This project was assisted by a grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission, a division in the Department of State, State of New Jersey, a Fieldwork Grant from the Vernacular
Architecture Forum, and an in-kind match of services from the Center for Historic
This project happened by virtue of many friends and supporters. I wish to thank most of all
the farm owners—Jean Whitaker, David and Suzanne Hancock Culver, Donn G. Smith, C. Dale Smith, and Steven G. Smith—for their willingness to open their farmsteads to architectural and historical research, search for and scan historical family photos, share
memories, answer endless questions, and to host busloads of North Americans on May 8, 2014 who were anxious to explore the Salem County landscape. They are heroes.
Funding for this kind of work is scarce, but the New Jersey Historical Commission has been a stalwart supporter of my vernacular landscape research. I am grateful for this fourth grant.
I thank my colleagues in the Vernacular Architecture Forum for the matching fieldwork grant, which made this volume of fieldwork possible. I am also grateful for the willingness of
the University of Delaware’s Center for Historic Architecture and Design to contract with me for fieldwork services and for their generous contribution of matching in-kind services to make the budget work.
Much appreciation goes to Andrew Coldren, the curator/director of the Salem County
Historical Society, Margaret Matthews, Alloway Township Historian, and Janet Foster, chair of the 2014 VAF Conference Steering Committee, for their letters of support for this project.
I thank Stephanie Long Fazen and Beverly Carr Bradway for their willingness to serve as fieldwork trainees in exchange for a paltry stipend. Their enthusiasm and success in learning
the art and craft of making field notes encourages me. I also extend heartfelt thanks to the kind volunteers who helped me measure buildings: David Culver, Suzanne Culver, Steven G. Smith, Maria Cerda-Moreno and Noel Kemm. Thanks also go to Rich Guido and Sue
Dolbow at the Salem County Historical Society library for their cheerful research assistance. Finally, I want to extend special thanks to my friend and colleague Maria Cerda-Moreno for
her considerable volunteer drafting assistance for some of the building views, saving me from my over-optimism for what one person can do.
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Appendix III. John & Rachel Watson Farm ........................................................................23
Survey Forms…………………………………………………………………………. III-1
Drawings…………………………………………………………………………….. III-42
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Table of Figures
Figure 1. Salem County map showing the townships and the locations of the three farms. .......... 6
Figure 2. Historic properties in the vicinity of the Wyatt and Wistar Farms. Square shapes
represent archaeological sites not named in the list. Shapefile source: NJDEP Bureau of GIS http://www.state.nj.us/dep/gis/ .................................................................................................... 8
Figure 3. Historic properties in the vicinity of the Watson Farm. Squares represent archaeological sites not named in the list. Shapefile source: NJDEP Bureau of GIS
Figure 4. 1849 map of lower Mannington showing locations of Wyatt and Wistar farms in
relation to the town of Salem. Source: A Map of the Counties of Salem and Gloucester, New Jersey from the Original Surveys by Alexander C. Stansbie, James Keily, and Samuel M Rea.
Phila: Smith & Wistar, 1849, from http://www.loc.gov/item/2012586902..................................10
Figure 5. 1849 map showing location of the Watson farm and Watson’s saw mill in relation to
the village of Alloway. Note the many mills and mill ponds. Source: A Map of the Counties of
Salem and Gloucester, New Jersey from the Original Surveys by Alexander C. Stansbie, James Keily, and Samuel M Rea. Phila: Smith & Wistar, 1849, from
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Introduction The purpose of this project was to begin a study of agriculture in Salem County by using its buildings as primary source data. The trigger for the study was the desire to offer a theme of
agriculture to the 2014 Annual Conference of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF), slated for southern New Jersey, May 7-11, 2014. VAF conferences emphasize tours for getting
participants into the field to examine first-hand the resources that illustrate regional landscapes.
The steering committee discovered that there was no research of farm complexes available to base a tour upon.
Salem County has been and still is a major agricultural area in New Jersey by virtue of its inner coastal plain geography, rich soils, early settlement, and proximity to the large Philadelphia
urban market. The rapid disappearance of farm buildings from the landscape is a local problem shared with the rest of the nation, and so the need to study the surviving examples for
preservation planning purposes and to inform our understanding of agricultural history is urgent.
Once essential for the housing of livestock, the storage animal feed, milking a dairy herd,
equipment storage, and vegetable and fruit operations , they have steadily fallen into disuse and
disrepair, falling down, burning down, or taken down for salvage or reuse elsewhere. The varieties of farm buildings—houses, barns, corn cribs, chicken coops, pig sties, wagon houses,
landscapes—cultivated fields, pastures, irrigation ditches, roads, meadows, wood lots—and their construction, uses, spatial relationships, and regional variations—will be unknown to the future if
they disappear before we record enough examples in situ. In other words, we will lose an irreplaceable primary data source for learning what characterizes these local types, and how they
associate with the context of agricultural history.
There have been statewide histories of agriculture written for New Jersey, by Hubert G. Schmidt
and Carl Raymond Woodward, for example, but none from the standpoint of architectural
evidence.1 In Pennsylvania however, Sally McMurry, a rural historian, has traced the character
and evolution of northern farm life in the nineteenth century by garnering evidence from the built
landscape of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and New England in a number of books. McMurry also coordinated “The Pennsylvania Agricultural History Project” organized by
Pennsylvania’s Bureau for Historic Preservation to support the evaluation of agricultural
properties for eligibility to the National Register of Historic P laces.2 Bernard L. Herman, J.
Ritchie Garrison, Rebecca Siders and others interpreted material life in Delaware, including
houses and landscape features, to understand cultural shifts in everyday life that took place
1 Carl Raymond Woodward, The Development of Agriculture in New Jersey, 1640-1880 a Monographic Study
in Agricultural History (New Brunswick, N.J.: New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, Rutgers
University, 1927); Hubert G. Schmidt, Agriculture in New Jersey: a Three-hundred-year History (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973); Robert Craig, NJ SHPO, personal communicat ion regarding
scarcity of agricultural studies based on architecture, August 15, 2012. 2 Sally Ann McMurry, Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth-century America: Vernacular Design and Social
Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Sally Ann McMurry, Transforming Rural Life: Dairying
Families and Agricultural Change, 1820-1885 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Sally Ann
McMurry, From Sugar Camps to Star Barns: Rural Life and Landscape in a Western Pennsylvania Community
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); The Pennsylvania Agricultural History Project
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during the federal era.3 Rebecca Sheppard’s recent dissertation on the agricultural landscape in
Delaware rested in part upon the evidence of the over 450 farms recorded or surveyed there by the Center for Historic Architecture and Design since 1985.
4 In Salem County, rural houses have
been documented to the neglect of the overall landscape of the farmstead, yet “numbers and types
of work buildings are strong indicators of the scale and direction of rural economy.” 5 Robert St.
George, in writing about New England barns in 1982, observed that scholars have neglected the
barn due to genealogical and antiquarian interpretive priorities that privilege the house, the difficulty of dating, and the tendency to forget that early families spent most of their time out-of-
doors and their daily and seasonal routines were closely linked to their domestic and farm
outbuildings.6
Despite the thirty years since then, New Jersey is still lacking in th is type of scholarship. A
search of VAF’s extensive online database of literature yielded only two sources related to farming in New Jersey.
7 The Historic American Building Survey (HABS) , a New Deal program,
began documenting the built landscape during the Great Depression. But an online search of agricultural buildings in the HABS collection turned up mostly houses, and the few complexes
that are documented fall in states other than New Jersey, such as Pennsylvania and Maryland.8
New Jersey’s eminent cultural geographer Peter O. Wacker touched upon New Jersey barn types (Wacker, 1971, 53-55), briefly citing the presence and general distribution of English barns, bank
barns, and Dutch barns, and connecting them to immigration patterns in colonial New Jersey.
There is significant scholarship on American barns as a property type, such as John Fitchen and
Gregory Huber’s important work on the American Dutch barn, which occurs in northern New
Jersey and New York. Folklorist Henry Glassie made several studies of barn types across the country. One problem is the lack of an overall New Jersey study. A second problem is a nostalgia
which celebrates the large hay and livestock barns which dominated the nineteenth century rural landscape to the exclusion of other types of farm outbuildings. A third problem is that these
studies do not develop linkages to the farm family, how the farmstead operated as a whole, and
their socio-economic contexts—all key to understanding their cultural significance.
Within the National Register of Historic Places, which links property types to historic contexts,
there are only fourteen Multiple Property Submissions (MPS) from twelve states that are farms or farmsteads: One each in Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, New
York, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, two each in Pennsylvania and Wyoming. In New Jersey
3 J. Ritchie Garrison, Bernard L. Herman, and Barbara McLean Ward, After Ratification: Material Life in
Delaware, 1789-1820 (Newark, DE: Museum Studies Program, University of Delaware, 1988). 4 Rebecca Jean Sheppard, “Making the farm pay: Persistence and adaptation in the evolution of Delaware’s
agricultural landscape, 1780-2005” (Diss. University of Delaware, 2009), Appendix B. 5 Bernard L. Herman, “Ordinary Mansions,” After Ratification, 61.
6 Robert Blair St. George, “The Stanley-Lake Barn in Topsfield, Massachusetts: Some Comment on
Agricultural Outbuild ings in Early New England,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, I (Annapolis:
Vernacular Architecture Forum, 1982). 7 http://www.vernaculararchitectureforum.org/resources/bibliography.html; Kimberly R. Sebold and Historic
American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, From Marsh to Farm: the Landscape
Transformation of Coastal New Jersey (Washington, D.C.: Historic American Build ings Survey/Historic
American Engineering Record, Nat ional Park Serv ice, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 1992); Herbert Richardson,
“Farm Plans and Build ing Types in Harrison Township, New Jersey,” Pioneer America Society Transactions 3
(1980): 88–121. 8 “Library of Congress, American Memory, Built in America.”
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/habs_haer/ Historic American Building Survey online database.
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there is only an MPS regarding outbuildings , Stone Houses and Outbuildings of Washington Township (Morris County) (ID#2267). Thomas C. Hubka’s book, Big, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings
of New England provides an inspiration for this study. It is not only an architectural analysis of a
regional type of agricultural building, but is also a cultural study. “Buildings are seen as an expression of their culture and can be interpreted to reveal insights about the people who made
them and the reasons they made them” (Hubka, 1984 , rev 2004, vii). He considered the old
question of how they appeared and concluded that they arose not from a climatic reason, but in response to nineteenth-century progressive agrarian reform ideas promoting efficiency in the face
of the decline in regional agriculture from western competition and the industrialization of New England (Hubka, xi-xii).
This project was approached as such a vernacular architecture study to begin to address the gap in New Jersey’s agricultural architectural history , especially in southern New Jersey. At the heart
of the method is detailed study of farmsteads in the form of measured drawings of the historic
buildings. The work serves to preserve local and statewide history in the form of records of farm buildings that have a high risk of perishing, associated research about their particular stories, and
how they fit into the statewide contexts of settlement, agriculture, and architecture. The drawings,
photos and state survey forms will provide data for historians, students, and resources for future research and public interpretation of local history.
Research Design
Objectives The project objectives were:
To analyze farmstead buildings: Dwelling forms and styles, outbuilding types, and their
changes over time in Salem County.
To make a graphical record of the buildings and farmsteads.
To uncover the human history of each farm by linking them with archival documents.
To provide a basis for continuing study and preservation planning.
To train local interested persons in the skill of measuring buildings and creating scaled, handwritten field notes.
Expected research materials The data sources will be the buildings themselves, deeds, wills, inventories, maps, genealogies,
local secondary histories, oral histories, New Jersey agricultural histories, and period sources on
agriculture.
Methodology
The study farmsteads were selected using the following criteria:
Variety in types of houses and outbuildings;
Historic integrity;
Geographic diversity;
Socio-economic diversity;
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Early age (to maximize the chance of finding the earliest types of outbuildings);
Accessibility to interiors as well as exteriors;
Practicality of accommodating two busloads of visitors.
Willingness of owners to participate in the VAF tour.
A VAF committee including Janet Sheridan, Janet Foster, Rebecca Sheppard visited four farms in Mannington Township selected by David Culver, and one in Alloway Township in August 29
and 30, 2012 in anticipation of the grant application. The Mannington farms were identified by David Culver as historic, contained two or more historic farm outbuildings, and had owners
amenable to such a study. The house at the Alloway farm had been a prior subject of study by
Janet Sheridan, so had the advantage of existing documentation of the house (Sheridan, 2007: 73-82).
The following farms were selected: 1. The Bartholomew Wyatt/John and Charlotte Wistar Farm, Mannington Township
The Wyatt and Wister farms have the added value of being socially related, the latter generationally following the former on the same ancestral land parcel. Both are associated with
the location of earliest English settlement in Salem County, elite Quakers, closed-plan domestic
architecture, and the context of meadow bank farming. The Watson farm provides a contrast to Wyatt and Wistar: it is farther inland, on high ground with no tidal meadows, was settled later
and by back-country Methodists, is associate with village life, and open-plan domestic
architecture.
Documentation tasks: 1. Cultural Resource Survey: Follow the Guidelines for Architectural Survey(NJHPO) for a
planning survey. Complete NJHPO CRS forms for the three farms including the houses
and the historic outbuildings. The forms include architectural description, setting description, historical background, significance, eligibility opinion, and photographs.
Modern (less than 50 years old) buildings were not surveyed.
2. Drawings: Measure the buildings to create field notes and make digital drawings of plans and sections with AutoCAD software following HABS standards. CHAD assists at the
Wyatt and Watson farms. Trainees assist at the Wistar farm.
3. Photography: Capture views using a Nikon D80 digital camera with a tripod. Edit for light quality using Lightroom 3.6 64-bit version.
Training:
1. Select two local persons for fieldwork training and assistance.
2. Train at the Wistar Farm. 3. Give a brief lecture on recording.
4. Learn concepts and skills while measuring in a three-person crew with J. Sheridan, taking
turns recording measurements on the board.
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Personnel
The following people carried out the particular tasks of this study:
Farm Selection: Janet Sheridan, project director and VAF tour coordinator, Janet W. Foster VAF conference coordinator, Rebecca Sheppard, associate director, CHAD, and
David Culver, Mannington Township historian.
Cultural Resource Survey and Photography: Janet L. Sheridan
Fieldwork for Drawings: Janet L. Sheridan, grant trainees Stephanie Long Fazen and
Beverly Carr Bradway, volunteers David and Suzanne Culver, Noel Kemm, Maria Cerda-
Moreno, and Steven G. Smith, and University of Delaware Center for Historic Architecture and Design personnel: Professor Rebecca Sheppard, Program Assistant Cate
Morrisey, and graduate students Sushmita Arjal, Hannah Blad, Melissa Blair, Virginia
Davidowski, Michael Emmons, Keisha Gonzalez, Jennifer Nichols, Alexandra Taratino, and Alex Till.
Drawings (AutoCAD drafting): Janet L. Sheridan, Maria Cerda-Moreno, and Alexander
Tarantino.
Training: Janet L. Sheridan
Expected Results Property types expected from the three preselected farms include dwellings from the colonial era
through the early Republic, and represent English post-medieval, Georgian, Federal and Greek Revival styles. The expected outbuildings are hay barns, dairy barns, corn cribs, and sheds.
Setting The Wyatt and Wistar farms are located in lower Mannington Township about three miles north
of Salem, the county seat and the town laid out by English Quaker colonial founder John
Fenwick in 1675. Both farms retain their rural setting, with the urbanization that crept north from Salem halted at the confluence of State Route 45 and County Route 540 a mile south of the
farms. The level landscape is characterized by scattered, large, brick and frame 18th
and 19th
century farmhouses and cultivated fields. Lying to the west is Mannington Meadow, a 6,000-acre inland tidal flat surrounding the Salem River, which flows south to Salem and the Delaware
River, forming the western border of Mannington Township. Route 540, or Pointers-Auburn Road, runs north between the farms and traverses the meadow and Mannington Creek, a tributary
of the Salem River, on a causeway that was once a private dam of the Mannington Meadow
Company. It continues to block tidal water flow such that a freshwater lake lies east of the causeway. Mannington Meadow is well-known for its importance to migratory and native birds,
such as bald eagles and black ducks, and is categorized an IBA (Important Birding Area), by the
National Audubon Society, and is classified a Natural Heritage Priority Macrosite by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Mannington Township has been very proactive
in preserving its farmland, though has no historic preservation ordinance to protect historic farm
buildings. The Wyatt and Wistar farms include parcels of preserved farmland.
The Watson Farm, commonly known as Triangle Farm, occupies a corner of the rural hamlet of Aldine in Alloway Township between headwaters of Alloway Creek and the Cohansey River.
Aldine lies at the intersection of Alloway-Aldine Road (County Route 611) and Daretown Road
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(County Route 635), and contains a small conurbation of houses and a Methodist Church built in
1868. Here there is a small concentration of 19th
century, three-bay, two story “stack houses” (one-over-one room, or chambered halls), including the Watson House, in addition to several
houses built the 1960s. The old mill village of Alloway lies to the west, and the market town and
former railroad depot of Elmer to the east. Daretown, a site of early Presbyterian and Baptist settlement and another railroad depot, to the north, and Friesburg, an ear ly German Lutheran
settlement of glassworks workers lies to the south. The Watson Farm touches a woodland surrounding Deep Run, a tributary of Alloway Creek, on the north, which is occupied by a Boy
Scout camp. The farm is surrounded by other farms and cropped fields.
Figure 1. S alem County map showing the townships and the locations of the three farms.
Wyatt and Wistar Farms
Watson Farm
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In terms of New Jersey or National Register properties, the following sites are in the vicinity of the Wyatt and Wistar Farms and appear on the map in Figure 2. Benjamin Wright House (ID#4757) 132 Halltow n Road COE: 12/17/2007 Benjamin & Mary Bassett House (ID#4755) 31 Halltow n Road Block B24, Lot 20 COE: 12/17/2007 Jacob Fox House (ID#4753) 55 Nimrod Road Block 38, Lot 10 COE: 12/17/2007 Joseph Bassett, Jr. House (ID#4754)
177 Pointers-Auburn Road Block 37, Lot 6 COE: 12/17/2007 Mannington Township Hall (ID#2900) NJ Route 45 / Salem-Woodstow n Road at Welchville-Alloway Road SHPO Opinion: 9/19/1995 Marshalltown Historic District (ID#5042) Roosevelt Avenue and Marshalltown Road COE: 11/19/2010 SR: 2/21/2013 [NR: 7/17/2013] Salem Motor Vehicle Inspection Station (ID#2576) 185 NJ Route 45 SHPO Opinion: 6/9/1998 Sarah Bassett Griscom House (ID#4756) 84 Nimrod Road Block 24, Lot 21 COE: 12/17/2007 William Smith House (ID#2437) NJ Route 45 and Bassett Road SR: 12/14/1993 NR: 2/24/1994 (NR Reference #: 94000008)
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Figure 2. Historic properties in the vicinity of the Wyatt and Wistar Farms. S quare shapes represent
archaeological sites not named in the list. Shapefile source: NJDEP Bureau of GIS
http://www.state.nj.us/dep/gis/
The following sites are in the vicinity of the Watson Farm and appear on the map in Figure 3. Dickinson House (ID#2428) Brickyard Road SR: 8/10/1973 NR: 2/20/1975 (NR Reference #: 75001156) Philip Fries House (ID#2429) Cohansey-Daretown Road SR: 8/10/1990 NR: 9/28/1990 (NR Reference #: 90001451) 26 Daretown - Alloway Road (ID#333)
26 Daretow n - Alloway Road SHPO Opinion: 8/28/1999
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Pittsgrove Presbyterian Church (ID#2452)
Daretow n Road At Allow ay-Daretown Road and Allow ay-Bridgeton Roads SR: 6/15/1973 NR: 9/19/1977 (NR Reference #: 77000904)
Figure 3. Historic properties in the vicinity of the Watson Farm. S quares represent archaeological sites
not named in the list. Shapefile source: NJDEP Bureau of GIS http://www.state.nj.us/dep/gis/
Statewide Contexts All three farms fall under the HPO historic statewide contexts of #7 Initial Colonial Settlement , #8 Early Industrialization, Urbanization & Agricultural Development, 1775-1860, and #10
Immigration and Agricultural, Industrial, Commercial & Urban Expansion, 1850-1920. They
also fall under the thematic historic contexts of Agriculture, Farms and Farmsteads, and Vernacular Architecture.
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Figure 5. 1849 map showing location of the Watson farm and Watson’s saw mill in relation to the village
of Alloway. Note the many mills and mill ponds. S ource: A Map of the Counties of Salem and
Gloucester, New Jersey from the Original Surveys by Alexander C. Stans bie, James Keily, and Samuel M
Rea. Phila: S mith & Wistar, 1849, from http://www.loc.gov/item/2012586902
Data Summary
Comparison of Buildings
DWELLINGS
The dwellings of the three farms represent a variety of forms, styles, materials, preferences, and periods of construction and renovation, which seem to relate to location, period of
settlement, level of wealth, and affinity group. Linkages can be made in all to farm life. Bartholomew Wyatt House
Deep Jersey Cottage , 1765
Full Georgian late Colonial, 1780s
The Wyatt house exemplifies a succession of architectural ideas common to Delaware Valley. One could say, using a variety of terms used to describe house forms and plans, that it was an
open-plan house converted to a closed-plan house, or a post-medieval plan to a Georgian plan, or
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The Wyatt house was like ly initially built by Richard and Sarah Wister, despite the common name of the house, circa 1765, and made over in the 1780s by John and Charlotte Wistar.
Initially it was a two-story, two-bay, double-pile frame house with a central stack of corner
fireplaces and a one-story kitchen wing, a massing termed “big house, little house,” or “cow-calf” (Hubka, 1984: 6; Hayden, 1992).
Such a two-room deep main section with no separate room for
a staircase follows the “one-third Georgian” plan described by Henry Glassie (1972: 36). Other names for a house of this configuration have been the “Deep East Jersey cottage” (Wacker:
1971:47) and simply, “double-cell plan” (Lanier and Herman, 1997: 19). The term “Deep Jersey
Cottage” might be appropriate for this house type , which appears to be fairly common in the rural countryside of southwestern New Jersey as well as in the north.
A one-third Georgian plan brings visitors from the exterior directly into a heated, occupied room (a front parlor), which is the definition of “open plan,” which runs counter to the Georgian
architectural idea of enforcing social separation by controlling access to spaces within the house (Lanier and Herman, 1997: 12; Galernter, 1999:73-75). The one-third Georgian also lacks the
symmetry in fenestration as well as floor plan.
The deep cottage of 1765 may have suited a tenant with no social pretensions before the
plantation was bequeathed by Richard Wistar to his son John. It is not likely that any Wistar lived
in it before John and Charlotte moved onto it in 1782. Absentee land ownership and tenancy on improved parcels prevailed in 18
th century New Jersey (Wacker, 1995: 92-93). Richard Wistar
lived on High Street in Philadelphia, though he frequented Salem County on glassworks business
in Alloways Creek Township, where he had established a farm and a mansion. So, no doubt his Mannington farm was tenanted, likely acquired in the first place with a view to passing it on to a
son. Even after John Wistar settled there, he placed tenants on two undivided portions of his estate (John Wistar’s will, 1815).
John Wistar arrived with the architectural sensibilities of a Philadelphian and the wealth and social station of a Wistar, so a full Georgian plan was in order. He and Charlotte were on the eve
of their new marriage and a new nation. They converted the deep cottage and its large, one-story
kitchen to a five-bay plan with fenestration to follow by raising the kitchen to two stories, inserting a central stair hall which accessed both sides of the house from a landing, and carving
out a parlor or dining room from the kitchen. The outcome was finely finished in restrained, colonial-style deep paneling typical of many early 18
th century Salem County Quaker dwellings ,
though the manner in which the center sta ir communicated with both wings was a bit
unconventional due to the retro-fit into the unequal masses of the two wings. Another sign of fitting the square peg was the imperfectly spaced front windows. A gesture to the dawning
Federal style , however, was the rounded wall between the kitchen and front room.
Caspar and Rebecca Wistar House
Full Georgian late Federal/Greek Revival, 1825
Caspar Wistar, John and Charlotte Wistar’s son, had the opportunity and the means to express the
full Georgian plan from scratch in brick using Federal and Greek Revival decorative ideas. Federal, or Adam, style is seen in the five-bay fenestration, tallness (from high ceilings) and
absence of string courses and water tables, segmentally-arched dormers, bridged end chimney
pairs, the Diocletian gable end window, and a rounded wall in the stair hall. Greek Revival finds expression in myriad woodwork profiles containing Grecian ovolos and stepped fasciae on the
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exterior and interior, and in the Tuscan-columned front porch. With four-over-four rooms
bisected with a generously proportioned central hall decorated with an impressive and delicate tiger maple staircase, it departed from a pure expression of Georgian plan only in an asymmetry
of plan, apparently driven by more practical concerns with space needs on the kitchen side.
Again with family pride and means, the Wistars executed the Georgian idea largely, and in brick,
a performance fitting for one named Caspar Wister, of an early Quaker landed family. It was not unlike the colonial pattern-brick houses of weighty Quakers which expressed their “cultural
authority” on the landscape. Special amenities like the many closets, including one for
featherbeds, illustrate household life. The large kitchen, former large fireplace and bake oven, deep cellar structure, and the rows of iron and wood hooks in the basement link the house with
the farm enterprises of growing food for the home and market.
John and Rachel Watson House
Stack House or Chambered Hall, 1790s
I-house, ca. 1840
The Watson House likely began as a 16x20 foot hewn-framed tenant house that was a chambered hall on a high basement native stone foundation. “Chambered hall” is a term for a regional
English post-medieval colonial period house having a bed chamber above the first floor room,
which was called a hall. Attached was a separately framed 16x20 foot one-story kitchen wing that may have been earthfast (sill-on-the-ground).
A possibly more familiar term for such a one-over-one room house is “stack house,” and is associated with early English settlement in rural tidewater areas of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware,
and New Jersey (Sebold and Leach, 1991: Appendix II). The three-bay symmetrical front elevation fenestration of the two sections is arranged window-door-window. Shed additions are
typical. In the case of Watson, a shed was placed on the west end of the kitchen wing, doubling
the kitchen space by sharing the cooking fireplace which they opened from the back.
Like the Wyatt house, the Watson house an open floor plan, but unlike the Wyatt house, it had a
one-room deep or single-pile plan. One hall with a room above, that was later divided in two. Like the Wyatt house and many others, the one-story kitchen was raised to two, matching the
roof of the chambered hall, becoming an I-house of sorts, two stories high, two rooms wide, and one-room deep.
The raising of the kitchen to two stories appears to be a common trend in 19th
century domestic expansions in southwestern New Jersey. In this case, it appears that the entire frame was removed
and rebuilt around the old chimney stack. In essence, it became two window-door-window stack
houses side-by-side, which did not communicate at the second floor until the early 20th
century.
Significantly, unlike both the Wyatt and Wistar houses, the Watson house never became a
Georgian plan and all three sections remain open each with its corner winder stair. Perhaps it was just too small to accomplish it without a major and costly enlargement, or perhaps the occupants
were happy with it and did not aspire to such pretensions. Its articulated posts and beams continue to recall the earliest of architectural ideas of colonial America.
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JANET L. SHERIDAN, CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HISTORIAN
14
BARNS
Type 1 (English Barn): timber-framed, gable-roofed in the long dimension, three structural bays, a central drive-through bay
Type 2 (Livestock Barn): two structural bays, no drive bay, two levels, animals on ground floor,
hay storage above
The Wyatt and Watson farms each had English barns. Both began as hewn, English three-bay threshing barns that were expanded in the late 19
th or early 20
th centuries for increased hay
storage and then into milking barns. The Watson barn is distinguished from the Wyatt Barn in its
straw shed addition, which was converted to the milking parlor. The Wyatt milking ell was a new addition apparently purpose-built for dairying.
The original threshing barns differ in size and symmetry. The Wyatt barn is larger than the Watson barn (40x28 feet versus 32x23 feet) , and one hay mow bay is wider than the other, while
the Watson barn has equally sized hay mows. Not only was the Wyatt barn larger, but it had an additional similarly sized barn to house animals. This is probably related to the extensive grazing
opportunity of the banked meadows in Mannington. At the Watson farm, an additional animal
barn 36x22 feet, smaller than at Wyatt, was added in the early 20th
century, probably to house the work animals displaced from the main barn when it was converted to a milking parlor.
The Wyatt barn and the Watson dairy barn contain the technological innovation of the hay track. At Wyatt is a wood track extending the full length of the combined and extended barns with its
surviving car or carrier. At Watson is a partial steel track. They show efforts made to make the
work of loading hay in the barn more efficient than pitching it from a wagon up to the mows by hand.
CRIB B ARN/WAGON HO USES
Timber-framed, wood sided, gable roofed in the short dimension, cribs at exterior side walls.
Type 1: one story with garret, two drive bays, central stair, cellar Type 2: one story with garret, one central drive bay, no cellar
Type 3: keystone-shaped crib with central drive bay, shed additions on both sides, no cellar
All three farms had some form of multi-purpose crib barn/wagon house , but no two were alike.
Wyatt and Watson were squarish in plan (34x30 feet and 21x 20 feet) and had plumb exterior walls. Wistar’s length was twice its width (41x20 feet) due to the sheds, but the crib alone was
also squarish (19x20 feet) with canted exterior walls, forming a keystone shape in section. The
cribs at Watson were a foot smaller in width than those at Wyatt and Wistar resulting in much less volume for storage. The larger capacities of Wyatt and Wistar speak to the greater need for
livestock feed, again, an advantage given by the pastureland in the banked meadows.
All had two cribs, one in each side wall, and all had drive bays parallel with the roof ridge and
double doors in the gable ends. Wistar and Watson had one central drive bay. Wyatt, a much
larger building, had two drive bays with a central staircase. Two (Wyatt and Wistar) were drive-through types, but Watson was apparently a drive-in type. Only Wistar had lateral sheds for
storing vehicles or housing animals. Only the Wyatt crib barn had a cellar.
Wyatt and Watson, but not Wistar, had second floors for storage. They might have served as
granaries, though there was no evidence of bins. There was separate granary in the Wistar
SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT NOVEMBER 25, 2014
JANET L. SHERIDAN, CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HISTORIAN
15
farmyard, so there was no need for grain storage in the crib barn. Wyatt had a secure smoked
meat storage room.
Framing took different forms as well. Though all used traditional, pinned mortise and tenon
joinery, Watson and Wistar were hewned timbers, while Wyatt was sash-sawn. Though Wyatt could be as early as any of them, the issue of sawing instead of hewing may have been a matter
of convenience or innovation.
Watson was an English box-frame. The Wistar keystone crib was a variation on box-framing
with its canted outside walls, but heavy hewn tie beams functioned to restrain the tops where sawn floor joists did so at Watson. Wyatt used a different structural logic—a variation on H-
bents, a Dutch-derived method. Wyatt’s H-bent beams, however, were discontinuous over a
center beam—in essence, two half-bents overlapping at the middle of the building.
THREE-SIDED SHEDS Type 1: Gable-roofed in the long dimension, footprint long compared to depth, constructed with
timber frame bents cantilevered at the front to support the roof plate, wood-sided.
All three farms had a one-story open-fronted shed for housing wheeled vehicles, whether for
carriages, horse-drawn field implements, or later, tractors. The extant Wyatt shed was appended
to the main barn in the 1990s. It is higher than the older type, and is not free-standing, though like the older ones, is open on one side.
The Watson and Wistar sheds shared rough construction, and much reworked and/or re-used framing, especially Watson. Both were roughly twice as long as deep, and roughly constructed
with bents, forming three or four bays or compartments. Watson had been extended from its original 30x 20 feet to 42 x 20 feet, but the Wistar shed may have been shortened from 20x 40
feet to 20x 34 feet upon being moved. Wistar had the best integrity of frame and wood siding,
and is probably older, having hewn members versus circular sawn. Watson had modern metal siding and the front roof was supported on helper posts instead of relying on the cantilevered roof
frame. Being open structures no doubt exposed their frames to the weather, and have required
such repairs as concrete post bottoms.
