Reader and commenter Deb wondered aloud yesterday after reading about my Cape Cod fetish: “…I wonder if there are any authentic Cape Cods here in the Madison area?”
Well, the answer is no, I’m afraid.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There are undoubtedly various revival versions of the Cape Cod style in Wisconsin, but the true Cape Cod style never even made it as far west as New York State. The first truly contemporary style I can come up with that isn’t just a vernacular shelter that covered the midwest is Greek Revival. Civil War-ish.
Got me to thinking though. Here in Massachusetts, I can go right back to the medieval. Most of Europe can’t find anything as old as what we’ve got right here. If they do, it’s usually a big stone cathedral or palace. The home of a regular person, made from flammable wood, is a rare thing when you’re talking just past the middle ages. Check this out:
That’s the Peak House in Medfield, Mass, and it’s still there. I’ve been in it a handful of times. I’ve driven past it many thousands of times. I’ve banged nails into the house next door, which might be even more interesting. It was the stagecoach stop on the Boston to Milford Post Road.
The Peak House is from 1680. Look at it. You can see the beginnings of a true version of American architecture there. Of course, you can picture a medieval European street there as well.
After hovel type shelters, this is the first sort of thing they built in America. It’s called a linear plan. It’s one room deep, two stories high (the second story is really just a loft) and the rooms are laid end to end in a linear fashion. Glass was expensive, and grew crazy expensive if you wanted big panes, hence the little leaded bits of glass for windows. Even that was a luxury.
Hey look, I’ve got the plans for the thing if you want to build one.
15 by 24 feet. Almost exactly twice as big as the shed I keep my mower and garden tools in. Cozy.
Anyway, the people crazy enough to brave the Atlantic Ocean, Metacomet, and Medfield mosquitoes built that little gem in the linear style, and eventually their collective children moved to Connecticut and stuck a sort of lean-to shed on the back, and extended the roofline. Et Voila! The saltbox:
Then followed all sorts of variations of two story things. And then someone, in the 1700s now, decided that a house two rooms deep, one story high, with an attic you could live in if you wanted might be just the thing. Think of it!
Hey, look, a 3/4 Cape. Lovely.
Eventually a furniture making maniac moved to Southcoast Massachusetts, and wondered what kind of house to live in. He built this thing in the swamp, and you can hear the table saw or the clicking of the keyboard if the wind’s just right.
This house is exquisite. You might not think so at first blush.
If you’ve got a pulse you probably know this is called a “Cape” style house. That’s short for Cape Cod. Cape Cod is a bit of a swim from where I’m typing this, or a very short sail.
Real estate people call every damn thing a Cape. They likewise have no idea what a Colonial or a Victorian is with any certainty. They also are confused about what “pristine” means. Their dictionary of adjectives is shredded and loaded into a blunderbuss, then shot at the listings, apparently.
This is what is called a Full Cape. It has five bays (four windows and a door) across the front facade. A Three Quarter Cape would have window, window, door, window. A Half Cape would have window, window, door. Cape Codders would often start with a Half Cape, and add on from time to time to get Full Cape goodness.
This is a Full Cape with Ell. The “ell” refers to the perpendicular addition jutting out of the back of the main house, also probably added much later that the original structure or representing a proper fitting out of an animal shed. It’s got an addition on the addition, too, but it’s not really a Full Cape with Two Ells, as that would generally mean the main house had two different ells coming simultaneously out of its rear. Some persons call the little ell at the end of the other ell the “Back House.”
It’s a Center Chimney Cape. That big pile of brick serves multiple flues, as the house was heated by fireplaces originally. They were likely very shallow fireboxes that drew very well, and threw a lot of heat. More modern ornamental fireplaces are much deeper. There might be a huge fireplace in the kitchen, perhaps with an oven right in the bricks.
These houses might have a shallow dirt cellar under them, but much of the house, and usually all of the ells are built right on the ground. They had a rubble stone foundation usually. They had rotted sills generally, too.
