While at the library, I asked Librarian Bill Copeley to see the 1798 second edition of Asher Benjamin’s The Country Builder’s Assistantcontaining the signature of Nathaniel Demeritt. There are two other signatures in the book, Samuel Furber, dated 1816, and Gorden Demeritt, dated 1826. We could tell that much of the trim in the house was derived from Benjamin’s designs, but it would seem that they were derived from this very book. I was especially interested in the penciled notes in the margins. On the back of a plate with an example of a front elevation, someone wrote, “A Fine House.” More photos, below:
When I embarked upon a career in wood, I wondered whether I should become a furniture-maker, and construct finely joined objects of beauty, or build houses, which provide a lot more utility to people. I soon found that it was a false dichotomy; working in preservation, I can work on buildings that are constructed like furniture. On the building we’ve been referring to as “The O’Kane House,” I’ve written previously on the finely-proportioned trim, and the stoutly-joined frame. Even the sheathing is weather-joined, creating a water-tight envelope, and the windowsills are grooved on the bottom to sit down tight over the sheathing. The carpentry employed at O’Kane isn’t ostentatious, but every day I am inspired by the craftsmanship employed at each phase of its building.
Given this gushing, we think that carpenter deserves some credit. “The O’Kane House” is a bit of a misnomer. For a long time, the building UNH now calls the O’Kane House was referred to as “The Demeritt House” in reference to the Demeritt family who built it, and lived on the land for more than 200 years.
In July of 2001, Jim Garvin*, the New Hampshire state historian, wrote an Individual Inventory for the NH Division of Historical Resources for the Demeritt House, one of the steps for applying for its placement on the National Register of Historic Places. In reading the report, I expected a bureaucratic list of dry historical attributes, but discovered instead a well-crafted narrative exploring the house’s former residents and their relationship to its architectural significance. I encourage anyone who has been interested in the O’Kane House to read the whole report, here.
The house was built for Israel Demeritt in 1808, on land that had been granted to his Great-grandfather, Eli Demeritt, before 1700. Israel inherited the land from his father, Captain Samuel Demeritt, and replaced his father’s two story house with the one we so recently dismantled. It was likely built by his brother Nathaniel Demeritt (1751-1827), a joiner who is known to have built a neighboring house with his son, the Rev. William Demeritt in 1819.
If Nathaniel was indeed the builder, there were architectural consequences. First of all, by 1808, Nathaniel would have been 57 years old, which explains why the house is so conservative in its layout and plan. The center chimney and first floor layout resembles other houses that began to appear in coastal Maine and New Hampshire shortly after 1700 (pg. 98 A Building History of Northern New England).
Floor Plan, two-room deep house, from A Building History…, by James Garvin
Conversely, the interior trim is far more contemporary and heavily influenced by Asher Benjamin. The casings in the front entry are elaborate, and Garvin’s report cites Plate 1 of The Country Builder’s Assistant and Plate 11 of The American Builder’s Companion as possible influences. I found a couple other possibilities in my copy of The American Builder’s Companion: in the top left corner of Plate 27 of is an example of a cornice that is very similar to the crown in the second floor front hall, and Plate 35 illustrates an example of reeding similar to that found in the Blue Chamber. I don’t own a copy of the Country Builder’s Assistant, but Nathaniel Demeritt did! His name is written in a second edition housed at the New Hampshire Historical Society in Concord. Concord readers (Hi, Mom and Dad!) go check it out.
First Floor, Demeritt-O'Kane House
Nathaniel Demeritt’s age and life experience determined the design of his brother’s house. His commitment to traditional techniques determined that the house was stoutly built, but his openness to Asher Benjamin’s new forms and proportions allowed him to trim it out in a style that was lasting. People often ask me to define “preservation carpentry” and my stock answer cites our use of traditional joinery and appropriate techniques. I mention that as Preservation Carpenters, we still get to work on houses (and barns, and steeples) that are built like furniture, which is something that can’t often be said of contemporary buildings. But one of the best parts of preservation, and something that I have tried to express through the O’Kane Notebook posts, is the connection to builders like Nathaniel Demeritt. He faced so many of the choices and challenges we still face today, and it is satisfying to uncover tangible examples of his decisions in the Demeritt House. Demeritt relied upon proven tradition to help him design a sturdy, lasting frame, and watertight sheathing, but he also made room for innovation, and style, and took inspiration from the pages of Asher Benjamin’s books. In rebuilding the Demeritt House, we will face a similar dilemma. We have committed ourselves to using traditional techniques to repair and rebuild the remaining 85% of original material, but we face choices with regard to those couple of rooms that contained no original material, and will be needed for modern conveniences. We can only hope that we will be as successful as Nathaniel Demeritt in building new rooms of lasting style.
