
The massive gambrel folds over a one-and-one-half-story central-chimney house, displaying this roof type in a particularly impressive manner. The frame and side lights at the entrance are certainly later (perhaps a Federal alteration, which apparently has itself been altered). The additions to the east, which date partly from the nineteenth century, seem to have been redone in a twentieth-century picturesque version of cozy storybook “colonial.” Meticulous maintenance and conscious prettification alter the character of the house into an idealized picture of itself, so that it appears to be almost a replica of what it really is. But the eighteenth-century massing of the house and the bulk of its central chimney prevail, and there is visual and intellectual stimulation in the play between the forceful assertion of the past and the charm that the present means to give it.