A house of this vintage would have been timber framed, ie: assembled from fewer, larger framing components instead of the smaller more numerous framing lumber we use now. The interiors would have been covered with wood lath, that is thin strips of wood with gaps between them, and then had plaster applied over the lath with animal hair put in it to strengthen the bond. There was probably no insulation in the walls, although they might dump a lot of construction debris in there. The reason old ceilings sag in these houses is that the portion of the plaster that had extruded through the lath breaks off over time, and the face coating’s weight overcomes its modest adhesive strength. You can screw a sort of metal button washer through the plaster into the lath, and plaster over the button, to re-affix it. I have, many thousands of times over the years over many jobs. And I’m not even in the plastering business. All of that has been replaced first by wire lath instead of wood, and then by sheets of gypsum with a paper face. It is customary still on Cape Cod to put a full coating of plaster over these sheets of “Blueboard” – or “GreenBoard” if you’re in a damp place. In most of the country they simply cover the seams and screw holes and call it Drywall.
There are clapboards on the front of the house, and cedar shingles on the other facades. It was sheathed with boards, as plywood was as yet unknown. I saw houses still being sheathed with boards when I was child in the 1960s, as some old-timers stuck to their old ways. Pretty rare.
Originally, only the front might be painted, and the rest left to weather to a soft silver if white cedar was used, or a blackish tone if red cedar. This picture was taken in the 1960s, and by that time, it was customary to paint the whole thing white.
The house would have low ceilings downstairs, and you’d live right under the eaves in the upstairs room. You can see the windows are 6 over 9. The top sash has six lites, and was probably fixed in place. The bottom, operable sash has 9 lites. They may originally have had no spring or counterweight on the sash, and earned their sobriquet of “Guillotine Window.” They make fake muntins for the large sheets of glass in a modern window, to approximate the look of these panes, and 99 times out of 100 get the proportions wrong. A window pane is is approximately the size and proportions of a human face in a window this big, and that’s why you like looking through them. They look OK exactly square, too. And it’s a muntin, not a mullion. A mullion is a piece of wood between sashes, not between panes of glass. Even the spell checker is confused.
You can tell the shutters actually operate by the angle they sit at. The heel of the shutter at the window frame sits on pins well out from the facade, but the outer edge is pinned back to the siding. You can tell a fake shutter at 1000 yards because they are screwed flat to the house.
That’s a real cedar shingle roof. Probably red cedar. It will last as long as an asphalt roof shingle, but has the three dimension quality and variegated color that asphalt shingles always lack. That’s a wooden gutter, by the way, slopped with linseed oil every year and diverting the roof’s rainwater into galvanized leaders and down into the ground into drywells. The ground is fine sand down just a few inches, and drains away the water quickly. The ocean is right down the end of the street. I lived on that street for several months in the 1980s while I was building something else. I passed by this house without noticing, probably, because there were so many more like it everywhere. They are beginning to seem rare now, though, as remuddling and vinyl siding takes it vigorish of the housing stock. These houses were routinely flattened to make way for a bigger house, too. Or they leave one wall standing to call it a remodel, and blast the rest to splinters. The ocean makes the lots precious and the house too small for the value of the lot.
Ladies and gents, a real Five Bay Center Chimney Full Cape with Ell and Back House.
Pater noster, qui es in coelis: sanctificetur nomen tuum: adveniat regnum tuum: fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo, et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem.
I’ve got to steal one. God forgive me. I’ve got to steal a flower from you. There are so many, God, and mother only needs one. I’ll burn forever but mother needs her Easter lily.
“Child, what are you doing?”
“I need the lily for Easter, Sister. I have no money and there are so many.”
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis.
“It is a sin to steal, child.”
” I know it is, Sister, but I can’t help it.”
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis.
“You can always help it child. Where is your mother and your father?”
“Father is nowhere, Mother says, Sister, and I don’t know where nowhere is. Mother is sick and I think she needs an Easter lily or she’ll die.”
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: dona nobis pacem.
“Where is your mother, child?”
“She’s in the bed with the diphtheria, Sister.”
“Is she alone?”