Dave, Jim, Scott and Andrew, dismantling rafters, with Pete represented by the lull forks
Over the past month, an injection of new blood has invigorated the dismantling process. Not only have we three new Maine Preservation interns; Dave Ewing, Andrew Cushing and Noah Kerr, but Jim and Kendra, two clutch workers, to boot. Brian Cox has been on site, managing the inventorying and dismantling of the windows (stay tuned for his upcoming window article) and Pete Dellea has been working his lull magic. The eager crew dismantled the entire cape ell one full week ahead of schedule. We can only hope that the rain stays away, and the house comes down as smoothly.
The Neat Stuff Update:
Dragon Spikes!
Dragon Spike
These spikes were used to pin the main house and ell frames together. There were seven spikes in all, one in a rafter, one in the front gable tie, and five distributed between a corner post and a beefy stud.
Scott and Dave, Vanquishing the Dragon Spike
Using levers, and some brute force, the rafter, post and stud were able to be pried, preserving master smithery. The spike that did need cutting was in the gable tie beam, which needed to be lifted straight up, and could not be pried out. It took six sawzall blades, ground to nubs, to cut through that unlucky nail.
Half Doves!
Tie Beam to Plate Joinery
For those non-timber-framers out there, a half dovetail is just like the first dovetail in a drawer, with one straight side, and one slanted one. The geometry that a drawer-dovetail employs in order to resist the outward pull of the drawer front is the same geometry that is used in buildings; the half dovetail in a tie beam is resisting the outward thrust created by rafters.
Half dovetailed tie beam (with trunnel hole) and two adjacent joists
In most English barns, only the tie beams have a half-dovetail joint on the end, and the attic joists half-lap over the plate.
Attic Joists, Upside Up and Upside Down, photo by Noah Kerr
In this building, every one of the attic joists had a half-dovetail joint, which helps to explain why these buildings stayed so square and straight for more than 200 years.
Teasel tenons!
Post hacked back, revealing mortise and pin that used to hold teasel tenon
In an English tie joint, the tie beam cogs over the plate with the aforementioned half dove. The tie beam is also connected to the post directly below it, by means of a teasel tenon. The confluence of so much joinery at the top of one post, i.e. tenon into plate AND tenon into tie beam, results in most posts flaring at the top, to as much as 11 1/2 inches in the case of the O’Kane house.
Two Mortises, One Plate, photo by Noah Kerr
One tenon runs parallel with the eave of the house, and inserts into a mortise in the plate, (pictured directly above), and the other tenon runs perpendicular to the plate, parallel to the tie beam, and extends from the interior plane of the flared post. This tenon inserts into a mortise on the underside of the tie beam. If that’s difficult to imagine, a few of the posts in the O’Kane ell were shaved back, revealing the innards of teasel tenon joinery (previous photo, above).
Interns!
Andrew and Kendra, preserving wrought nails
We are fortunate to have been blessed with so many terrific Maine Preservation interns, as well as interns from North Bennett Street School and other interns with an unaffiliated, but unabashed interest in preservation. They are always eager to learn and participate, as well as share their varied knowledge and experiences. Thanks to interns past and present for your indelible contributions.
Please peruse the slideshow below for more photos of our process:
Room 101 (The Pink Parlor), Wall D, Photo by John Butler
On Friday, Scott finished removing the trim from the Pink Parlor, pictured above. I had eagerly anticipated the joinery surrounding the fireplace, given our recent work on another fireplace surround. The displaced surround, turned upside-down, is below:
Pink Parlor Surround Turned Upside Down
When I think about the era in which this house was built, in a relatively new country, with newly earned independence, it can feel very foreign to me. I struggle to understand the mindset of these post-colonial carpenters. But when I see the joinery detail below, and a fireplace surround constructed nearly the same way I’d construct it today, I feel much closer and more connected with our region’s history. I realize that we are still a young country, and in the context of the rest of the world, this is a pretty young house. The importance of preservation is emphasized not simply because the house is “old,” but because so much hard work went into constructing it.
Mid Rail and Stile Joinery
Oh, and the stiles were buried deep, just like in the Blue Room.
