In the fifty years following the Revolutionary War Worcester County's landscape shifted from one dominated by one-story houses and low English barns to a two-story landscape of "upright" houses and tall New England barns. The rebuilding of the Worcester County landscape in the early 1800s was not fired by economic opportunity or by a sudden desire to adopt urban culture, but rather by a new world view that required a new set of building rules.

The post-Revolutionary era in New England was labeled by contemporaries the age of improvement. Virtually all aspects of daily and personal life were subject to reform and improvement. One of many enthusiasms was that for agricultural improvement, an issue of great importance to farmers from the nation's own Cincinnatus, George Washington, to the members of innumerable agricultural societies. While the interest in agricultural improvement had its practical side, it also had its aesthetic angle. In the early Romantic era of the new Republic the issue of aesthetics was not one to be taken lightly. Virtue, an all-important indication of the awakened and reformed farmer, was considered the heart of an individual's character. It was made visible and expressed through one's taste, in other words, through the material goods that surrounded a person. When seen as a manifestation of virtue, and as part of the middling farmers' attempts to define it for themselves, the intense contemporarty debate, played out in the landscape and in the press, over appropriate rural building forms takes on meaning.

As the first step in understanding the controversy that surrounded the changes in rural domestic building practice we will examine the early nineteenth-century farm dwellings of Sutton. Located in the Blackstone Valley in the southeast corner of Worcester county, Sutton was one of the three or four largest towns in the county throughout the eighteenth century and into the first decades of the nineteenth. Its economy was mixed agricultural and manufacturing and much of the early nineteenth-century landscape remains intact. The controversial nature of these farmhouses will become evident in the ensuing discussion of rural improvement.

The new farmhouse

Josiah Quincy caricatured the dwelling of the thriving New England farmer in 1819 as thirty or forty feet square, two and a half stories tall, with four rooms on a floor and immeasurable lengths of rear outbuildings.¹ Although he exaggerated its size, the two-story with ell farmhouse had, indeed, become a common sight in rural Massachusetts. It was not, however, the assault on tradition or break with well-known formulas that Quincy and many of his contemporaries seemed to think it was. The two-story farm dwellings built in Sutton in the early nineteenth century emerged out of two established building patterns—the Georgian center-hall, double-pile form that gained popularity in the second quarter of the eighteenth century all along the Eastern seaboard, and the more locally rooted center-chimney, hall and parlor plan.

The new century brought two major changes to the venerable hall/parlor plan. It ceased to be built by degrees and its chimney was increasingly removed from the center bay of the house and replaced with gable end or paired rear wall stacks. Since the first century of settlement in the Massachusetts Bay colony houses had grown from plans of one room with chimney and often a lean-to to two rooms or more with a center chimney.² All phases existed simultaneously in the colony, but individual houses often began as units of larger versions of themselves.³ This seventeenth-century custom of expansion held true for eighteenth-century Sutton. The original plans of eight pre-Revolutionary dwellings investigated in Sutton were determined from structural evidence. Five of those eight were built as two-story, single-room plan, end chimney structures.⁴ By around 1780 all five had been enlarged to center chimney plans. By 1800 three of the five were widened to double pile plans, the other two remained one room deep. Of twelve dwellings built between 1794 and 1838 that I investigated in town, none was built through phased construction. Six of those dwellings were lobby-entry, hall/parlor structures, but again none had a central chimney stack.

Early nineteenth-century builders in Sutton broke with nearly two centuries of practice, more if one counts the English traditions from which the American ones derived, when they took to rearing full hall and parlor plan houses in one build as the general rule rather than as the exception. In addition, they broke with long-standing local custom when they removed the chimney stack from the central bay. The earliest as yet recorded Sutton structure in which these changes were implemented is the Phelps/Stockwell house of c. 1801-1806. This two-story, single-pile farmhouse was built with a lobby-entry, hall and parlor plan and with its chimney stacks in the gable end walls. Behind the lobby entry with its dog-leg stair, in the customary location of the chimney stack, was a small room, about seven feet by eight feet, that probably served as a pantry. [Fig. 1] To either side of the lobby were the formal parlor with its elaborate Federal mantel piece, and the hall with its serviceable fireplace and bake oven. The plan of this house, then, was only minimally altered through the rearrangement of its chimney stacks. From the exterior it appeared to be something far more revolutionary than it was. The superficial character of the change is even more evident when we examine the framing.