“Yes, as I am here, Sister.”
“When did you eat last, child?”
Panem coelestem accipiam, et nomen Domini invocabo.
“It’s another sin I know, Sister, but I ate the heel of the bread this morning while Mother was moaning. She wouldn’t eat it, and I needed it.”
“I see. And before that?”
“I don’t know. I was sick first, and Mother might know but she can’t tell you. She is hot and talks of places I don’t know and people that are dead, Sister.”
“And she sent you for the flower?”
“It is my own sin, Sister. She said “The lilies, the lilies, the Easter lilies… ” over and over until I promised I’d fetch her one. She would not have me steal, but she cannot come. Will I burn forever, Sister?”
“You will have your flower, child, and the kingdom of heaven besides, for to tend to the afflicted is the hallmark of the saint.”
“And saints can steal flowers, and God don’t mind?”
Indulgentiam, et absolutionem, et remissionem peccatorum nostrorum, tributat nobis omnipotens et misericors Dominus.
“No, God does not mind. Now take me to your mother, and we will give her the lily together.
By the time you are reading this, I’ll be pushing wood through a saw. I have help occasionally, but for the most part it is a solitary thing.
Many people used to work in solitary endeavors, or in small groups. Those types of situations are becoming much more common again, and many more people are joining the ranks of the fractured work force, as I have. I think it’s better in many ways.
There is an image I have in my head of the average denizen of the office building. It is not an imaginary image, as I have worked there myself. It occurs to me that it it is the office building filled with information workers that is old-fashioned, not me and my version of the work picture.
The office building is the text version of belching smokestack-noon whistle-timecard punching-id badge-break room-factory of my youth. The cubicles and the old CRTs and the in and outboxes are the assembly line of text now. That’s the modern version of the old sepia colored photo of a humming factory. You nice folks with the boxy shoes and skinny glasses and the Blackberrys and ACT folders open are the buggy whip people now. You are the people who used to wear coveralls and carry a sandwich in a pail and grind it out until you get a watch and bed with a lid. Not me.
The idea that you’d all congregate in one place made sense when there was a smelter in the back. The smelter is a server now, and you probably don’t even know where it is. There is little reason to congregate in one place between low-pile carpeting and drop ceilings just to think. It is unlikely people will continue to do so much longer.
I have a network of persons to help me when I need it. That pool is too small, but not inconsiderable. We congregate when it is necessary. We generally each have the tools we need available to us wherever we are, or go. We buy components and materials and machinery from people we will never meet, and sell the fruits of these constantly shifting associations to other persons we may never meet. In the past, I’ve even occasionally worked in occupied homes and never met the occupants. It’s not always necessary.
The little shelf outside the HR office with the brightly colored forms. The vending machine. The bagels laid out before all but the most hardy clerk arrives by a contractor no one has ever met. It’s all going the way of the dodo. You cutting edge old-fashioned people are going to have to learn to live in the world outside the office tower. The world is booming, and it’s kinda scary if your sun is of the fluorescent variety. Be brave, and do not allow yourself to be taken advantage of by those that say they can put the workplace genie back in the bottle.
If it walks, or crawls, or flies, or wriggles on its belly, it wanders into my yard eventually.
We had three huge turkeys by the kids’ sandbox this morning. They startled a handful of Canada Geese that were cruising in the swamp just off the grass there, and the Tom puffed himself up nicely. I took this picture from my living room window.
There is not one worthwhile restaurant in the town I live in. No fast food, either. No movie theater. Not a lot of retail stores of any kind. There’s only a couple of traffic lights in the whole town. One night, my old truck broke down maybe a mile from my house. It was as dark as the grave. Moonless, starless night. To find my way home, I had to walk along the yellow stripe down the middle of the road, as it was the only thing I could see at all. I walked all the way home, and never had to yield the road to a passing car. It was safer out there than along the road’s shoulder with all the poison ivy and the critters. And I live on the busiest street in town, except for the lightly traveled highway that cuts through it.
There are other attractions in this world, that do not have a sign out front.
Month: April 2007
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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