exercise begins, as always in this series, at the silhouette. But it begins with a warning the other posts have not had to give: the silhouette that matters is not the one the house presents to the road.

The principal feature of the saltbox is the catslide roof, and it is worth being exact about what the word names. A First Period house began as a rectangular two-storey block under a steep simple gable, the ridge running parallel to the front. At some point — often a generation or two into the house’s life — a single-storey lean-to was built against the rear wall, the full width of the house, to take a ground-floor kitchen and a pair of small service rooms. The builder did not give the lean-to its own roof. He continued the existing rear slope straight down over it, unbroken, in one long plane running from the original ridge to a new eave only seven or eight feet above the ground. That long unbroken rear plane is the catslide — a roof that slides, in a single sweep, from a two-storey ridge to a one-storey eave. The house is now two full storeys at the front and one at the rear, its section a lopsided wedge rather than a symmetrical triangle.

The second feature is the massive central chimney, the feature around which everything else in the house is organised. The First Period house was not arranged around a hall and then heated; it was arranged around its heat. At the very centre of the plan stands a great masonry stack — fieldstone below, brick above, often six or eight feet square at its base — and it is not a chimney serving a fireplace so much as a core serving a house. Flues rise within it from a fireplace in every principal room: the hall and parlour fireplaces below, the chamber fireplaces above, and, once the lean-to is added, the broad kitchen fireplace at the rear with its bake oven set into the masonry beside it. The rooms do not stand in a row with a stack at one end; they are wrapped around the stack, the stair squeezed into the narrow space between chimney and front door. To build a First Period house was, in the first instance, to build a chimney and frame a house against it.

The third feature is the frame, and the frame is the house. Under its clapboard the First Period house is a heavy timber structure — post-and-beam, the timbers hewn square with axe and adze from the abundant New England oak, joined with mortise and tenon and pinned with oak treenails, not a nail of iron in the structural work. The frame is not hidden. Inside, the corner posts stand proud of the plastered walls, the great horizontal summer beam crosses the ceiling of each principal room carrying the floor joists above, and the whole skeleton is left frankly visible, chamfered along its edges. The roof, steeply pitched at fifty degrees and more — a pitch inherited from the thatch the first houses wore before shingle replaced it — is covered in wood shingle. The wall is thin and the frame enormous, and the house keeps the weather out by the mass of its timber and the steepness of its roof.

The fourth feature belongs to the windows. The original First Period window was a casement — a small window, hinged at the side to swing open, its opening filled with diamond-shaped panes of greenish glass set in a lattice of lead cames. The windows are small because glass was dear and imported and the climate bitter; they are few because every window is a hole in a wall that is fighting the cold. Almost none survive in their first form. Through the eighteenth century the leaded casements were pulled out across New England and replaced with double-hung sash, and the saltbox one meets today nearly always wears the later sash — so that the windows are the part of the house most likely to be telling a partial truth about its own date.

The fifth feature is the absence of ornament, and it is a feature in the way silence is a feature of a room. The First Period house has no portico, no pilasters, no cornice worth the name, no fanlight, no classical anything. The door is a plain affair of vertical boards, sometimes with a small projecting hood against the rain and often without even that. This is not poverty alone, though the colonists were not rich; it is a building culture that had not yet been taught to think a house should be composed. Everything the later colonial styles made their display of — the symmetry, the classical doorway, the ranked windows — is simply not yet present. The saltbox is the American house before it learned manners.

The English Memory and the New Land

The documentary anchor of the First Period house is not a pattern book, as the Federal’s was, nor a developer’s tract, as the Cape Cod’s was. There was no architect, no pattern, no published model. The anchor is a memory — the memory the English colonists of the 1620s and 1630s carried across the Atlantic, of the houses they had left behind.

Those colonists, settling Massachusetts Bay and, a little later, the Connecticut valley, came very largely from the eastern counties of England — from East Anglia and the southeast, regions of timber building. The house they remembered was the late-medieval English yeoman’s house: a timber-framed structure, post-and-beam, its frame exposed inside and often outside, built around a hall and heated, in its more advanced forms, by a chimney rather than an open central hearth. The English colonist did not arrive with a design for an American house. He arrived with a builder’s memory of an English one, and built that — as nearly as the new conditions would let him — on the far side of the ocean. The First Period house is, in its bones, the English vernacular of about 1600 transplanted; the term the historians use, “First Period,” names precisely this, the first period of English building in America, before anything distinctively American had happened to it.