The house was framed as houses had been framed decades earlier, avoiding even the common late-eighteenth-century practices of straight-hewing posts and reducing framework so that it protruded into the room as little as possible. Here the two-story corner and chimney posts were hewn to gunstock form and the summer beam in at least the east chamber was left exposed. The roof was framed with a principle rafter/common purlin system with a diamond ridge pole that was very much like a c.1755 roof frame in a neighboring farmhouse. The Phelps/Stockwell house stands squarely in two centuries, its builder accomodating his client with modern surface treatments while persisting in customary structural design.

figure 1

An equally ambivalent house was the 1835-1838 Zadok Woodbury house. [Fig. 2] Woodbury, a successful carriage maker, returned to his native Sutton from his residence in Charlton around 1838. He was forty-five years old and had been married for twenty-three years. Between 1835 and 1838 he built a two-story, double-pile, hall/parlor dwelling with what appeared from the outside to be a center chimney. Moving inside we discover that the chimney was actually two stacks that came together in the attic, emerging from the roof as a single stack. The stacks served stoves in the front rooms on the first and second floors as well as a bake oven in the simply detailed east front room of the first floor, and a small fireplace in the rear range of rooms. The space normally filled with chimney stack in a plan of this sort was devoted to a walk-in pantry on the first floor. As at the Phelps/Stockwell house, modern innovation was accomodated without disrupting a traditional floor plan.⁵

The lobby entry plan had other variations as well. In the 1810s and 1820s several houses were built with single-pile, lobby-entry plans and rear chimney stacks. Three were recorded on site visits, a fourth was observed only from the exterior. The three that were investigated had dog-leg stairs like the Phelps/Stockwell and Woodbury houses. Three of the four dwellings observed were built with hipped roofs, the fourth with a gable roof. Each of these houses was built in a highly visible location on one of the two major east-west roads in town. The owners' occupations at the time of construction were farmer, tanner and lawyer, suggesting that this house form was a popular one throughout the ranks of middling society.

figure 2

figure 3

It is interesting to note that for all its long history and preeminence in architectural history writings, the center hall plan was infrequently employed in Sutton until the early nineteenth century. Only one center hall plan house dating to before the Revolution has been located in Sutton. By the end of the eighteenth century the use of a Georgian central-hall plan and symmetry was no longer sufficient to convey gentle status.

In early nineteenth century Sutton bilateral symmetry was standard and central hall plans became one among many options for arranging domestic space. The two-story, center-hall farmhouses of men like Salmon Burdon and Timothy Burnap, jr., were no larger or more expensively finished on the whole than the homes of those who chose to build lobby-entry houses. Burdon built his dwelling in 1813 at age thirty-four. Already married for fourteen years and the possessor of over one hundred acres of farm land, Burdon built a farmhouse that was substantial but not extravagent. The main block of the house was a single room deep. The central hall, which led to the rear ell, divided the two rooms of the main house. The hipped roof and paired windows on the end wall, characteristc of full double-pile Georgian structures, belie the abbreviated form of this dwelling. Timothy Burnap's 1815 two-story, double-pile, central hall house came closer to the Georgian ideal of symmetry of plan and elevation, but he employed a gable roof rather than the more aristocratic hipped roof.

Of ten houses investigated that were constructed between 1794 and 1838 four were built with central hall plans, an equal number of houses were constructed with lobby entries and the old dog-leg stair. Whether built with an entry lobby or central stair hall, end chimneys or center chimneys, the two-story farmhouses that were built in early nineteenth-century central Massachusetts were based on plans that had been in use in America for over two centuries in one case and at least a century in the other.

The truly new element of the farmhouses that were being reared all over Worcester County in the early nineteenth century was the ell. Thirteen houses built between 1794 and 1838 were investigated and all were built with ells. Furthermore, ells were added to fifteen out of seventeen pre-1790 houses inspected. The almost universal abandonment of lean-tos for ells should not surprise us. By the late eighteenth century Georgian forms were standard. A lean-to, whether to the rear or side of a building, would have destroyed the symmetry of roofline and profile crucial to Georgian aesthetics. The independent roofing system and separate entrance gave the ell the appearance of a little house. Indeed, the nineteenth century rhyme "Big house, little house, back house, barn" indicates that this was the general perception of the appendage. Larger ells, with their own chimney stacks, appeared to function as independent service wings. The notion was closely associated with the Georgian ideal of the main house serving the formal and social needs of the family while services and servants were relegated to subsidiary wings or detached buildings. But in central Massachusetts the function of ells was not so cut and dried.

