Well, remember in my last post we had removed a small doorway that lead from the kitchen to the dining room. When we were removing that doorway a piece of the tiles in the dining room came down and through the hole we could see hand hewn beams! So what were we to do but........tear down the ceiling. I think in the project management role it is called scope creep. Well we creeped right into the dining room and began demolition.
Under the ceiling tiles was, what was left of a plaster ceiling and lath.
After all the plaster and lath had been removed we discovered something that was very puzzling. We knew that we were in the oldest part of the house (1878) so the fact that there was hand hewn beams under all that didn't suprise us but what did suprise us is part way through the room the beams changed from hand hewn to mill sawn which was not possible at the time the orginal house was built.
So Clarke went into the attic and there too was a change in the beams but the interesting part was the very front of the house went back to hand hewn. So we figure that the very orignal house was actually quite small and Willard (determined through process of elimination) wanted/needed the house to be bigger so he cut the front off the house with the windows and doors still intact and moved it forward and built in between and then reatached the front piece.
It is times like this you would really like to be able to talk with your ancestors about why they decided to do it that way or if our assumption is even correct. If only the walls could talk.
Nancy
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