Buried Stile
For more photos of last week’s progress, click on the slideshow, below:
On Tuesday, Dan was removing southern yellow pine flooring in a room we’ve dubbed “the Pink Parlor.” As an earlier layer of flooring was uncovered, he detected beneath the scrim of sand and dust a pattern in the mottled finish. A little washing revealed a fine stenciling.
Stenciling Detail
Scott had also been working on dismantling the Pink Parlor, and discovered some craftsmanship that has made me re-think a hasty declaration about the best way to field panels
Fielded Wall Panel
The crisp beveled edges of these raised panels are beautiful. It’s hard to believe that this was the back face, appreciated by the carpenter alone. Large panels need to have a certain amount of thickness for stability, but their edges must be narrow in order to fit into a groove that runs along the inner edges of the stiles and rails. At O’Kane, we have discovered a variety of techniques for relieving that edge, each one more impressive than the last.
Wall Panel Detail
When we were first assessing the room, and removing the plaster, many of us thought that the wall beneath the chair rail was finished in plaster, because the wall section was so wide, and smooth. In our day and age, it is hard to believe that a 24 inch, 17 foot wall section could be composed of a single, clear board, but in this building’s day and age, that was entirely possible.
Scott removing nails from wainscot panel
The wainscot that Scott removed was 24 1/2 inches wide, tightly grained, and completely free of knots and defects. Lain upon the horses, in the strafing light, the scallops left by the joiner’s plane were obvious.
Wainscot Panels
This is a limited selection of what we’ve revealed in the past week. For more, see the slideshow below:
After a piece of trim is removed from an O’Kane wall, it is taken over to a photograph of that wall and traced with a fine tip marker. The dis-assembler then writes a description of the piece on the item list for that wall and assigns it an item number. The room number, wall letter and item number are written on a piece of masking tape, which is affixed to the upper left, backhand corner of the piece. The piece is carefully de-nailed, and then a final “acquisition” number is etched into a patch of white shellac using a Dremel tool. The piece is wrapped in shrink wrap with his cohorts, and tightly stacked in an assiduously organized, and mapped trailer. I have just finished re-tracing all the photographs of those walls which have been completely denuded. The results, below:
Before it was dismantled, the fireplace in O’Kane’s Blue Parlor got a lot of attention. It is a simple-looking surround, with a single large panel above and an applied mantle, but it’s a good representation of the vernacular style from its era. Aside from a little bit of backband added in a Greek Revival-era renovation, the surround was intact, and allowed a visitor to feel transported in time. While I found the piece pleasing aesthetically, I didn’t fully appreciate the workmanship until it was dismantled, revealing another chapter in the story of this building.
After Scott removed the adjacent paneling, and had cut or pulled the wrought nails attaching it to the wooden lintels, we realized that removing the surround wouldn’t be so easy. The stiles on either side of the panel and fireplace opening extended past the first layer of brick, but we could never have guessed just how deeply. After removing a piece of subfloor and digging into crumbled clay mortar, we found that the stiles extended below the surface of the subfloor by 8 inches. Eight Inches!
We haven’t found anything like this elsewhere in the building, and, based on the adjacent wall paneling, which went no deeper than the first layer of flooring, there is no reason to think that the original floor was eight inches lower. My theory is this: while the frame was being fit, joiners were cutting this and the other frame & panel walls (joinery shots, below). As soon as the frame was erected and sheathed, joiners installed this surround first so that this hearth could warm and feed the carpenters as they finished the rest of the house.
After digging out the stiles, we carefully laid the surround onto a specialized piece of preservation equipment called a Trash Can, and then we discovered something AWESOME.
A Pulvinated Panel! I have a thing for pulvinated, or “breasted” panels (would an analyst draw some connection between my interest and being a woman in a male-dominated field?) I have loved them ever since I first encountered them at Hancock Shaker Village on a NBSS class trip. At Hancock, the technique is seen on the front of the panel, and elsewhere, it seems to refer largely to friezes. I just think it is The Number One Most Elegant Way to field a panel, and ought to be used more often, and visibly. It is appealing to me how present the crafts-person is in this method of shaping a panel. The curve is shaped by his eye and hand, rather than a combination square. To me, the process is nearer to the construction of a chair than that of the austere wall panel.
Pulvinated Panel at Hancock Shaker Village
Given that the back of the panel we found was mostly rough, and totally invisible, the gently curved backside was not really where this crafts-person showed his stuff. That was in the triple stub tenon we found in the wide bottom rail, and the double tenon up top. The joinery involved is partly what leads us to believe that the surround may have been made ahead of time, off-site.