It is crucial to keep in mind here that well into the nineteenth century distinctions between homelife and farm work were foreign to rural residents of New England.⁶ In other words, the idea of a service wing as something separable from a non-service house was not a part of local builders' or residents' competence. They had no rules, no mental templates, for creating such structures.⁷ Ells, like dooryards, garretts, and cellars were all integrated parts of farm activities. Even the best room, derided by Quincy in his 1819 denunciation of modern building practice as the lumber room, served multiple functions, often acting as parents' bedroom, family dining room, and textile production center. The visual distinction of the ells of the middling farmers was not matched by a functional distinction in the early nineteenth century.

The interdependence of house and ell and the multi-purpose nature of ells is readily apparent in several examples from Sutton. Among the simplest ells was that of Malachi Marble. Before his death in 1810 Marble built a single-room rear ell onto his c.1760 house. It was called a well room by the administrators of his estate and contained a pump (and presumably a sink) on the main level and a three-seat privy and wood shed in the ground level cellar. There were entrances at the cellar level and on the south side of the first floor. With this addition Malachi did not substantially alter the function or circulation pattern of the main house. He merely appended what were formerly detached necessities.⁸ His widow still set her cheeses in an upstairs room of the main house, designated the cheese chamber, and set her milk in the buttery on the first floor to which the well room was adjoined. The presence of water within doors meant an incredible saving in time and labor, primarily for women. In Malachi's addition we can see the essence of an ell's function. In the terminology of the day, it promoted economy, what we would interpret as an efficient use of time and space.

Contemporaneous with the construction of the Marble ell was the addition of side ells to the early eighteenth-century dwellings of Bartholomew Hutchinson and Moses and Nathaniel Putnam. The histories of these wings reinforce the conclusion that the new ells, like the spaces within the main body of the house, could and did serve multiple functions.

The Hutchinson farm house was built c.1728 as a single-room plan, two-story dwelling and expanded at mid-century into a center chimney dwelling. Bartholomew Hutchinson came into the family farm in 1756 and retained full ownership until 1806 when he sold an undivided half of all his property to his newly married son Simon. Simon and his wife remained in his father's house. Common practice at the time, when two families occupied the same dwelling, was to expand the old house. Yet Bartholomew's house remained a salt-box form with two stories in front and one story in the rear. It appears that instead of raising the rear roof slope to create new second story rooms Bartholomew built a side ell. The story-and-a-half ell was asymmetrically fenestrated with one window to the left of the door and three to the right. Eyebrow windows did not align with first floor windows. The chimney stack was located toward the left edge of the door.⁹ [Fig. 3] The scale of the new ell indicates that it could have housed either the new family or activities of the main house that would have been displaced in order to properly accomodate two separate households. In either case, it is significant that the Hutchinsons chose to build a very visible ell rather than remodel the back side of the old house.

While we are forced to speculate on the nature of the Hutchinsons' new ell, their neighbor Moses Putnam left us more concrete evidence. At the death of this father in 1812 Moses submitted to the estate administrators an account of his running of the farm which he had begun in 1779.¹⁰ This document indicated that in 1806 Nathaniel requested that Moses build an addition to their shared house consisting of a "small house, wood house, milk room." In Thomas Hubka's work on connected farm buildings he finds that the little house contained a kitchen and the back house contained work rooms such as dairy or laundry rooms, storage space, and privy.¹¹ In the Putnams' case the term "small house" remains partially ambiguous for the main house already had two large kitchen rooms, one in the front of the house with a large hearth and bake oven, and one in the rear of the house with a bake oven and a hearth that was partially closed in in 1807 to accomodate a set kettle.¹² While the term "small house" is vague, wood house and milk room are quite clear. This story-and-a-half structure served to remove from the main body of the house certain activities such as dairying, but the addition of the set kettle in the main house makes it apparent that a disjunction between work space and home or living space had not occurred.