Survey Forms
See the Appendix for each farm.
Drawings
The drawings are formatted onto HABS standard 36" x 24" sheet sizes, and follow HABS guidelines for drafting and content as closely as possible. Reduced versions of the drawings are
found in the Appendices. Full size drawings will be archived at the Salem County Historical
Society, the Salem Community College Library, and Rutgers Library in New Brunswick. Electronic versions of the drawings will be available online for download at
www.sheridanpreservation.com, http://issuu.com/jlsheridan/docs, and
https://app.box.com/s/v5780zzcf819jce9kbah.
Wyatt Farm drawing set includes: 1. Basement P lan and First Floor Framing Plan, Dwelling;
2. First Floor P lan and Second Floor P lan, Dwelling;
SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT NOVEMBER 25, 2014
JANET L. SHERIDAN, CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HISTORIAN
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Gordon, Thomas, A Map of the State of New Jersey. Phila: H. S. Tanner, 1833. http://gallery.njpinebarrens.com/showphoto.php/photo/3788/title/thomas-gordons-
SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT NOVEMBER 25, 2014
JANET L. SHERIDAN, CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HISTORIAN
18
Cook, George H. Geology of New Jersey by the Authority of the Legislature (Newark: The Daily
Advertiser office, 1868;
Craig, H. Stanley, compiler. Genealogical Data: The Salem Tenth in West Jersey (Merchantville,
NJ:H. S. Craig, 1926).
Cushing, Thomas and Charles E. Sheppard, History of the Counties of Gloucester, Salem and Cumberland, New Jersey. Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, 1883; repr. Woodbury, NJ:
Gloucester County Historical Society, 1974.
Davids, Richard Wistar. The Wistar Family: A genealogy of the Descendants of Caspar Wistar,
Emigrant in 1717. Philadelphia, 1896.
Endersby, Greenwood and Larkin, Barn Preservation & Adaptation (Universe: 2003, Repr 2008);
Frandsen, J. H. and W. B. Nevens. “Dairy /Barn and Milk House Arrangement” Circular 6,
Agricultural Experimental Station, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska October, 1919.
Garrison, J. Ritchie. “Remaking the Barnyard: The Archaeology of Farm Outbuildings in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts, 1770-1870,” in De Cunzo, Lu Ann, and
Bernard L. Herman. Historical Archaeology and the Study of American Culture.
Winterthur, Del: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1996.
Glassie, Henry. “Eighteenth-Century Cultural Process in Delaware Valley Folk Building,”
Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 7 (1972), 36
“Guidelines for Completing National Register of Historic Places Forms, Part A: How to Complete the National Register Application Form.” U. S. Department of Interior,
National Park Service, 1997.
Hayden, Philip Aldrich. “The Cow and the Calf : Evolution of Farmhouses in H opewell Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, 1720-1820,” Master’s Thesis, University of
Delaware, 1992.
Herman, Bernard L. “Eighteenth-Century Quaker Houses in the Delaware Valley,” in Quaker
Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 188–211.
Hood, John. Index of Colonial and State Laws of New Jersey Between the Years 1663 and 1903
(Camden, NJ: Sinnickson Chew and Sons Co, 1905).
“How to Apply the National Register Criteria for Evaluation.” U. S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, 1991.
Huber, Gregory. “Wyatt-Wistar Three-Section One-Level Frame Barn,” unpublished comments submitted to author, July 2014.
SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT NOVEMBER 25, 2014
JANET L. SHERIDAN, CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HISTORIAN
19
Hubka, Thomas C. Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn : The Connected Farm Buildings
of New England (Hanover [N.H.]: University Press of New England, 1984), 6McAlester, Virginia and Lee. A Field Guide to American Houses. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Jones, Edson Salisbury. “The Lefevre and Pledger Tract,” Early Salem County, a Paper Read
Before the Salem County Historical Society. December 10. 1907 (Sunbeam Publishing, 1911, 6-8).
Lanier, Gabrielle M. and Bernard L. Herman. Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic : Looking at Buildings and Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997), 12.
Leaming, Aaron and Jacob Spicer. Grants, Concessions, and original Constitutions of the Province of New Jersey, etc. (Phila: W. Bradford, repr Honeyman & Co, 1881);
Mercer, Henry C. The Dating of Old Houses. Doylestown, Pa: Bucks County Historical Society,
Nelson, Lee H. “Nail Chronology as an Aid to Dating Old Buildings,” American Association for State and Local History Technical Leaflet 48, History News Vol 24, No 11., November
1968.
NJ Archive, New Jersey Colonial Conveyances.
Nylander, Jane C. Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760-1860 ( New
York, Knopf, Distributed by Random House, 1994);
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Salem Quarter: The Quakers of Salem Quarterly Meeting of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of
Friends in Southern New Jersey from 1675-1990. [N.J.?]: Salem Quarterly Meeting,
1991;
Salem County Cultural Resource Surveys, 1984, 2004, New Jersey Historic Preservation Office.
Salem County Historical Society: Marshalltown, Churches, Schools Files.
SalemCountyParcels.shp. GIS shape file of Salem County tax parcels, https://njgin.state.nj.us/NJ_NJGINExplorer/DataDownloads.jsp
Sebold, Kimberly R., and Sara Amy Leach. Historic Themes and Resources Within the New
Jersey Coastal Heritage Trail: Southern New Jersey and the Delaware Bay : Cape May,
Cumberland, and Salem Counties. Washington, DC: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, National Park Service, 1991
Sheridan, Janet L. “’Their House are Some Built of Timber’: The Colonia l Timber Frames of
Fenwick’s Colony, New Jersey.” Masters Thesis, University of Delaware, 2007.
SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT NOVEMBER 25, 2014
JANET L. SHERIDAN, CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HISTORIAN
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Thomas. Shourds, History and Genealogy of Fenwick’s Colony, New Jersey, (Bridgeton, N.J.:
G.F. Nixon, 1876);
Sickler, Joseph S. The History of Salem County, New Jersey; Being the Story of John Fenwick's
Colony, the Oldest English Speaking Settlement on the Delaware River. Salem, N.J .:
Sunbeam Publishing Company, 1937Splain, Shelby Weaver. Guidelines for Architectural Survey. Trenton: Historic Preservation Office , n. d.
Sobon, Jack A. Historic American Timber Joinery: A Graphic Guide . Timber Framers Guild, 2004. Edited by Kenneth Rower
Streeter, Donald. “The Historical Development of Hand-forged Iron Builders’ Hardware,” in H.
Ward Jandl, ed., The Technology of Historic American Buildings: Studies of the Materials, Craft Processes, and the Mechanization of Building Construction
(Washington, D. C.: APT, 1983), 1-34;
Vanneman, William B. “The Hancock Cannery.” Standard & Jerseyman, December 10, 1969. Salem County Historical Society.
Wistar Files (Salem County Historical Society)
Wyatt Files (Salem County Historical Society)
SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT NOVEMBER 25, 2014
JANET L. SHERIDAN, CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HISTORIAN
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Appendices
Appendix I. Bartholomew Wyatt Farm
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 1
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:1705-121-A&E
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Street Address: Street #: 120 Apartment #: (Low) (High) (Low) (High)
Prefix: Street Name: Harris Suffix: Type: Road
County(s): Salem Zip Code: 08079
Municipality(s): Mannington Township Block(s): 50
Local Place Name(s): Mannington Lot(s): 14, 14.01, 19
Ownership:: Private USGS Quad(s) Salem Description: The Wyatt farmstead in lower Mannington Township is a remnant of a working farm that includes a frame house, a crib barn, and a main barn. It is located on the south side of Mannington Creek adjacent to Mannington Meadow, and faces south on east-west Harris Road. The house displays design and workmanship from the second half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, and additions and historic restoration from the mid and late twentieth century. The barn consists of three main sections with later extensions beginning with two hewn barns from an early period of occupation, one of which was a three-bay English, the other, a cow barn. The third main section is a twentieth-century stabling or milking barn that was later used for vegetable sorting and packing. The other outbuilding is a drive-through corn crib, or crib barn/granary/wagon house, from the mid-nineteenth century. The surrounding land is still farmed. Registration and
Status Dates:
National Historic Landmark: SHPO Opinion:
National Register: Local Designation:
New Jersey Register: Other Designation:
Determination of Eligibility: Other Designation Date:
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 2
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:1705-121-A&E
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Photograph:
Location Map: Site Map:
Site
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 3
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:1705-121-A&E
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Bibliography/Sources: : Thomas Cushing and Charles E. Sheppard, History of the Counties of Gloucester,
Salem, and Cumberland New Jersey : with Biographical Sketches of Their Prominent Citizens (Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, 1883); Everts & Stewart., Combination Atlas Map of Salem & Gloucester Counties, New Jersey : Compiled, Drawn and Published from Personal Examinations and Surveys. (Philadelphia: Everts & Stewart, 1876); Thomas. Shourds, History and Genealogy of Fenwick ’s Colony, New Jersey, (Bridgeton, N.J.: G.F. Nixon, 1876); Salem County Deeds, Wills and Inventories; NJ Colonial Documents (Newspaper Extracts and Wills); 1765 Survey map of division of land of Bartholomew Wyatt to Richard Wistar (Salem County Historical Society) ; Suzanne Culver, Jean Whitaker, personal communications; Salem County tax maps and parcel data; Donald Streeter, “The Historical Development of Hand-forged Iron Builders’ Hardware,” in H. Ward Jandl, ed., The Technology of Historic American Buildings: Studies of the Materials, Craft Processes, and the Mechanization of
Building Construction (Washington, D. C.: APT, 1983), 1-34; Mercer, Henry C. The Dating of Old Houses. Doylestown, Pa: Bucks County Historical Society, 1923; Lee H. Nelson, “Nail Chronology as an Aid to Dating Old Buildings,” American Association for State and Local History Technical Leaflet 48, History News Vol 24, No 11., November 1968. Bernard L. Herman, “Eighteenth-Century Quaker Houses in the Delaware Valley,” in Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 188–211. Sobon, 2004; J. H. Frandsen and W. B. Nevens “Dairy /Barn and Milk
House Arrangement” Circular 6, Agricultural Experimental Station, University of Nebraska, L incoln, Nebraska October, 1919; R. L. Ardrey, American Agricultural Implements; a Review of Invention and Development in the Agricultural Implement Industry of the United States (Chicago: R. L. Ardrey, 1894), 100; Greg Huber, personal visit, April 14, 2014. John Hood, Index of Colonial and State Laws of New Jersey Between the Years 1663 and
1903 (Camden, NJ: Sinnickson Chew and Sons Co, 1905); Samuel Allinson, Acts of the General Assembly of the Province of New Jersey (Burlington: Isaac Collins, 1776); Bartholomew Wyatt’s Account Book (Salem County Historical Society MN70, 000.070.0240); Aaron Leaming and Jacob Spicer, Grants, Concessions, and original
Constitutions of the Province of New Jersey, etc. (Phila: W. Bradford, repr Honeyman & Co, 1881); New Jersey Colonial Conveyances, NJ Archive; Wyatt/Wistar Files (Salem County Historical Society); Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Salem Quarter: The Quakers of Salem Quarterly Meeting of
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Southern New Jersey from 1675-1990. [N.J.?]: Salem Quarterly Meeting, 1991; Nelson, NJ Colonial Documents XXII (First Ser) Marriages 1665-1800; Joan Berkey, “A Survey of the Early Heavy Timber Frame Buildings of Cumberland County, New Jersey,” (Cumberland
County Historical Society: 2011); Endersby, Greenwood and Larkin, Barn Preservation & Adaptation (Universe: 2003, Repr 2008); J. Ritchie Garrison, “Remaking the Barnyard: The Archaeology of Farm Outbuildings in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts, 1770-1870,” in De Cunzo, Lu Ann, and Bernard L. Herman. Historical
Archaeology and the Study of American Culture. Winterthur, Del: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1996. Greg Huber, “Wyatt-Wistar Three-Section One-Level Frame Barn,” unpublished comments submitted to author, July 2014. Additional Information:
More Research Needed? Yes No
INTENSIVE LEVEL USE ONLY
Attachments Included: Building Structure Object Bridge
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 4
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:1705-121-A&E
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Associated Archaeological Site/Deposit? Yes (Known or potential Sites – if yes, please describe briefly) There has been no formal investigation, but as the site of habitation and farming activity since the late eighteenth century, there is high potential for cultural deposits in the farmyard and wells , including postmolds from earthfast outbuildings . There are no known site disturbances other than the construction and removal of mostly small lightweight outbuildings on grade. A stone feature has been observed under the earth floor of the barn, and may yield information about the evolution of the farm complex. The association with Richard Wistar, the glassmaker, would be important for the interpretation of glass artifacts which may turn up. Being on what was originally Wyatt property may lead to information regarding slavery, since it is known that Bartholomew Wyatt Jr. kept slaves, and lived nearby.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 5
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:1705-121-A&E
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
THIS PAGE TO BE COMPLETED ONLY AT INTENSIVE LEVEL AND
ONLY IF PROPERTY IS A FARM COMPLEX
Historic Farm Name: Bartholomew Wyatt Farm
Period of
Agricultural Use: Bef 1765 To present Source 1765 survey, owners
Agriculture Type: Cattle ranching and farming; Vegetable and melon farming;
Remaining Historic Fabric Medium Acreage: 3
Farm Description: The farmstead sits on a tax parcel excised from its associated land of before 2006. The farmstead includes a two-story frame house and two, two-story agricultural outbuildings. All the buildings face south on the north side of Harris Road behind a broad lawn planted with a variety of trees and shrubs. The house stands on the west side of the lot which is lines with pine trees. Lying northerly behind the house, is the farmyard where once a garden was planted and a privy stood. The driveway passes along the east side of the house between it and the crib barn/wagon house. Behind the wagon house, lying north is the main barn standing in an ell formation which once enclosed a fenced barnyard for horses and cows. On the north side are cropped fields and tidal Mannington Meadow, which at one time was banked and provided lots for cultivation and grazing. The surrounding fields are rented out for vegetable production, but the farm outbuildings are no longer used for farming. The outbuilding closest to the road is a timber-frame drive-through crib barn/wagon house. In its basement, seed potatoes and possibly apples were stored. Behind it, to the north, is a two-story barn, amalgamated of out four connected buildings in laid out in two long ells. The barn grew from two separate, possibly eighteenth-century barns that shared an east-west axis, into one when the space between them was covered. It was subsequently extended to the west, and a one-story milking barn ell was attached to the south side on a north-south axis, probably in the early twentieth-century. An open machinery shed was built on the south side of the two-story barn after 2010. After 1947 and until ca. 1995, the milking barn and the west end of the two-story barn were re-purposed for vegetable sorting and packing. Non-extant buildings and site features included a small brick smoke house of the “ English Tidewater
Smokehouse” type ( Noble and Cleek, 147) and a frame early 20th century garage (removed early 1970s) which stood south of the crib barn, several migrant labor houses northeast of the main barn (removed late 1980s), chicken houses and two labor houses northwest of the house (houses later moved), a one-story open frame equipment shed that was attached to the west end of the main barn (removed 2010 after snow storm damage), a silo on the north side of the barn (not used after 1947) a corn crib on the north side of the main barn, a fenced animal barnyard on the south side of the main barn, a privy on the northeast corner of the house, and an apple orchard west of the house. The equipment shed housed tractors and trucks, and was open on the south side. According to historic photos, it appears to have been constructed as a gable-roofed box frame rather than the cantilevered style (see Wistar farm survey). Sometime after the 1950s, the west half was enclosed. The present owner grew up on this farm, and it was purchased by her grandpar ents in 1941. Her parents moved to the property in 1947 as tenants, buying it in 1951. They restored the house, which was in very deteriorated condition, in a way that was respectful of its historic fabric. It had been occupied by tenants
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 6
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:1705-121-A&E
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
operating a dairy prior to their occupation. After 1947 the farm produced vegetables including asparagus, tomatoes, potatoes, wheat, corn, and alfalfa for hay. The barn was repurposed as a sorting and packing house from where the produce was trucked to Philadelphia and Camden. The barn also served to stable horses, and a cow was kept for the family’s milk. They kept chickens and fattened pigs for market. It was a family operation
in which the five children helped in the packing house, and when older, operated farm machinery in the fields. In the 1960s, there were as many as thirty Puerto Rican migrant laborers working and living on the farm. Farming operations by the family ceased when the owner’s parents retired in 19xx. The fields are currently rented for cultivation by others. The land is under a permanent farmland protection easement to the New Jersey Department of environmental Protection.
View of Wyatt farmstead looking west.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 7
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:1705-121-A&E
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Wyatt Farm in the 1950s during the occupation of the Hancock family. Note the silo and labor houses to the right of
the barn, the fenced barnyard, and the garage to the left of the wagon house.
View looking north in the 1950s showing barn with the equipment shed (no longer standing) to the left.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 8
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:1705-121-A&E
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
View of garage and smokehouse looking east across the driveway. These buildings stood south of the wagon house.
The smokehouse was wrecked by the tree falling on it during a storm.
View of the east end of barn looking northeast in the 1950s. Note the horse stalls occupying the south side of the
barn, the top of the silo beyond the roof ridge, and the labor houses beyond.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 9
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Bartholomew Wyatt House
Historic Name: John and Charlotte Wistar House
Present Use : Residential Activity - Permanent
Historic Use: Residential Activity - Permanent
Construction Date: 1765-1790 Source: 1765 survey, woodwork, hardware
Alteration Date(s):
early 19th c. , 1940s-1980s Source: Woodwork, timber cuts, oral accounts
Designer: Unknown Physical Condition: Good
Builder: Richard or John Wistar Remaining Historic Fabric: High
Style: Colonial and Greek Revival
Form: Center Hall Stories: 2
Type: n/a Bays: 5
Roof Finish Materials: Asphalt shingle
Exterior Finish Materials Wood clapboard Exterior Description: This two-story five-bay timber-frame house is composed of three sections: (1) a two-bay, double-pile west side with central chimney, (2) a three-bay kitchen wing on the east side, also two rooms deep and with a central chimney, but shorter in depth and height, and (3) one-story, shed-roofed additions on the north side composed of a kitchen extension, a screened porch and a mud-room. The cladding of the house displays several types of siding including beaded wood weatherboard, plain wood weatherboard, and aluminum siding, all creamy yellow in color. Many of the windows have paneled wood shutters painted dark green hanging on iron pintels by strap hinges and held to the walls by rat -tail tiebacks. The panel design on the historic shutters matches that found on the interior doors (ovolo-molded frame edges and quirk-beaded panel edges). Most of the windows are historic in six-over-six, six-over-nine, and nine-over-nine sashes using 8x10 inch panes. They retain a good many panes of early glass. The window frames vary in being single-hung or double-hung, and there are four muntin styles dating from eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth -century periods. All the windows are fitted with triple-t rack storm windows. The eave is boxed all around, and the roof is clad with dark gray fiberglass three-tab shingles. The roof is drained with aluminum K-gutters and downspouts hanging from all roof edges. South Elevation: The main façade faces south a central door under a classical, pedimented porch constructed around 1980 which replaced a longer, shed-roofed porch. The door has four horizontal raised panels trimmed with applied round ogee moldings and is topped with a rectangular transom with a sunburst motif and swags around the side and upper edges. A second floor window is centered above the door. Flanking the central door on both sides are two asymmetrical bays of windows, regularly arranged on the west side and irregularly arranged on the east, where they are also spaced more widely. Only the second window from the east is not placed directly above a first floor window. The first floor windows have bull-nosed sills and a flat apron, but the second floor windows lack an apron. All have three-paneled shutters which appear to be original and have identical panel design as the interior doors and paneling. All first floor shutters hang from iron strap hinges on pintels , held back with rat-tail shutter dogs. Two of the latter sills appear to retain only the bull-nosed sill, but three have flat-faced sills which might be replacements. The window architraves have two different profiles: stepped ovolo on the west, and quirk-bead on the east, all with a sloped cap. In the upper east corner of the façade is a small section of beaded wood weatherboard which is the earliest type. Elsewhere is eight -and-one-half inch wide plain wood weatherboard, and the material below the second floor windows was replaced when the old porch was replace with the current one. The box cornice is trimmed at the soffit with a crown molding, and has a seam at the point where the two buildings meet.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 10
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
West Elevation: The west elevation is the gable end of the two-bay, double-pile house. The siding is all plain wood weatherboard. The six windows are regularly arranged in two bays and three levels. The first and second floor windows, nine-over-nine and six-over-nine with three-paneled paneled shutters respectively, are located above one another asymmetrically flanking the central chimney stack, which is exposed above the roof. The second floor shutters are reproduced and screwed to the wall. The first floor shutters appear original to the house and hang by iron strap hinges on pintels, held back by rat-tail shutter dogs. They share the ovolo-molded architraves and bull-nosed sills of the south elevation. Arranged symmetrically about the centerline of the gable at the third floor are two six-over-six windows without shutters and with flat quirk-beaded architraves. There are also two basement windows in the same bays as above. The foundation is parged stone and bulges out at the north end. The roof rake and eave returns are trimmed with a fascia and crown molding flush to the wall. The north corner is flashed with metal on top of the weatherboards. North Elevation: The north elevation is the most irregular in massing and fenestration, but clearly shows each section of the house. The west section is clad with aluminum siding and contains a slightly off-center bay containing a nine-over-nine and a six-over-nine window, both with shutters. The lower set of shutters matches the panel design of the south and west, but the upper shutters are ogee-molded panel shutters of a later vintage and do not hang on the pintels. On the east side of this bay in the second floor is a small, four-over-four window without shutters that lights a hallway. All three windows lack the molded architraves of the south and west elevations; instead they have flat, quirk-beaded archit raves like the west garret windows. The east section contains, at the east end, a one-story entry shed, built around 1980, clad with aluminum siding. It is lit with a six-over-six window with a wood storm window and single-panel wood shutters applied to the wall. West of the shed is a screened porch in front of the aluminum-clad north wall of the kitchen where a fourteen-over-fourteen double-hung window was installed in the 1950s. A glazed early twentieth-century door with nine lights and three horizontal panels opens into the stair hall. On top of the shed roof is a skylight above the kitchen. Above the shed roof is the north wall of the two-story section, clad in five and eight-and-one-half-inch reveal wood weatherboard. Three small windows of two different configurations are irregularly spaced. At the east end is a six-over-six window, followed by two four-over-four windows, all with flat quirk-beaded archit raves and no shutters. East Elevation: The east elevation is the end gable wall of the east section. It contains the kitchen chimney stack with exposed brick masonry at first floor level, a front parlor window, a basement bulkhead entrance, a garret window, a kitchen window, and a shed door. The wall is clad with four-and-one-half-inch reveal wood weatherboard. From ten courses above the brick masonry, the weatherboard was recently replaced after framing repairs. The first floor parlor window is nine-over-nine double-hung with reproduction panel shutters that are screwed to the wall. The archit rave is flat with a quirk -beaded edge. The kitchen window and wall extension, and mud room addition, were built between 1959 and 1967. Before 1959 there was a kitchen entrance where the window is in the kitchen addition, but the wall was set back under a small porch with a brick deck. Before 1947 there was a shed on the side of the house over the chimney wall which covered the well and pump, and used for outside coats, washing, etc. It was removed shortly thereafter. The roof rake is constructed like the west elevation. Interior Description: The interior is organized as a two-room deep house with a central stair passage flanked by a parlor on each side. The awkward arrangement of the central stair in relation to the adjacent spaces and the different massing and footprints of two separate buildings strongly suggests that the plan is an alteration from an earlier open-plan house with a kitchen wing. It clearly does not present as a house originally designed as a five-bay Georgian plan, but one that was altered to achieve that plan. The house contains woodwork and hardware of Colonial, Federal, Greek Revival periods, as well as salvaged late-twentieth century restoration items. The two distinct masses include a double-pile, two-bay house with back-to-back corner fireplaces and parlors, measuring 18' - 6" feet wide and 34' - 6" feet deep, and a three-bay house that includes a front parlor and rear kitchen,
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 11
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
measuring 27' - 8" wide and 24' - 9" deep. The frames of each house are independent but both are hewn timber frames of similar size and workmanship. Both houses contain flared or jowled corner posts. Throughout the house are hot-water radiators with sheet metal covers that date from the mid-twentieth century. Basement: A full basement in four sections underlies the entire house except for porches and the rear entry shed. The foundations are stone, with a layer of cementitious parging that dates from 1960s. Within the kitchen chimney relieving arch, the parge is inscribed with the names of the seven Hancock family members and the date “Nov 19, 1963.” Where the stone is exposed, native types including round cobbles and limonite are apparent. In the west house, a brick masonry partition divides the basement into two rooms (001 and 002) and carries a shallow wood beam over which the north-south first floor joists are lapped. All the first floor framing here is hewn oak, four to five inches wide and 7¾ inches deep. Four joists in the middle of room 001 are charred. Between each joist on the underside of the flooring above is a plaster finish on riven lath secured the floorboards above with wrought nails. Where the plaster is missing, gauging and plowing of the floorboards (a traditional carpentry practice that created a flush floor on top) is evident. Though the inter -joist spaces are plastered, the timbers are not finished in any way. The interior corners of the rooms on the west wall each contain a corbelling of several brick courses on a base of stone and a brick arch that supports the corner parlor fireplace above. Where the brick is exposed, it reveals a layer of whitewash. Room 002 contains extensive floor frame repairs with modern lumber done in the 1940s and 1950s: several joists were sistered, the hearth framing was replaced, and the west and possibly the north sills were replaced. The basement window fenestration echoes that of the first floor. There are two windows in the south wall, one in the west wall of each room (the one in the north room is missing and filled with brick) and one in the north exterior wall, all three-light awning windows of twentieth century making. In addition, there are empty masonry openings in the center wall and the east wall between rooms 002 and 004, but the parge hides any evidence of former window frames. The brick floor in room 001 is laid in an east-west running bond, but the floor in 002 was covered with a thickness of concrete in the mid-twentieth century. A doorway 4’-6” wide in the east wall of room 001 leads into the east house at room 003. Room 003 is the entire space under the original east house/kitchen wing. It contains the fireplace supports, a wood basement staircase under the main stair above, and exterior entrance on the east side, and the remains of secure storage room made of a vertical wood board partition with a wide picket door hung on wrought iron strap hinges. There are two front windows, one a twentieth -century three-light awning, and the other boarded over under the front porch. This fenestration may be a clue to a prior fenestration in the wall above (perhaps window-door-window), although it is not perfectly symmetrical in the wall. The original north foundation wall of the house was partially removed for extension of the full basement underneath the kitchen shed addition, but contains a remnant exterior window containing one timber window jamb with the cut -off ends of seven diamond-section bars still in the frame. A beaded edge decorates the edge of the frame jamb. This window is at the west end of the wall, but is not exactly opposite the corresponding window in the south wall, perhaps suggesting a shift in the southern window location. The stairway appears partially original with repairs due to rotting at the floor level. The handrails are beveled, rest on timber newels to which they are mortised and pinned, and are mortised into the beams above, as is a lower guard rail. The stringer, rails and and posts are whitewashed. Under the whitewash is a red painted finish. The present owner in 2014 non-destructively inserted new stair treads and handrails within the historic stair case. The secure room stands on the east side of the stair, and inside of it the running brick floor bond runs north-south, perpendicular to the bond on the south side of the partition. The partition boards range six to eighteen inches wide. The east house frame is independent from the west house frame. Its west sill does not rest on a foundation along its length, but bears upon the north and south foundation walls about three inches from the sill of the west house. The floor frame is divided into two sections, one with north -south hewn joists, and the stair hall frame of mill-sawn
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 12
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
joists. They are separated by a large, squarish, hewn transverse beam that supports the stair wall and the east -west mill-sawn joists under the stair hall. This beam joins the south sill over a window, an unlikely location for a large load-bearing beam, and may be evidence of a change in the floor framing. The hewn joists are very similar to those of the west house in cut, size and spacing, except there was no intermediate support at mid-span (they are not as long). There are more recent supplementary posts and beams shoring the joists. The short sawn joists are joined to the beam and the sill with a joint known as the “central tenon with soffit spur,” a traditional joint that has been observed in other local houses of this vintage and also in a first -period house in Greenwich, Cumberland County, NJ. [ Note: This joint is also found in both hewn barns comprising the main barn.] By contrast, the long hewn joists are joined to the north sill with a simple “butt -cog” joint. The issue of mill-sawing versus hewing may be explained by their difference in length because early sawmills could not cut very long pieces. So they could be contemporaneous versus an alteration. The beams and joists are whitewashed and the floor above is plastered on riven lath secured with cut nails, versus the wrought nails used in the west house, so the plastering here post-dates that of the west house. Also, the flooring undersides lack the gauging and ploughing treatment seen in the west house. This may mean that the entire floor and floor frame post -date the existence of the west house, and may have something to do with the Georgianization of the house, i f the layout of rooms above was changed. A patch in the floor under the kitchen stair may mean it was constructed after the floor was laid down pursuant the reorganization of the east house. Selective demolition of the parge in the southwest corner of Room 003 revealed that the north -south foundation wall between 001 and 003 passes through to the front wall, and the foundation wall in 003 butts into it. Therefore, the foundation under the kitchen wing was added to the west house. There is no evidence for a west foundation wall under the kitchen wing even though it has an independent frame with an unsupported west sill. Under the kitchen fireplace south cheek wall and above the brick foundation under the cheek wall is course of stone, which may indicate that the kitchen wing was originally built over a crawl space on a short stone foundation. The present full basement may have been an alteration made to provide a full basement, in which the entire floor framing was replaced as the kitchen fireplace and chimney masonry was preserved and underpinned with brick. Early kitchen wings observed by his author in this locality are commonly built over a crawl space or half -height cellar using sleepers, which are floor joists that are whole trees squared only on the top surface to receive a floor. Room 004 is the area under the kitchen shed addition. The foundation is parged stone and the much thinner 2¾ x 7½ joists are sash-sawn and joined to the old house sill with pinned, central tenons with housed soffit shoulders (per Hewitt, 280). [Note: this joint is also found in the first floor framing of the crib barn] A parged brick pier supporting the west side of the hall floor framing stands at the southwest corner abutting the other foundations. There is no white-washing in this section. First Floor: The front door opens into a central stair passage (103) with an open, paneled staircase. The staircase is unusually designed to access the two house sections from the landing, a consequence of presumed desire to physically and visually integrate two post-medieval, open-plan houses into one Georgian, closed-plan house. From the hall, the stair run to the west house shows off the balustrade in elevation, which required the entire width of the first-floor ceiling to be terminated at the stair opening. An anomaly of the altered construction is the plastered soffit with wood-beaded edge running along the west hallway wall which covers the transverse timber girt of the east house. The stair wall is characterized by ten quirk-beaded raised panels and ovolo-molded frames, a combination which according to Mercer, should not be found together. He associated the ovolo molding with pre-Revolution and the quirk-beaded panel with post-Revolution. Therefore, this may be transitional workmanship, say, during the Revolutionary War. The stair newel post and handrail balusters are stout, classically-ordered Doric columns with a heavy handrail that terminates in square, hipped caps at the posts. This design is similar to one is a pre-Revolutionary house in Mannington. The hall is flanked by two parlor doors on the west side and parlor door on the east side. The two front parlor doorways are trimmed with a classical fluted architrave with bulls-eye corner blocks, and the doors have four horizontal raised panels with applied Grecian ogee moldings . The lock stiles of these doors have a central pointed bead. The rear, west parlor door has four raised panels of the same design as
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 13
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