To see more photos of our process click on the slideshow, below
We’ve been using softwood wedges, made from 2x stock, to carefully remove delicate moldings and wide wall panels. Either the wedges loosen the nails completely, or they provide use with enough room to slip a sawblade behind to cut the nail. Like ziploc tupperware, they can be reused, but eventually the edges get grungy, and need to be thrown away. Using a sled on the tablesaw, I can safely make buckets of fine, sharp wedges.
Some of the wedge templates are pictured above. The larger wedges, 15″ x 1 1/2″, and 12″ x 1″, are used for flooring , and wide wall panels. Smaller wedges in 5″, 7″ and 9″ by 1/2″ sizes help with smaller, more delicate moldings.
This is a photo of the template after it has been screwed to the tablesaw sled. I added a fence (pine, left) whose top is co-planar with the top of the stock to be ripped (pine, right). Then I screw a cap onto the fence which covers the stock and holds it down as it is pushed through the blade. This allows me to cut the wedge safely, my fingers far from the blade. The sled is then retracted, the wedge popped out from beneath the cap, and the next blank squeezed in.
Jig with the cap screwed in place, above.
Profile view of jig, devoid of stock.
I know that some people use a bandsaw to make wedges. That method has the benefit of a thinner kerf and less waste, but for us, this method was safe, speedy and accurate.
Over the past week, we have been using up our supply of softwood wedges at the O’Kane House. In the effort to gently remove the delicate, hand-planed moldings, we tap narrow wedges in along the paint lines, crushing the wedges with repeated use (and saving the edges of the trim). It is a slow, thoughtful process and along the way, we speculate about what the original carpenters of 1790 might have been thinking.
There is strong evidence that the trim carpenter who finished the front hall and the upstairs bedrooms was thinking, “OMG, Can’t get enuf of this sweet, new reeding plane!” The pattern of five 3/16 inch half round “reeds” is used to create a variety of decorations around the room. So far, all of this molding has been hung with wrought nails. The accordian lath behind it was hung with a combination of cut and wrought nails. This was typical for the time period, according to A Building History of Northern New England, by James Garvin. Cut nails broke more, but were less expensive to make, so a few wrought nails were used to hold the lath in place, and then the field was filled in with cut nails. It makes sense to me that the carpenter wouldn’t risk breaking a cut nail as he hung his precious, hand-milled moldings. It was worth it to stick with the more trusted technology, the wrought nail.
He used it in multiple runs adjacent one another to adorn the echinus of the pilasters next to the front door.
And he ran multiple passes on one 6 or 7 inch board that he then cut on the diagonal and reassembled to dress up the simple fireplace surround.
We get sort of excited when we see mistakes like this one. When we turned the board over, we saw the knot that caused the plane to go off-track. I like to imagine commiserating with the post-colonial carpenter around the horse trough. It’s evidence like this that will remind the client that he lives in a wholly handmade house. There are some moldings that we may have to reproduce, and for short sections, it is easier to do by hand. If anyone out there has seen a plane like this one, please let us know.
For more photos on the process, check out the photos below, updated regularly with our daily finds.
On Friday, we peeled plaster from the walls of the Blue Parlor, in the O’Kane Farmhouse. Scott was Bill and I, Ted, as we traveled in our proverbial telephone booth through layers of plaster, lath, wallpaper and time.
There were clues to some of what we might find. Surrounding the door openings were wooden strips, wedge-shaped in profile, that served as plaster grounds. They were a little over an inch thick, and were nailed four inches away from the opening itself, creating a border around the door opening that looked like a recessed casing. The application of these plaster grounds became popular in the mid-18th century, and allowed the plasterer to create a flat wall plane within the borders of the ground (Much of this initial dating information comes from James Garvin’s A Building History of Northern New England, pp 65-71). In most cases, the chair rail, baseboard, and door and window casings were applied directly to the frame, and served as the plaster ground. In Shaker buildings, for example, the casing is nearly flush with the plane of plaster. But in this wall, the plaster plane was an inch proud of the recessed door border, due to the applied ground, and there was a vertical, beaded joint between the side sections of the border and the top. It looked like a larger section of beaded paneled wall was peeking through.