So far the examples of ell construction all have been additions to older houses. But ells were not a result of old houses being insufficient to meet new demands. Newly built houses, too, were fitted with ells. The c.1801-1806 Phelps/Stockwell house broke with customary practice not only in its placement of chimneys and its two-story height, but also in the presence of a side ell. In this case the "little house" was literally that. The mid-eighteenth-century gambrel-roofed dwelling that stood on the site was relegated to a secondary role when the new main house was built in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Because the old house has been gutted and probate records are silent on its contents we have no way of knowing precisely how it was used when Enoch Stochwell bought the place in 1806. Enoch's will makes clear, however, that by the end of his life in 1836 at least two families occupied the premises. Stockwell's daughter, Abigail Russell, married Palmer Harback in 1832. In 1836 Stockwell added a codicil to his will which contained a bequest to Harback who "has come to reside with me in my old age and at my request."¹³ Documents do not indicate whether he had any other married children residing with him.

When Zadok Woodbury built his two-story, double-pile house around 1835 he, too, constructed a gable-end ell. As on the Stockwell farm, this ell was an older structure, moved to this location from elsewhere on the farm by Zadok. Its original function is not discernible but its new use is at least partially apparent from physical evidence. Zadok had a small chimney stack built at the east end of the ell. The stack housed a small fireplace, a bake oven, and a set kettle. Recall that the stack of the main house also accomodated a bake oven. Adjacent to the north side of the ell stack not even two feet from the set kettle, was a well. The stairs to the cellar where the dairy room was located were also within only a few steps of the chimnney stack and well.¹⁴ The rear room of the ell apparently served as wood shed as its interior remained unfinished until recent years. Clearly the ground level of this ell was a service space, and a highly efficient one at that. The set kettle, which would have used large quantities of water, was adjacent to the well. Wood was available only a few steps from the fireplace. The room was spacious enough to accomodate day to day food preparation as well as dairying activities. It was well-lit with natural light from the four windows on the east and south walls. We can imagine that the women of the Zadok Woodbury house had a voice in these labor-saving arrangements.

For all its efficiency, the ell was not a self-sufficient work space. Woodbury's household bears out the integral nature of work and home life that existed in rural New England well into the nineteenth century. The activities of ell and main house were clearly interdependent. Women's house work was divided primarily between the southeast hall with the pantry and bake oven, the cellar with the dairy and food storage space, and the ell. But New England farm women's work was not confined to the house. Their duties often included care of fowl, milking cows, and tending garden plots. Barns and outbuildings were used regularly by women.

The entire home lot as reconstructed by Woodbury emphasizes the interwoven patterns of home and work life. When Zadok bought the Jonathan Woodbury farm in 1835 a house and barn stood on the property somewhere on the other side of the Boston post road. By 1841 Zadok had removed the old buildings from the homestead and constructed new farm structures adjacent to his new house. Zadok's house lot contained a shed or shop at the northwest corner of the house and a New England barn with an attached carriage shed just west of the shed.[See Fig. 2] Whether for display or organization of work or both, and I believe it was both, Zadok had outbuildings and house built in close proximity to one another.

The building pattern that emerged in the early nineteenth century is unmistakeable. When rural residents in Sutton built two-story dwellings they reared the frame for the entire house rather than start with a portion of what they envisioned the completed house would be. Ells were ubiquitous. Center hall and entry lobby plans were equally popular. The central chimney was no longer a nearly universal plan element. The vernacular had clearly been redefined.

The form of virtue

The first decades of the new Republic constituted a Romantic era with a widespread belief in the ability of all things and all people to improve. Through improvement an individual, or even an entire nation, gained virtue. Virtue could be manifested through personal deportment, hence membership in improving associations was taken as an indication of virtuous character. Virtue could also be manifested through one's taste. The debate between the middle class and the aristocracy over taste had been underway in England since the early eighteenth century. With the publication in 1711 of the Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Man, Manners, Opinions, Time ethics and aesthetics became inextricably intertwined, and taste became "the most important of an individual's qualities."¹⁵ By the early nineteenth century issues of virtue and taste permeated popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

The proper form of virtue fueled the controversy over building practices of the middling ranks of rural residents. Its general characteristics—cleanliness, order, and economy or convenience— seem to have been universally agreed upon, but the literature and buildings reveal that definitions of those characteristics were open for debate.