the stair wall. The walls and ceilings are plastered and are trimmed with a stepped wood baseboard with a Grecian ogee cap molding. The east wall beyond the staircase contains doors to the kitchen, a closet, and a bathroom which have raised, six-panel doors, all with butt hinges. At the end of the hall is a six-light, three-panel wood door with a 1920s glass knob. The wood floor boards run north-south and break at the point of the shed addition and appear to be original. The southwest parlor (101) is plastered and its original wood floors of four to six-inch wide tongue-and-groove blind-nailed boards run east-west. A corner fireplace with a Greek Revival-style, gray and white marble mantle is surrounded by a plastered wall. The mantle has fluted pilasters with bracket-shaped capitals supporting a mantle shelf edge-molded with a Grecian ovolo. Over the firebox is a fluted and incised frieze panel. The firebox is lined with a cast-iron fireback inscribed with “Cumberland Furnace,” and is divided into six panels of circular and elliptical sunburst designs divided by fluted columns. The hearth is a slab of marble cut into and framed by the wood floor. The only wall trim, like the hall, is a stepped baseboard, but the two front windows contain a wood under-panel raised and trimmed with applied Grecian ogee-moldings that matches the door panels. The three windows and hall door are surrounded with the same classical architraves as the hall. The northwest or back parlor (102) is a step back to the time of the stair. While the two front parlors experienced a Greek Revival renovation possibly around 1825, this rear parlor of the double-pile house remained in the early Federal or late Colonial period. The doors, fireplace wall paneling, architraves, baseboards and window sashes are consistently marked by the earlier designs, and the room is trimmed with a ledged chair rail, which is missing in the front rooms. The baseboard is partially embedded the plaster wall, and molded on top with an ovolo profile. The panel design of the fireplace wall matches that of the stair wall in the hall. There is a hierarchy of finish on the hall and closet doors. The hall side of the hall door, hung on wrought H-hinges, is designed as described above, but the parlor side has flat panels with an ogee-molded edge on the rails and stiles. The closet doors are like the latter but with no molding on the inside panel. The flooring is like that of the front parlor. The entire corner wall is paneled and crowned with a box cornice trimmed with a cyma recta crown molding, and a two-part sub-molding of ovolo and cavetto profiles. Framing the firebox is a three -level architrave with ovolo, ogee and quirk-bead moldings, and a flat cap with an astragal or beaded edge. The uncoated brick masonry fireplace shows evidence of having been plastered at one time. The unlined firebox is spanned by a brick jack arch. The running bond brick hearth, relaid in the 1950s along with floor framing repairs, is framed with mitered strips of flooring. It is likely that the original front parlor (101) fireplace wall was similarly designed. There are three nine-over-nine single-hung windows which have a wide, probably Colonial-period muntin unlike those of the other first floor parlors, except for one replaced lower sash. The flooring matches that of the front parlor (101). On the east wall is a bank of closets: one full-height, and one over/under cupboard whose doors are mounted with H-hinges. The east wall inside the closets is lined with horizontal beaded wood boards and the full height closet has peg boards on three walls. This wall bears many scars which may be evidence of an earlier period. The east front parlor (106) is decorated much like west front parlor (101), with the same Greek Revival woodwork. However, the three windows lack underpanels, the hall door lacks a lock , and the baseboard lacks a step, indicating a slightly less formal, or less public, space. The fireplace is flat against the east wall, and decorated with a wood, Greek Revival-style mantle flanked by Doric columns, a fluted frieze, and a firebox surround of flat, heavily veined black, gray and buff marble. The hearth is laid in running brick, and was relaid on repaired floor framing in the 1950s. The north wall between the parlor and kitchen arcs into the kitchen cooking fireplace cheek wall, in an apparent effort to maximize the area of the parlor. This construction could be an alteration of the original first floor configuration of the east wing. The flooring in this room is a double layer of pine. The underlayer as seen from the basement contrasts with the west parlors in that is shows no gauging and plowing, and the plaster lath that is applied to the underside is secured with cut nails versus wrought nails. The flooring may have
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 14
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
been replaced during the Georgianizing renovations. As a work space, it may have been quite worn and stained. The top layer of flooring is 2½-inch wide tongue and groove—probably twentieth-century. The windows in this room are all double-hung, in contrast to the single-hung windows on the west side. The kitchen (107) occupies the northeast corner of the house. The space was extended with a one-story shed addition in the mid to late-nineteenth century (according to the floor framing seen from the basement). An exterior door once occupied the east end of the shed, at which was a small porch. The shed was extended to match the east wall of the house, eliminating the porch, between 1959 and 1967. The dominating feature of the kitchen is the enormous walk-in cooking fireplace which has two bread ovens, covered up until 199x. The original opening was 11’-3” wide and 5’-4” to the one foot-deep timber lintel. Today the lintel is exposed and bears what looks like hatchet marks from a campaign of over-plastering, not normal hewing. The height was reduced with three courses of brick on a steel beam or plate bolted upward into the timber with large, square wrought bolts, suggesting an early-nineteenth-century change, possibly to improve the draft into the fireplace. A wood shim at both ends of the iron beam may be part of that change. The north cheek wall looks repaired with newer brick, but the east and south walls looks original. The ovens are bricked closed under their brick arches, and the exterior structures associated are missing. The earliest oven is at the north end, and at the south end is a newer oven which protrudes by one wythe of brick into the fireplace, and is built with slightly smaller brick. Below the oven is a wrought iron door, which may be a “Dutch oven.” The brick hearth is laid in a herringbone pattern. It was relaid at the time of re-opening the fireplace, and extended further into the room than formerly. From the south cheek wall, the south wall of the room arcs into the room between the kitchen and the parlor. A staircase ascends behind a door on the south wall under which is a closet, and a passage to the stair hall (105) and the basement stair is behind a door on the west wall. These four-panel doors have raised panels but no molded edges, and could be eighteenth-century doors suitable for a work space. The hall door is hung on butt hinges, and the stair and closet doors are hung on H-hinges. The room is plastered on lath, but the ceiling is drywall. The earlier portion of the kitchen, within the two-story house, has a horizontal beaded wood wainscot capped with a beaded chair rail, and doors are trimmed with a 1¼ inch-wide beaded architrave. In the portion of the kitchen under the shed roof, on the west side, is a bank of cabinets built with raised panel doors and beaded-edged casings. The door hinges are antique H-hinges, but some drawer pulls are twentieth-century reproductions. These cabinets were extant in the 1940s, so may be original to the nineteenth-century extension of the kitchen. Room 108 is an exterior entry shed on the north side of the kitchen built circa 1980 that contains two exterior doors and one into the kitchen. The walls are gypsum board and all the trim is simple flat boards. It has a twentieth-century wood, six-over-six, double-hung sash window on the north side. Cabinets flank the window above laundry machines. Second Floor: The open staircase ascends north to a landing from which steps ascend to the east and west into the two house sections. The hand rail and balustrade continue up the west stair in a straight run and terminate at the wall between the sections. The stair lands on the second floor of the west sec tion at the wall, which is nearly thirteen inches thick, encasing the end walls of both houses. The stair leading to the east section is a winder with no handrail, but a handrail balustrade lines the edge of the stair opening above the east stair wall. The west stair passage tees into a north-south hallway in the west house. At the north end of the hall is a small double-hung window, along the west side are two chambers, and the east wall has two closets and a stair to the garret. The walls are plaster on wood board walls. Inside the closets, beaded board is set horizontally against the east wall, and vertically at interior partitions. The partition walls consist of alternating boards, beaded on both edges or unbeaded. The closets contain peg boards and shelving which appear original. The doors to closets and chambers are all raised, four-panel with the same design as the first floor stair wall on the hall side, but no
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 15
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
moldings on closet or chamber side. They are hung with wrought H-hinges. There is a floor patch at the south end of the hall which is partly in the closet. Bed chambers (Rooms 201 and 202) are both intact from the late Colonial period, with paneled fireplace walls and doors, wrought HL hinges, ledged chair rails, beaded embedded baseboards, and plastered walls. Both floors are laid in seven to twelve-inch-wide boards, which are wider than those in the rooms below these. In the front chamber, there is evidence in the flooring for a removed partition that ran north to south from the hall wall to the front exterior wall, where the baseboard and chair rail abruptly stop. There are two patched mortises in the floor which may mark the location of a former door or partition, suggesting that there was a small, third room on the east side of room 201 which contained one of the two front windows now in this room. This change afforded room 201 more space and a closet, lacking in room 202. The closet board walls bear hand-plane marks and cut nails, so the work may date to as early as 1790 or as late as the early nineteenth-century. The beaded baseboard on the west interior wall of the closet is evidence that this wall is a remnant of the removed room partition. The drywall ceilings are part of the mid-twentieth century restoration. A Victorian-period door connects Room 201 with 205. The east stair hall (204) opens to a front chamber on the south (205), a modern bathroom on the east (207), a passage to the kitchen stair and another front chamber at the south wall (206). There was once a partition across room 204 with a door running north to south from the north wall to the back stair wall, removed in the mid-twentieth century, which means the east house contained three rooms. A patched mortise in the floor could mark a former door post. The board-and-batten door to the kitchen stair is a Victorian alteration that created access between room 206 and the main stair. It was an awkward construction, with an angled tread set atop the winder treads that led to room 206, which was originally socially isolated from the rest of the second floor rooms. Bed chamber 205 is situated mostly above the first floor stair hall in the middle of the house. This is the only room in the house with articulated framing. A flared, beaded cased post is exposed in the south west corner which the Victorian door frame from room 201 just clears. Here, a two-inch difference in the floor elevations between the two houses is revealed. In the northwest corner of the room is a beaded cased up-brace that rises from a boxed-out portion of plastered wall, likely hiding a corner post for this room. These framing elements are part of the west end of the frame of the east house where it stands adjacent to the west house. From this room running to the north , in the stair hall, this end wall frame is encased behind a plaster finish where it was not as critical to maximize room space. It stands on the boxed girt visible from the first floor hall. Room 205 has ledged chair rail all around which is exactly like the one found in rooms 101 and 102, but dif ferent from the more elaborate profile in rooms 201 and 202. The baseboard is capped with a bead like the other second floor rooms. The south wall contains two windows which are not arranged evenly in the wall, and do not share the more balanced arrangement or size of the windows on the north wall of the second floor, opposite. The lack of perfect symmetry on the south elevation may be explained by the desire to fit two windows in this room. Oddly, co-existing with the late Colonial beaded baseboard, chair rail, hall door and architrave is Greek Revival architraves with bulls-eyes around the windows, but of a different design from those in the first floor rooms. The hall door is even different from the other late Colonial doors described to this point, in that its molded edges are post-Revolutionary a la Mercer (quirk-beaded panel edge plus ogee molded frames). A louvered transom above the door is also a unique trait not found elsewhere in the house. This room, alone among the second floor rooms, appears to have been upgraded possibly at the same time as rooms 101, 103, and 106. Bed chamber 206 was apparently used by servants, as it was originally physically isolated from the rest from the other rooms on this floor (the doorway to the stair hall was cut in later). It communicated only with the kitchen and unfinished garret above with winder stairs. The room is trimmed with plainer, beaded board and the garret stair door has four raised panels (one is a repair) with no moldings and a wooden li ft latch. A beaded-board closet with board-and-batten door was built under the garret stair in the late twentieth century. A beaded baseboard runs
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 16
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
around the room, but there is no chair rail. A diminutive fireplace with a running brick hearth but no mantle or trim occupies the east wall. There is no modern heating fixture in this room. The house framing is exposed within the garret staircase. A guttered post flared in the plane of the end wall carries the east tie beam and south wall plate, all hewn and pinned. The wall is plastered between post and studs, apparently attached to the braces. The purpose of guttering a post was to allow the plastering to rest on top of the L-shaped surface, hiding the post. The gutter was not utilized in that way in this case. The opposing south post in room 206 protrudes from the plastered wall, implying that it is not so guttered as this one. The bathroom (207) dates from the mid-twentieth century renovations. It and a portion of the hall apparently comprised a chamber behind the former partition noted above. A closet on the east wall above the kitchen fireplace is lined with unbeaded vertical wood boards and has a late Colonial four -panel door hung on H-hinges and furnished with a small brass knob. The closet may remain from the former chamber. Garret: Room 301 is a finished living space over the west house. The winder stair from the second floor hall ascends southward and passes under a purlin resting on a flared post. The post contains a robbed mortise with an extant pin which once held a brace which would have blocked the staircase. This implies that the stair may have been built sometime after original construction. The post, purlin, and underlying tie beam protruding from the plastered wall in the stair case are adzed smooth and chamfered with tapered stops, indicating an effort to dress up a living space. The plastered chimney occupies the center of the west wall and is flanked by six -over-six wood double-hung sashes with the same wide muntin and ovolo architraves found in the late colonial period parlors. In the east gable wall is a more recent window. The hewn purlin-on-post frames support the roof about mid-span of the rafters on both sides of the room and provided an opportunity to create plastered knee walls. In each knee wall is a short door with four raised panels without molded edges. Their architraves consist of a flat board capped with an ovolo embedded in the plaster. These unusually weathered doors hang on reproduction H-hinges. On the other side of the knee walls, the space is floored and the end wall studs are 3x3.5 inch oak secured with wrought nails (evidence for a pre-1790 construction date). The oak rafters are sash sawn except the end rafters which are hewn. They are three inches wide, and taper from six inches to four from plate to ridge, and join there with pinned mortise and tenon joints. The carpenter’s marriage marks are scratched across the entire depth of the rafter. The rafters rest upon a three-inch wide timber false plate. The drywall ceiling hangs on modern lumber ties spanning the rafters, except that two original board ties survive at the ceiling hatch opening, which is a curb built of boards assembled with nails that are hand-headed, implying a construction date of before 1800. The ceiling was replaced, along with all but these two ties and the hatch curb, in the 1940s. The two east rafters are charred. Room 302 is an unfinished space except for flooring: nine to thirteen-inch tongued or grooved pine boards. There is no gable end wall structure at the west end of the east house, more evidence that the east house was raised to meet the west house. The east gable end of the west house is the only wall. Against the west house are unpainted, beaded, mill sawn and shiplapped weatherboards ranging from five to eleven inches to the weather, secured with wrought nails (evidence for a pre-Revolution construction date). This wall was an exterior wall at one time, but the absence of any significant weathering indicates that it was not exposed for long. In the floor at the door to room 301 is an outline of a former closet that was accessed from room 301. Rafters above it and adjacent siding are charred, and the siding in the vicinity of the closet is replaced (with wire nails) with the same type, but is painted white and weathered. The occupant of the house reported that this was a smoked meat storage closet that burned due to a lightning strike between 1941 and 1947. The siding was apparently patched with material taken from elsewhere on the house.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 17
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
The rafters are shimmed increasingly from east to west to get the roofs in the same plane. This is evidence that the east house was raised to match the west house. Also, the rafter marriage marks are in a different style than those of the west house (one-inch chisel marks), more evidence that they were made at a different time. There are no hewn rafters as in the west house. The rafters rest on board false plates. Setting: The house and associated outbuildings are situated on a neck of upland overlooking the tidal estuary of Mannington Meadow to the north and facing south on Harris Road. The farmstead is surrounded by cultivat ed fields that extend east to Pointers-Auburn Road, south to Salem-Woodstown Road, and to Mannington Meadow on the north and west. On the west are two other houses on Harris Road: a twentieth century ranch house and a nineteenth-century, Greek Revival-period frame house. To the east stands the Casper and Rebecca Wistar House, which has been socially tied to this property through the Wistars, and more recently, through the Hancocks.
West and south elevations.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 18
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
South and east elevations.
South elevation.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 19
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Front door and portico, south elevation.
East elevation showing kitchen fireplace wall.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 20
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
North elevation.
North and west elevations.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 21
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Barn
Historic Name: Barn
Present Use : No activity
Historic Use: Cattle ranching and farming, Vegetable and Melon Farming
Construction Date: Ca 1765-1790 Source: Similarities to house timber framing
Alteration Date(s): Early 20th c, 1940s Source: Construction, historic trends, oral history
Designer: Unknown Physical Condition:
Builder: Richard Wistar or John Wistar Remaining Historic Fabric: Medium
Style: None
Form: Stories: 1
Type: English/ Three-bay barn Bays: 6
Roof Finish Materials: Metal
Exterior Finish Materials Wood, flush; Wood, clapboard Exterior Description: The wood-framed, gable-roofed, and wood-sided barn consists of a main, one-story section 91 feet long and 26 feet wide, and a one-story dairying ell 60.5 feet long and 22.5 feet wide, sitting on a low foundation of poured concrete and concrete block. The roofs are clad with corrugated metal, and the ridges are fitted with lightning rods, some with glass ball insulators. The wall cladding is mainly vertical, red-painted ship-lapped boards with portions of horizontal wood clapboard. The main, older section lies on an east-west axis while the ell lies north-south. There are two shed-roofed additions on the south side of the main section: one built of concrete block, closed with an overhead door, and the other wood-framed, open on the south side. North Elevation: The north wall is a single plane pierced by two pairs of six -light wood sash and two doors. A double-leaf sliding barn door on a 20th century track occupies the third bay from the west. One of the sliding leafs contains a swinging passage door, called “door-in-door” (Noble and Cleek, 54). A Dutch passage door enters into the west bay, with a single lower portion on wrought iron strap hinges and a double-leaf upper portion on 20th century cast strap hinges. The cladding is vertical boards laid in one or two courses, except for one section of horizontal boards arranged in three sections of clapboards and one of flush boards. One of the clapboard sections appears to be a patch over a former hay mow door. The east bay has an extant upper hay mow door hung on wrought iron strap hinges. West Elevation: On the west is the two-story gable end of the main barn, the side wall of the one-story dairy ell, and a terminal, smaller gable-roofed section. The gable end of the main barn and the long wall of the ell are pierced by four regularly -spaced nine-light wood window sashes of two different sizes which lit the milking parlor. The diary ell contains three doors: a passage door at the north end, a large wood sliding door in the middle, and a roll-up aluminum garage door in the south end. The southernmost section, the pump house (possibly the original milk house), has one six-light sash. The main barn gable end is clad with an upper course of vertical board and batten, and a lower course of vertical wood boards. There is a ghost of a non-extant one-story gable-roofed equipment shed that was storm-damaged and removed in 2010. The gable roof overhangs the wall and is finished with a plain rake board. The west walls of the dairy ell and milk house have exposed rafter tails. South Elevation: On the south side of the main barn is an extension to the south built with concrete block walls and closed with an aluminum roll-up door, and an open equipment shed addition. The south wall contains two sliding barn doors, one of which is under the shed, and one nine-light sash adjacent to the dairy ell. The earth-
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 22
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
floored shed is closed with a board wall on its west side, and open on the south. The south wall of the pump house has a swinging passage door on 20th century hardware and a six-light sash window. The south side of the main dairy ell contains one, six-light window, but there is evidence for a large (animal-size) door formerly in this location. East Elevation: The east gable of the main barn is clad in two courses of vertical tongue and groove board. A square window opening in the peak holds a window sash fragment. The concrete block wall of the south addition appears to support the corner of the main barn. Its low-slope shed roof rises to just under the main roof eave. Two wood, double-hung sash with wood six-over six interior grids are regularly spaced in the block wall. The east wall of the dairy ell is fenestrated with seven regularly-spaced windows: five nine-light sash and two six-light sash, and a wide, Dutch passage door (animal size) hung on wrought iron strap hinges secured with bolts and square nuts (suggesting reuse of older hardware).
Interior Description: The main barn embeds two original hewn-frame barns of similar size (approximately 40x26 feet) that stand about ten feet apart, and were later connected. A seven-foot extension to the west of the threshing barn was built by moving the original west wall framing. Despite alterations and losses of framing members, the basic structural form of these barns is discernible through surviving timbers and robbed mortises. The west barn was a one-story three-bay English or threshing barn. The central drive-through bay once held double-leaf swinging barn doors evidenced by the surviving header beams and clear height of the bay. Flanking the central bay on the east was a ten-foot wide hay mow that had a passage door in the southeast corner, and on the west, a 19-foot bay that shows evidence of animal stalls: a post with robbed mortises that held a partition of thick planks and a harness hook made of a natural tree branch (Greg Huber, 2014). The east barn is structured differently, probably to house animals and fodder. It had two bays of equal size, and a longitudinal four-foot-wide aisle as evidenced by robbed mortises in the west girt where two longitudinal beams joined to it at the second floor level. There is evidence of the same arrangement in the east gable wall. Surviving central posts show the former existence of a north-south cross, or summer, beam which would have supported these longitudinal aisle beams. A missing door post in the west wall and a surviving door pintil provide evidence for an entry door wide enough for a large animal—almost four feet. There was likely a corresponding door in the east gable. Most bracing has been removed. The longitudinal beams may have been sacrificed to twentieth-century agricultural shifts in crop production, with the need to s tore large pieces of equipment, evidence by later sliding doors fitted into the side walls. The east half of this cow barn was converted to a secure shop, the lower central tie beam giving way to a two-story wall of concrete block that reached, and supports, the upper tie beam. The surviving corner and central posts in this barn are flared at the second level to support girts and cross -beams with a bearing shelf. These upper level beams would have supported poles on which hay and straw were stored and from which food and bedding would have been dropped down to the stalls. Both of these barns share cutting technology (hewed posts and beams, sash-sawn rafters, braces and studding), mortise and tenon joinery, timber sizes (8x10, 8x8, 7x8, 6x8), and the same technique of roof framing. The roof consists of sash-sawn common rafters birds-mouthed over a wall plate joined to the top of each wall post. Approximately half-way up each roof slope is a 5x5 hewn purlin plate (Sobon, 2004) tenoned into vertical end and intermediate posts bearing on the end and inner tie beams and pinned to the end rafters. Each longitudinal hewn purlin plate was braced at the posts and tied to the opposing purlin plate with half-dovetailed tie beams at third points. The original braces and tie beams are missing, but some braces were replaced, and cleats were attached to the rafters to restrain the purlin from moving inward. To prevent wall spreading, steel or iron tie rods have been added across the wall plates. The uppermost tie beams in both barns are “dropped” below the plate either approximately one or six feet, forming H-shaped bents. Notable are the two “raising holes” in the posts, signifying a distinctly “non-English” and probably Dutch-derived technique of raising the bents during construction (Greg Huber, 2014).
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 23
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
In the earth floor between the two barns a stone foundation is apparent a few inches under the surface where a groundhog burrowed under it. Investigation of this feature may yield information about the evolution of the barns and barnyard. The barn is fitted with a 4x4 wooden track that is suspended just below the ridge on iron bolts that hang on an iron staple embedded into the tops of the rafters. The track stops about five feet short of both gable ends. A heavy hook is attached to a cross tie, which formerly held a pulley for pulling the unloader along the track from the loading point (Louden, 52). Because the rail does not protrude from either end of the barn and there is pulley hardware over the drive bay, the hay was loaded from the drive bay. The hay carrier itself is extant on the track in the west section. The floor in the main barn between the concrete shop wall and the concrete floor slab in the west end is earthen. In the west two bays is a deep concrete slab that was laid in two pours eight inches thick. This slab served the purpose of vegetable sorting and packing, post-dating the dairying period because it lacks manure and feeding troughs and stanchions. In these west two bays is a second floor laid in center-beaded (early 20th century) tongue-and-groove boards on whitewashed joists running east-west over a center beam (a recycled barn post) supported by two jack posts and a 4x4. The beam and joists are supported on wood blocks resting on the north and west wall girts (to achieve adequate ceiling height), and by a beam supported by jacks posts on the east side. This floor construction appears to date from the addition of the dairy ell. The dairying ell is characterized by a concrete floor, open wall framing, tilt-in wood sashes with wood ventilator shields, a ceiling of plywood, and white finishes. The 20th century, circular-sawn lumber is secured with wire nails. The floor slab is continuous with that of the west end of the main barn, as noted above. The windows are a shielded ventilating type used in dairies (Frandsen and Nevens), though in the Wyatt barn, the shields are wood instead of galvanized steel. The design allows the single sash to tilt in at the top until it hits a wood stop that spans across the side shields, and the triangular side shields prevent drafts at the level of the animals in their milking stalls. The window sashes may be recycled older dwelling sashes, being built of 8x10 glass panes. A work bench is built into the southwest corner at a south window which formerly was a door. The south end of the dairy ell was partitioned off for a garage with a light stud wall clad with unfinished vertical wood boards. The southeast corner of the garage at the south end of diary ell was partitioned off for a pump room with a light stud wall, clad with horizontal rabbeted wood boards on the north side, and vertical center -beaded tongue and groove boards with a board and batten door hung on 20th century strap hinges on the west side. A modern pump is extant and pumps water from the well in the well room on its south side. It kept a trough in the barnyard full of water for horses 1940s through 1995. It has an earthen floor. The attached well house has a concrete floor, a wood board ceiling, and walls of vertical center-beaded tongue and groove boards. The walls and ceiling are finished in white, uniformly crazed paint. In the center of the floor is a well with a square concrete curb and stone cap. It was used most recently as a tack room, and was likely the milk house for the dairy operation. A “Myers Single Track Hay Loader” is hung on a track in the center of the ceiling, and may have functioned to haul water from the well before pumps and/or to suspend containers of milk in the well for cooling purposes before the days of cooling tanks. This type of hay loader was on the market in the first decade of the 20th century (Farm Implement News, January 4, 1906, 5)
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 24
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Setting: The farmstead is situated on a neck of upland overlooking the tidal estuary of Mannington Meadow to the north and facing south on Harris Road. The farmstead is surrounded by cultivated fields that extend east to Pointers-Auburn Road, south to Salem-Woodstown Road, and to Mannington Meadow on the north and west. The barn stands northeast of the house on the east side of the farmyard. Standing to the south is the crib barn/wagon house. Crop fields lay adjacent to the barn on the east and north, and slope downward northerly to Mannington Meadow.
North and west elevations.
Main barn contains historic threshing barn (foreground) and cow barn (background), connected and extended.
Dairying ell extends south (to the right).
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 25
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
West elevation, showing dairying ell and milk house south of main barn.
East and north elevations. East elevation of main barn is the east end of the cow barn.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 26
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
South elevation showing shed additions.
Dairying ell at south elevation of main barn.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 27
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Milk house at south end of dairying ell.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 28
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Crib Barn/Wagon house
Historic Name: Crib Barn/Wagon house
Present Use : Storage
Historic Use: Cattle ranching and farming, Vegetable and Melon Farming
Construction Date: 19th c Source: construction
Alteration Date(s): 1940s Source: owner
Designer: Unknown Physical Condition: Fair
Builder: Unknown Remaining Historic Fabric: High
Style:
Form: Stories: 2
Type: Bays: 2
Roof Finish Materials:
Exterior Finish Materials Exterior Description: The crib barn/wagon house is a story-and-a-half, three-bay, drive-through crib barn on a rectangular plan under a low-slope gable roof of wood shingles. There are two drive-through bays at different elevations: the higher one on a non-native stone foundation and full basement, and the lower one on grade. Earthen ramps rise to the upper bay, though somewhat eroded below the level of the floor. Each side wall contains a corn crib flanking the drive bays. The building is clad with red-painted horizontal boards of various vintages. South Elevation: The first floor fenestration consists of two large drive -through doors and a passage door between them which leads to the staircase going up to the loft. The upper drive bay is accessed by a double-leaf board-and-batten wood door hung on long wrought-iron strap hinges on pintels in the north and south gable end walls; it appears to be original. The lower drive bay has more recent sliding board-and-batten door hung on an overhead steel track that extends past the building on the east side. The passage door is board and batten hung on iron strap hinges on pintels and secured with an iron hasp. The west drive door and the passage door are capped with a small wood board drip molding. In the second floor are three six -over-six sliding wood sash symmetrically spaced. The walls are clad with wood clapboard laid in two different reveals, indicating areas of repair. The older material higher on the building has rabbeted edges and a 5-7 inch reveal. The roof rake is trimmed with a plain wood board. West Elevation: The west wall is the wall of the crib and is clad with three generations of wood boards that represent repairs. The upper nine courses are butted in two lengths that join in the center. The middle six boards are mitered on their edges and spaced about one inch apart for ventilation; they appear original. The next l ower eight courses, unlike those above, are continuous lengths of butted boards. At the bottom is one long board on 20th century steel strap hinges, secured with surface bolts, and the building baseboard. Below the eave are four square regularly spaced openings secured with wood covers and three wood turn latches. The rafter tails are exposed. North Elevation: The north elevation is like the south except there is a door to the east crib, and the central opening on the second floor is a door, not a window. This latter door appears to be an alteration.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 29
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Interior Description: The building is a braced timber frame made of sash-sawn oak joined with pinned mortise and tenon joints. The first floor framing is organized around a central 8x10-inch summer beam running east-west between the 8x7 sills, with 4x9-inch joists radiating north-south. The second floor joists measure 3 x 7 ½ inches and run east-west and join into sidewall 4x4 posts, forming H-bents at 20-22-inch intervals. The corresponding 4x4 posts at the interior crib wall tenon into the bottom of the upper joists. The center bent uses a larger, 6x6 post (possibly larger for nailing two ends of siding) and its corresponding joist is 6x5. The center wall posts are braced up and down to the center joist and upward to the wall plates. The joists from both side walls lap over a central 5x8 tie beam at the wall between drive bays, protruding 4-5 five inches past the beam. Two floor hatches are framed into the floors above and below the west drive bay. Cellar: The cellar is one room with an earth floor. The foundation stone appears to be Delaware gneiss. The west wall was largely replaced with concrete in the 1940s. There are two windows at grade in the east and west walls. The joist/summer beam joint is a “central tenon with housed soffit shoulder” (Hewitt). At the stair, the joists are 8x7 inches on both sides of the summer beam. Headers frame two floor hatches and the stair. The longitudinal beam under the inner crib wall was replaced with a beam built up with five 2x8s. Steel jack and wood posts are shoring up several failed or weak members. The stair is built of three oak plank (2 inches thick) stringers and plank treads. The bottom ends are reduced by the height of one step by dampness so the stair does not sit level. The stone wall next to the stair is recessed by five inc hes for the length of the stair: roughly six feet. The reason is not apparent, unless it is a filled-in former opening. First Floor, West Drive Bay: The first floor of the upper drive bay on the west side is floored with a double layer of wood boards running east-west, a lower layer 1¼ inch thick and the upper layer one inch thick. There are two floor hatches, one near the north end and the other near the south end for lowering produce into the cellar. The drive bay room is finished on the east side with sash-sawn horizontal wood boards measuring 12-16 inches wide secured with cut nails with irregular heads. Against this wall is a staircase enclosed with flights to the cellar and to the loft. A board and batten door opens into the cellar stair in the stair wall. On the west, the horizontal crib lath of 1x2 oak is original but covered with 1970s laminated wood paneling. There is a doorway into the crib in the crib wall. Inside, the floorboards run north south, and a removed crib door stands at the south end of the crib. It is made of vertical crib lath on braced battens, and has iron strap hinges. The exterior wall posts are all sistered on both sides. First Floor, East Drive Bay: The crib portion was rebuilt in the 1940s, including all new wall posts, six new interior crib wall posts, replacement siding, and replaced crib lath with pine. The original joists are connected to the new posts with board sisters on two sides. An original doorway into the crib from the drive bay was widened. The drive bay has a concrete floor. The west wall of the drive bay is clad with the same horizontal board (13-17 inches wide) found in the other drive bay and contains three passage doors: one that passes under the staircase, and a narrow one (20 and 22 inches wide) at both the north and south ends. The stone foundation and two screened basement windows are visible at grade. The window frames are pinned timber frames. Overhead, the joists are exposed and there are two square wooden hangers suspended from the joists. On both sides of the center joist are iron straps that pass through the wall. Loft: A wide central stair accesses the loft, which is continuous over the whole building. The stair opening is surrounded on the second floor with a skillfully made wood railing on six posts mortised and pinned into the floor beams that frame the opening. The corn cribs extend to the roof with lath on studs resting on the joists, but much of the lath is missing. The studs support a purlin plate under the rafters. The remains of a secure room stand in the northeast corner. It was enclosed on the west and south by a wood-board partition. A board-and-batten door in the west wall of this partition contains a wood box lock. The rafters within the partition contain an array of cut nails on regular spacing and may served to hang smoked meats (a smokehouse stood adjacent to this building). The flooring is one layer of 8-11 inch-wide tongued or grooved boards. The roof is common rafters of sash-sawn oak with mortised and pinned collar ties at every other rafter pair. The rafters are birds-mouthed at the interior
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 30
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
side of the plate. The window frames and sashes are a mix of single and double-hung types. Three muntin profiles correspond to those found in the house.