But the new conditions would not let the memory stand unaltered, and the alterations are the interesting part. Two things were different in New England, and both pressed on the house at once. The first was the climate, harder than England’s, and the house answered the cold by gathering itself around that single great chimney, by keeping its windows few and small, by pitching its roof steep and sheathing its walls tight. The medieval English house had often kept its hearth at one end; the New England house pulled the stack into the centre, where every room could borrow its warmth. The second difference was timber. England by 1600 was growing short of building oak; New England was drowning in it. The colonist who had framed sparingly at home, eking out scarce timber, found himself in a forest, and the First Period house is framed with a heaviness — posts and beams an English builder would have thought extravagant — that is the direct mark of that abundance. The house is the English memory rewritten by a cold climate and a limitless woodlot.

The saltbox itself enters this story not as a design but as a habit of growth. A young household built the two-storey block — hall and parlour below, two chambers above, the chimney between — and that was the house. Then the household grew, or prospered, and wanted more ground-floor room: a proper kitchen with its own great hearth, a buttery, a small bedchamber off the warm kitchen wall. The cheapest way to get that room was a lean-to against the back wall, and the cheapest way to roof a lean-to was to borrow the roof already there — to carry the rear slope down over it in one continued plane. The saltbox is what that decision looks like from the side. A great many First Period saltboxes were born this way, as plain two-storey houses that acquired their catslide a generation after they were framed; the seam is often still legible, the lean-to’s lighter framing meeting the original heavy frame along a line an attentive eye can find. So common did the arrangement become that, by the early eighteenth century, builders had begun framing the lean-to with the house from the start, the long rear slope intended from the first day. The form thus has two histories at once: it is an accretion that became, in time, a design. But the accretion came first, and the post insists on it, because it is the thing that separates the genuine First Period saltbox from every later imitation. The original saltbox was not drawn. It accumulated.

A word is owed on survival, because it bears on everything one can actually go and see. Genuine First Period houses are rare — they are the oldest standing houses in the country, and three and a half centuries of fire and rot and demolition and unsympathetic remodelling have left only a few hundred in recognisable form, concentrated in the older towns of eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut. Because they are rare they are studied with a closeness no later style in this series receives: dated by the dendrochronology of their timbers, recorded frame-member by frame-member, argued over in the literature. The canonical example is the Fairbanks House in Dedham, Massachusetts, built between about 1637 and 1641 and generally held to be the oldest surviving timber-frame house in North America — itself a house that began as a block and grew lean-tos, so that it is, among its other distinctions, a saltbox by accretion. And it is precisely because the genuine article is so scarce and so admired that the twentieth century, when it went looking for a romantic colonial type to copy, found the saltbox waiting — and the Colonial Revival took up the catslide silhouette as one of its favourite forms.

What It Is Not

Four styles stand near enough to the saltbox that the beginner confuses them with it, and the four together map out almost the whole of New England’s colonial building.

A Cape Cod is the lower, symmetric cottage cousin, the saltbox’s nearest relation in the whole series — the Cape Cod post treated it directly, and the two are children of the same seventeenth-century New England building culture, told apart by their roofs alone. The original Cape and the saltbox share the central-chimney plan, the heavy frame, the clapboard or shingle wall, the small-pane glazing, the want of ornament. The difference is in the section. The Cape Cod is a one-and-a-half-storey cottage under a symmetric gable: the roof descends evenly from a central ridge, the front and rear slopes of the same length and the same pitch. The saltbox is a two-storey house whose roof is asymmetric: a short front slope and the long catslide behind. The Cape never had a second storey to be unequal about; the saltbox is unequal by definition. The rule of thumb: an even gable over a low storey-and-a-half cottage is a Cape Cod; a long unequal catslide over a two-storey block is a saltbox.

A Garrison Colonial is the other principal First Period type, the saltbox’s true contemporary — a genuine seventeenth-century New England house, not a later thing — and it is distinguished from the saltbox by where it does its growing. The saltbox grows backward and down, adding a lean-to at the rear under a continued roof. The Garrison grows forward and up: its second storey jetties, projecting beyond the first-storey wall across the front of the house by a foot or so, carried on the cantilevered ends of the upstairs floor framing, sometimes finished at the corners with small carved pendant drops. The jetty was an inheritance from the medieval English town house, where it had answered the cramped frontages of a city street; in rural New England it carried over as a builder’s habit more than a useful device. Both are First Period houses with a central chimney and a steep roof; the difference is the direction of the irregularity. The rule of thumb: an overhanging second storey at the front is a Garrison; a long roof sweeping down at the rear is a saltbox.

