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Drawing by Theresa Coleman
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By Chuck Ross
Few home styles are as easily recognized as the classic New England saltbox. Its characteristic high-in-front, low-in-back roofline gives the appearance of an antique home with a Mohawk haircut. Interestingly, though, this iconic form was rarely constructed of a piece. Instead, these houses are most frequently the work of the nation's earliest remodelers.
"The saltbox is the result of adding a kitchen wing to the back of the house." says Sally Zimmerman, a preservation specialist with Historic New England, a Boston-based organization that manages historic house museums and archives throughout the New England states. "It's rare that the saltbox was the thing that they started to build."
Among the earliest homes built by Colonial settlers were two-story structures rooted in medieval English vernacular styles. These structures generally featured two rooms on the first floor: a hall, which was the center of the family's life, and a parlor or reception area opposite, with a large central chimney between them and a steep stairway or ladder leading up to sleeping areas above. This design traveled across the Atlantic with the earliest English colonists.
The first kitchen remodeling craze
"One of the things that's interesting about American vernacular architecture is that it's additive," says Zimmerman, who dates the saltbox style from a period running approximately between 1700 and 1750. "The 17th- and 18th-century builders were part of a tradition of timber framing that went back hundreds of years."
These earliest American homebuilders soon learned that clapboards held up better in harsh New World winters than traditional wattle-and-daub exteriors common to English homes. Similarly, as settlements became more permanent and families expanded, homeowners used American ingenuity to move cooking functions to new single-story, lean-to additions tacked onto the rear of their homes in the nation's first full-scale kitchen-remodeling craze. In the process, these early do-it-yourselfers created a new architectural form.
"It was just a shed built onto the back," notes Treena Crochet, author of Colonial Style: Creating Classic Interiors in Your Cape, Colonial or Saltbox House (Taunton Press, 2005). "When you move to the side, you'll see that the roof goes all the way down, because the rooms that were added were only one story."
In some cases, Zimmerman says, these early remodelers put time and effort into reframing the entire roof, creating a monolithic roofline with a uniform slope throughout its entire rear length. In other cases, though, an astute observer can recognize the point where the addition begins, because of a noticeable change in the new section's pitch.
Zimmerman notes three characteristics common to original saltbox-style homes:
- An asymmetric roofline, with a long rear slope enclosing an attached addition
- Either a uniform slope to the roof or two distinct pitches, with the second, shallower pitch indicating the point of the addition
- A central chimney. Colonial remodelers added a new flue to this chimney to create a cooking space for their new kitchens.
Chuck Ross is a freelance writer who specializes in building and construction topics.
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