Setting: The farmstead is situated on a neck of upland overlooking the tidal estuary of Mannington Meadow to the north and facing south on Harris Road. The farmstead is surrounded by cultivated fields that extend east to Pointers-Auburn Road, south to Salem-Woodstown Road, and to Mannington Meadow on the north and west. The crib barn/wagon house stands on the east side of the driveway east of the house. Standing to the north is the barn. Crop fields lay adjacent to the crib barn/wagon house on the east, and slope downward northerly to Mannington Meadow.
West and south elevations
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 31
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
South and east elevations
East and north elevations
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 32
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
North and west elevations
Interior of west crib showing sawn timbers and H-bents
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 33
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
History: The land descends from Bartholomew Wyatt (1669-1726), a Quaker from Worcestershire, England, who arrived around 1690 and bought 850 acres between 1692 and 1708 at “Quiettitty,” the Indian place name for
this vicinity. Besides amassing a large tract of land, he was a merchant who kept a store (Account book, 1703) in the port town of Salem. He, with his wife Sarah, were active members of Salem Friends Meeting, contributing one of the largest sums of money for, as well as overseeing, the building of the second Meeting House in the town of Salem. Active in local civil affairs, Wyatt also served in the New Jersey colonial legis lature in 1707. The Wyatts built a “log house of considerable size” near Puddle Dock Creek overlooking Mannington Meadow. Their second house, built of brick, was located about a half-mile north on Mannington Creek, roughly a quarter -mile west of 120 Harris Road (Shourds). Both houses are no longer stand, but a barn associated with the second house may be extant as a ruin (1765 survey) nearby. Bartholomew II (1697-1770), heir to the 850 acres, would have occupied the brick house built by his father, which is described in his father’s will of 1726 as a chambered hall. He was instrumental in the management of the Mannington Meadow Company. His minute book begun in 1753 followed a state act “to enable the Owners of the
Meadows and Marshes adjoining to and on both sides of Manneton [sic] Creek, to keep out the Tide from overflowing them.” Over a two year period, Wyatt recorded expenses for the construction of a new dam and sluices over the creek: labor, boarding workers, getting and hauling timber, digging, an d of course, rum. They may have been expanding upon what was built subsequent to an identical law enacted in 1713/14. Indicative of sustained banked meadow development in Mannington, another act was passed in 1758 “to enable the Owners and Possessors of some Meadows, Marshes and Cripples in Manington [sic], in the County of Salem, to keep the Tides from overflowing the same.” (Allinson, 33-34, 197, 224). In 1765, Wyatt II sold a moiety of his 1200-acre estate totaling 641 acres to his daughter Sarah’s husband Richard Wistar “of Philadelphia…Brass Buttonmaker,” who is principally remembered as the glassmaker of Wistarburg. Richard Wistar was a Quaker, and his marriage to Sarah Wyatt in 1751 indicates the linkage of Richard to the Salem Meeting, to which he transferred his membership on that occasion (Salem Monthly Meeting records). A survey of the division survives to reveal a landscape of cleared land, woodland, a dam and tide bank on Mannington Creek with drained meadows upstream, and a vast wild marsh extending from the fast land west to Salem Creek. Two houses labeled “Wyatt’s House” and “Wistar’s House” are depicted, but “The Barn” located
at a right angle to Wyatt’s house is an architectural sign of Wyatt’s agricultural enterprise. In this location, brick field scatter has been observed and the ruin of a stone barn foundation stands in the orientation shown on the survey. Richard Wistar died in late 1781, leaving “the plantation and marsh” in Mannington to his son John (1759 -1815) who had previously relocated from Philadelphia to Upper Alloways Creek. John married Charlotte Newbold at the Chesterfield Meeting in Burlington County just before his father’s death on October 17, 1781 (Nelson, 672). They relocated to the Mannington plantation where they raised nine children. John Wistar immediately joined the Mannington Meadow Company and took his turn managing the waterworks, assessing the lots, and collecting the assessments (Wyatt’s Account book). He is credited by historians as a principal advocate for the establishment of the county almshouse in 1796, and oversaw construction of a new almshouse in 1804 (Cushing & Sheppard, 1882). Possible sequence of construction:
Build I (1765-1782): The house at 120 Harris Road falls within the boundary of Wistar’s parcel, but the survey depiction of “Richard Wistar’s house” does not fall on any standing structure of today (see Wistar Farm discussion of the frame Richard Wistar house that stood on Casper Wistar’s farmstead, likely moved from the west side o f the road). If the surveyor showed all dwellings extant at that time and did so accurately, then this house was built after 1765 by Richard Wistar. If not, it, or part of it, could have been built by Bartholomew Wyatt before 1765.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 34
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
After Richard Wistar purchased the 641 acres from Bartholomew Wyatt in 1765, he either added the double -pile west section to a pre-existing one-story house, or he built both sections at once: a double- pile, two-bay, open plan house with a large one-story kitchen wing, forming in either case a “cow-calf” or “big house-little house” form
of dwelling. Typically in this region, colonial double-pile houses with no separate stair hall had an enclosed stair to the second floor from one of the parlors and three rooms on the second floor, with a one-story kitchen wing with a winder stair or ladder next to the fireplace accessing a garret that housed a servant. This house probably had such a plan. During this period, however, Richard and Sarah Wistar were residents of Philadelphia, so the farm could have been built as an inheritance for one of their sons, and tenanted in the meantime. The possibility of a pre-1765 house is suggested by the fact that Bartholomew Wyatt boarded meadow bank laborers from 1753-1755. His journal does not say where, but it was probably separately nearby because his own house of two rooms (a chambered hall) would have been too small for that purpose (Bartholomew Wyatt’s will,
1726). The degree of labor-intensive construction on the banks in Mannington Meadow may have justified the construction of a boarding house with a large kitchen and cooking fireplace. If so, the existence of this kitchen wing in the form of a one-story house may extend as far back as the early 1750s, but as an outbuilding, the surveyors may have chosen not to show it on the survey. The physical evidence of a shallow stone foundation lying above the current full height brick foundation under the cooking fireplace supports the idea of an earlier phase for this wing in which it was built over a crawl space, possibly with unbarked sleeper (half-log) floor joists that predated the current floor framing. The unusually large size of the cooking fireplace—opening 11’-3” wide and 5’-4” high under a one-foot-square timber lintel with a bake oven—points to a large amount of food preparation for a large farming operation involving many people to feed. The tapering cheek walls, bread oven, and swinging crane are technological improvements that probably point to a second period, or after 1720, construction date. Before that date, fireboxes were deeper with square rear corners, lacked bread ovens, and were fitted with longitudinal wood lug poles for hanging pots. Regional examples of these include the Pledger House/Forkland plank house in Salem County, believe d to be late 17th c. and Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation, Delaware County, Pa., 1720 section). The Wyatt cooking fireplace does contain an iron lug bar installed crosswise at the south end, which may point to a transitional period of construction. It is not known what other outbuildings may have existed in this period, but it is likely that a brick smokehouse that stood south of the crib barn did. Build II (1782-1825): Richard Wistar died in late 1781, leaving “the plantation and marsh” in Mannington to his son John who had previously relocated from Philadelphia to Upper Alloways Creek (possibly to run the glassworks for his father). John married Charlotte Newbold of the Chesterfield Meeting in Burlington County just before his father’s death. They relocated to the Mannington plantation where they raised ten children. By 1793, he had joined the Mannington Meadow Company and took his turn managing the waterworks, assessing the lots, and collecting assessments John Wistar was described by local historians as “as a man of sterling integrity and uprightness of character, and very useful in his neighborhood,” and “one of nature’s noblemen. He had an intellectual mind which he inherited
from his mother’s family, and a large share of the milk of human kindness.” (Shourds) He, “in accordance with his feelings toward suffering humanity,” initiated advocacy for the establishment of the Salem County almshouse in 1796, and oversaw construction of a new building in 1804. Such sympathy for the oppressed is a Wistar family trait. His father and brother Casper were involved with penal reform in Philadelphia, his brother Thomas served on the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Indian Committee, and his nephew Thomas, Jr. promoted Native American rights as a federal Indian Commissioner. Richard Wistar manumitted slaves and mentioned none in his will, and John’s
brother Casper, the noted Philadelphia physician, was an abolitionist much involved with the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (Haverford College Library Special Collections (“Finding Aid for the Thomas Wistar and Family Papers”).
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 35
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
After the Revolution, the landscape in Salem County as elsewhere experienced extensive rebuilding. John Wistar, being from great wealth, would have been well-positioned after his father’s death in 1781, after the end of the war
in 1783, and after selling off the Wistarburgh glassworks lands, to infuse his plantation with new buildings and renovations. As an elite Philadelphian, he would have been well-aware of regional architectural, economic, and agricultural trends, and no doubt took his place in Salem County as a progressive farmer, likely to be on the cutting edge of change. He and Charlotte extensively remodeled the open-plan house and wing into a five bay, Georgian plan, two-room deep, with a unified, though imperfectly balanced, front elevation and central stair passage with paneled open staircase. The inscription of “1788” in the parge coating in a basement wall
remembered by the current owners may have marked this event. The kitchen wing was split into three rooms: a kitchen, a central stair hall, and an east front parlor. The rather awkward rounded partition wall at the kitchen fireplace jamb appears to be a solution to maximizing the area of the parlor in an Adamesque-appropriate way. A winder-stair that likely occupied the southwest corner of the wing next to the kitchen fireplace was removed to accommodate the new parlor and its fireplace, and a new service stair was built between the rooms which isolated the chamber and garret above the east parlor, housing servants. The flooring was probably replaced or re-laid given that the floor framing was, and also evidenced by the plastering under the floor which post-dates that of the west wing. In the rear west parlor, a closed parlor staircase may have been removed under the flight to the west garret. Room 201, a chamber, was enlarged by eliminating the small chamber on its east side, and a closet to that room was formed using the door from the small room to the hall (it is mounted backwards, with its panels facing into the closet). Another hall closet was created on the south end of the hall where the passage into the small room had been. The eighteenth-century finishes of the staircase, rear parlor and upstairs rooms are consistent with one another and compare well to the raised paneling, surface-mounted hardware and staircase details in the Holme House in Elsinboro, dated 1784. The kitchen fireplace compares well with that in the William and Mary Bacon House in Cumberland County, NJ, built in the third quarter 18th century (Berkey, 2011). Alterations in the cooking fireplace which include lowering the height from 5’ -4” to 4’-5” with brick masonry on an iron bar, and the addition of a second bread oven with an iron clean-out door, probably date to this period. The Wyatt Meadow Company was formed in 1818 to develop the marsh extending west to Salem Creek, a large undertaking. This expansion of banked meadow would have required a larger work force to feed. John Wistar probably built the two hewn barns upon commencing his owner-occupation of the plantation. It is unknown whether there were earlier outbuildings on the site, but such hewn barns with sash-sawn braces and studs could easily date from this period. The barns share with each other and with the house a particular joint whereby a horizontal beam heads into another, called a “central tenon with soffit spur.” It carried beams in both barns which would have support upper hay mows, and is also found in the first floor joists of the house stair hall. Thus, the same carpenter may have been responsible for both the Georgian changes in the floor framing of the house and the construction of the barns. The discovery of a three-bay English threshing barn is not surprising, but the cow barn is hardly discussed in the American barn typologies consulted. The “field barn” of Yorkshire, England, built remotely in a field to house grazing livestock on the first level and hay/straw above could be a precedent for this barn type. (Endersby, Greenwood and Larkin, 17). The fact that the flat terrain here precluded a two-level barn, such as a “bank barn,” or “Pennsylvania barn,” with threshing and hay storage above and stables for animals below, may have driven the
construction of two barns to accommodate a sizable population of livestock afforded by the access John Wistar had to the banked meadows. A cow barn would have protected cows fattening over the winter and also would have facilitated the production of manure mixed with straw for fertilizing the fields in the spring. The configuration of Wistar’s cow barn or cow house appears to be not like any found in the literature thus far. It is two bays wide and has a longitudinal animal runway four feet wide entered by gable end doors. It has or had hay loading doors in the upper level on both side walls in both bays. No evidence has been found of entry doors in the side walls,
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 36
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
though equipment doors were cut in later. After 1780 in southeastern Pennsylvania, which, as Salem County, was influenced by the Philadelphia market, agriculture shifted away from a diversified crop system to a diversified livestock -based system, with grass and livestock being the main products raised in response to growing urban markets (Agricultural Resources of Pennsylvania, 26). The appearance of these barns, together with the evidence of John Wistar’s 1815 inventory
listing a herd of horned cattle worth $948, or 15 percent of his total chattel assets , $535 in horses and carriages, $165 in sheep, $62 in swine, and $537 in stored hay and corn corroborates the agricultural trend of this period. Specialized hay barns and cow houses or were found in the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts, associated with the grain-fattening of cattle for market in the mid-late 18th century (Garrison, 368). They tended to be of a longer aspect ratio, and most were one-bay wide, versus Wistar’s two-by-two-bay version with virtually the same footprint as his threshing barn. However, in the late-18th and early 19th centuries, cow houses “were initially rare and were owned by elites” (Garrison, 383). This seems to have been true in southwestern New Jersey as well. Among the four surviving Salem County 1798 Federal Direct Tax “B” lists (Mannington’s is not among
them), one record of a “cow house” was found—in Lower Alloways Creek. It measured 27x20 feet, smaller than Wistar’s, but probably two bays deep, and stood in addition to a barn 44x20 feet. Similar to Wistar’s the two barns had a common short dimension and may have stood side by side like Wistar’s. In Pilesgrove, there were two cases of two barns on one property, one of which could have been a cow house: (1) 26x30 and 38x27, and (2) 30x40 and 30x67. In each case, one could surmise that the second listed, being longer than the other, would have been a cow house. These are also the same or nearly so in the short dimension. All of these examples suggest a similar pattern of second barn sizing and possibly placement in the barnyard, along with their scarcity in 1798. The asymmetry of the English threshing barn was noted as typical in 18th century Massachusetts: the larger bay and drive bay loft stored hay, and the smaller one stabled livestock with a hay loft above (Garrison, 364). Wistar’s threshing barn was similarly asymmetrical, but the evidence points to a reverse use: a stable was built into the larger side. However, Wistar’s taller posts, lack of shouldered post tops, and dropped tie beams point to either a cultural variation in structural logic present in the Delaware Valley (Dutch-influenced H-bents versus English box-frame) or a later evolution in construction. Dropped ties create H-bents, a Dutch-American structural logic. Also, the presence of lifting holes (for fitting ropes around a large peg) at the post tops is known as a Dutch practice, not an English one (Greg Huber, 2014). These features may indicate the influence of the Delaware Valley Dutch-American culture on local barn-building methods. The additional height may also be a response to a need for more hay and straw storage space. Dating these barns cannot rely on construction; the entire historical context of the farm and region must be considered due to the lack of local barn scholarship. At this point, no colonial-period barn in southwestern NJ is known to exist for comparative study. It is possible the crib barn was built in this period or in the next period, considering its sash-sawn frame and early cut nails (they appear to have very irregular, possible hand-formed heads, which could date as early as circa 1790). Its foundation of imported Delaware gneiss (blue rock), imported into Salem County as early as 1737, could date to before the Revolution or later. The foundation anomaly noted above could indicate a filled-in cellar entrance, which is not likely to have co-existed with the east drive bay. Thus, it is possible that the extant crib barn was preceded by a different type of structure and re-used as the crib barn foundation. Regardless, John Wistar would have been one of the first farmers to build one, given his economic status. For example, in 1798, in adjacent Pilesgrove, of 91 land parcels with a barn, only 7 of those also had a crib barn (1798 Federal Direct Tax List). In Upper Alloways Creek, of 84 barned properties, one has a “crib. ” In Lower Alloways Creek, however, none are noted among the 76 properties with barns. The crib barn afforded multiple purposes: corn crib, granary, fruit cellar, wagon house. The cribs stored corn which fed livestock, another sign of the agricultural trend. The cellar would have been a good place to store orchard crops. Grain could have been stored above in the spacious second-floor loft under the shallow-pitched
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 37
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
roof, though traces of bins have not been found. Also in the loft was a secure room for storing smoked meat. The drive bays would have protected farm wagons and other equipment. Crib barns have various local forms, many with one central bay and aisles or shed additions on the sides, often referred to as “wagon houses.” Others are
like this one, with a squarish plan, without sheds, and with cellars. Build III (1825-1887): John Wistar died in 1815. His will divided the contiguous upland 394-acre portion of this plantation into three parts for his children Caspar, John, and Catherine. John, Jr. received the family homestead (151 acres), Casper, a portion occupied by John Knight (125 acres), and Catherine, a portion occupied by Samuel Hilliard. Thus the original plantation was already divided and developed into three farms, two being occupied by tenants, one by the family. His son Clayton received a farm nearby which John had purchased of Zadock Street. According to the 1882 historians Cushing and Sheppard, Caspar “succeeded him [his father] on the old Wyatt
homestead.” (This seems to implicate Bartholomew Wyatt as the builder of John and Charlotte Wistar’s home farm at 120 Harris Road. But Wyatt’s house stood on land that was not John Wistar’s . This attribution cannot be taken as reliable evidence, given the other evidence laid out above.) It seems likely that after their father’s death,
Caspar and John (ages 20 and 11) continued to reside in the family dwelling, with their mother, who either occupied or rented out the recently built townhouse in Salem left to her. When John Wistar, Jr. attained his majority in 1825, he took possession of the homestead while his older brother Caspar undertook his own extravagant building project upon his own inherited farm (See Caspar Wistar Farmstead Survey Forms). John, Jr. remodeled the two front parlors and one upstairs bedroom in up-to-date, Federal wood work, replaced the parlor mantelpieces with classical, columned types (one in marble very similar to Casper’s) but left the rear parlor, kitchen and upstairs in their late 18th century state. In five years he sold it to Thomas S. Bacon and moved to Philadelphia with his wife Margaret. Apparently, farm li fe did not appeal to him; by 1850 he was living in South Kingston, Rhode Island as a bookkeeper (1850 Federal Census). It was probably during Bacon’s occupation that the kitchen was expanded to the north by nine feet with a one -story shed addition. This was a major alteration that would have required the insertion of a large bearing beam spanning under the north wall of the kitchen wing. The stair hall was extended to a new doorway in the shed north wall. The extant kitchen cabinets may pre-date this change, relocated along the west wall of the kitchen. There is also evidence that the cellar stair from the basement was changed to run straight to a cross passage between the kitchen and hall instead of winding up to the kitchen west wall. If not John Wistar, Jr., then it was Thomas S. Bacon who built the crib barn. Indicative of a growing livestock emphasis, its cribs stored corn to feed animals over the winter. Bacon also joined and expanded the threshing and cow barns, and added the hay track and carrier, suggesting the storage of more hay for expansion of livestock or a switch to dairying late in the period. This is verified by a cursory look at the 1850 agricultural census show Bacon with comparatively large milk cow (12) and sheep herds (20). His other livestock included 7 other cattle and 12 swine. Indeed, he had one of the larger values for animals slaughtered, at $359. The fact that the track runs the entire length of the barn means the barn was connected and extended by the 1870s when wood tracks for hay carrying were first marketed to ease the very laborious task of filling hay mows. By one nineteenth-century account, in the 1860s the harpoon fork was invented to aid the hoisting of hay into a barn. That was followed by grapple forks and tracks that were attached to the rafters allowing a car or carrier to move a pile of loose hay anywhere in the barn. The first sort of track was an iron rod (1869), followed in 1872 by a wood track of 2x4 scantling. In the early 1880s Ohio inventors first introduced tracks made of steel angles. By 1900 the market was dominated by steel track systems (Ardrey, 100). Local makers were also inventing such agricultural implements as farming increasingly mechanized through the nineteenth century. The open -fronted equipment shed that stood on the west side of the main barn may have appeared in this period as well to house implements such as horse-drawn plows, harrows, cultivators, seeders, threshers, mowers, harvesters, etc. Also, the years 1840-1860 were very profitable for potatoes, aided by the aggressive mining of marl and lime in
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 38
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
the township, which may explain the storage cellar under the crib barn (Cushing and Sheppard,338). Bacon also owned the land to the west and built a new frame house in 1840, so this farm may have been occupied by a tenant. He died before 1887. Build IV (1887-1941): A series of four farmers owned the farm after Bacon’s death, at times renting the farm to
someone else (George Acton, William S. Lawrence, Joseph B. Crispin, and Benjamin F. Nixon). In the house, the door between 201 and 205 was cut in. The old servants’ quarters (206) was reclaimed for the family by cutting a door from the upper stair hall into the back stair and adding a new stair tread at the top. This may have signaled the end of live-in servants or farm hands. The dairying ell was constructed on the south side of the barn according to guidance being published in state and federal agriculture pamphlets. Tilt-in wood windows with side shields were placed in the side walls at regular intervals in the new ell as well as in the old barn in the west end. They look like a home -made version of the metal ventilating windows seen in those pamphlets. The milk house is a somewhat rare wooden version and thus an early example of a milk house. Later on, they were built of concrete block. Because the dairying floor does not survive, there is no evidence of how the parlor was laid out or how the cows circulated in and out. Build V (1941-ca.1995): William and Ida Hancock (who lived on the adjacent 1825 Caspar Wistar farm) purchased this farm in 1941 for their son William, who married Jean Whitaker after World War II. They settled there as tenants in 1947, and purchased the farm in 1951. They initiated a period of vegetable or truck farming for the Camden and Philadelphia markets. The house and barns were in a run-down state, from which they were repaired, altered, and restored. Sometime between 1941 and 1947, the house was struck by lightning which set the roof ablaze. Charred rafters survive, but the closet between the two house sections, which stored smoked meat, was destroyed. Initial changes in the house included: replacement of some ceilings with drywall, repair of rotted first floor framing, and removal of a large shed on the east gable end. This shed, which enclosed the house well, was of unknown age, but likely it was a historic domestic work area where washing and other chores took place. In 1963, the basement of the house was freshly parged. In the 1970s and 1980s, the kitchen was expanded to the east where a small porch stood outside the kitchen door, the front shed roof porch was replaced with a smaller pedimented porch (designed by Jean Hancock and built by a Pennsville company), a new entry or mud shed was built to provide exterior access to the kitchen, a laundry, and a place for Mr. Hancock to conveniently come in during the work day to make phone calls, and a new screened porch on the north side of the kitchen. The crib barn was repaired, replacing in kind many framing members and crib slats on the east side, rebuilding the west foundation wall in concrete, and shoring up the drive floor. The barn was modified for vegetable farming. The threshing bay was enlarged for larger trucks to get inside with the vegetables from the fields by cutting away one of the drive bay posts. A sorting and packing area was made by filling the diary ell and west end of the main barn with a concrete slab and inserting two sliding doors on the west wall for trucking off the packed produce to Philadelphia and Camden markets. After 1947 the farm produced vegetables including tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, wheat, corn, and alfalfa for hay. The barn also served to stable horses (in the south side of the former cow barn), which were still used for draft purposes in the 1950s, and a cow was kept for the family’s milk. The barnyard south of the barn was enclosed with a post and rail fence. They kept chickens and fattened pigs for market. It was a family operation in which the five children helped in the packing house, and when older, operated farm machinery in the fields. Several worker houses stood on the north side of the barn. Migrant labor was bused to the farm by the owner In the 1960s, there were as many as thirty Puerto Rican migrant laborers working and living on the farm in labor
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 39
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
houses on the north side of the barn. The labor houses and chicken houses are gone. The smoke house was destroyed by a tree falling during a storm. Farming operations in these buildings ceased in the mid 1990s. The equipment shed on the west end of the barn was demolished after a storm wrecked it in 2010, and a new pole shed was added to the south side of the barn. The fields are currently rented for cultivation by others. The land is under a permanent farmland protection easement to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Significance: The Wyatt Farm has local significance under Criterion A (association with agriculture, meadow-bank farming, and early Quaker settlement), Criterion B (association with Richard Wistar and his son John Wistar), Criterion C (association with design and workmanship qualities of a Quaker-built eighteenth-century house, and subsequent trends of rebuilding in Georgian style, circa 1783-1815, English threshing barn, cow house, and crib barn) and Criterion D (known well locations, underground stone features, African American, labor)).
Eligibility for New Jersey and National Registers: Yes No
National Register Criteria: A B C D
Level of Significance Local State National
Justi fication of Eligibility/Ineligibility: Criterion A: This eighteenth-century farmstead contains integrity of location, setting, design, materials, workmanship, feeling and association in the farm house the two farm outbuildings which evidence patterns of agricultural li fe in Salem County. The farm buildings illustrate the farming culture based upon banked meadows that is specific to lowland tidal marsh areas of the state, particularly along the Delaware Bay. The prosperity of this access resulted in a life of both gentility as reflected in the house, and large-scale farming emphasizing grain and livestock. Alterations in the barn reflect the trends of agriculture over time from grain and livestock in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to dairying in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to vegetable growing in the late twentieth century. Criterion B: The property is associated with Richard Wistar, who is nationally significant for his glassworks, and his son John Wistar, the lone family member who settled in Salem County . It is likely that the house was initially built by Richard Wistar. Although Richard Wistar owned the Wistarburgh glassworks, where there was also a farm, it stands to reason that he would make improvements on this parcel to make it productive, and to leave a legacy to his descendants. The site of the glassworks is known, but not listed, and where on hta tsite His son John Wistar carried on a familial concern for the oppressed, and is especially noted as an advocate for the establishment of the Salem County Almshouse, serving as the overseer of construction and trustee for that institution. The extant form of the house (Georgian, 5-bay center-hall plan) was created by John Wistar, therefore retains high integrity of association with him. Criterion C: The house retains high integrity of location, design, setting, materials, and workmanship of a late colonial period house which exemplifies the architectural trend of transforming a post-medieval house to one displaying modern, Georgian ideas of house form. This timber frame house also offers a counterpoint to the long -held link between the venerated early Quaker families and patterned-brick houses. Its genteel architectural finishes connect with an elite Salem County Quaker family, the Wistars. John Wistar, son of Richard Wistar the glassmaker, migrated here from Philadelphia, and established himself as the progenitor of the Salem County line of Wistars. This farmstead provides examples of three types of farm outbuildings from the years of the early Republic. The barn retains the timber frames of two barn types, the English three-bay or threshing barn, and the very rare cow house (one not mentioned in the popular barn literature), and its alterations reflect the trends in
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 40
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: November 25, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
New Jersey agricultural markets and technology over time: livestock and grain, dairying and truck farming. The corn crib is a distinctive local form that may not be found in other regions. The collection retains setting, association and feeling, though several other outbuildings have been lost. Criterion D: Occupied since the eighteenth century and relatively undisturbed, the likelihood of the discovery of early deposits is high. A stone foundation found within the barn could lead to a better understanding of the configuration and construction of the barns and barnyard. The house well should contain potential for finding household wares, including Wistar glass objects, from the period of establishment of this farm. Being on land that was owned by Bartholomew Wyatt I and II, who owned slaves, and spatially close to their farmstead, excavations may yield material culture related to the presence of slaves or free blacks. Because of the large labor force working on meadow banking activities, the same is true of the labor class in general.
For Historic Districts Only:
Property Count: Key Contributing: Contributing: Non Contributing:
For Individual Properties Only:
List the completed attachments related to the property’s significance:
Building – House Building – Barn Building – Crib Barn/Wagon House
Narrative Boundary Description: Tax parcels Block 50 Lots 14, 14.01, and 19 comprise the contiguous historic farm that has been intact since 1887, which is a portion of the land that John and Margaret Wistar sold to Thomas S. Bacon in 1830 which was the plantation glassmaker Richard Wistar willed to his son John Wistar in 1780.
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SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT NOVEMBER 25, 2014
JANET L. SHERIDAN, CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HISTORIAN
22
Appendix II. Caspar & Rebecca Wistar Farm
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 1
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Property Name: Caspar and Rebecca Wistar Farmstead
Street Address: Street #: 84 Apartment #:
(Low) (High) (Low) (High)
Prefix: Street Name: Pointers-Auburn Suffix: Type: Road
County(s): Salem Zip Code: 08079
Municipality(s): Mannington Township Block(s): 38
Local Place Name(s): Mannington Lot(s): 4.01 and 4
Ownership:: Private USGS Quad(s) Salem
Description: The Wistar Farmstead features a large, five-bay, brick Georgian-plan house built in 1825, with a crib barn/wagon house, a carriage shed, and sites of a large livestock/hay barn and other outbuildings in the farm yard. It faces west on a historic road connecting Salem and Sculltown (now Auburn) just south of Mannington Creek, surrounded by a landscape of planted trees and shrubs. The hewn timber crib barn features a large, keystone-shaped crib with central drive-through, and shed-roofed aisles, and may date to the time of the house. The sawn timber-frame carriage shed is a three sided, one-story building with three bays for keeping wheeled vehicles and equipment. Registration and
Status Dates:
National Historic Landmark: SHPO Opinion:
National Register: Local Designation:
New Jersey Register: Other Designation:
Determination of Eligibility: Other Designation Date: Photograph:
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 2
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Location Map: Site Map:
Bibliography/Sources: Thomas Cushing and Charles E. Sheppard, History of the Counties of Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland New Jersey : with Biographical Sketches of Their Prominent Citizens (Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, 1883); Everts & Stewart., Combination Atlas Map of Salem & Gloucester Counties, New Jersey : Compiled, Drawn and Published from Personal Examinations and Surveys. (Philadelphia: Everts & Stewart, 1876); Thomas. Shourds, History and Genealogy of Fenwick’s Colony, New Jersey, (Bridgeton, N.J.: G.F. Nixon, 1876); Salem County Deeds, Wills and Inventories; NJ Colonial Documents (Newspaper Extracts and Wills); 1765 Survey map of division of land of Bartholomew Wyatt to Richard Wistar (Salem County Historical Society); Suzanne Culver, Salem County tax maps and parcel data; Donald Streeter, “The Historical Development of Hand-forged Iron Builders’ Hardware,” in H. Ward Jandl, ed., The Technology of Historic American Buildings: Studies of the Materials, Craft Processes, and the Mechanization of Building Construction (Washington, D. C.: APT, 1983), 1-34; Mercer, Henry C. The Dating of Old Houses. Doylestown, Pa: Bucks County Historical Society, 1923; Lee H. Nelson, “Nail Chronology as an Aid to Dating Old Buildings,” American Association for State and Local History Technical Leaflet 48, History News Vol. 24, No. 11., November 1968. Wistar Files (Salem County Historical Society); Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Salem Quarter: The Quakers of Salem Quarterly Meeting of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in Southern New Jersey from 1675-1990. [N.J.?]: Salem Quarterly Meeting, 1991; Lanier, Gabrielle M., and Bernard L. Herman. Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic: Looking at Buildings and Landscapes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; Survey No. 3137 Caspar Wister April 10, 1835, Franklin Insurance Surveys, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Richard Wistar Davids. The Wistar Family: A genealogy of the Descendents of Caspar Wistar, Emigrant in 1717. Philadelphia, 1896; Additional Information:
More Research Needed? Yes No
INTENSIVE LEVEL USE ONLY
Site
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 3
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Attachments Included: Building Structure Object Bridge
Associated Archaeological Site/Deposit? Yes (Known or potential Sites – if yes, please describe briefly) This farmstead has been occupied since 1825. There are wells, extant and former outbuildings sites, a farmyard and a barnyard site, all likely to contain archaeological deposits that could yield information about agricultural history. An 1835 survey locates former building and well sites. Also, the site is likely to contain deposits associated with African-American laborers and servants.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 4
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
THIS PAGE TO BE COMPLETED ONLY AT INTENSIVE LEVEL
AND ONLY IF PROPERTY IS A FARM COMPLEX
Historic Farm Name: Homestead Farm of Caspar Wistar; Oakland
Period of Agricultural Use: 1825 To Present Source Deeds, wills, census, owners
Agriculture Type: Oilseed and grain farming
Remaining Historic Fabric Medium
Acreage: 69
Farm Description: The farm includes a four-acre farmstead and 65 acres of cropland. The farmstead contains a center-hall, brick Federal/Greek Revival-style house, three wood-sided historic outbuildings, and a modern greenhouse in a setting of lawn and specimen trees and shrubs. The cropland lies north and south of the farmstead. Its northern edge bounds on Mannington Creek; on the south, more cropland. The farmstead faces west on County Route 540 (Pointers-Auburn Road), which runs north from Salem and crosses Mannington Creek and Meadow on a causeway that was once part of the waterworks of the Mannington Meadow Company. The farmstead is arranged with the outbuildings on the east side of the house. They include a crib barn/wagon house and a carriage shed, which was relocated within the farmstead at an unknown time, but probably in the early 20
th century. The crib barn faces north along the southern edge of the farmstead, and
consists of a central keystone-shaped double crib with drive-bay, and two shed additions. The three-sided, four bay carriage shed faces east in the farmyard. These two outbuildings are both hewn-framed of oak. A third outbuilding, perhaps built in the early 20
th century, is a small wood gable-roofed shed that houses an oil tank
that services the house. The green house constructed in the 2000s stands east of the crib barn on a concrete slab. The driveway from Pointers-Auburn Road is paved with Belgian block (granite street pavers) and terminates in a circle in front the crib barn. An elliptical boxwood parterre lies on the west side of the house, in the front yard, on the central axis of the house. Sinusoidal curves of boxwood line the north and south boundaries of the farmstead. Non-extant buildings include buildings described in an 1835 insurance survey (distances are from the house): a “Bath and Bee house” 8 feet square and two stories high, 26 feet east, a “Carriage house” 20 x 40 feet, 74 feet south, a “Granary and workshop” two stories high and 18 x 28 feet, 94 feet southeast, a barn 30 x 75 feet, 174 feet northeast, and a white oak tree 12 feet in circumference reaching twenty feet above the house, 51 feet due south. The carriage house may survive as the same-sized extant crib barn, or as the extant carriage house, which is the same width but shorter by six feet, and was reputedly moved. The granary, barn and a 20
th century garage were taken down in the 1970s.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 5
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Ida and William C. Hancock at the dining room door on the south facade. Note the wood stoop, brick
bake oven with shed roof beyond, and the Gothic-trimmed trellis.
