Myths about old houses have evolved over time, some with roots in a romanticized past, others based upon partial historical truths, and many apparently sprung full-blown from fertile imaginations. Many old house myths concern construction and woodworking.
The generations who built seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses were thought of as self-sufficient and frugal. From these assumptions came the myth that all builder’s hardware and nails were made by local blacksmiths and the curious notion that because nails were costly and made by hand, houses were burned down to salvage the nails. While artisans’ account books confirm that blacksmiths occasionally repaired or made latches or hinges, surviving late-eighteenth-century hardware catalogs from Sheffield manufacturers provide evidence that most builder’s hardware was imported from England. Modern blacksmiths, familiar with the metallurgy of traditional wrought iron, assure us that nails salvaged from a fire would be virtually useless.
At the other extreme is the myth of the pegged house, built entirely without expensive nails. Posts, beams, and rafters of braced timber-frame houses were usually secured by large wooden pegs called “tree nails” but pronounced “trunnels”. The stile-and-rail system for assembling wall and door panels depended upon pegs to secure their mortise-tenon joints and, in rare instances, wide oak floorboards were fastened by pegs rather than with nails. Muntins of window sash were fastened in place with small pegs. Although there were lots of pegs used in eighteenth-century house construction, the myth of the pegged house fails to take into account the many nails securing the wall sheathing, fastening the hardware in place, affixing the roof boards and shingles, and anchoring the wood lath for the plastered ceilings and walls.
Another myth explains that the pegs used to secure the joints of the staircase newel post, handrail, and balusters identify a “knock-down staircase” designed so the railing could be quickly dismantled to make it easier to move furniture up and down stairs.
Some newel posts are believed to be hollow for storage of the deed to the house. Though it’s possible that someone, somewhere, decided to store something of importance in the cavity of a newel post, people usually kept their important papers in special document boxes, and we know of no deed ever found in a newel post. Hollow newel posts may be square or lathe-turned round, and the round ones may have an inlaid mother-of-pearl medallion in the cap as a decoration. Tradition suggests that the medallion would be pried out when the mortgage debt was retired, but since no mortgage, deed, or any other document would be kept there, there was no reason to.
Another body of folk tradition acclaims the skill and craftsmanship of colonial artisans: “They sure don’t build ‘em like that anymore.” A misunderstanding of joinery techniques has resulted in misconceptions such as “all hand-carved moldings” while a remarkable quantity of surviving period molding planes mutely attest to the fact that trim moldings were “run” using planes with specialized blade profiles to produce the crown, cyma, astragal, and bead moldings found in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century buildings. Carving a molding entirely by hand was too labor-intensive even for an eighteenth-century craftsman.
“They never had mantel shelves in the eighteenth century” is another myth. While it’s true that fireplace mantel shelves are rare in houses built before the third quarter of the eighteenth century, they certainly become a principle feature of chimneypieces designed following the introduction of the English/Adamesque/American Federal style after the American Revolution.
No discussion of house myths would be complete without the old chestnut that “all the bricks for the chimney came as ballast in ships from overseas.” Perhaps in the earliest times some bricks were imported into the Middle Atlantic colonies from sources in Holland, but the practice certainly died out by the mid-seventeenth century as production of less expensive brick was established here. Since bricks readily absorb water, it’s probable that only select, hard fired bricks were imported. A prudent ship master would reject soft-fired, highly absorbent brick as poor ballast and unprofitable.
Finally, there are myths which have arisen from a partial understanding of historical truths combined with a romantic desire to somehow experience a portion of that history. The most prevalent such myth is that of the Underground Slave Railway. Unexplained voids in masonry may immediately take on unwarranted significance and romance if they are misidentified as hiding places for runaway slaves. These spaces may be as pedestrian as an ash pit or food storage closet in the chimney base, a meat-smoking chamber higher up in the stack, or merely an access port in the side of a chimney designed to allow occasional inspection of the condition of the masonry. These are sometimes found halfway upstairs in the chimney wall. In New York and the Middle-Atlantic states where a tradition of houses raised on “English basements” continued until well into the eighteenth century, cellar windows were ocassionally fitted with wooden or metal bars. Why this feature gave rise to the myth that these barred cellar windows signified underground slave railway stops is also obscure, especially when you consider that the very last thing a slave seeking freedom would want to see is a barred window.
Of course, there were safe havens for slaves making their way north to freedom, and there were hiding places in them. But the myth has become bigger than the fact, and confirmation of the truth must rest upon documented research of known slave travel routes.
* A myth associated with late-seventeenth-century houses concerns the overhanging second story seen on some timber-framed houses in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Nineteenth-century antiquarians saw this holdover of mediaeval framing technique as a defense; householders could pour boiling water or oil on attackers who, it was evidently assumed, would accommodatingly congregate at the front door, beneath the edge of the overhang, and wait around while the water or oil was heated. To date, no evidence has been found to substantiate the defense concept. The idea that the houses were built with overhangs so waste water could be poured from the upstairs window and not soil the front of the house below and the notion that the overhang was put there to protect pedestrians from that same splash of dirty water are equally false. More likely, the overhang represents the persistence of the practice of extending the second floor out over the first floor to increase living space in walled mediaeval cities where building lots were small.
* People like to assign names to things, and if they don’t know the actual name, or if the name seems old-fashioned or somehow lacking, they make up a new one. For example, the lean-to house, a common house form developed early in the seventeenth century from a simple two-story, one-room-deep plan, was renamed the “salt box” because it’s profile resembled an eighteenth-century slant-top salt box. The name “salt box” is believed to have its origins in the Colonial Revival which began about the time of our Centennial in the nineteenth century, a period when Americans were prone to romanticizing their colonial past.
* The nineteenth century was a time of western expansion and Indian fighters on the prairies, and there are old-house myths based upon the unhappy tradition of Native Americans as enemies. Interior window shutters, whether disappearing into pockets in the wall cavity as in Massachusetts, sliding along atop the chair rails as in Connecticut, or folding back against the window frame elsewhere in the East, were features of some eighteenth-century rooms. Our late-nineteenth-century ancestors romanticized them as “Indian Shutters” for protection against attack instead of recognizing their usefulness in climate control. (Privacy was not as important as it is today.)
* The Pilgrims and their successors had a well-deserved reputation for religious devotion. How appropriate then that the typical eighteenth-century four-panel door should come to be identified as a “Christian” door because of the cross shape formed by the intersection of the stiles and rails. A late-eighteenth-century variant, the six-paneled door, became the “double Christian” door. Even one form of the hinges used to hang the doors underwent a name change to evoke piety; simple HL wrought-iron hinges, which have a horizontal member to provide enhanced support for the door, became “Holy Lord” hinges.
* A vaulted, domed, or arched ceiling, became a popular feature of some Federal-period houses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, used to enhance a special space such as a ballroom on the second floor where the framework of the ceiling could project into the attic. Because of the curved nature of such ceilings, a myth arose that vaulted ceilings were built by ships’ carpenters.