As we carefully peeled the plaster from the lath, we paid attention to the composition of the plaster. Older plasters have a higher concentration of goat hair, and regularly one will uncover a multi-colored tuft that was was never fully mixed in. Older plasters were applied in three coats, a base coat, a straightening, or “brown” coat, and a skim coat. The base coat is thickly applied and creates the keys that lock the plaster onto the lath. The base coat squeezes through the slits between the pieces of lath, and droops behind. A skilled plasterer will use the right amount of pressure to create an even pattern of keys, enough pressure to create a key big enough to hold, but not so much that the plaster breaks off and splooges into the wall cavity. After the base coat has dried to a leather hard consistency, the brown coat is applied, and the plasterer drags a long straight-edged board, or screed, over the surface, flattening the wall plane between the grounds. The brown coat is usually where you see the most goat hair. The skim coat is the last, thinly applied coat, devoid of hair and leaving that hard, cured, eggshell finish. On the first two sections of wall, we found sawn lath behind the plaster, hung with machine-cut nails. This dates the added plaster surface to sometime after the mid-19th century, as we suspected (Garvin, p. 67).
One Wall, Many Coverings
Behind the lath we found beautiful, psychedelic wallpaper. The profile of beaded paneling telegraphed through, and punched vertical lines in the wallpaper at each panel’s joint. On the wall, one could see three different periods all at once. The horizontal shadow lines left behind by the lath, the lively geometric pattern of the wallpaper, and the vertical beads poking their noses through the surface.
Scott, Salvage Detective
So I liked that, but the most exciting discoveries were yet to come. So far, all we could determine in terms of dates was that the plaster was applied before the advent of wire nails during the late-1800’s, leaving no real indication of the date of the beaded paneling. Farther along the north wall, to the west, was a section that appeared to have once been partitioned off into a different room (according to a long joint in the floorboards). When Scott began dismantling this section, the wall cavity was different. There was a void behind the lath, and in its depths he could see the horizontal, bevelled profile characteristic of feather-edged paneling, and shiny, chrome yellow paint. The paneled wall he uncovered was was hung horizontally, and it had a feather-edged profile, where the edge of the board is beveled to a thin tongue that slips into a groove on the adjacent board. Conversely, beaded tongue and groove has a bead with an edge perpendicular to a quarter inch tongue. The joints in such boards are typically tighter. Both styles were used and re-used during the first half of the 18th century, but the feather-edged stuff is reminiscent of an earlier era.
Across the face of the older, yellow paneling, we saw the regular shadow lines of shelving, leading us to believe that this section of wall had been obscured by pantry storage and left alone when the rest of the room was upgraded. The wall plane of the beaded section is sufficiently proud of the feather-edged wall plane that the beaded paneling could be hiding more yellow feather-edged paneling–but this is only one of a number of possible scenarios. The beaded paneling could be contemporary with the feather-edged paneling; the feather-edged paneling might have been recycled from elsewhere, or simply used to delineate a different room in the house. In most homes, we’d never know the answer to these queries, because we wouldn’t dismantle the wall any more than was needed to make repairs, but the O’Kane house will be completely dismantled, and it is exciting to know that as we proceed, some questions will be answered, and even more created.
Three Walls in One
Adjacent the feather-edged paneling was the most exciting section yet. A section so exciting as to make the author flap her arms in an improvised, peacock-like dance. Behind the plaster Scott found accordian, or split board lath, hung with wrought nails. Accordian lath is hung using a wide, rough, knotty board. The first edge is nailed to the studs, and then the board is split along the grain and checks are stretched open and nailed, creating voids for the plaster to “key” into. This kind of lath supplanted the use of split, or riven lath around 1800. It was used until the mid-19th century, with the introduction of sawn lath.
Wrought Nail Detail
Wrought nails were used until the advent of machine-cut nails, invented in 1790. So we were finding a relatively newer lath style with an older nail technology allowing us to date the wall to sometime between 1790 and 1800 (Garvin, p 66). Dating a building without recorded documentation is a fuzzy practice. Often, the invention of a technology allows us to bracket a building’s date into “well, we know it wasn’t built before such-and-such,” and this is an unsatisfactory conclusion. Most technologies were in favor for at least fifty years. We use all these time brackets, and the popularity of certain styles throughout the house, to come up with an approximate date. It is unusual, and thrilling, to uncover a wall that so neatly falls between the advent of one technology and the extinction of another–and that was why I found myself flapping my arms, wildly.
Please peruse the photos below for more information about our process, and stay-tuned for more exciting discoveries.