Caspar Wistar's granary in the 1960s at the east edge of the farmyard. A 20th century garage stood to
the left.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 6
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
West elevation of granary 1960.
"Caspar Wistar and the original hip-roof Wistar house” which was attached to the granary. The date is
unknown, but if this is Caspar Wistar, Jr. it was probably taken by the Hancocks before 1910.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 7
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Caspar and Rebecca Wistar House
Historic Name: Homestead Farm of Caspar Wistar; Oakland
Builder: Caspar Wistar Remaining Historic Fabric: High
Style: Federal
Form: Center Hall Stories: 2.5
Type: -- Bays: 5
Roof Finish Materials: Wood, Shingle
Exterior Finish Materials Brick, Flemish Bond
Exterior Description: This two-and-a-half-story, gable-roofed, double-pile brick house presents both Federal and Greek Revival stylistic features in a way that is consistent with mid-Atlantic builders’ response to the onset of the Greek Revival (Lanier and Herman, 138-139). Its steep gable roofline with segmental-arch dormer roofs, tall floor heights, regular five-bay façade with mediating center hall, lack of a roof overhang on the rakes, and double-chimney stacks in both gable ends convey the characteristics of the Federal-style. The one story, hip-roofed front porch trimmed with an intricately molded entablature supported on Tuscan columns suggesting a temple-front, the rectangular front-door transom, and Grecian ovolo molding profiles found throughout convey the Greek Revival. The roof is clad in sawn cedar shingles (installed 1990) and is pierced by three dormer windows on the front, two dormers on the rear, and a set of two chimneys at each gable end wall which are bridged to each other above the roofline with a horizontal brick parapet. A brick stoop, not original, accesses a front parlor door on the south, and an enclosed one-story frame shed is attached to the rear, east wall. Throughout, the windows are mostly original six-over-six double-hungs and the frames are trimmed with an ovolo molding above a decoratively incised marble sill and below an iron bar lintel. Many historic panes of glass survive. Original paneled shutters, four-paneled on the first floor and three-paneled on the second with an applied ogee molding (same construction as interior doors), are hung with original iron pintels, rings, surface bolts, and shutter dogs. Triple-track storm windows protect all but the dormer windows. West Elevation: The main elevation is organized into five bays with a central front door. The wall is laid in Flemish bond with queen closers at the corners. The fenestration is regular in that the first and second story openings line up, but the bays are not evenly spaced. The front door is off-center but its south edge aligns with the window opening above, which is centered in the elevation. The irregular spacing seem to stem from a spatial asymmetry in the floor plan—the north pile of rooms is 17 feet wide, and the south pile is 20 feet wide, pushing the central stair hall to the north. Efforts to enforce symmetry pushed the front door to the south wall of the hall, enough to align it with the window above but not enough to center it under that window. Why the north and south piles were made different widths is unknown, but may have been driven by the need for a large kitchen and servants’ quarters above on the south side. All windows on the first and second floors contain shutters, The three dormer windows have segmentally-arched roofs and upper sashes, and are decorated with an entablature resting on two fluted pilasters punctuated with a frieze of round corner blocks or paterae. The dormer side walls are clad with wood clapboard. The roof overhangs
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 8
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
the wall with a plain box cornice trimmed with a bold cove and round molding. A half-round gutter hangs from the roof edge which drains into a decorative sheet metal scupper with the date “1825” painted in black. The front porch extends across the central three bays, and has a low-slope hip roof clad with flat-seam, possibly original, terne metal. The roof rests upon a classical entablature that bears on four slender, round Tuscan columns (which have an entasis) on square plinths. The roof has a ceiling of beaded, tongue and groove wood boards from which hangs, in the center, a glass-paned electrified lantern. The porch is floored with 2 ½ inch wide tongue and groove wood boards and is accessed from grade by a set of two wood steps. A wood lattice skirt covers the space under the porch floor. The eight-paneled front door, with brass doorknob and key escutcheon, is surmounted by a rectangular transom sash containing a sunburst design, and flanked by a set of three-paneled louvered shutters, each with two upper panels of horizontal blades and a lower one of vertical blades. The door is trimmed with a header of three stepped fascae crowned with a beaded elliptical ovolo, and a flat architrave with a grooved flat and round door stop . The door panels are trimmed in a Greek Revival style: a flat step molding surrounded by an applied Grecian ogee molding. The door sill is marble. In the window bays are basement windows, but two are hidden under the porch. The east and west basement windows have brick masonry wells at grade. Beyond the façade is the one-bay west elevation of the frame rear addition, clad in wood clapboard. South Elevation: The south elevation is a gable-end wall laid in six to ten-course common bond. The fenestration is regular but not symmetrical. There are four bays at the first floor level, but the first bay from the west holds a door to the front parlor at the southwest corner, which may have served business visitors. The next two bays moving east have windows in both first and second floor. The fourth bay on the first floor is a window constructed in the 20th century in a space formerly occupied by the original fireplace. The second floor window above that, but not aligned with it, appears to be original, one of two in the large servants’ quarters. Centered in the third floor is a Diocletian window: a semicircle with three sashes divided by wide wood mullions. This window design is seen in several area houses of this period. Above that is an “S” shaped iron wall tie that connects to the attic collar ties above the third floor ceiling. The two gable-end chimneys interrupt the roof rake crown molding. Each chimney has a two-course band of corbelled brick just under the top course. Such a band is carried across the parapet between the two chimneys, and is there capped with copper flashing. The side door design is like the front door but its header architrave contains five stepped fascae, not three. The windows on this elevation lack their shutters, but the pintels and shutter tie-backs are in place. The brick stoop, fitted with wood facing benches, is not original and replaced a wooden one that appears in an early 20
th century
photo. At that time, there was a wood trellis decorated with a Gothic fascia over the side entrance and stoop. Also present on the south elevation is the end wall of the frame one-story rear addition, with two late-20th-century wood thermal windows with 6/6 grids evenly spaced in the wall. It is clad with wood clapboard and trimmed with flat boards. Seen in the photo referenced above, and articulated by Caspar Wistar in his 1835 survey description of the house, is a shed roof that sheltered the bake oven, though the extent of it is not clear. The shed roof and brick oven were removed, along with the interior oven and kitchen fireplace, probably by Ida and William C. Hancock (son of Joseph G. and Flora Hancock) in the early 20th century, who placed two new windows in that wall (one survives) (Suzanne Hancock, personal communication). The brickwork from the middle window to the East Elevation: The rear of the house is laid in six to eight course common bond. The fenestration is irregular and asymmetrical. The first floor has four openings including two windows and two doors: one into the center hall, and one into the shed addition. At the second floor, two windows are located at the north and south ends directly above first floor openings. A stair landing window occupies the middle of the stair hall up a half-level, but
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 9
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
accordingly off-center in the entire wall. On the roof are tow symmetrically place dormer windows. In contrast to the west dormers, these are gable-roofed with a crown molding under the rake. Small eave returns are in keeping with the Greek Revival style. The sashes are rectangular. The dormer side walls are clad with wood clapboard. On the east wall of the house is the scar of a removed chimney that was likely built in the late 19
th or early 20
th
century to service a kitchen stove in the shed. The kitchen was apparently relocated there from its original and present location at that time. The chimney was removed and the roof eave restored after 1990 by the present owners. The frame shed addition is clad with wood clapboard and fenestrated with a bank of six, late-20th-century wood thermal casement windows with 12-light grids and a door accessed by a set of concrete steps. The hipped roof is clad with asphalt shingles, placed in 2013. A flower garden surrounds the shed. North Elevation: The walls are laid in 7-11 course common bond. The fenestration is regular but asymmetrical at the first and second floors. There, three windows are arranged with the end two equidistant from each corner, and the middle one on the west side of center. The placement was apparently driven by the decision to light the front parlors on each floor with two windows, and with one in the east parlors. In the third floor, two double-hung windows are symmetrically placed between the two chimneys. An “S” shaped iron tie is in embedded the parapet wall above. The chimneys and parapet have the same corbelled band as on the south side. Basement windows are situated in the east two bays. Interior Description: (see drawings for room numbers) Basement: There are five rooms in the basement with a stair from within the rear shed and a blocked off stair that once descended from under the main stair in the center hall. The basement is divided east-west with a stone foundation wall under the south stair wall, which is brick shear wall rising to the eaves. Brick walls divide the other rooms from each other. All the floors are brick paved (4x8 ½) in running bond running east-west, except Room 005 which has an earthen floor. The first floor framing is exposed, sash-sawn, with consistent joist sizes of 3x10 oak spaced on an average 19 inches. The walls are whitewashed, but the floor framing is not. The floorboards above are gauged and ploughed (to create a flush top surface from boards of inconsistent thickness). In Room 001 is the southwest room. A whitewashed board and batten door hung with strap hinges on pintels and fitted with a box lock and forged hook evidence a secure room. In the southeast corner stands a triangular brick fireplace support. It is unlike most period corner supports in that it rises from the floor instead of corbelling out from a point halfway up the wall, and the brickwork is not tied into the adjacent walls. The timber framing around the hearth bears evidence of 20
th century alteration, and at the wall is a fragment of original corbelling for the brick
hearth (the triangular pillar hides other evidence in the wall), so the extant construction apparently represents a repair and alteration to the hearth support. There are two basement windows in the west wall: one has two lights with pinned rail and stile hung on H and HL hinges in a replaced frame. The other (under the porch) has a board and batten door on strap hinges. Room 002 houses the house boiler, oil burner and water softener systems, and a shop. The most prominent feature is the original kitchen fireplace supports running 12 feet along the south wall configured in two brick arches with shelf ledges. Arched hearth supports spring from the wall. The larger east arch supported the fireplace and the smaller west arch supported bake oven(s). An original basement window occupies the south wall west of the fireplace support. The 2-light sash is a pinned rail and stile and hangs on wrought iron HL hinges. Another feature is the exterior cellar entrance in the east wall. An empty timber pocket on a slope to grade in the brick bulkhead wall indicates a former door frame when entry, was directly from the exterior. The cellar entry is 4’-6” wide, adequate for moving farm products in and out of the cellar. The walls of the shed above the stairs are lined with 2 ½ inch horizontal tongue and groove product labeled “OCKHARTAIA.” The doorway into Room 004 is a timber frame on which one pintel survives from a set of double doors that swung inward.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 10
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Room 003 occupies the space under the northwest parlor and stair hall. It has an outward-swinging board and batten door with a Blake’s patent handle and latch on a wood partition built in the 20
th century. The stair hall joists
are pinned to a 4 ½ inch wide beam. Every east-west floor joist is fitted with small and large iron hooks and wood pins for hanging food items—perhaps meats, herbs and root crops. The east brick partition contains three large holes that were made for piping. The floor paving was disturbed and patched with a timber, brick and concrete, possibly for a fuel oil line. A 10 ½ inch diameter earthenware crock is embedded in the floor. There is no known consensus on the use for such a crock, but they are quite common in early area houses. Ideas include keeping pickles or butter. There are three windows, one of which has the early sash described above, and two are three-light sashes hung on butt hinges laid flat in a replaced frame. Room 004 occupies the space under the rear stair hall. It contains a former stair under the main staircase that lead to a cross-passage to the kitchen. It was blocked off when a bathroom was built in the cross-passage under the stair. The stair case is enclosed by a vertical, tongue-and-grove beaded board wall. The whitewashed, beaded board-and-batten door to Room 005 hangs on modern strap hinges but the iron strap hinges and upper pintil are still attached. This apparently original door is in a pinned timber frame, and is fitted with a wooden latch. There is window hung on butt hinges laid flat in the east wall. In the middle of the room hangs a set of shelves hanging from the joists above, which appears historic. Room 005 is very different from the others. It has an earthen instead of brick-paved floor, and it is 4’-4” lower than the rest of the basement. It may have been purpose-built to store root and orchard crops. Sometime in the 20
th
century it became a boiler room. The fireplace arch support is filled in with concrete block and brick in which is a flue opening and a clean out below it. In the north wall is a basement window sash hung on H hinges. The room is now used for germinating plants. Throughout the first and second floors, consistent finishes include original lath and plastered walls and ceilings, panel doors, baseboards, yellow pine flooring, Greek Revival moldings at architraves and baseboards, lack of crown moldings or ceiling ornament. Brass door knobs are replacements for various porcelain ones extant in 1987 when the current owners began their rehabilitation. The heating system is hot water, using early 20
th century cast
iron radiators. First Floor: The front door opens to a wide plastered hall through the house (Room 102) in which rises an open staircase with a delicate rail and turned tiger maple newels and balusters. The stair rises to the east along the south wall (a plastered brick shear wall that rises to the eaves) to a landing at the east wall, and from there turns west and rises by a short flight to the second floor hall. The upper newels penetrate the ceiling and terminate with a pendant. The wall under the stair is finished with a field of rectangular and triangular raised panels trimmed with applied quirked Grecian ovolo moldings, framed with a quirked bead and reeded molding. The ends of the treads and risers are trimmed with a flat molding. A tall baseboard all around the hall is capped with the same quirked ovolo molding as the wall panels. There are six doors on the hall, five to rooms with eight raised panels and one to a closet with four raised panels, all with identical moldings. The front door differs in having flat panels framed with both a flat molding and the ovolo molding, and a large wrought iron box lock. The massive original brass front door key survives. All the door edges are beveled for exceptional fit into the frames. The door architraves are fluted or reeded with opposing quirked ogees and a central flat, and terminate at the upper corners with a “bulls eye” corner block with concentric circles made of a round and a Grecian “bird’s beak” profile around a central conical point. At the floor the architrave terminates in plain plinth the height of the baseboard. Four rooms communicate with the hall: two each on the north and south walls. Under the stair is a modern rest room occupying a space that was formerly a passage from the kitchen to the hall, and retains the original door. The flooring runs east-west and ranges 4 to 8 inches in width, as it does uniformly on the first floor. Room 101 is the northwest parlor, and would have been the most formal, public space in the house. The door and
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 11
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
window architraves match those in the hall. It has two west (front) windows and two side windows which flank the fireplace and chimney breast in the north wall. Their plastered jambs taper out into the interior, the stool has a quirk-beaded edge, and the aprons have two stepped fasciae terminated with a quirked bead. The six-over-six sashes hang with chains and pulleys, have a typical period muntin profile, and the vertical pieces are pinned. The fireplace is adorned with a marble (possible from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania) mantle configured with a shelf supported by two fluted pilasters on plinths capped with arched brackets and edged with a Grecian ovolo. A fluted frieze or truss spans the firebox between the brackets. Within the mantle are flat marble fasciae surrounding the firebox. Lining the firebox are cast iron fire backs decorated with six panels of elliptical and circular sunbursts divided by classical columns and topped with a frieze of hexagonal flower motifs (paterae) and the inscription, “Cumberland Furnace.” (The mantle and fireback are identical to that in the best parlor at the nearby Bartholomew Wyatt/John Wistar farmhouse.) The hearth is laid with (possibly) schist surrounded by a frame of marble, and the front edge is trimmed with a narrow mitered board. The corners of the chimney breast are trimmed with a large bead. A tall baseboard, more elaborate than the one in the hall, consists of a stepped plinth trimmed at the floor with a cyma reversa and round ovolo and capped with a quirked Grecian ovolo and bead. The floor boards run north-south. The plastered walls and ceilings are unadorned. A closet is centered in the east wall. Its door is the eight-panel type seen elsewhere, but cut in half, possibly as an alteration since the two surface latches are of different periods. Room 103 is the dining room, which communicates with the hall, the kitchen and the exterior on the south wall. In addition to the side exterior door and the hall door, a door in the east wall leads to the kitchen. North of that, a China cabinet is built into the east wall. It has an open upper section with three shelves, and a lower section with a pair of raised panel doors and two shelves. A keyed latch is missing. The windows, doors and trim are the same as the northwest parlor (101) but the baseboard is not stepped, and the mantelpiece at the corner fireplace in the southeast corner is plainer, though it is marble. It features plain pilasters with a bulls-eye patera in the capital. The firebox contains the same cast iron fireback as in Room 101. Room 104, in the northeast corner of the house is the back parlor, used as a music room and a play room in recent generations. It is where Flora Hancock stored cans of tomatoes produced by her business while it operated on the farm, and can marks on the floor show this use. The room is identically finished as the front parlor (101). The firebox contains a cast iron fireback that is not from this house. Additionally, there are two closets in the west wall. One closet has a full height eight-panel door, and the other has an upper door of six panels, and a lower door of four panels, evidently original. The interior of the full height closet is plastered on the west side, but on the east side a vertical beaded-board wall is exposed. Room 105 is the kitchen. It was originally the kitchen and was fitted with a cooking fireplace and a bake oven on the south wall. These were totally removed in the early 20th century, and three windows were added: one in the east and two in the south wall, and the room was used as a dining room. Also, sometime before 1987, a galley kitchen partition was constructed. It was removed in a 1987 rehabilitation in which the extant fire place/oven was built by local mason George Ahl using bricks from the nearby Wyatt House smokehouse (destroyed in a storm). The fireplace was configured conjecturally and smaller than the original, because there was no evidence and in order to retain the southeast window. It, and the east window, lack tapering jambs and pinned muntins. The fireplace is trimmed with a quirk-beaded fascia and topped with a shelf. The corners of the chimney breast have corner beads. The brick hearth, also reconstructed, is laid in running bond. The other window in the south wall is original, and is still hung with rope. The original finishes in this room are less elaborate than those in the other rooms on this floor. The baseboard is plain, quirk-beaded and shorter than the others. The architraves are molded with a quirked bead, two stepped fasciae, and a quirked Grecian ovolo. The window apron differs only in having a plain fascia. The original southwest window also lacks tapering jambs. All the trim was disassembled, stripped offsite and reassembled in 1987. The flooring is consistent with the other rooms; it was restored with the removal of a parquet floor laid over top. A closet in the east wall is probably not original. Also on the east wall protrudes the stair and landing from a service stair relocated to the shed from the north wall of the kitchen, possibly during
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 12
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
the early 20th century renovation. A modern six panel wood door in the east wall accesses the rear shed. The shed is divided into three portions: the sun room on the south side (106), an enclosed stair to the second floor, and the rear entry and basement stair (107). The shed housed a kitchen with a brick stove chimney as early as the late nineteenth century. The walls and ceiling of the sunroom are drywall which replaced older drywall in 1987. The floor is carpeted plywood. There are two 20
th century wood double hung windows in the south wall, and
a salvaged, older one of the same in the north wall that is from elsewhere (contains a hold-open pin in the stile, but there is no corresponding hole in the frame). A bank of thermal glazed casement windows installed in the 1990s occupies the east wall. The architraves and baseboards match those in the kitchen and were milled by Ralston Dorrell from Alloway in 1987. Opening to the back stair and to the entry (107) are four-panel doors that could date from the colonial period, and may have been obtained from elsewhere when the stair was constructed in the early 20th century (see above discussion of the kitchen). The door to the basement stair is a 3’-6” wide, whitewashed and very weathered colonial period six-panel door that from the collection of Gerald Waitland, a New York City historical architect who at one time owned the 1754 Dickinson House in Alloway Township (Irene Hancock, “In the Shade of the Old Oak,” 44). It was in the house, but not installed, before 1987, and bears evidence of several periods of use and re-use in changes in hardware locations. The floor of the entry is two steps lower than the main room and is laid in 12 inch slate installed in the 1990s. The north wall is finished in the same horizontal wood material found in the basement stairway: probably early-mid 20
th century. The exterior door is a
modern steel, six-paneled type. The shed roof was raised according to the evidence of a rafter pocket in the main house wall that is 11 brick courses lower than the present rafter bearings, visible from the basement stairway. Second Floor: The second floor contains seven rooms, a living room, three bedrooms, a bath room, an office, and the central staircase. The southeast rooms (205 and 206) appear to have been servant quarters, and possibly were one large room originally. A small room occupies the space between the two front rooms, and is now a bathroom. The floor boards match those of the first floor in species and range of widths. The hall (202) contains six doors, five to rooms and one to a closet, and the open staircase from the first floor continuing to the third floor. The pendanted upper newels penetrate the sloping stair ceiling as on the first floor. A curved wall marks the southeast corner of Room 207. The stair landing between the first and second floors contains a window without tapered jambs. The south wall bears evidence of a doorway which was removed before 1987, and may have been to a closet or an earlier entry into the servant quarters. The closet is at the west end; its door has no moldings on the inside face. The hall doors at all the rooms are distinguished by having different panel moldings on the two sides. On the hall side, the panel has a sloped outside surface with an integrally molded ogee edge on the frame, while that on the room side is flat with an applied ogee molding, i. e., a hierarchy of finish with the better work on the room side. The “living room,” “library” or “TV room” (Room 201), a family gathering place upstairs, occupies the northwest corner of the second floor. It has the highest level of finish of any room on this floor. As such, it may have been the master bedroom or an upper best room for more private entertaining. Two windows occupy the west wall, and the north wall once had two windows flanking the centered fireplace, but the northwest window is within a closet constructed possibly in the late 19
th century. All windows have tapered jambs. The finishes are consistent with the
first floor except the doors, which are six-paneled with a smaller ogee molding. A closet occupies the northwest corner of the room, but was an alteration. The interior of the closet is not plastered and consists of beaded vertical jointed boards, which also covers an exterior window contained within. The six panel closet door has no moldings. The baseboard matches that in Room 103. The fireplace, centered in the north wall, is adorned with a plain, more Federal-style wood mantle and shelf. Though the fascia and frieze areas are undecorated, the moldings of the classically ordered entablature are fairly complex with a cavetto, stepped fasciae, quirked Grecian ovolos and beaded edges. The firebox lacks a fireback. The herringbone bond brick hearth is trimmed like that in Room 101. A mid-20
th century tiled bathroom occupies Room 203. Until 1987, a door passed through the south wall into
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 13
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Room 204. This small room may have originally been what was termed a “trunk room,” for storage, at the head of a hall. The southwest chamber (204) contains two tapering jamb windows in the west wall and a straight jamb window in the south wall. A corner fireplace stands in the southeast corner, an original closet in the northeast corner, and a late Victorian door opens into Room 205 on the east side, suggesting an alteration. The window and door trim matches that of the kitchen. The fireplace mantle is like that of Room 201 but lacks the pilaster capitals. There is no fireback. The brick hearth matches that in Room 201. Overall, the finishes signal a lower rank, or a more private space, than Room 201 or the hall. East of Room 204 is Room 205. The baseboard is a ¾ inch diameter beaded flat board. The architraves match Room 204 and the kitchen. Marks in the ceiling of 205 suggest a former closet at the north wall. The window in the south wall has straight jambs. The four-raised panel door with molded edges to Room 206 appears to be 20
th
century vintage though it was fitted with a Norfolk latch in 1987. The door to the hall has raised panels but no moldings on the room side, and may be relocated from the former hall closet location. A closet with three raised-panels with ogee edges but plain on the inside occupies the south wall. Room 206 is an office and laundry. It may have been one with Room 205 at one time or a stair passage and common room for servants. A straight stair ascended from the kitchen on the north wall until it was relocated to enter from the east wall. There it ascended from the shed to a landing inside the east wall, from where it ascended both north and south to the room. The present owners removed the south flight and floored over the opening. They installed cabinets and laundry machines along the north wall. In the southeast corner, four steps approach an original enclosed winder stair at a raised panel door with ogee molded edges, which climbs to the third floor. Under it is a closet which partially obstructs a straight-jambed window in the south wall which has been retrofitted with spring balances. The northeast room (207) is the largest bedroom, and contains a fireplace and closet like Room 201 and straight-jambed windows, one each in the east and north walls. Third Floor: The third floor is plastered and divided into two garrets separated by a solid partition. The northern two-thirds is accessed by the central staircase, including one room, three knee-wall spaces, the stair hall and three large closets. The southern one-third is reached via a closed winder staircase from Room 206 and contains one plastered room with three knee-wall spaces. The flooring at this level may be a softer species of pine and ranges wider than the floors below, 5 to 12 inches. The woodwork is a lesser, almost retrograde, level of finish in the round ovolo door architraves, surface-mounted wrought hinges, and round-ovolo molded door panels and simple beaded baseboards embedded in the plaster. These profiles are typical of the colonial period, but here may evidence a cheaper grade of finish, still made, but less stylish, and also use of some salvaged materials. North garret: The tiger maple-balustrade staircase doglegs up to the third floor where it terminates at a plastered partition and doorway. On the south stair wall within the stair well is an access door into the knee-space under the roof. Visible here is the top of the brick shear wall and roof rafters. The reason for the access door is not apparent. At the top of the stair is a six-panel door; the stair side has ogee molded raised panels, but the garret side has no moldings around flat panels. It is fitted with a straight lift Norfolk latch and hangs on H and L hinges. In the garret hall (Room 302) is a dormer window in the west wall, wallpapered plaster walls, and a bank of three large plastered closets along the south wall. Closet 302b is a rare example of a featherbed closet. It has double-leaf six-raised-panel doors with round ovolo moldings hung with 5-knuckle hinges. Five lattice frames constructed of half-lapped 3-inch boards, mortised and tenoned at the perimeter with half being pinned, rest on beaded ledgers secured to the three unfinished walls. The other two closet doors (302a and 302c) differ in having deeper panels and being hung with H and L hinges. The doors, with plainly visible plane marks, appear to be salvaged
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 14
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
from an older house: the hinges are secured to the doors with wrought nails, but to the door frames with cut nails. They are fitted with wrought iron English spring latches which could date from the late 18
th or early 19
th century
(Streeter, 23) . On the interior, closet 302a has an old white painted finish and is fitted with a high shelf on beaded ledgers and pegboards. Closet 302c has wallpapered walls, beaded baseboards, and several shelves on beaded ledgers. The window, with a segmentally arched upper sash, is original, very weathered, and contains a spring sash fastener in the jamb, which differs from the rope and pulley method in the lower floors—another cost reduction (Streeter, 27). Room 301 takes up most of the area in the north garret. The lath and plastered room contains two plastered chimney stacks, two six-over-six double hung gable end windows, two dormer windows, two knee-wall doors, and a closet in the south wall next to the stair well. The hall and knee-wall doors are six raised-panel with round ovolo applied molded edges on the hall side of the door, and flat-paneled with no moldings on the room side. They do not appear recycled like the hall closet doors, but original to the house. The closet and knee-wall door architraves are embedded in the plaster. The front (west) dormer window upper sash is segmentally arched, but the rear (east) window is rectangular. Exposed lath is riven, not sawn. South Garret: The southeast winder stair enters the finished south garret, which up until the 1920s was one room. It was divided with a lumber stud wall and U. S. Gypsum Co. “Sheetrock” labeled with a 1921 patent. Together, the rooms contain two plastered chimney stacks, a gable-end Diocletian window, an east and a west dormer window, three accessible knee-wall spaces (two on the west, one on the east), a ladder and hatch to the attic above, and a grooved wood hook board on the north wall. The white-painted north wall is an original plastered wall which separates the north and south garrets. The absence of a passage through signals a social spatial separation, with servants at one time dwelling on the south side, as in the room below. In the stairway at the level of the eave, a flat board covers the top of the exterior wall as it diminishes in thickness in the gable end. The closet doors match those of the north garret. The west chimney corbels to the west to achieve exterior symmetry. Attic: The attic is a wide open space from the collar ties to the ridge. The attic hatch door consists of three tongued or grooved boards, and slides in a board frame built between two collar ties. Roof framing details: (Seen from within the knee wall space and from the attic) The rafters rest on a 4x4 timber false plate embedded in 1½ inch deep notches in the floor joists which rest on and pass over timber plates on top of the exterior brick wall. The false plate is joined to the joists with wood pins. The rafters are sash-sawn oak, ranging 2½ to 3 inches wide, tapering from 5¾ inches deep at the plate to 4 inches at the ridge. Lookouts 2½ inches wide nailed to the rafters continue past the false plate to carry the roof edge and box cornice. Each rafter pair is marked at the ridge with matching Roman numerals and joined with an open, pinned central mortise and tenon, but the rafter pairs are lined up in random numerical order. Each rafter pair has a 2-inch wide collar tie joined with a pinned, central mortise and tenon, with south surfaces flush. The collar ties carry the third floor ceilings. Three collar ties (from the south, #2, #6 and #14) are convex in elevation. The 14
th joist is over the shear
wall, but #2 and #6 do not correlate with any other structure, and the reason for the shape is unknown. There are none over the north garret. Setting: The house faces west on Pointer-Auburn Road (County Route 540) amid a designed landscape of boxwood hedges, specimen trees and shrubs, and a straight driveway paved with Belgian blocks. It is part of a farmstead of which survives two 19
th century buildings: a crib barn/wagon house to the southeast, and a
carriage/equipment shed to the east. A small 20th century shed housing an oil tank also stands to the east. A large
livestock and hay barn once stood to the northeast. A small barn that could have been a granary and a story-and-a half former dwelling once stood together to the east. A large orchard once stood to the east beyond the farmyard. The farmstead stands just south of Mannington Creek and Meadow, which was once drained and provided pasture and grain fields. The farmstead is surrounded on all sides by cultivated fields in which grow grains, hay, corn, and vegetables. Three working farms stand to the west, east and north. Visible in the distance
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 15
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
to the south is the Memorial Hospital of Salem County surrounded by line development along state route 45.
View of Farmstead looking northeast.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 16
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
West and south elevations.
