My Favorite Room at Coggeshall Farm Museum
by Patty Frye
The repainted parlor is elegant, the back chamber
interesting, and the kitchen full of character - but
my very favorite room at the farm is the little pan-
try that faces west off the kitchen.
This small space was mostly overlooked in the inevit-
able modernization of the house, and as we turned
back the clock on the farmhouse to restore, as much
as possible, the look it had at the end of the 18th
Century, it came into its own. More than any other
room, it has authentic details of the first period of
the house, and traces of all the successive periods.
A brief time-line: as originally built it was a useful
pantry/buttery, very plain with whitewashed rough
board walls. Narrow shelves ran along the right hand
wall, and there was a small nine over six pane win-
dow, its’ frame projecting from the single-plank wall
of the house. Some years later, in the early 19th
Century, the shelves were hacked off and the walls
plastered, but the thrifty plasterers used the bits of
shelf close to the plank walls as lath, so their posi-
tion was preserved.
The little room was a nice plastered pantry for a long
time—John Vaughn counted at least thirty-five coats
of whitewash when he analyzed the surface. Then it
was the 20th Century, and a family still lived in the
house. Modern times demanded indoor plumbing—
where to put it? Of course: the handy little pantry.
Off came the outward opening plank door, and a mod-
ern inward opening door was added, along with the
sanitary fixtures. A sash with larger panes was set
into the window frame somewhere around this time.
Legend has it that the sash was cast up by the Hurri-
cane of 1938, true or not, it needed shims to make
it fit into the original frame.
And so the little room stayed a bathroom until Walter
Karkovitch undertook the repair of the floors and un-
derlying joists in the late 1990’s. He took out the
bathroom fixtures, removed the plaster to repair rot-
ted sections of wall, and revealed the long hidden
shelf positions by their shadow lines, hidden for near-
ly 200 years.
Luckily, the west wall of the house was never doubled,
as the walls on the north and east were. The window
frame was never altered. And remains the only one in
the house to show how all the sash was originally held
in place. I love old windows, and have studied them
for years. To find a bit of the original detail on this
window was a tremendous thrill for me.
So here is this little room, quietly demonstrating the
entire architectural history of the house, from the sim-
plicity of its’ original whitewashed boards and shelves,
through the somewhat upscale plastered period. The
ceiling remains as it was as a bathroom, with an elect-
ric fixture. The left wall of the room shows modern
materials, plywood and steel plates used to strengthen
decayed wall sections. I added a “new” (to the house)
plank door which matches the door to the cellar as it
did so long ago. Only when it is opened can you see
the changes wrought over time.
Be sure to go around to the back of the house to see
how the window frame projects from the house wall.
All the windows had that look originally, as well as
“ears” at the sill section as this frame does. You can
clearly see the shim of wood added to make the new
sash fit, showing clearly that the original top
sash was larger then the lower one.
-Patty Frye
*Special thanks to Linda Rhynard, who as former
Board President authorized me to undertake the
current restoration project.
Patty Frye is a long time volunteer, member, and
(as of March 06) Board Member. - L. Lake