A Colonial Revival in saltbox form is the twentieth-century copy — the romantic reach back to the First Period that the Dutch Colonial and the Cape Cod posts both watched the modern suburb make, here aimed at the catslide. The Colonial Revival, finding the saltbox silhouette picturesque and unmistakably old, built new houses wearing it: a long unequal roof, sometimes a token central chimney, a clapboard wall. But the Revival saltbox is a light-frame house — dimensional lumber, no hewn summer beams, no exposed posts, the structure hidden inside finished walls. Above all, its catslide is deliberate: it was drawn that way on a plan, by a builder who wanted the look of a lean-to without a household ever having needed one. The genuine saltbox’s roof records a history; the Revival saltbox’s roof quotes one. The rule of thumb is, as it was for the Dutch Colonial against its original, not finally a matter of the roofline they share: one tells the First Period saltbox from the Revival copy by the frame, the date, and whether the long roof is a fact of the house’s life or a picture of someone else’s.

A Georgian Colonial is what the plain First Period house became once the colony had money and had learned, from England, that a house should be composed — and the comparison closes the series’ New England circle. The Georgian, of the middle and later eighteenth century, is the First Period house’s prosperous descendant: a formal, rigorously symmetric two-storey house, its facade balanced about a classically detailed central doorway, its windows evenly ranked, its eaves finished with a proper classical cornice. Most tellingly for this post, the Georgian abandons the single massive central chimney. With the rooms now arranged for symmetry rather than around their heat, the great central stack gives way to two chimneys set at the gable ends — a plan announcing that the house no longer needs to huddle around its core. The saltbox and the Georgian are the same regional building culture a lifetime apart: the one a frame and a chimney sheathed against the weather, the other the same colony’s house after wealth and the pattern book had taught it manners. The rule of thumb: a single great central chimney and an asymmetric catslide is the First Period saltbox; twin end chimneys and a rigorously symmetric classical facade is the Georgian Colonial it grew up into.

What It Was Trying to Say

What I find most telling about the saltbox is that, of all the houses this series has treated, it is the one that was trying to say nothing at all — and that this is precisely what makes it worth the post.

The first thing to set down is that the saltbox is the series’ clearest case of a form that is found rather than designed. Every other house in this series began as an intention. The Federal was drawn from a pattern book; the Colonial Revival and the Dutch Colonial were romantic ideas about the past, executed on purpose; even the Cape Cod, in its post-war form, was a developer’s deliberate decision about what a returning veteran’s house should look like. The saltbox was none of these. The catslide is simply what a builder’s most economical answer to a common problem looked like from the side — a household wanted more ground-floor room, a lean-to was the cheapest way to get it, and the existing roof was the cheapest way to cover the lean-to. Nobody, in the first saltboxes, set out to make a saltbox. The lopsided profile the modern eye finds so satisfying was, to the seventeenth-century builder, simply the shape that not buying a second roof produced. The saltbox is what a building tradition does when it is allowed to follow necessity without anyone standing over it with a drawing.

The second thing the saltbox was saying it said by being identified, alone in this series, from the side. This series has spent twenty-one posts teaching the eye to read the front of a house — the doorway, the symmetry, the ranked windows, the silhouette presented to the road. The saltbox refuses that whole method. From the street it is mute: a plain two-storey colonial that could be a hundred things. Its entire identity is held in a profile the road never sees. There is a lesson in this that goes a little beyond architecture. The features a building advertises to the passer-by are the features it has chosen, composed, and put on display; the features it keeps to its flank are often the ones that record what actually happened to it — how it was used, where it ran short of room, what its household needed in the second generation that it had not needed in the first. One reads the front of a house to learn what it wished to be. One walks around to the side to learn what it was.

The third thing the saltbox was saying is the one that returns the post to the gap it was built to open, and it is the most important of the three. The genuine First Period saltbox is the original — the actual seventeenth-century New England house, the article that every colonial revival in this series spent its energy reaching back to imitate. And the original turns out to be the plainest house in the whole series: no portico, no classical doorway, no symmetry, no ornament beyond a chamfer worked on a beam; a heavy frame, a great chimney, and a steep roof, lit as little as a hard climate would allow and grown a lean-to when the family needed one. For twenty-one posts this series watched the revivals labour to reproduce a colonial past — the Cape Cod quoting it in catalogue sash, the Dutch Colonial borrowing a roof and a name, the Colonial Revival assembling Georgian doorways on suburban lots — and all of them were reaching, in the end, for this: a plain weather-fighting frame-and-chimney house built by people who had no pattern book, no architect, and no intention of being copied. The thing the revivals romanticised was the least romantic house imaginable — a structure with no design on the future at all, that solved its problems as they came and let the solutions show on its flank. The saltbox is the American house before it knew it was being looked at. Everything else in this series is what happened after it found out.

The next specimen I should like to take up holds to this same First Period ground — the Garrison Colonial, the seventeenth-century New England house that grew not backward into a lean-to but forward and upward into a jettied overhang, the saltbox’s true contemporary. Having read the house that records its history at the rear, the series turns to the one that carries it at the front.