South and east elevations.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 17
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
North elevation.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 18
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Front door and porch, west elevation.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 19
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Dormer, west elevation.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 20
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Rafter bearing on timber false plate on joist at eave, looking east.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 21
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Exterior Description: The crib barn is a locally familiar drive-through type, often called a wagon house, which is composed of a central gabled section flanked by two shed additions with broken slopes. This example has a footprint of 20 x 41 feet. It is slightly asymmetrical because the west shed is wider than the east shed by two feet. The central section stands on a low foundation of gneiss stone (of probably Delaware origin) less than a foot off the ground. The sheds stand on poured concrete foundations. A set of board-and-batten double-doors hang on wrought iron strap hinges and pintels on both north and south elevations at the central drive bay. The sheds each have a set of such double doors on the north elevation. There is also a passage door with the same early hardware hanging between the east and central double doors, which enters into a crib. The siding is nine-inch wide horizontal wood weatherboards on north, west, and south with newer vertical board siding on the east. The roof is clad with cedar shingles laid on plywood sheathing. Interior Description: The frame is exposed on the interior. The central portion is keystone-shaped corn crib of box-framed hewn oak posts and beams and sash-sawn braces composed of two cribs flanking the central drive bay. The cribs are framed with two levels of girts running north-south from the posts and tied overhead with four internal tie beams notched over the upper girt. The outer crib walls cant outward and are each topped with a 4x6 plate that bears the rafters. There are two types of rafters in the central section: four are hewn with carved rafter tails, and five, placed alternately, are sawn without rafter tails. It appears that the latter were either added in between the hewn ones to supplement them, or are replacements. At the ridge the rafter pairs are joined with a pinned, central mortise and tenon. At the plate, the rafters are birdsmouthed. The hewn rafter tails pass over the plate through a sloped notch. The central doors hang from the plumb inner crib posts; the outer crib posts are canted. The cribs are enclosed with 1x3 vertical oak slats secured with irregular-headed nails, suggesting early 19
th century construction. Above
the doors, sawn studs form the gable end to which the siding is nailed. The cribs are floored with wood boards, but the drive bay has a concrete slab. The sheds are built of hewn and sawn timbers, some recycled, such as the west shed sill with its empty mortises. The door posts are creosoted salvage, attached to the crib posts. The shed rafters lay on top of the upper rafters with a tapered end. At every rafter, below the plate notch, is a rectangular cutout in the crib slats. It is not clear
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 22
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
what the cutouts were for, but they may have been shed rafter pockets, since it appears that the upper rafter tails were formerly exposed. Thus, the shed roofs were set below the main roof initially. In 2014 the framing and siding of the east wall was repaired in kind. The cant-walled crib may have been free-standing, with or without doors, originally. There are many variations but the keystone shape is a design that prevents settling and sheds water, and was common type in early 19
th
century Pennsylvania (Pa Ag History Project). This one, being hewn and not mill-sawn, probably dates to the early part of the century, and may date from the establishment of this farmstead (1825). The sheds may have been added later, followed by raising the roof line even later, but were probably open to the north without doors until the 20
th century. Such expansion and changes evidence growth and shifts in farm economy, markets, and
technology over time. Setting: The crib barn/wagon house faces north into the farmyard at the end of the driveway southeast of the house. Behind it, to the south, are crop fields. On its east side is a new greenhouse on a concrete slab. On its north side is a cobblestone paved area, and lawn surrounds the west and south sides.
North and west elevations of crib barn/wagon house.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 23
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
South elevation of crib barn/wagon house.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 24
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Carriage Shed
Historic Name: Carriage Shed
Present Use: Unclassifiable activities
Historic Use: Unclassifiable activities
Construction Date: Unknown Source:
Alteration Date(s): Unknown Source:
Designer: Unknown Physical Condition: Fair
Builder: Unknown Remaining Historic Fabric: Medium
Style: None
Form: Other
Type: Shed
Roof Finish Materials Wood, shingles
Exterior Finish Materials Wood, flush Description: The second surviving outbuilding is a one-story, four-bay “carriage shed” open on the east side, and possibly built circa 1850. The gable roof shed is rectangular in plan, measuring 20 x 34 feet, clad with ship-lapped, center-beaded vertical boards nine inches wide, and roofed with cedar shingles. It rests on a wood sill on a low stone foundation. It is framed with five hewn oak structural bents, consisting of a central post and transverse beam up-braced in both directions. The post and beam are lapped and secured with a large bolt. Each center post east face has a cut-off brace tenon and pin in the mortise. The extant braces are nailed (with wire nails) replacements (one is missing). The original braces on the west side are intact. The central posts support the ridge beam to which each post is braced on both sides, but at this level the original pinned mortise and tenon connections are intact and in use. The ridge beam is in two pieces, lapped and pinned, near the center of the shed. The east slope rafters are 1¾ x 5¾ inches (nominal 2x6 lumber likely from the 1930s), and form an overhang that bears on a front plate let into the cantilevered transverse beams at each bent. The west slope rafters are from an earlier build, measuring 3x3½ inches. The long side wall on the west side is a braced frame of braced posts and a wall plate. The roof is clad with cedar shingles. This type of open shed is a common outbuilding in the area typically used to house wheeled vehicles, whether domestic or agricultural. Some are attached to or near barns, and some are situated close to houses. According to the family, it was moved from within the farmstead, but from where and when exactly is unknown. Caspar Wistar described a 20x40 foot “Carragehouse” [sic] in his 1835 survey which stood south of the house. It is conceivable that the 1835 shed was moved but erected six feet shorter in length by changing the spacing of the bents. Its historic proximity to the house supports a domestic use to house carriages, particularly on the site of such an elite property. Moving the shed closer to the barn may mean it was needed les for carriages than for wheeled farm implements pulled by horses. In any event, the move and changes in the structure evidence adaptation of farm buildings as the needs of agriculture and daily life change.
Setting: The carriage shed faces east in the farmyard northeast of the house. It faces the site of the former hay barn and the fields to the east. To the north are other crop fields. It is surrounded by lawn.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 25
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Carriage Shed, looking northwest.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 26
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Shed
Historic Name: Shed
Present Use: Unclassifiable activities
Historic Use: Unclassifiable activities
Construction Date: 20th c Source: Construction
Alteration Date(s): Unknown Source:
Designer: Unknown Physical Condition: Good
Builder: Unknown Remaining Historic Fabric:Medium
Style: None
Form: Other
Type Shed
Roof Finish Materials Metal
Exterior Finish Materials Wood, flush Description: The shed is a small gable-roofed, wood-sided building that stands east of the carriage shed. Its foundation is concrete block, and its framing appears to be early to mid 20
th century. It is sided with vertical
boards and roofed with corrugated metal. It has one opening—a door—in the west wall hung with modern steel strap hinges. It houses an oil tank.
Setting: The shed stands adjacent to a mature sycamore tree surrounded by lawn in the farmyard. To the east is a flower garden and the site of the hay/livestock barn.
North and west elevations of Shed.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 27
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
History: The Caspar Wistar (1795-1872) of this farm is one of several such namesake descendants of the well-known German immigrant who arrived in Philadelphia in 1717. His great-grandfather Caspar (1696-1752) became one of the wealthiest men in Pennsylvania from his button making, mercantile, and glassmaking businesses, but mostly from his shrewd land speculations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Immigrant Caspar Wistar brought one line of his prolific family to Salem County through his son Richard (1727-1781), who ran the glass works in Alloways Creek established by his father in 1739. Richard also invested heavily in land, and acquired nearly 1500 acres of his own in Salem County, in addition to inheriting the glassworks with its 1500 acres. Richard’s presence in the area and his Quaker social ties led to his marriage to Sarah Wyatt of the Salem Friends Meeting in 1751. Her parents, Bartholomew and Elizabeth Tomlinson Wyatt, sat on an estate of 1200 acres known as “Quietitty,” or “Sandy Burr Woods,” bounding on the broad inland tidal flat called Mannington Meadow. Roughly half of this estate, 641 acres, “I partly purchased and partly was given to me by my father-in-law” to satisfy a debt in 1765. Richard and Sarah did not settle there, however, remaining residents of Philadelphia, even though their membership in the Society of Friends was in the Salem Monthly Meeting where they married. Wistar did have a house on his allotment which predated the time of the sale, and may have been tenanted, or built by Wyatt as a settlement house for his daughter and son-in-law when they married. Any land bounding on tidal meadow was very desirable agricultural real estate because of the potential for reclaiming the land for cultivation by building banks, dams and sluices. This method of “stopping the tide” was practiced from the beginning of European settlement in the Delaware Valley and other coastal areas of New Jersey. Mannington Meadow and the town of Salem were among the first places where the NJ colonial legislature authorized property owners to build such waterworks. The banked meadows were known as extremely fertile and productive farmland. Development and use of the meadows as such expanded through the nineteenth century and began to decline in the early twentieth century. Richard Wistar wrote his will in October of 1780 and died one year later. He left properties in Salem County to four of his sons, Bartholomew, Richard, John, and Thomas. To John, he left the 641-acre plantation at Quietitty, where John and his wife Charlotte (nee Newbold) of the Chesterfield Quaker Meeting in Burlington County settled in 1782. But they, too, maintained a house and social ties in Philadelphia. John and Charlotte Wistar raised ten children on the farm at 120 Harris Road, one of whom was Caspar Wistar (1795-1872). When John Wistar died in 1815, he left Caspar “the part of my plantation now in the occupancy of John Knight,” along with three lots of meadow and a parcel of woodland. John Wistar also devised a tenanted plantation he had purchased to his son Clayton, and the home plantation (now 120 Harris Road) to his son John, Jr. These legacies to his sons suggest a pattern of large parcels of land occupied and developed by tenants until the next generation of a landowning family needed farms of their own. At that point they were divided off. Caspar Wistar not only inherited the 125-acre farm, he was a beneficiary of his great aunt Sarah Wistar (1738-1815). She bequeathed £11,000 to each of her three grand-nephews named Caspar Wistar. Caspar Wistar was 20 years old when his father died and “succeeded him [his father] on the old Wyatt homestead” (Cushing and Sheppard, ) This may imply that he and John Jr. both occupied the family homestead prior to 1825, when Caspar commenced the construction of his brick mansion on Pointers-Auburn Road (formerly Sculltown Road). Caspar married Rebecca Bassett, the daughter of Quaker Joseph Bassett, a major landowner on the north side of Mannington Creek, on April 2, 1817. It is possible that if Caspar and Rebecca did not share his parents’ homestead with his brother John, they may have occupied a story and a half frame house that stood west of the homestead, later identified as the ancestral house of Richard Wistar. This gambrel roofed house later appeared in the farmyard of Caspar and Rebecca Wistar as an outbuilding (Suzanne Culver, Hancock family photo). Pointers-Auburn Road was not mapped as a public road until sometime between 1833 and 1849. John Wistar’s 1814 will refers to “the road from Salem into Haines Neck,” so a local road existed on the earthen dam across Mannington Creek built by Mannington Meadow Company. The upstream meadow areas were farmed by the
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 28
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
members of Mannington Meadow Company from 1714, one of the earliest authorized in the colony to build such waterworks. Bartholomew Wyatt hosted company meetings 1756-1786, with his grandson John Wistar appearing in the minutes in 1783 and active until 1814. “Wyatts new drain meadow Company” began meeting in 1818 with Caspar Wistar, Clayton Wistar, and, when he came of age, John Wistar, Jr. among the members (Bartholomew Wyatt minute book). The Wyatt Meadow lay south of Mannington Creek and east of Salem Creek, the wild marsh on Bartholomew Wyatt’s “Quietitty” that he divided between himself and Richard Wistar in 1765. In 1825 Caspar, at age 30, began construction of his capacious new house in a transitional Federal and Greek Revival mode. His Georgian plan, four-over-four house with some 5,000 square feet of living space, not to mention outbuildings, perhaps manifests the generosity of his great-aunt Sarah Wistar’s in her legacy to him ten years earlier. He called it “Oakland” (Franklin survey, 1835) and also his “Homestead Farm” (Will of Caspar Wistar, Book G Page 37). Although in plan the house is Georgian (modern, closed, formal, Renaissance), the façade fenestration departs from the strict symmetry one might expect from a classically-derived house. The almost-centered front door hides an even less symmetrical interior layout—the south pile is 17 feet wide, and the north pile is 20 feet wide. The second floor fenestration almost made it, but the three segmentally-arched dormers finally achieved it. What drove this imbalanced arrangement might be related to a desire for a large kitchen and servants’ quarters on the south side. The large size of the room and its cooking structures—cooking hearth and bake ovens extending over 12 feet—implies a lot of cooking, and the need for a large space to prepare food and to sit a large crowd at mealtimes. Like the Wyatt Farm, this large kitchen and cooking fireplace could have been driven by the ongoing development and farming of the great expanse of banked meadows in Mannington Meadow. The interior is spacious, gracious, highly crafted, but not overly decorated. In the most formal spaces, a crown molding is lacking, for example, but the marble mantelpieces and cast iron firebacks evidence taste and respectability without ostentation. Fine workmanship is evident in the corner blocks of the architraves—scribed around the fluted pilasters instead of simply abutting. Caspar Wistar appears to have perpetuated his father’s Quaker sensibility to “finish it in a plain substantial way” (will of John Wistar, Book B page 231). His house exhibits conservatism in its outward Federal appearance, but the latest architectural trends of Greek Revival come through in the carpenters’ workmanship of interior and exterior woodwork, the front porch, and columned fireplace mantles. Wistar was described as “plain in his habits and tastes, and an earnest and consistent member of the Orthodox branch of the Society of Friends.” Caspar Wistar’s house, though modern in other respects, expressed one rather antiquated, even Colonial, feature—the corner fireplace. A stack of these rises in the southwest cell. It may have been, however, a practical solution to fitting a fireplace into a wall that was to have both a door and a window. The fireplaces in the north parlors, on the other hand, stand in the middle of each parlor end wall, more typical of Federal-period architecture. Because the house was built of a piece and has such good integrity from 1825, it offers a good study in hierarchy of finishes and hence room function. Differences in woodwork (complexity of baseboards, door panels and moldings, and window jambs) and mantelpieces (materials and elaboration) are detectible from side to side, front to back, from lower level to upper level, and between the family quarters and the servant quarters over the kitchen. In the extreme is the woodwork in the finished attic which is reminiscent of the colonial period; some of the doors with their wrought H and L hinges might be salvaged from elsewhere as a cost-savings. An exterior side door into the less formal southwest parlor may be a sign that the house served also as a place of business. There is also a mix of door molding profiles: some molded integrally, and others applied, often on the opposite sides of the same door, signaling a difference in the formality or public/private nature of the spaces. Unique features of this elite house include a deep basement room, an array of iron hooks and wooden pegs embedded in the joists above the northwest basement room, and the non-extant cooking fireplace which had an eleven to twelve-foot opening (partially reconstructed). A non-extant one-story high exterior brick structure at this
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 29
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
location in a historic photo might be evidence for an array of bake ovens. These features may relate to food storage, such as potatoes and meat, and like the Wyatt house, daily cooking for a large crowd of laborers. The attic contains a rare featherbed storage closet with wooden racks which speaks to household management. The delicate tiger maple stair balustrade is a display of wealth intended to impress visitors who enter the spacious stair hall lined with grain-painted paneled doors. The roof rests upon a timber false or raising plate which is unusual for this time period, when most seem to be the board type. In 1835 Caspar undertook a survey of the property. In April he wrote a description of the house and outbuildings, with dimensions and locations relative to the house, in a request for a policy from the Franklin Fire Insurance Company. A survey map drawn by surveyor Joseph E. Brown in August depicts 156 acres divided into farmstead, orchard, fields of 2 to 13 acres, a 33-acre woodland and swamp, Mannington Creek, the road to Salem, and adjacent property owners. His insurance survey describes a “Bath and Bee house” 8 feet square and two stories high, 26 feet east, a “carriage house” 20 x 40 feet, 74 feet south, a “granary and workshop” two stories high and 18 x 28 feet, 94 feet southeast, a barn 30 x 75 feet, 174 feet northeast, and a white oak tree 12 feet in circumference reaching twenty feet above the house, 51 feet due south. The latter, obviously an important feature on his farm, might have been the namesake for Wistar’s farm which he called “Oakland” on the survey application (See Site Plan). Of these outbuildings, The carriage house may survive as the crib barn/wagon house which has the same footprint but stands further east, or it was moved and reconstructed six feet shorter as the carriage shed, which was reputedly moved from another location. Caspar’s biography in Cushing and Sheppard’s 1882 county history (one of two in the township, the other being Samuel Abbot, who married Caspar and Rebecca Wistar’s daughter Sarah) paints a picture of an upright, exemplary, and conservative Quaker:
About 1825 he built the house now occupied by Andrew Griscom, where he resided until his removal to the city of Salem in 1861, successfully pursuing the business of a farmer, his place being a pattern of neatness and comfort. He was a man of decided convictions, a warm and sympathetic friend, exerting a strong influence in the locality in which he passed a long, useful, and exemplary life; plain in his habits and tastes, and an earnest and consistent member of the Orthodox branch of the Society of Friends.
He participated in township governance, serving as the Commissioner of Appeals 1821-1825 and the Surveyor of the Highways in 1824 and 1833-34. Caspar and Rebecca Wistar had thirteen children, of whom only five lived to adulthood: Sarah, Mary, Catharine, Caspar, and Joseph Bassett. Caspar, Jr. married Mary Emma Fogg in 1867 (Richard Wistar Davids, 12). Caspar Wistar, Sr. died in 1872, leaving the farm to Caspar, Jr. (Will of Caspar Wistar). At 40, he was already residing there and farming (his parents had moved into Salem in 1861 to live with their daughter Mary and her husband Caspar Wistar Thompson on West Broadway). Apparently Caspar Jr. did not find farming profitable, or perhaps the financial Panic of 1873 reversed his fortunes, for late in 1876, Caspar assigned the farm to Josiah Wistar and Caspar W. Acton for public sale in order to satisfy debts (Deed 49 page 172). Caspar and Mary Emma thereafter moved to Philadelphia (1880 Federal census). The 1876 auction ad describes the farm in its prime. A large, two-story barn with stabling for 40 head of stock stood at the northeast corner of the farmyard. In addition, there was a wagon house, granary, shedding for stock, “other necessary outbuildings,” and a “nearly new” four-room tenant house. The farm contained 120 acres, including 34 acres of meadow and the balance upland “in a high state of cultivation” divided into 12-acre fields, and a 5-acre “prime-bearing” orchard with a “well-selected variety of fruit.” A 7-acre tract of white and black oak timber “suitable for posts and cord-wood” lay adjacent. Like his father and brother, he seemed quite focused on livestock, which would have pastured well in the meadows. Corn in the crib and hay in the large barn would have fed Wistar’s 20 head of cattle, 20 of swine, 5 milk cows and 4 horses over the winter (1850 Federal Census,
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 30
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Agricultural Products). The large orchard may explain the deep cellar under the house. The abundance of meat produced on this farm for the family and for market may explain the many hooks in the basement room. The presence of a new “tenant house” may suggest the absence of the owner from day-to-day farming activities, or the anticipation of a new gentleman farmer occupant, for whom a hired farmer would actually run the farm. Edward Lawrence, of an old Mannington family, was the high bidder on the farm in 1876. He sold it in three months to Andrew A. Griscom, a major landowner who held it for eleven years. In 1888, Griscom sold it to Richard Bassett, who sold it two years later to Joseph G. Hancock. All of these owners were Quakers. From 1890 to the present, the property has been retained among Hancock heirs. Joseph and Flora Lippincott Hancock established a commercial canning operation on the farm. Joseph died in 1894 at the young age of 43, but Flora, undaunted, continued the business alone. The canning business began “in a building in the rear of their house,” according to an account by their son, William. The wording does not make it clear whether this was the attached shed “in the rear of their house,” or a separate “building” to the rear of the house. An account written by her grandson Joseph G. Hancock related that her cold pack canning began on her kitchen range, and then expanded to a wagon shed in which she installed six ranges, hiring six women. She specialized in tomatoes selected for frying, built up a considerable local reputation, and sold her excess product in Philadelphia. She also hired African American workers from Marshalltown, who walked to her farm. For a time, Flora stored her product in the northeast parlor of the house, where stains on the floor tell the tale. Later she moved the operation into Salem, where her workforce peaked at 200 when she sold it. Flora procured a government contract during World War I, but when the war ended, the government reneged and she was left owing thousands of dollars to area farmers for their tomatoes. Over time, she repaid them everything and earned great respect as a tough, enterprising woman of integrity. Flora’s son William C. Hancock assumed ownership of the farm in 1906. He and his wife Ida Fogg, or his second wife, Irene, were probably responsible for the extensive changes made to the kitchen (Suzanne Hancock, personal communication). They removed the original brick fireplace and bake oven, probably truncated the shed from the south elevation, and added windows. The kitchen originally contained a straight staircase along the north wall into the servants’ chamber above. It appears that the shed was extended over the rear cellar entrance, and a new kitchen staircase was inserted into the shed. The idea may have been to convert the interior kitchen to a different use. After William and Irene passed on, the house passed into disuse and deteriorated. The current owners began a restoration beginning in the 1990s. An old Hancock family photograph shows a one-story frame gambrel-roofed house. It stood next to a small, two-story outbuilding which is possibly the granary in the southeast corner of the farmyard described in Caspar Wistar’s 1835 survey. The roof ridge was sway-backed, the weatherboard in the gable end was in disarray, the lower, shingled roof slope was heavily stained, and the upper roof slope was re-roofed with standing seam metal. Where the roof overhung the wall, a missing soffit exposed the overhanging joists. Three asymmetrical bays contained replacement sash windows, but no door, suggesting it had been altered. An unidentified, plainly dressed old man with hat in hand stood in front of the house facing the camera. Handwriting on the back of the photo identifies him as Caspar Wistar, and the house as “the original hip-roof Wistar house.” The house in the photograph looks very much like gambrel roof houses built in the county in the early eighteenth-century, though most known examples are brick. In the Hancock family is an oral account of a gambrel-roofed house that once stood across the road from the farmstead. That memory, and the 1765 Wyatt-Wister survey showing Richard Wistar’s house in that vicinity, suggests a scenario: Caspar Wistar, Sr. moved the vacant, ancestral Richard Wistar House from across the road to his new farmstead. Perhaps it housed Caspar and his family until his new brick house was built. Annexed to the farmyard after 1835, it may have housed free-black laborers like Susan Green, Ebenezer Duck, Isaac York, and
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 31
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Lucy Oliver, who lived on Caspar’s property in 1850 (1850 Federal Census). When the “new” tenant house was built circa 1876, its use may have downgraded. Since this is a Hancock family photo, it is possible that Caspar Wistar, Jr., in his elder years between 1900 and 1910, nostalgically visited the old homestead where he was pictured. Or perhaps the occasion of the photograph was to document the relic on the eave of its demolition. Thus Caspar, or more likely his son Caspar, proudly stood with the dwelling of his ancestor on this piece of Quiettitty. Significance: The farm meets Criterion A for agriculture, Criterion B for the business woman Flora Hancock, Criterion C for domestic and agricultural architecture, and Criterion D for potential to yield information about the history of agriculture.
Eligibility for New Jersey and National Registers: Yes No
National Register Criteria: A B C D
Level of Significance Local State National
Justification of Eligibility/Ineligibility: Criterion A: The farm is significant for its association with the development of agriculture in Salem County beginning in the decades before the Civil War, particularly related to use of banked tidal meadows that characterized the tidal portions of coastal New Jersey, particularly along the Delaware Bay and River. The house and the crib barn illustrate everyday farming activity in its provision for the storage of farm products. The large corn crib in particular evidences livestock farming, as does the farm’s proximity to the formerly banked and drained Mannington Meadow, the scene of pasturing animals and the growing of hay and seed. The carriage shed, which may also have stored wheeled farm implements as well, illustrates the trend of mechanizing agriculture that proceeded during the nineteenth century. The house and crib barn/wagon house retain integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling of farm life during the historic period, and association with agriculture. The carriage shed, being moved and rebuilt, retains all but specific location, though it is still in the farmyard, and possibly design if it was shortened. However it was altered and reused, it still associates with agriculture. Criterion B: The farm is significant for its association with Flora Hancock, a woman entrepreneur who owned and operated a tomato canning business. Unusual in its time for being a female enterprise, it grew from a 6-person operation on this farm into a 200-person operation in a Salem factory. Her business held federal contracts during World War I, and she became locally well known for her brand of frying tomatoes and her business integrity in overcoming indebtedness after World War I. Flora Hancock can be considered an early local feminist. The location of her Salem factory is not known, so this farm, as her home and site of the establishment and early operation of her business would have the best association with her. Criterion C: The farm’s buildings are significant for their association with architectural styles, property types and workmanship. The house is exemplary for its idiosyncratic blend of Federal and Greek Revival styles, workmanship of finishes, and material evidence of farm life (cellar, iron hooks, featherbed closet, and office with side door). It also expresses the wealth and architectural tastes of an upper-class Quaker family in Salem County. The gable-front, drive-through, canted crib barn with lateral sheds provides an early 19
th century example of such
an agricultural property type. The open carriage shed provides the same for a domestic outbuilding. Both show changes over time in local agricultural economy, markets, and technology, and here add to scarce documentation of agricultural buildings in New Jersey.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 32
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 6, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Criterion D: Because an 1835 survey locates several key but missing elements of the farmyard (hay/livestock barn, granary/workshop, bee and bath house, privy), there is an opportunity to tie excavated artifacts to specific farm outbuilding types and agricultural activities. Linking archaeological evidence to the already documented architectural and archival data would expand the understanding of agriculture at this site and contribute to a context of regional practices. Also, excavations may shed light on the lives of the African American laborers and servants who lived on this site.
For Historic Districts Only:
Property Count: Key Contributing: Contributing: Non Contributing:
For Individual Properties Only:
List the completed attachments related to the property’s significance:
Base Building – House Building – Crib Barn Building – Carriage Shed Building – Shed
Narrative Boundary Description: The boundary consists of the farmstead and its associated fields defined by Tax Parcels Block 38 Lots 4 and 4.01. These parcels constitute the remnant of Caspar Wistar’s farm that is still attached to this farmstead, which is that portion lying on the east side of Pointers-Auburn Road.
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SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT NOVEMBER 25, 2014
JANET L. SHERIDAN, CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HISTORIAN
23
Appendix III. John & Rachel Watson Farm
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 1
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Property Name: Triangle Farm
Street Address: Street #: 600 Apartment #:
(Low) (High) (Low) (High)
Prefix: Street Name: Alloway-Aldine Suffix: Type: RD
County(s): Salem Zip Code: 08318
Municipality(s): Alloway Township Block(s): 36
Local Place Name(s): Aldine Lot(s): 17, 17.04
Ownership:: Private USGS Quad(s) Alloway Description: Triangle Farm is a farmstead on an active farm at the crossroads village of Aldine. It consists of a core of historic farm buildings characterized by hewn and sawn, joined timber frame construction, surround by an outer ring of more modern farm buildings. The historic farmstead consists of a late eighteenth-century, timber frame, one-room deep generational farmhouse and farm and domestic outbuildings built from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The farm outbuildings include a hewn-framed crib barn/wagon house of farmhouse vintage reused as a shop and storage shed, a timber-framed equipment shed, a hewn-framed, English 3-bay basement barn that expanded twice into a milking barn, and an early twentieth century basement barn used to house livestock connected to the latter. The domestic outbuildings including a frame auto garage, a privy, and a chicken house. Registration and
Status Dates:
National Historic Landmark: SHPO Opinion:
National Register: Local Designation:
New Jersey Register: Other Designation:
Determination of Eligibility: Other Designation Date:
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 2
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Photograph:
Location Map: Site Map:
Site
Site
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 3
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Bibliography/Sources: Thomas Cushing and Charles E. Sheppard, History of the Counties of Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland New Jersey : with Biographical Sketches of Their Prominent Citizens (Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, 1883); Everts & Stewart., Combination Atlas Map of Salem & Gloucester Counties, New Jersey : Compiled, Drawn and Published from Personal Examinations and Surveys. (Philadelphia: Everts & Stewart, 1876); Thomas. Shourds, History and Genealogy of Fenwick’s Colony, New Jersey, (Bridgeton, N.J.: G.F. Nixon, 1876); Steven G. Smith genealogy records, Salem County Deeds, Wills and Inventories; NJ Colonial Documents (Newspaper Extracts and Wills); Donald Gary & Carleton Dale Smith, Steven G. Smith personal communications; Diary of Herbert Smith, 1905, 1910; Salem County tax maps and parcel data; Donald Streeter, “The Historical Development of Hand-forged Iron Builders’ Hardware,” in H. Ward Jandl, ed., The Technology of Historic American Buildings: Studies of the Materials, Craft Processes, and the Mechanization of Building Construction (Washington, D. C.: APT, 1983), 1-34; Mercer, Henry C. The Dating of Old Houses. Doylestown, Pa: Bucks County Historical Society, 1923; Lee H. Nelson, “Nail Chronology as an Aid to Dating Old Buildings,” American Association for State and Local History Technical Leaflet 48, History News Vol 24, No 11., November 1968; Janet L. Sheridan, “’Their House are Some Built of Timber’: The Colonial Timber Frames of Fenwick’s Colony, New Jersey.” Additional Information:
More Research Needed? Yes No
INTENSIVE LEVEL USE ONLY
Attachments Included: Building Structure Object Bridge
Associated Archaeological Site/Deposit? Yes (Known or potential Sites – if yes, please describe briefly)
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 4
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
THIS PAGE TO BE COMPLETED ONLY AT INTENSIVE LEVEL AND
ONLY IF PROPERTY IS A FARM COMPLEX
Historic Farm Name: John F. & Rachel S. Watson Farm
Period of Agricultural Use: Ca.1784 To Present
Source
Construction, Nails, Hardware
Agriculture Type: Cattle ranching and farming
Remaining Historic Fabric High
Acreage: 61.01 Farm Description: Triangle Farm occupies five discontiguous parcels of land totaling roughly 80 acres at the crossroads village of Aldine in eastern Alloway Township near the border of Cumberland County. The land is high, on the divide between the Alloway Creek and Cohansey River watersheds. The portion being surveyed is the two continuous parcels of 61 acres containing the farmstead with associated pasture and crop fields. In February, 2012 the farmhouse and yard was subdivided out from the barnyard, farm buildings, and land for sale to one owner’s son for his residence. The farm owners live on other nearby parcels. The frame farmhouse stands at the northwest corner of Alloway-Aldine Road (County Road 611) and Aldine-Daretown Road (County Road 635). The farmstead faces south at the edge of Alloway-Aldine Road, surrounded by a wood rail fence at the road edge. The buildings form a ring around an open barnyard on the west side of the house, where a driveway enters from the road. Another driveway enters from Aldine-Daretown Road north of the house. The historic farm outbuildings, including the milking barn with attached bulk tank milk house, a concrete-block wall-enclosed barnyard, an animal barn, an equipment shed, and a crib barn/wagon house, surround the barnyard on the east, north and west. A small corn crib once stood on the west side of the wagon house, and another crib barn once stood on the north side. Before the 1950s, they were removed and two concrete block extensions to the wagon house were built to form a long garage for large vehicles. The historic farm outbuildings are uniformly constructed of joined and pinned timber frames, either hand-hewn or mill sawn. With the exception of the metal-clad equipment shed, they are all sided with vertical wood boards, and all are painted red. All of the buildings have been underpinned to some degree with concrete block foundations due to deterioration of timber sills and post bottoms over time. All such foundation walls are painted white. Behind the house on the north are domestic outbuildings including a garage and outhouse built before 1924, and a chicken house built in 1985 to replace an earlier one. Farther north on the entrance lane leading to Aldine-Daretown Road is a concrete block laborer’s house built in 1949. The domestic outbuildings are all built in the twentieth century, wood-framed, clad in vertical wood boards, and painted white. A frame house known as “the old red house” once stood facing Aldine-Daretown Road behind the farm house, and may have housed farm laborers. A more modern ring of buildings stand on the north and west sides of the historic barnyard. A machinery shed that stores baled hay was built in 1982. On its east side stands a wood garage, circa 1900, which was moved here from another farm in the 1980s. It has had multiple uses, including as a calf stall. One concrete silo built in 1977 and two steel silos built in 1982 and 1990 stand on the north side of the older barns. A large concrete yard with a concrete feeding trough surrounds a metal-clad free-stall barn built in 1972. The pasture and crop fields stretch north from the farmstead toward a branch of Salem Creek. From 1909 until 2010, this farm was a dairy operated by three generations of the Smith family. Until October 2011,
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 5
BASE FORM Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
the farm was rented to another dairy farmer. Currently, the barns and pastures are leased to a farmer who raises miniature horses. The owners still grow hay in the crop fields.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 6
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Aunt Betty’s House
Historic Name: John and Rachel Watson House
Present Use: Residential Activity: Permanent
Historic Use: Residential Activity: Permanent
Construction Date: 1784-1800 Source: Nails, hardware
Exterior Finish Materials Other (Composition weatherboard (Hardiplank)) Exterior Description: The two-story, braced timber-frame, generational I-house is composed of three linear sections that face south on Alloway-Aldine Road. The two eastern sections are both two stories, each 16 x 20 feet in plan, with a shared gable roofline, and each with a brick chimney on its western end. The east section stands at a higher elevation on a foundation of limonite (local “Jersey sandstone”, “bog iron,” or “peanut stone”) and represents Period I. The adjacent section on its west was originally a one-story, step-down kitchen that was raised to two stories circa 1840-50 (Period II). It appears that this section had little masonry foundation under the sill (one course of stone if that), but was recently underpinned with poured concrete. The third, westernmost section is two-story shed, similarly on the ground, which was reputedly a former slaughterhouse moved to this site (Period III). A slaughterhouse existed nearby on this road in 1875, so the story may well be true. A two story, gable-roofed ell, which added kitchen space and an upstairs bathroom, was added in the 1930s (Period IV). Restoration of the house began in 2008 with most of the work completed by 2012 The 2008-2012 period will be referred to in this survey as “the restoration,” regardless of the exact year. Early twentieth-century asbestos tile siding installed in 1936 was removed, revealing early, beaded-edge, rabbeted-edged weather board ranging from 6½ to 12⅜ inches wide that had been disassembled and reattached flat to the house with wire nails as a base for the asbestos siding on the east and north elevations. The upper rear face of these weatherboards was planed for a flat fit against the frame. On the south elevation was a weatherboard without bead, laid 5 inches to the weather, one of which was signed “Marian Smith, April 30, 1936” (see the Eligibility section for the history of families in this house). The historic siding was retained as found under the new, horizontal composition weatherboard siding (Hardiplank). All the windows were replaced with identically-sized, aluminum-clad wood units with thermal glazing. The earlier windows were circa 1919 replacement one-over-one wood sashes in the original single-hung frames, except for two, single-light wood awning sash in the west wall of the shed addition (newly added in 1936), and one, six-over-six double-hung wood sash in the south wall of the shed addition with Federal-period muntins. The latter window provided the model for the configuration of the current replacements. The window surrounds are flat pieces of Hardiplank, replicating the original casings, and the wood sills are panned with sheet metal. The circa 1936 asbestos tile roof remains in place, but the two chimneys were rebuilt in the original banded and
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 7
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
corbelled design. The wood box cornices are clad with vinyl. At the north door to the Period III shed a one-story, shed roofed mud room entry, built probably in the 1940s, was removed. South elevation: The main façade faces south. Each of the two gable-roofed sections (Periods I and II) have identical fenestration in the typical colonial, symmetrical, window-door-window arrangement, with two second-story windows placed directly over the first floor windows. The door to Period I is a reproduction board-and-batten door which replaced an early twentieth-century, single-light, five-panel door. The Period II door is a single light, early twentieth-century glazed, four-panel door. The shed addition (Period III) has a window and a four-light, two-panel, early twentieth-century door in the first story with one window centered above. The first floor of the easternmost section stands about two feet higher than the other two, which are at grade, and has a Victorian one-story front porch with a hipped roof and wood floor. The second and third sections share a one-story shed-roofed porch with a concrete floor on grade. The west end of the shed porch is a solid wall containing a window. Projecting to the south from this shed porch is a gable-roofed enclosure over an exterior well and porcelain sink. Both the shed porch and the well enclosure were screened with wood lath prior to the restoration.
