Living with antiques: the Crane and the Ware houses united

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 1999 by Roderic H. Blackburn

If rivers are the arteries of continents, it was the connecticut River that brought European life to the interior of New England. It was explored by the Dutchman Adrian Block in 1614, and its fertile lands were first settled by Walloons, who arrived in 1624 at what became Fort Good Hope, later Hartford. The Dutch bought land from the Indians, but in short order their claim came into dispute with the arrival, beginning in 1633, of English and New England settlers in such numbers that the valley became theirs, acknowledged so by a treaty with New Netherland in 1650. The English settlers, isolated from the Dutch by treaty and from other New Englanders on the eastern coast by wilderness, evolved their own culture, today most readily apparent in the houses and furnishings of their first century. The house that is the subject of this article is made up of two such early houses - a large one built in the early eighteenth century by the prosperous Crane family in Durham, Connecticut, and the more modest farmhouse built about 1745 by the Ware family in New Braintree, Massachusetts. They were brought together and reerected in the hill country of western Connecticut by an extraordinary pair of collectors, Linda Dano and Frank Attardi.

Many of the English settlers in the region were originally from East Anglia and shared a social structure based on rank and wealth. While all received land, those of rank - the gentry - averaged three times as much land as yeoman farmers.(1) As time went on, their large tracts of land, which were passed down through families, increased in value, particularly as the population grew. Prosperity came through commercial agriculture, with the valley becoming the breadbasket of New England, first exporting a wide range of crops and, later, cattle.(2) Wealth begat wealth, and economic wealth translated into power of other sorts too. Early on, the gentry consolidated its hold on the positions of power within the militia, courts, government, economy, and the church. So powerful did some families become that they were sometimes referred to as the "River Gods."(3)

Yeoman families and those living further in the uplands away from the river tended to enjoy less prosperity, yet by the mid-eighteenth century many of them had also benefited from the region's bounty, increasing their holdings to two or three times that of their grandparents. One's position in society was, not surprisingly, reflected in the architecture and furnishings of one's house. Nearly all the early houses, large or small, were of frame construction with a center brick chimney and a small winding central stairway inside the front door. Farmers, especially in the upland and hill towns almost invariably lived in small houses, usually one-and-a-half stories high and one room deep, sometimes with a rear lean-to giving the house a saltbox form. From the earliest settlement, wealthy families generally built two-story houses that were one-room deep, usually with a lean-to kitchen across the back. Most of daily life, including sleeping, was played out on the first floor, with the upstairs rooms used for storage and as secondary bedrooms. After about mid-century the "medieval" gave way to the "baroque," or Georgian, style. Center chimneys gave way to end chimneys and central-hall plans. Plain front doors evolved into the stylish pedimented doorways, for which the region became renowned, and, in a related innovation, the front door was elevated to the status of an entrance for the few and the side door became the common entrance. One exterior feature of the old style that continued well past the introduction of the Georgian style in the mid-eighteenth century was the projecting, or overhanging, second floor.

Despite the continuation of the somewhat severe exterior, the interior often became surprisingly elaborate in decoration and furnishing. The common two-over-two plan included a parlor (usually on the north side) and a hall on the first floor and bedrooms upstairs. The hall was the center of domestic life, sometimes functioning as a kitchen but definitely serving as a place for food consumption and for socializing. In early inventories it is sometimes called the "dwelling room," "kitchen," or "out room," as distinct from the "inner room," or parlor, which was more private and formal. It too was a multipurpose room, containing a bed (often for the owner of the house or for special guests) and a table on which to dine, as well as the other finest furniture and decoration in the house, in effect providing a social "portrait" of the owners - how they wished the world to view them. The gentry had a particular desire to possess foreign artifacts. Whether from Boston, London, Canton, or elsewhere, these were unobtainable, even unknown, by lesser families and thus indicators of taste and culture. The house and its furnishings were for these people far more than functional objects. Most of their cost represented added decorative value specifically intended to convey a message of social superiority, and even of God's favor. When the United States moved from an agrarian to an industrial economy after the Revolution, New Englanders were hard hit. Vast numbers of farming families, including the Cranes of Durham, moved westward into the newly opened fertile Indian lands of upper New York State. The baton of wealth and position passed into the hands of manufacturers, who built and furnished their houses in a purposely different style.