South Elevation
The East elevation contains the gable end of Period I and the side elevation of Period IV. Period I has one bay of centrally-placed windows on each floor including the garret. The roof overhangs the wall about one foot, and is faced with a flat, non-tapering rake board that flares down to meet the north and south eaves. The original house probably did not have such an overhang and may represent an alteration made in the 1930s or before. The foundation is exposed below the wall and is parged. The single-bay Period IV wall contains a couplet six-over-six window in the first story and a single six-over-six window in the second story.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 8
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
East and North Elevations
The North elevation is the rear of the house. Period I at the east end contains one bay on the west side, with one window at the first and second stories. Evidence for a central door exists on the interior, and during the restoration, a beaded-edged door frame was uncovered under the asbestos siding. Evidence for a balancing window in the framing on the east was not accessible at that time, but it is likely that the rear elevation mirrored the front with window-door-window fenestration. The parged foundation is exposed below the wall and some of the underlying stone is showing. Two basement windows are arranged symmetrically, and because one is directly beneath the two upper ones, the other may indicate the placement of a former window bay. The Period II section contains one bay of windows, which is a remnant of a window-door-window arrangement. The other window was extant at the Period IV addition on the interior, and green-painted doorjambs were discovered within the wall during structural repairs of the north wall that took place from the interior. The door may have been removed when the Period IV ell was constructed, as the new wall fell very close to the door location, or it was closed whenever the kitchen was moved to the shed. The Period IV ell has no fenestration. The Period III shed has an irregular fenestration of a first-story new, glazed and paneled door in the east corner and a centered six-over-six window in the second story. A new concrete pad lies along the walls of Period IV and III. The West elevation contains the gable end of Period II and the side of the Period III two-story shed. The gable end is distinctive for its shingled cladding laid in alternating triple courses of straight- and diamond-butt wood shingles. The historic shingling probably dates from the late nineteenth-century, and was revealed during the restoration. The gable end is fenestrated with two symmetrically placed six-light thermal casements that replaced single-light wood awnings. The shed wall fenestration is irregular with two windows in each story. At the first story are two, couplet six-over-six windows symmetrically arranged close to the centerline of the building. The one on the south end occupies a former couplet window opening of the same size. The one on the north end was placed
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 9
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
in a new opening, replacing a single six-over-six that was located closer to the north corner. The second-story windows are asymmetrically-arranged, nine-light, awning windows. The latter replaced single-light awnings of the same size. An apron of concrete at the ground underpins the wall. Interior Description: The Period I section has a full basement built of limonite, a first floor hall, two second floor chambers, and an unfinished garret. The chimney stack provides fireplaces at the first and second floors. On the south side of the fireplaces is a winder staircase rising from the first floor to the attic. Access to the full-height cellar is from Period II. All interior doors in the house are board-and-batten. Cellar: Evidence in the cellar (Room 001) suggests that an exterior cellar entrance four feet wide once existed on the east side, where a full-height opening was filled in with the same type of stone as the foundation. The cellar floor is brick-paved in a basket weave pattern. An earthenware pot eight inches in diameter and eight inches deep is embedded in the floor near the kitchen stair. The walls and first floor framing over the cellar are whitewashed. The chimney base consists of a brick arch on two brick piers with a wood shelf sitting atop a ledge at the top of the piers. There are four windows at grade: two each, evenly spaced on the north and south walls. One was closed up with masonry and contained a rotted 3x4 inch timber window frame that contained mortises for seven diamond-shaped grille bars. The other three windows have updated frames and three-light awning sashes on surface mounted butt hinges. The muntin profile dates from the late-nineteenth- or early twentieth-century. The house sill is hewn and the full-span floor joists are hewn and sash sawn, joined to the sill with a central tenon. The 5x6 inch hewn joists roughly alternate with the 3x7 inch sash sawn joists, as though they were a retrofit to strengthen the floor. However, it seems impossible to accomplish that with central tenons without a complete floor frame disassembly. All the joists have been sistered with modern lumber, and there is evidence of a major termite infestation in the past. The absence of a mortise in the south sill at the southwest corner indicates that there never was a sill on the west foundation wall south of the chimney. This is the space where steps descend from Period I to Period II and from Period II to the cellar. The foundation steps down two feet for a distance of five-and-a-half feet, and there is no evidence, such as broken bricks at the edges, that it was reduced after construction. Thus a kitchen wing in the Period II location was contemporary with Period I. The steps to the cellar are made of modern lumber. The floor boards of the first floor visible overhead are four to six inches wide and appear hand sawn. The cellar contains a water heater, a water conditioner, a dehumidifier, and the house electrical panel. First Floor: The first floor of Period I (Room 101) has one plastered room with articulated corner posts and beams. The exposed posts and beams at the north and south walls are cased with return-beaded boards one inch thick with a ½-inch round. A beaded baseboard with a ½-inch bead encircles the room embedded in the plaster. At window sill height is a ledged, beaded chair rail on top of the extant shaved-off original chair rail that was embedded in the plaster. The new chair rail installed during the restoration duplicated original sections that were intact in the closet and window stools and aprons. The four windows and exterior door are trimmed with an architrave that is different from the other woodwork. It also is recently duplicated from what was extant, but which had to be removed to install the new windows. The door architrave is original, however. It has a Grecian ogee profile much like one that surrounds the fireplace, and probably represents the Watson remodeling after 1830. A nail extracted from the discarded architrave is an early cut nail dating probably to the late 1830s. The wall plaster is made with circular-sawn lath, but the ceiling has riven, or hand-split, lath. A ghost of the missing north central door is evident in the plaster wall, so it was removed after the Watson remodeling. There is no such ghost of an expected removed window, however. The joists are rough hewn and not intended to be exposed, so the ceiling likely dates from the time of construction. Evidently Watson removed riven lath and plaster walls and possibly a window. The floor boards are each tongued or grooved, an eighteenth century practice, and range four to seven inches in width, secured with hand-headed T- or L-head nails. The winder stair case, enclosed with hand-planed vertical boards is constructed with rose-headed wrought nails. The two stair doors are hand-planed, board-and-batten, hang on butt hinges, and are fitted with lima bean thumb latches with straight lifts of a late-eighteenth century vintage. Inside the stair, the walls are plastered, but the framing members are exposed and unfinished. A
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 10
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
closet on the north side of the fireplace is made with machine-planed vertical boards, and its door has a post-1840 patent thumb lift latch with curved lift: it is thus an alteration. Within the closet is extant original chair rail which provided the template for the reproductions. The fireplace occupies the middle of the east wall, surrounded by a mantle of plain flat hand-planed boards edged with a beaded molding at top and sides. Boards extend upward on both sides to frame the plaster wall above the fireplace. An ogee-molded architrave dating from the 1830s frames the fireplace. A plain board serves as the mantle shelf, but part of it appears cut-off. The brick hearth is laid in running bond. Early in the restoration the owner constructed a Rumford fireplace within the original firebox (to heat the house with), but removed it in 2014. Second Floor: The second floor of Period I contains two plastered rooms (201 and 202), articulated posts and beams (wall plates and tie beams) with beaded cases, a diminutive fireplace and hearth (uncovered in the restoration) and an enclosed winder staircase in the west room. The plaster walls are very rough, telegraphing the texture of riven lath, in contrast to the parlor below with its sawn lath and smooth walls. Intact beaded chair rail with two different profiles survived the modernization of the first floor, but under the windows are duplicated sections necessitated by the recent window replacements. The sawn lath (both circular and sash) ceiling was removed in the restoration, uncovering a formerly articulated ceiling consisting of planed oak joists with tapering chamfers below hand-planed floorboard undersides above. The wall plaster was carried up over the wall plates to meet the bottom of the garret floor. This finish evidences a more traditional, post-medieval taste, in contrast to the ceiling below, which has a more modern character in being plastered on rough hewn joists from the beginning. Seen in concert, the original finishes of the two floors represent a transition between the building practices of the post-medieval and the modern or Georgian era. Also it shows a hierarchy of finish in which a plastered ceiling was reserved for the more public spaces. The covering of the second floor ceiling took place during a time of transition in the mill sawing of lath with sash saw (straight up-and-down) and circular saw. According to Mercer, circular sawing of lath (beginning 1825-1835) occurred before sash sawing. The lath nails, according to Mercer, are after 1825, and by Nelson’s criteria are late 1830s or later. The ceiling could therefore date from the same period as the first floor changes by Watson. Since the uncovering of the joists in the restoration, a drywall ceiling with can lights was installed. Electric baseboard heat was added. The original floor had been covered with 2-inch wide hardwood flooring in the late 1930s. This was removed to reveal the original, and though somewhat eaten by insects, it was retained as found. A four-inch thick plastered partition with a centered, beaded-board-and-batten door separates Rooms 201 and 202. Slight differences in construction may indicate that it was an early change: there is no chair rail, and the lima bean door thumb latch is different from the others. It is hung on 4-knuckle instead of 3-knuckle butt hinges. The door architrave is a beaded board with a quirked bead edge molding embedded in the plaster. In Room 201, the tiny fireplace and plaster wall above it are framed with quirk-beaded, mortised, tenoned, and pegged boards, formerly painted red. A red-painted, ½-inch return-beaded board formalized the chimney joist above the fireplace. A shelf once hung above the fireplace atop the horizontal board. The posts, beams, chair rails, and baseboards were all painted red and later whitewashed before the plaster ceiling installation. The joists and overhead floorboards were not painted. The winder stair in the southwest corner is enclosed with hand-planed, unbeaded, vertical tongued or grooved boards, and the board-and-batten door, assembled with clinched rose-head nails, hangs on 3-knuckle butt hinges. The lima bean thumb latch is identical to the one downstairs. The first step is almost 17 inches above the floor, but probably had a step sitting on the floor at one time. The exterior walls in the stair case are plastered up to the garret but clad with whitewashed horizontal boards down to the first floor. Later wallpapered, the paper was removed and the whitewash was conserved in the restoration. The boards are nailed with hand-headed cut nails. Room 202 has three different historic chair rail profiles which may represent repairs over time. In the north wall a
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 11
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
matching seam in chair rail and baseboard and plaster irregularities suggest a window removal. There was considerable insect damage to wood framing, floors and woodwork in this end of the house. The garret (Room 301) has riven lathed, plaster gable walls, a tongued or grooved board floor, and exposed rafters. The lath nails are early cut nails. The sash-sawn, mortised and pinned oak rafters taper 4¾ inches at the board false plate to 3½ inches at the ridge, and bear carpenter scribe marks that extend across the width of the rafter. Each rafter centers over a joist and extends past the wall to form a boxed eave. The original west garret window is open to the other garret, but was boarded over before the restoration. The frame has channels for a single fixed sash, which is missing. When the window opening was uncovered, a Bible printed in 1818 with the name “Hannah Filer” was found inside. This may be evidence of a superstitious practice similar to putting shoes in the eaves. Period II Section: The frame of this house is circular-sawn timber, which probably dates from 1830s–1840s. It may have been part of John F. and Rachel Watson’s renovation campaign after they bought this farm in 1830, or perhaps after 1838 when John Watson’s father, John A. Watson, died. John F. Watson built and owned a nearby sawmill (Watson’s Mill) in 1826 (the time of the introduction of the circular saw), so he may have been at the cutting edge of circular sawing large timbers. Room 102 is a living room, but was originally a kitchen with a small cooking fireplace. The restoration revealed the cooking fireplace, chair rails, plate rails, formerly exposed joists, and a former door location on the north wall. The walls and ceiling were plastered on lath that was both circular and sash-sawn and installed with post-1830s cut nails. The wall plaster was carried to the floor above between the joists, so the ceiling post-dated the walls. When the north wall was gutted to the frame for structural repairs in the restoration, a central door opening and green-painted trim were revealed, then replaced in drywall. The windows and doors are trimmed with flat boards with a return bead at the inside edge. The chair rail, continuous with the window sills had been cut off flush with the wall, but left in place at the windows, as in, and identical to that in Period I. It was replaced with a reproduction. The pre-restoration floor was hardwood over a 4-inch wide tongue-and-groove subfloor installed in 1950 with cut and wire nails on 3x6 inch circular-sawn joists on 24-inch centers. The floor framing lay just a few inches above earth. The historic sawn sills survive on the south and east sides with 3x3 inch butt cog mortises in the top of the sill. The joists and floor were replaced with nominal lumber and a tongue-and-groove knotty-pine wood floor. The second floor frame consists of 3x6 ¾- inch sash-sawn joists at 24-inch centers. It was left exposed, as it appears that it was originally. The joists are not decorated with bead or chamfers, but the chimney joist was painted red for show. Though rough in appearance, the open ceiling was fitting for a work space. The cellar door is consistent in construction, finish, and hardware with the doors in the Period I side, so it is likely that it is contemporaneous with Period I as a feature of the original kitchen and was preserved in the circa 1840 renovation. The fireplace was concealed behind a brick infill wall, and the chimney had been fitted with a metal flue from a kerosene stove that heated the house since the 1930s or earlier. The firebox was five feet wide, blackened but with evidence of whitewash, with a wide, red-painted fascia board above it, and plain boards covered the cheek walls. Evidence of a former shelf cut off at the plaster wall was above the fascia and embedded in the north wall. A small closet was on the north side of the firebox cheek wall and a cupboard was above the shelf against the north wall. The back wall of the firebox was found to be infill after a period when the firebox was opened from the shed side. It was roughly altered with a wood lintel, much charred, and the former opening was infilled with brick. This very weak rear wall was replaced with cinder block faced with red brick in the original firebox. The owner constructed a Rumford-specification brick firebox inside the historic firebox and used the leftover space on the north side for a new wood closet. A new wood shelf was installed over a return bead trim duplicated from the partition door trim in Room 201. The Rumford fireplace was removed in 2014. The winder staircase which rises to the attic over the second floor has a longer north-south dimension than the
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 12
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Period I stair, and the hand-planed board-and-batten doors are fitted with Norfolk latches, which were popular 1800-1840. Thus it represents a later period, and prior access to the Period I garret may have been via a ladder instead of a staircase. Room 203 is the room over Room 102, and was originally a garret over the Period I kitchen. It contains the chimney stack, which necks down to exit-size and contains no fireplace. This chimney was rebuilt in concrete block from four brick courses above the neck up through the garret, and replastered, to the original dimensions. The overhead joists were open until the early twentieth century according to the wire lath nails, wall plastering that reached the underside of the garret floor, and whitewashed joists under the lath and plaster which was removed in the restoration. Doors of a late Victorian vintage open to Room 201 (four-panel ogee-molded) and 204 (beaded board-and-batten), so the social separation of the house sections ended circa 1890-1909. The bathroom (Room 204) built circa 1941 is still finished with vintage drywall, two-inch tongue-and-groove hardwood floor, bathtub, lavatory, and five-panel wood doors at the entry and closet. The toilet has been updated. Room 302 is the garret over Room 203. The underside of the floor was visible during the restoration and bore evidence of being the Period I garret floor over the kitchen: the undersides of the flooring are gauged and ploughed: an eighteenth-century practice. When the house was raised, the old garret floor was reused. The garret is unfinished save for sawn lath and plaster on the west gable wall. The rafters bear one-inch long, chiseled carpenter scribe marks and are assembled in numerical order from the west. At the sixth rafter begins increasingly thick shimming to make the roof match the level of the Period I roof. This may be due to error in matching the building height at the outset or to gradual subsidence of the building, which showed signs of being earthfast (sill on the ground). The difference in the style of rafter scribe marks between Period I and II may mean that the rafters built at different times by different carpenters. The chimney was rebuilt in the recent restoration above the floor with concrete block and brick above the roof. Period III Shed: The first floor contains is a kitchen (103) installed in the restoration. Prior to that, there was a partition that separated a dining room on the south side from a kitchen on the north side. The old kitchen contained a square brick chimney which served a cooking stove at one time. A baseboard with an ogee-cap molding and a wider beaded chair rail with no ledge suggested a late nineteenth-century construction date. The kitchen prior to the restoration was housed mainly in the Period IV section from which the adjoining wall had been removed at the first floor level. The partition in Room 103 was removed in the restoration, and the whole shed structure, which had stood sill-on-the-ground, was underpinned with a concrete foundation and new sills. The wall framing was repaired with additional posts, but the hewn posts and beams were retained and are still exposed. The ceiling was plastered on sawn lath prior to the restoration. It was removed to reveal the originally exposed sash-sawn floor joists, which had several layers of red, pink and white paint. After the restoration it was re-covered with drywall. Though a winder stair occupied the southwest corner of the shed, the ceiling framing north of that contains a patched-up opening which may have been a hatch with ladder access to the second floor (probably in its former life as a slaughterhouse, because all the finishes matches the rest of the floor frame). The floor frame was completely rebuilt. A family oral account that the fireplace had been open on both sides at one time suggests intensive use of the cooking fireplace beyond basic domestic needs during the ownership of William Simpkins (1869-1909). In 1894, William Simpkins’ son William E. Simpkins, nephew Jeremiah S. Watson, and Samuel V. Jones built a canhouse (canning factory) nearby. It may be that this family canning enterprise began in this shed. Room 205 is a bedroom above the today’s kitchen. It may have housed hired help in the past or stored supplies. Prior to the restoration it was partitioned across the room close to the south end. This partition, along with circa 1910 lath and plaster was removed, and drywall was installed. The flooring is wood boards nailed with irregularly-shaped machine-stamped heads. If they are early nineteenth-century nails, it may be that the shed was moved without disassembly from its earlier location.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 13
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Probable sequence of construction: Period I: 1784-1800: A two-story, hall-and-parlor, hewn timber frame I-house was constructed on a full basement of Jersey sandstone. It had two rooms and fireplaces on both floors, an enclosed winder staircase, and an unfinished garret. The house was fenestrated window-door-window on both front and rear facades. A one-story kitchen wing with the same fenestration was built also of hewn timber on the west side but two feet lower, with sill on the ground or on a few loose stones. The seven-foot wide brick cooking fireplace had an opening almost five feet wide, and the lintel was a seven-inch square oak timber. A ladder led to the kitchen garret. Period II: 1830-1840: John and Rachel Watson renovated by replastering the first floor walls, adding a closet, updating the architraves to Greek Revival, and plastering the second floor ceiling in the chambered hall. They raised the kitchen wing to two stories by taking the entire wing down to the ground but preserving the chimney stack. A new winder stair was built to the second floor and garret; Norfolk latches were used instead of Lima bean latches. A new, two-story frame was built out of sawn timbers, matching the rooflines with the reused rafters. They left the joists exposed on both levels and painted them dark red. The chimney stack was not altered, so there was no fireplace provided to the second floor room. There was no upstairs connection to the main house, where the owner’s family lived, and it is likely that hired help lived above the kitchen. The garret window of the main house, now opening into the garret over the kitchen wing, was boarded over and a Bible was stowed in the window space, possibly as a ritual concealment. The two garrets were thus socially separated like the second floor below it. Period III: Before 1867-1909: A two-story shed addition was built on the west side of the kitchen. Its hewn frame was from an old slaughterhouse down the road. The sash sawn joists were left exposed and painted red. The second floor, partitioned into two rooms, was not open to the other side; hired help might have lived in this isolated space. The back wall of the fireplace was removed, allowing cooking to take place on both sides. The shed may have been the site of a nascent canning operation which later moved to a canning factory built nearby in 1894. Period IV: 1909-1941: The Freas and Smith families plastered all the open ceilings, and cut doors between all the second floor rooms. In 1936 they re-sided and re-roofed the house with asbestos tile, putting down beaded T&G sheathing. The kitchen section, being earthfast, had subsided due to sill rot, and the rafters were shimmed to re- match the roofs. They added two second-story windows to the shed, replaced all the old six-over-six window sashes with one-over-ones, and added a two story bathroom/kitchen addition on the north side.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 14
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
The Smith home in 1938, probably after a roofing and siding renovation with asbestos tile. Different fence
styles define the farmyard and barnyard from each other.
Setting: This farmhouse is part of a farmstead known as Triangle Farm at the northwest corner of the intersection of Alloway-Aldine Road (County Road 611) and Aldine-Daretown Road (County Road 635) in Aldine. This spot occupies a high local elevation, being on the divide between the headwaters of Alloway Creek and the Cohansey River. To the north, crop fields extend to a wooded area on a branch of Alloways Creek, and to the west, a pasture extends to the next property where a vacant frame house stands. The farmstead faces south at the edge of Alloway-Aldine Road, surrounded by a wood rail fence at the road edge. The house stands a few feet from the corner of the intersection. The older farm buildings to the west form a ring around an open barnyard on the west side of the house, where a driveway enters from the road. Another driveway enters from Aldine-Daretown Road north of the house. On the south side of Alloway-Aldine Road, across from the house, is a cluster of frame houses. On the southeast corner of the intersection stands the Aldine United Methodist Church and cemetery. Beyond everything are more farms and cultivated fields.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 15
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Milking Barn
Historic Name: Unknown
Present Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Historic Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Construction Date: Circa 1800 Source: construction
Alteration Date(s): 19th, 20
th c. Source: construction
Designer: Unknown Physical Condition: Fair
Builder: Unknown Remaining Historic Fabric: High
Type: English/Three Bay Barn
Roof Finish Materials: Metal
Exterior Finish Materials Wood, Flush Exterior Description: The Milking Barn has a rectangular floor plan approximately 48 x 36 feet, and is composed of a two-story gable-roofed section and a two-story shed addition. Embedded within the gabled section is the original three-bay threshing barn 32 x 23 feet in plan. The timber-frame barn is clad with vertical tongue-and-groove wood siding nine inches in width, and painted red. The foundation is concrete block that varies in height from three to eleven courses, being a replacement for varying heights of original first floor framing. The barn is joined to the Equipment Shed and a silo on its north side, the Milk House on its southeastern corner, and the Calf Barn on the west side. It stands on the west side of the barnyard with its ridge line parallel with Alloway-Aldine Road. The East Elevation is the most visible façade, fronting on the barnyard. The gabled section is on the north side, and the shed is on the south side. A milk house adjoins the shed in the southeast corner of the barn. There are four exterior openings on the first floor south to north: a six-light wood sash, a Dutch door with two, braced-board-and-batten leafs on strap hinges, a single light window made of plexiglass, then another similar Dutch door. From the barnyard, one can enter a sliding wood door that provides entry into the Milk House, which leads into the milking parlor in the shed. In the gable end at loft level is a four-light wood sash. The barn cladding is laid in two courses which break at the eaves. Two wood, cut-out Holstein cows decorate the wall of the barn. The frame of the barn sits on six courses of concrete block painted white. A pulley is mounted in the wall under the peak of the ridge. Three electrical wires are anchored to the side of the barn with porcelain insulators. A weather vane sits on top of the ridge. The roof rake board overhangs the cladding. Attached to the north side of the barn is an open equipment shed. The North Elevation is partially covered by the equipment shed and two silos [what is the short one?]. In the exposed portion are a one-light wood sash window and a braced, vertical board-and-batten wood door in the first story, and a plywood door in the second story. On the east side of the ground-level door are five courses of concrete block to the wood siding, and on the west side, three courses. The two courses of board cladding break at the second floor level. There is a half-moon plywood cut-out applied to the barn wall. The West Elevation stands within a concrete barnyard. At ground level are a plywood-covered opening, a Plexiglas covered opening, a framed-plywood sliding door, and a steel six-light hopper window. In the second story are a swinging vertical wood door, a sliding vertical board door, and a three-light wood sash. The two courses of siding break above the eave. On the north side of the ground floor door are six courses of concrete block on three courses of brick at grade, and south of the door are eleven courses on the same brick foundation.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 16
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
The roof rake board is flush on cladding, unlike the overhang on the east side. South Elevation: This elevation is the south wall of the shed addition. There are eight bays with seven steel hopper windows and a central animal passage door, where the milk cows passed into the milking parlor from the barnyard. The first story wall is concrete block painted white, with vertical red-painted wood siding in the second story. The one-story, gable roofed milk house addition is built of concrete block with vertical wood board siding in the gable end and has two bays of steel hopper windows. It is roofed in corrugated sheet metal.
Interior Description: The barn began as a hewn timber frame, three-bay English barn, 32x22½ feet in plan, with a central drive-through bay and two side bays, which were probably used for animal and feed storage. Sometime in the late-nineteenth-century, the barn was extended to the east by about sixteen feet with circular sawn timbers. In the early twentieth-century, the Smiths added the shed on the south side which up until two years ago was a milking parlor. The Milk house was added in 1959. First Floor: The milking parlor takes up the space under the shed and also the south half of the gable section. To accomplish that, the original timber posts of the gable section were cut and supported on a large east-west timber beam supported by steel posts embedded in a concrete feeding trough that runs east-west through the parlor. The south wall is fenestrated with steel hopper windows and an animal passage from the concrete south barnyard secured with a steel gate. This is where the milk cows entered the milking parlor. The east wall has a passage to the milk house, and an old, animal-size Dutch door that leads to the central barnyard. On the west a wide animal passage with a wood door leads into the calf barn and the exterior door to the west barnyard, the free stall barn and the west pasture. An animal door leads directly to the exterior in the southwest corner of the main barn on the north side of the milking stalls. Twelve steel milking stanchions lined up east-west are still in place on the south side of the concrete feeding trough. They are oriented so the animals faced north as they were milked. To the south of those is a manure trench in the concrete floor which drains out through the west wall of the room. A small enclosed room on the east side houses a vacuum pump system that serves the milking system. The walls and circular-sawn wood joists and flooring overhead are whitewashed. The first floor is divided by a wood partition running east-west in the center of the main barn. It is studded with late-twentieth century 2x4s and clad with 5½ inch horizontal beaded boards. A wide central doorway is closed with a sliding, vertical board-and-batten door. On the north side of the partition is space that was used for animal pens at one time, but was most recently used for silage machinery and chutes that brought fodder into the milking parlor. In the northeast corner of the barn is a separate room that is open to the equipment shed and connects to the central barnyard on the east with an animal-size Dutch door. The second floor is supported by joists overlapping at beams. The floors were installed at different times, according to varying joist sizes, methods of cut, and spacings and different types of floorboards. It appears that earliest floor was in the east bay of the original three-bay barn. The west and central bays were not floored until the 1980s. The floor over the milking parlor in the shed addition was placed in two periods: first, the westerly three bays, and more recently, in the easterly two bays. The second floor is an open loft filled with straw. There are swinging wood doors in west, north and south walls. On this level, the barn framing has the best integrity and can be easily read for its evolution. The framing of the original three-bay English barn (the northwest portion) is hewn and joined with pinned mortises and tenons. Marriage marks are in evidence. The four structural bents are aligned north-south and are tied with a beam at the second floor level and three feet below the wall plate. The bents have up-braces, also hewn, from the end posts to the tie beam, and a central post without braces. Empty holes in each end post suggest that each bent was fitted at one time with a tie rod about a foot below the plate. The bays were symmetrical at ten, twelve, and ten feet across. The side walls have up-braces, but not in the central bay. There, a girt crosses at the level of the
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 17
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
original double-leaf barn doors. This girt is in place on the north side, but has been removed on the south side to eliminate obstructions in the interior. The upper iron door pintels for the south doors are still in place on the end posts. The posts show weathering at the edges of this former door frame, as well as at the east corner posts. The roof framing consists of common rafters 3x 6½ inches at the plate, but all but two have been replaced and spaced closer than the original hewn rafters, as evidenced by robbed rafter pockets at four-foot spacings on the outer edge of the plate (as seen from the shed side). Two hewn rafters survive, one at each end of the original barn. The replacement rafters are sash-sawn. The rafters are all tapered and pinned at the ridge, and birds-mouthed over the plate with rafter tails. Other alterations include most of the posts being cut below the second floor, and flooring over of the drive through bay and west hay mow. The east hay mow was floored either originally or later, but it has the earliest joists and floorboards. The west gable end tie beam was replaced with a sawn piece. The barn was extended sixteen feet to the east with sash-sawn timbers traditionally joined, probably dating from the early to mid-nineteenth century. However, the extension has a different framing arrangement. The bay is constructed as a box with an intermediate post in the north and south walls that does not have a tie beam connecting them, but does have up-braces in each bay (implies there was no wagon bay). There is a tie beam in the east gable wall, duplicating the bent design of the original structure. The plates were placed by resting them on wood brackets secured with cut spikes on the original end posts. The joists and floor boards are circular sawn, so may date later if this was a hay mow from the ground up. The first and second floors are divided differently, implying an alteration of the first level bays, possibly to line up the end (east) bay with the equipment shed for use as a large animal pen. Lastly, the two-story shed addition has posts opposite the bents in the main barn. The timbers are traditionally joined, except the braces are nailed, and circular sawn, signaling a construction date of after 1850, but probably late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The rafters rest on the main barn plates. Setting: The milking barn is part of a farmstead known as Triangle Farm at the northwest corner of the intersection of Alloway-Aldine Road (County Road 611) and Aldine-Daretown Road (County Road 635) in Aldine. This spot occupies a high local elevation, being on the divide between the headwaters of Alloway Creek and the Cohansey River. To the north, crop fields extend to a wooded area on a branch of Alloways Creek, and to the west, a pasture extends to the next property where a vacant frame house stands. The farmstead faces south at the edge of Alloway-Aldine Road, surrounded by a wood rail fence at the road edge. It forms a ring around an open barnyard on the west side of the house, where a driveway enters from the road. Another driveway enters from Aldine-Daretown Road north of the house. On the south side of Alloway-Aldine Road, across from the house, is a cluster of frame houses. On the southeast corner of the intersection stands the Aldine United Methodist Church and cemetery. Beyond everything are more farms and cultivated fields. The milking barn is oriented east-west on the west side of the main barnyard and on the north side of the enclosed cow yard. The original drive-through bay opened on the north and south sides, just like the crib barn, facing the road and the fields behind them. It is joined on its southwest corner by the calf barn, at its northeast corner by the equipment shed.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 18
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Milking Barn East Elevation
Milking Barn North Elevation
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 19
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Milking Barn West Elevation
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 20
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Milking Barn South Elevation
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 21
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
1938 view of the barnyard. Milking barn is in background. Equipment shed, wagon house and small crib
(no longer extant) at right. The original crib barn passage door had been moved before this time.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 22
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Crib barn/Wagon House
Historic Name: Wagon House
Present Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Historic Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Builder: Poss. John Watson Remaining Historic Fabric: Medium
Type: Corncrib
Roof Finish Materials: Metal
Exterior Finish Materials Wood, flush Exterior Description: The one-story, gable-front wagon house is a frame building on a twenty-foot square plan that faces south. It has been attached to two other buildings: a timber frame equipment shed on its west flank, and two linearly-arranged concrete block machine sheds on its north gable end. The south wall to the eaves has been replaced with concrete block, fenestrated evenly with a six-light steel window and a large board-and-frame wood sliding door. A few rocks are visible under the concrete block at the west end, suggesting that the original foundation was rock. The east wall, clad with butted, vertical boards painted red, sits on a three-course concrete block foundation wall. The north wall below the gable end is missing where building is attached to the machine sheds, and is supported by a steel post. The surviving gable end is clad with two courses of wide, vertical wood boards painted red with a rough opening in the peak. The west wall is intact, but its old, vertical wood board siding is covered with a thin veneer of modern paneling. The roof framing is hewn common rafters. The work of replacing walls with concrete block dates from circa 1980. The roof is corrugated galvanized steel. Interior Description: The interior is open with a wood stair accessing the attic on the west side and a row of low cabinets forming a work counter on the east side. The space is used as a shop and storage area. The floor is a concrete slab. The east wall is covered with a thin veneer of late-twentieth-century wood paneling, but the north corner post, middle post and upper girt are visible as original hewn timbers. The timber framing on the west wall is exposed and survives intact except for the south corner post. The attic floor joists are of varying thicknesses and sash-sawn. Each joist contains a robbed mortise for the former corn crib wall studs about three feet in from the east and west walls, thus this was historically a crib barn that housed a wagon in the central bay. Two cut floor joists and an attic floor patch provide evidence that the present stair was not originally against the west wall, but about three feet toward the interior, just inside the former crib. A circa 1920 photo of the crib barn shows a small door at this stair location. A 1938 photo shows the door moved to the west corner. The north wall tie beam contains empty mortises for posts and braces such that no large opening was framed for driving through. The attic is unfinished, exposing hewn rafters with marriage marks, pinned at the ridge. On the west side, all but one rafter is cut off at the wall where the equipment shed abuts and it was necessary to cut off the overhanging eave including false plate and joist ends. Each rafter was supported on the wall plate with a vertical piece of wood. This was 20
th century according to the wire nails used. The roof was wood shingled with cut nails at one
time, laid on nailers spaced at nine inches on center which survive. Flooring over the corn cribs was laid in after the corn cribs were removed.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 23
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Setting: The wagon houe/crib barn is part of a farmstead known as Triangle Farm at the northwest corner of the intersection of Alloway-Aldine Road (County Road 611) and Aldine-Daretown Road (County Road 635). The hamlet at this rural intersection is known as Aldine, but before 1890 was known as Watson’s Corners. This spot occupies a high local elevation, being on the divide between the headwaters of Alloway Creek and the Cohansey River. To the north, crop fields extend to a wooded area on a branch of Alloways Creek, and to the west, a pasture extends to the next property where a vacant frame house stands. The farmstead faces south at the edge of Alloway-Aldine Road, surrounded by a wood rail fence at the road edge. It forms a ring around an open barnyard on the west side of the house, where a driveway enters from the road. Another driveway enters from Aldine-Daretown Road north of the house. On the south side of Alloway-Aldine Road, across from the house, is a cluster of frame houses. On the southeast corner of the intersection stands the Aldine United Methodist Church and cemetery. Beyond everything are more farms and cultivated fields. The crib barn is the closest farm outbuilding to the house, and faces the road as the house does, but is set back further on the main barnyard. From the crib barn extends mid to late twentieth century machine sheds to the north and an early twentieth-century equipment shed to the west, which connects to the milking barn. Its original drive-through bay faced the road and the fields behind.
Wagon House/Crib Barn south elevation
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 24
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Carleton Smith and his road horse, circa 1920. Note wagon house passage door in original location, and early wagon doors with iron strap hinges. The small crib stands to the right, and a door is across the space, probably securing animals within the barnyard. A wheeled vehicle (some kind of wagon) stands in the shed.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 25
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Equipment Shed
Historic Name: Unknown
Present Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Historic Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Construction Date: 19th c Source: construction
Alteration Date(s): 20th c Source: construction
Designer: Unknown Physical Condition: Good
Builder: Prob. Herbert Smith Remaining Historic Fabric: Medium
Type: Shed
Roof Finish Materials: Metal
Exterior Finish Materials Corrugated steel Exterior Description: The Equipment Shed is a three-sided, one-story, three-bay timber-framed building with a low-slope gable roof and an earthen floor. Its rectangular plan measures 42 x 20 feet. It is underpinned with a concrete block foundation, which is a retrofit. It stands between, and is connected to, the Crib Barn and the Milking Barn. Its open side faces south, and opens onto the main barnyard. The shed is clad with red, ribbed steel panels and is roofed with corrugated steel. Interior Description: The interior is open and unfinished, exposing the framing. The structural system is composed of four transverse bents aligned north-south with end posts, a central ridge post, and connecting girts and up-braces. The bents stand on a sill and are connected by wall plates and ridge beam, both braced to the posts. The roof is supported by eighteen sets of rafters spaced about thirty inches on centers and lapped over the ridge beam. The ridge beam is a salvaged timber with robbed mortises. Some wood-shingle nailers survive. All the timber is circular-sawn, but the joints between posts, beams and braces are pinned tenons. The studs in the north wall are nailed, and the northwest corner post is replaced, as are the sills on all but the east side. Two horizontal rails support the exterior siding. The west bay is separated from the central bay by a vertical wood board partition, and a steel rail and a disassemble door containing a four-light window evidence a former closed animal pen. This pen was integral with the northeast room of the milking barn. Calves were housed here in recent years. The west two bays represent the original structure which had a 30 x 20 foot plan, which was extended easterly by twelve feet to the west wall of the crib barn. Setting: The equipment shed is part of a farmstead known as Triangle Farm at the northwest corner of the intersection of Alloway-Aldine Road (County Road 611) and Aldine-Daretown Road (County Road 635) in Aldine. This spot occupies a high local elevation, being on the divide between the headwaters of Alloway Creek and the Cohansey River. To the north, crop fields extend to a wooded area on a branch of Alloways Creek, and to the west, a pasture extends to the next property where a vacant frame house stands. The farmstead faces south at the edge of Alloway-Aldine Road, surrounded by a wood rail fence at the road edge. It forms a ring around an open barnyard on the west side of the house, where a driveway enters from the road. Another driveway enters from Aldine-Daretown Road north of the house. On the south side of Alloway-Aldine
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 26
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Road, across from the house, is a cluster of frame houses. On the southeast corner of the intersection stands the Aldine United Methodist Church and cemetery. Beyond everything are more farms and cultivated fields. The equipment shed forms part of the north edge of the main barnyard, and is connected to the crib barn on the east and the milking barn on the west. It faces the road as the house and crib barn do.
Equipment Shed South Elevation
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 27
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Equipment Shed North Elevation
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 28
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Calf Barn
Historic Name: Unknown, possible Horse Barn
Present Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Historic Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Construction Date: Early 20th c Source: construction
Alteration Date(s): Source:
Designer: Unknown Physical Condition: Good
Builder: Poss. Herbert Smith Remaining Historic Fabric: High
Type: Other
Roof Finish Materials: Metal
Exterior Finish Materials Wood, flush Exterior Description: This three-bay, two-story gable-roofed barn has a rectangular plan 36 x 22 feet. It faces east to the interior cow yard and is clad with two courses of vertical wood boards painted red above the first-story. The first story walls are all replaced with concrete block painted white. The roofing is corrugated metal. A half-round gutter used to hang from the exposed rafter tails, but only the hangars remain. Three lighting rods with glass balls stand on the ridge. The east elevation has three irregular bays: two steel hopper windows on the south side of a central animal door secured with a wood gate. In the second story is a central, vertical wood board swinging door hung on manufactured strap hinges. The south elevation has one window opening with a metal frame, and sliding battened plywood animal door. In the second story is a central, vertical wood board swinging door hung on manufactured strap hinges. A one-story open shed is attached to the south elevation, which provides passage between the inner cow yard and the west yard. The cow yard has a concrete surface and contains metal watering troughs. The south side, at the road edge, is walled with eight courses of concrete block. The west elevation has three bays defined by regularly-spaced openings in the first story block wall. There are no openings in the second story. The north elevation has one opening in each of three levels. An animal door in the first level has a vertical board sliding door clad with corrugated metal. Above are two windows placed just west of center: a vertical board swinging door at the second floor, and a vinyl, double hung window in the gable end. Interior Description: The first floor housed initially horses, then eight milking stanchions, and later calves for the dairy operation. There are two large pens enclosed with horizontal wood slats and metal swinging gates. Up until the early 1950s, there were a number of stalls for the farm’s working horses. Overhead, whitewashed floor joists run north-south and lap over two evenly-spaced east-west circular-sawn beams. On the center of each beam rests a central post from the second story. There are two milking stalls with the same stanchions as in the milking barn. Two steel posts supporting a short beam under the main transverse beam are integral to the stanchion rails. A feeding trough of a shorter design than the one in the milking barn lies on the west side of the stanchions. The second level is an open hay loft accessed by a ladder and floor opening in the northeast corner of the room, at the door to the milking parlor. Over the opening is a wood frame eight feet tall that could have been an air shaft in the hay mow. The circular-sawn, joined and pinned, timber framing consists of four structural bents (making three bays twelve feet wide) with tie beams under the floor and three feet below the wall plate. The upper tie is braced at the wall posts and supported mid-span by a post that rests on the lower tie beam. The side walls have three rows of common-nailed, horizontal girts supporting the vertical siding and up-braces between the posts and
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 29
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
wall plates. The floor consists of boards three to eleven inch wide, both sash and circular-sawn, and two old board-and-batten doors which may have been salvaged from the house. The twenty, untapered common rafters land on the wall plate and provide an exposed rafter tail on the exterior. They join at the ridge with a nailed butt joint. Setting: The calf barn is part of a farmstead known as Triangle Farm at the northwest corner of the intersection of Alloway-Aldine Road (County Road 611) and Aldine-Daretown Road (County Road 635). The hamlet at this rural intersection is known as Aldine, but before 1890 was known as Watson’s Corners. This spot occupies a high local elevation, being on the divide between the headwaters of Alloway Creek and the Cohansey River. To the north, crop fields extend to a wooded area on a branch of Alloways Creek, and to the west, a pasture extends to the next property where a vacant frame house stands. The farmstead faces south at the edge of Alloway-Aldine Road, surrounded by a wood rail fence at the road edge. It forms a ring around an open barnyard on the west side of the house, where a driveway enters from the road. Another driveway enters from Aldine-Daretown Road north of the house. On the south side of Alloway-Aldine Road, across from the house, is a cluster of frame houses. On the southeast corner of the intersection stands the Aldine United Methodist Church and cemetery. Beyond everything are more farms and cultivated fields. The calf barn is connected to the west side of the milking barn, representing a continuing westward expansion of the farmstead in the early twentieth-century. Its long sidewall on the east fronts on the inner cow yard which held the milk cows prior to milking after they made their afternoon walk from the pasture east of the intersection. A one-story, concrete block gable roofed shed is attached to its south wall. Beyond the calf barn to the west is a concrete-surfaced yard that connects to the 1972 free stall barn.
Calf Barn South and East Elevations
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 30
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Calf Barn North and West Elevations
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 31
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Garage
Historic Name: Garage
Present Use: No Activity
Historic Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Construction Date: Before 1924 Source: Placard for electrical equipment, Construction
Alteration Date(s): None Source:
Designer: Unknown Physical Condition: Good
Builder: Herbert Smith Remaining Historic Fabric: High
Type: Other
Roof Finish Materials: Metal
Exterior Finish Materials Wood, flush Exterior Description: The one-story garage is gable-roofed and rectangular in plan on a brick foundation. It is sided with vertical, tongue and groove, center-beaded boards. The vehicular door occupies the south gable end and is closed by a pair of sliding doors constructed with the same grooved and matched boards as the siding. The west and east side walls contain two six-light fixed sashes each in the upper part of the wall, and the south gable end contains a diamond-shaped glazed window above the door. The north gable end is unfenestrated. At the southwest corner of the building stand two utility poles which support the farm’s electrical service entry. On the west wall hangs an electrical panel. Interior Description: The interior is one unfinished room where an automobile was once kept and where electrical equipment was housed when the farm was first served with electrical power. Artifacts of a circa 1924 Delco-Light DC farm electrical system survive. A concrete pedestal supported the gasoline-powered generator. A thick plank attached to the west sill supported a bank of storage batteries. A placard on the wall is the original instruction sheet copyrighted 1922 for “Battery Instructions Models 850-1250-1271-1278 Delco Light.” It illustrates the generator, batteries, and ammeter. The placard is marked “Service Folder No. 153—Delco-Light—1-3-24-10M-R. E.” and is labeled “Dayton, Ohio” (city name is torn off except for “ton,”). Although the copyright is 1922, the folder number may indicate a closer production date of 1/3/1924. The garage is now used for storage. Setting: The garage is part of a farmstead known as Triangle Farm at the northwest corner of the intersection of Alloway-Aldine Road (County Road 611) and Aldine-Daretown Road (County Road 635) known as Aldine. This spot occupies a high local elevation, being on the divide between the headwaters of Alloway Creek and the Cohansey River. To the north, crop fields extend to a wooded area on a branch of Alloways Creek, and to the west, a pasture extends to the next property where a vacant frame house stands. The farmstead faces south at the edge of Alloway-Aldine Road, surrounded by a wood rail fence at the road edge. It forms a ring around an open barnyard on the west side of the house, where a driveway enters from the road. Another driveway enters from Aldine-Daretown Road north of the house. On the south side of Alloway-Aldine Road, across from the house, is a cluster of frame houses. On the southeast corner of the intersection stands the Aldine United Methodist Church and cemetery. Beyond everything are more farms and cultivated fields.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 32
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
The garage stands facing south and side wall to the driveway east of the crib barn and behind (to the north of) the farmhouse.
Garage South and West Elevations
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 33
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Garage North and East Elevations
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 34
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Help House
Historic Name: Unknown
Present Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Historic Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Construction Date: 1949 Source: Owner
Alteration Date(s): 1980s Source: Owner
Designer: Carleton Smith Physical Condition: Good
Builder: Carleton Smith Remaining Historic Fabric: High
Type: Worker Housing
Roof Finish Materials: Metal
Exterior Finish Materials Wood, flush Exterior Description: The rectangular, gable-roofed house with exposed rafter tails is built of concrete block and painted white. The low-slope roof is clad with asphalt shingles and the overhanging eaves at the gable ends are covered with flat rake boards. The south, or front, elevation has a balanced arrangement of a door and window. The door is a salvaged four-panel Victorian door, and the window is a metal, two-over-two double hung sash. The sash muntins are horizontal, typical of mid-twentieth century windows. Each gable end has a centered window of the same type and a louvered vent in the peak. The north elevation has two such windows symmetrically arranged. Between them rises an exterior concrete block chimney built against the wall. Interior Description: The interior consists of one room, but formerly there was a partition in the center with a centered doorway, forming two rooms, evidenced by a wood header in the ceiling that bears the scars of the wall studs. The ceiling is finished with wallboard and the floor is a concrete slab. The room is electrified with surface-mounted receptacles and conduit. Two flush metal ceiling fixtures are centered in each former room. The latter dates from the conversion of the building from a help house to a “clubhouse” where the milking crew gathered after milking. Setting: The help house is part of a farmstead known as Triangle Farm at the northwest corner of the intersection of Alloway-Aldine Road (County Road 611) and Aldine-Daretown Road (County Road 635) in Aldine. The hamlet at this rural intersection is known as Aldine, but before 1890 was known as Watson’s Corners. This spot occupies a high local elevation, being on the divide between the headwaters of Alloway Creek and the Cohansey River. To the north, crop fields extend to a wooded area on a branch of Alloways Creek, and to the west, a pasture extends to the next property where a vacant frame house stands.
The farmstead faces south at the edge of Alloway-Aldine Road, surrounded by a wood rail fence at the road edge. It forms a ring around an open barnyard on the west side of the house, where a driveway enters from the road. Another driveway enters from Aldine-Daretown Road north of the house. On the south side of Alloway-Aldine Road, across from the house, is a cluster of frame houses. On the southeast corner of the intersection stands the Aldine United Methodist Church and cemetery. Beyond everything are more farms and cultivated fields.
The help house stands amid lawn facing south and side wall to the driveway north of the farmhouse at the fringe
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 35
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
of the farmyard. A wire fence along the driveway abuts the east wall.
Help House
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 36
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Common Name: Outhouse
Historic Name: Outhouse
Present Use: No activity
Historic Use: Farming, tilling, plowing, harvesting, or related activities
Construction Date: Before 1924 Source: Date of electrification, Construction similar to garage
Alteration Date(s): None Source: Construction
Designer: Unknown Physical Condition: Good
Builder: Poss. Herbert Smith Remaining Historic Fabric: High
Type: Other
Roof Finish Materials:
Exterior Finish Materials Wood, flush Exterior Description The outhouse is square in plan with a pyramidal roof and faces south within the farmyard. It is sided with vertical, tongue and groove, center-beaded boards. The board-and-batten door in the south wall is constructed of the same matched boards, hangs on two modern strap hinges, has a pull handle, and contains a single rectangular light. A horseshoe hangs above the window. The roof is clad with asphalt shingles, the hips are capped with sheet steel, and the rafter-tails are exposed. The north elevation contains several courses of horizontal boards at ground level which appear to be for clean-out purposes, since they correspond to the seats and pit on the interior. Interior Description: This three-hole outhouse is without wall or ceiling finishes. The floor is wood tongued-and-grove boards. The seats line the north wall. Two seats are set at adult height, and one, on the west side, is set a few inches lower for a child. A single light bulb hangs via a twisted pair of wires at the southwest corner in a socket with a twist-type switch. The wiring is supported by porcelain fixtures, and the whole installation appears to date from the time of initial electrification of the farm, circa 1924.
Setting: The outhouse is part of a farmstead known as Triangle Farm at the northwest corner of the intersection of Alloway-Aldine Road (County Road 611) and Aldine-Daretown Road (County Road 635) in Aldine. The hamlet at this rural intersection is known as Aldine, but before 1890 was known as Watson’s Corners. This spot occupies a high local elevation, being on the divide between the headwaters of Alloway Creek and the Cohansey River. To the north, crop fields extend to a wooded area on a branch of Alloways Creek, and to the west, a pasture extends to the next property where a vacant frame house stands. The farmstead faces south at the edge of Alloway-Aldine Road, surrounded by a wood rail fence at the road edge. It forms a ring around an open barnyard on the west side of the house, where a driveway enters from the road. Another driveway enters from Aldine-Daretown Road north of the house. On the south side of Alloway-Aldine Road, across from the house, is a cluster of frame houses. On the southeast corner of the intersection stands the Aldine United Methodist Church and cemetery. Beyond everything are more farms and cultivated fields. The outhouse stands on the north side of the house in the farmyard lawn northeast of the garage.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 37
BUILDING ATTACHMENT Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Outhouse South and West Elevations
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 38
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
History: Before it was Aldine, this crossroads hamlet in the township of Upper Alloways Creek was known as Watson's Corner for the family who settled there and whose business pursuits anchored the development of a crossroads village. John F. Watson (1778-1864) and his wife Rachel Seeds (1781-1851) from Pittsgrove Township (which lay north and east of this farm) began buying land around this crossroads in the 1820s with many transactions through the 1850s. Watson built a saw mill on a branch of Alloways Creek not far from here in 1827 in partnership with Adam Minch. Many of the nine Watson children and their descendents stayed in this locale to farm, mill, can, merchandise, and build a Methodist church. The Watson’s purchase of this farm may have been driven by the mill venture and their need to reside nearby. His father, John A. Watson was a shipbuilder in Alloway village, and held interests in two schooners. Thus, the sawmill may represent an enterprise to exploit the abundance of uncleared forests in the inland townships to provide white oak for shipbuilding in Alloway and for export in the early nineteenth century. In 1830 and 1837, John and Rachel Watson formed their “homestead farm” out of two adjacent 25-and-a-half-acre parcels purchased from Isaac Johnson and Jacob Hitchner, local speculators who had scooped up the 300-acre “Gamble Farm” from in 1829. The farm house is on the parcel Watson bought in 1830. He purchased "land and premises," implying that the house was extant at the time of sale. It may have been a tenant house on the Gamble Farm, the pattern-brick farmhouse of which stands on the road to Daretown north of the Watson house. The Gamble estate was occupied by several tenants, as noted in a newspaper notice to them in 1762, and was probably never occupied by its owner. Two generations of Gambles never left Ireland, and the immigrant William Gamble lived in Mercer and Burlington Counties. The small size, simple quirk-beaded finishes, and board-and-batten doors of this house project a middling versus a genteel status. It is an American version of a post-medieval rural house of the British Isles, a form perhaps related to the Gamble’s Irish heritage. The likely construction period is between the Revolutionary War and 1800, based upon nails and hardware. Within the farmstead are three principal early buildings built of traditionally hewn and joined frames: the house, a threshing barn, and a crib barn. All could date from the initial establishment of the farmstead. The house evolved through the mid-twentieth century. Initially a two-story hall, 20x16-foot, open-plan house with a one-story, step-down kitchen of roughly the same size, each part had traditional window-door-window fenestration on both façades. The floor above the parlor, heated by a diminutive fireplace, was divided into two rooms with a plastered board wall. The hall ceiling was always plastered, but the chambers above had articulated ceilings, with oaken joists adzed smooth with chamfered edges. Thus the post-medieval house transitioned into modernity with the publicly visible “ceil’d” hall, retaining a traditional interior for the private space. Within a decade or so of their 1830 purchase, the Watsons raised the kitchen wing to two stories with an entirely new sawn frame built around the original cooking fireplace and chimney stack, and redecorated the main parlor in trendy Grecian-profiled architraves and new plastering over circular-sawn lath. The replastering may have served the purpose of erasing evidence of removed fenestration and to provide a more stylish “best room” for entertaining guests. Even so, the level of finish never achieved the ornamentation possible at the time; the parlor fireplace, an obvious opportunity for display, has only a narrow, quirked cyma reversa molding applied as a surround to the plain board mantel piece. The house has retained its informal, open form to the present, never following the Georgianizing trend that began in the late seventeenth century in the most elite American houses. The kitchen and new room above it had open-framed ceilings until the early twentieth century, a rough
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 39
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
appearance but evidently normal for a rural work space and the socially separated chamber over it. When the west garret window between the main house and the raised kitchen wing was boarded over, a Bible was placed in the space, perhaps as a blessing on the new construction. The two-story shed on the west side of the house is a hewn frame reputed to be salvaged from a nearby butcher shop; indeed, one stood nearby in 1875. The latter may have been the 1870 workplace of eighteen-year-old butcher William E. Simpkins, whose father took possession of the Watson house in 1869. Also, the kitchen fireplace was open on both sides and the shed ceiling was articulated on both levels, suggesting that the shed was an additional workspace related to cooking, or the house kitchen was relocated to the shed, allowing for a second parlor. However, a rear room containing a cookstove and a chimney suggests a multiple use of the shed, possibly a commercial one. William E. Simpkins and his cousin Jeremiah S. Watson built a canning factory nearby in 1892, so the shed may have housed a nascent canning operation before that. The shed, like the other two sections, had its own winder stair, and the second floor was divided in two but not connected to the middle section until the early twentieth century. So until then, the second floor chambers were connected only vertically, not horizontally, like three separate houses. This may signal social separation of unrelated people, likely laborers, from the family. Though Watson was a miller, like most people, he farmed. The barns illustrate the establishment of the farm, expansion, and change in agricultural activities from the late eighteenth-century to the late-twentieth century. The oldest farm outbuildings, those built of hewn oak, include a three-bay “English” threshing barn and a crib barn/wagon house. The preindustrial three bay English barn is embedded within the extant milking bar. The threshing barn had a central drive-through bay where hay from the field was offloaded to the adjacent mows. A wood floor was used for threshing grain before the advent of threshing machines. A small number of animals were probably penned in the side bays. The corn crib, also with a central drive bay, dried and stored corn as winter feed for livestock. It served a dual purpose of storing fodder and wagons. John Watson probably built the sixteen-foot barn extension to the east with sash-sawn joined timbers from his water mill and re-roofed the entire barn. There is no evidence that the extension had a drive-through bay, so it may have been primarily for the housing of a larger collection of animals and/or hay, hinting at growth in livestock husbandry, or entry into dairying. Expanding the farm was within Watson’s means—his probate inventory value of $3,454.74 fell at the 80%ile of other inventories of his time in the county, and he was prosperous enough to invest nearly half his net worth in loans. Though abundantly furnished with a desk, a clock, numerous bedsteads, dressers, chairs, tables, dishes, a stove, crocks, carpeting, and curtains, the house contents reflected practical farm work versus gentility. In 1850, he grew corn, wheat, oats, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, buckwheat, fruit, produced butter, and kept a horse, cows, sheep, and swine, all in rather average numbers compared to others in the township. But he favored crops over livestock, producing a higher than average amount of potatoes and buckwheat. If the additional barn space was not for him, it may have been for community use. When he died at age 86 in 1864, heirs conveyed the homestead to his son James F. Watson in 1867. However, James, a “dealer” who had operated a store in Aldine since 1838, died that same year. The next stage of barn expansion was the addition of a two-level shed on the long side, which may have been built for additional hay storage above and either animal pens or a milking area on the first floor. Its circular-sawn timbers and nailed braces suggest a late nineteenth-century period, perhaps that of William Simpkins. Simkins was a miller and blacksmith in the village since 1840 who married John Watson's daughter Jane and acquired the farm from James Watson’s widow Anna in 1869. The post-Civil War period marked statewide changes in agricultural markets, away from vegetables and fruits to market-oriented dairying. The spread of the railroads through southern New Jersey made it possible to more quickly transport milk to large urban markets.
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 40
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Watsons Corner was three miles from the Daretown station of the Salem Railroad, which joined the West Jersey Railroad at Elmer six miles east. The three-sided equipment shed was probably built in the post-bellum period as well, reflecting the increased mechanization of farming with labor-saving horse-drawn machines for plowing, planting, cultivating and harvesting. These open bays would have protected the iron and steel machines from the weather, while making them easy to pull out when needed. The shed was initially 30 x 20 feet in plan. In 1909 William J. Freas of Upper Pittsgrove purchased the farm. His daughter Hattie Freas and her husband Herbert Smith, married about 1903, may have moved in as tenants with their three young children. It appears that in this time period, the parts of the house with articulated framing were finally plastered, and doors were opened between the upstairs rooms. They purchased the property in 1919, and continued to expand the farm buildings for dairying. The barn shed addition became the modern milking parlor that exists today. In response to new state regulations on milk production and hygiene on farms, they installed the present setup of metal stanchions, concrete floor with manure and feed troughs, and whitewashed interior, possibly in the 1920s. It seems that in that period also, the "calf barn" was added at right angles to the main barn. It does not appear that the calf barn ever had a drive-through bay like the early barn, but always penned animals and provided extra space for milking below and hay storage above. This barn housed horses until the early 1950s. Because the main barn was taken over for a milking parlor, a second barn may have been needed to house the animals that used to be stalled in the main barn. After the farm converted over to motor-driven farming, the horse barn was fitted with milking stanchions. More recently, all but two of these were removed to create two pens for calves. The crib barn/wagon house was also altered in the twentieth century. Photographic and physical evidence point to a removal of the cribs and the relocation of the stair to the loft and the exterior door that led to it to the west wall sometime in the 1920s or 30s. Like the other barns, much of the first floor framing and cladding was transformed to concrete block at mid-century, as weather and rot took its toll on old sills and posts. The sawn-frame equipment shed could have been extended eastward to the crib barn during this period as well. Herbert and Hattie Smith probably built the early twentieth-century domestic outbuildings in the farmyard: the auto garage, outhouse, and chicken house. Their daughter Elizabeth never married and lived in the farmhouse until her death. Her brother Carlton took over the farm though he lived elsewhere. He built the concrete block laborer’s house now re-purposed for storage and the concrete silo and the house bathroom addition. Carlton’s twin sons Donn and Dale Smith took over the farm, by now called Triangle Farm, upon Carleton’s death in 1978. Reflecting the increasing mechanization of farming after mid-century, they added a ring of twentieth-century structures behind the earliest farm outbuildings: two more silos, a free-stall barn, and a large shed for farm equipment and hay bales. These buildings supported the shelter and feeding of the dairy herd using larger machines and baling methods developed in the late twentieth century. Significance: This farmstead is significant under Criterion A for the pattern of events under the area of agriculture and under Criterion A for architecture. The period of significance is 1790-1964. The latter date is the date of 50 year age, because the farm with all its historic buildings was in use at that time and beyond.
Eligibility for New Jersey and National Registers: Yes No
National Register Criteria: A B C D
Level of Significance Local State National
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New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office Page 41
ELIGIBILITY WORKSHEET Historic Sites #:
Survey Name: SALEM COUNTY FARMS RECORDING PROJECT Date: September 3, 2014
Surveyor: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Organization: JANET L. SHERIDAN
Justification of Eligibility/Ineligibility: Criterion A: This assemblage of house, farm outbuildings and domestic outbuildings evidence historical developments in agriculture and farm life from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth-century. Each building relates to specific functions and changes in agricultural technology and markets through this time period. Particularly significant are the conversion of the farm buildings to market-scale dairying in the early twentieth century with the survival of early milking stanchions, expansions of the outbuildings to accommodate larger numbers of animals and pieces of mechanized equipment, and the evidence of early electrification. Criterion C: Architecturally these buildings provide a variety of intact examples of farmhouse and outbuilding types, dwelling and outbuilding design, construction methods, and style. The farm outbuildings offer examples of the three-bay threshing barn, corn crib, additive hay/straw shed, animal barn, and three-sided equipment shed. The house presents an English post-Medieval form built in the post-Revolutionary period that has persisted through 19th and 20
th century rebuildings, standing as a traditional rural architectural idea. It is also
notable as an example of the simplified Anglo-American timber frame of southwestern New Jersey with its traditional and articulated timber frame. There is integrity in all seven aspects of each building the farmstead as a whole.
For Historic Districts Only:
Property Count: Key Contributing: Contributing: Non Contributing:
For Individual Properties Only:
List the completed attachments related to the property’s significance:
Building – House Building – Milking Barn Building – Wagon House/Crib Barn Building – Equipment Shed Building – Calf Barn Building – Garage Building – Help House Building – Outhouse
Narrative Boundary Description: The boundary consists of the tax parcels Block 36, Lots 17 and 17.04, which contain the subdivided house lot and the farmstead with its historically associated fields.