Timothy Dwight saw evidence of sound morals and prosperity in the handsome buildings and well-ordered farms that he observed on his turn-of-the-century travels through the northeast. Neatness and order signal virtue throughout his observations. A typical assessment of an upstanding community was that of Princeton in the hills of Worcester County, "The houses of the inhabitants and the appearance of their farms are sufficient indications of prosperity; and the people are distinguished for industry, sobriety, and sound morals."¹⁶ In his published travels Dwight expressed the belief that in the cultivation of his farm, a New England farmer gratified "his reason, his taste, and his hopes. . . ."¹⁷ Dwight was not referring, of course, to a gustatory sensation in this phrase. Rather, he was advocating the right, and perhaps the responsibility, of the average farmer to cultivate his mind and his judgement as well as his soil. It is apparent that those who exercised this right were owners of ordered and prosperous farms.

For Dwight, virtuous character was evident in the state of a man's farm and its buildings. Early nineteenth century Romantic thinking went beyond the manifestation of an individual's virtue that Dwight observed. If virtue could be expressed through these physical attributes then surely it could also be taught or absorbed in the same manner.

Richard Elsam was expressing a popular belief, but addressing the gentry, when he wrote in 1816 that "experience tells us, whatever has a tendency to improve the general appearance of the country, has likewise a tendency to improve the general morals, manners, and condition of the people."¹⁸ Writing for English landholders, Elsam offered the opinion that landlords could not do any better by their tenants than to instill in them principles of "neatness, cleanliness, and a love of order," which would lead to an improvement in their habits.¹⁹ Because virtue was inherent in order and cleanliness it could be imbibed by those who were surrounded by its physical attributes.

Both of these notions— appearances as expression of virtue and virtue as a quality that could be learned or gained from physical surroundings— were present in the popular agricultural press that took hold in the 1820s in New England. In 1823, its second year of existence, the New England Farmer began its promotion of domestic tidiness with a clear equation between neatness and happiness on the one hand, and dirt and misery on the other,

There is something so pleasing in the appearance of neatness and cleanliness about a dwelling house, that even a stranger. . . cannot help being prepossessed with a favorable opinion of those within. He passes along with the idea fixed in his mind of prosperity and happiness presiding within those walls. How different the sensation felt on viewing a contrary scene, — a house dismal and dirty, the doors and walls surrounded and bespattered with filth of all denominations, and fragments of broken dishes and dirty dairy. utensils scattered in all directions impress on his mind the idea of misery and mismanagement.²⁰

The campaign for cleanliness and order continued. Samuel Denny wrote in his 1824 treatise on agriculture that any breach in the economy of cleanliness was "a breach in the character and property of everyone who allows it."²¹ In 1827 the New England Farmer observed, "that a man's character, in some particulars, may be learned from the appearance of his dooryard, no reasonable man can doubt."²² It went on to note that a neglected dooryard was a sign of a slovenly farmer, slovenly wife and slovenly house. The implications of dirt and disorder were made explicit in an 1829 article:

Neatness and order, whether on a farm, in a barn, a dwelling house, or in a man's dress and manner, are as indispensable to competence, comfort, and happiness as the sun is to day light. Neatness is necessary to health as well as to respectability. The want of it in cultivation and domestic economy, is extravagent as well as disgraceful. A slovenly husbandman or housekeeper is on the high road to ruin.²³

It was incumbent, then, on rural residents to make themselves and their surroundings conform to the new standards of order and neatness if they wanted to be viewed as respectable, virtuous folk. Those who met the challenge would be elevating not only themselves, but passersby. A writer in the Christian Spectator regarded the man who

surrounds his dwelling with objects of rural taste, or who even plants a single shade tree by the roadside, as a public benefactor....There is power in scenes of rural beauty, to affect our social and moral feelings.... One may judge, with confidence, the taste and intelligence of a family by the external air of their dwelling.²⁴

The relationship between appearances, or the outward expression of taste, and virtue continued to be a popular theme for the rest of the century. All architectural writers dealt with the subject and in 1834 William Dunlap noted that "the effect of domestic architecture upon moral feelings and character of mankind, renders it a subject not to be disregarded by us."²⁵ He then cited Timothy Dwight's Travels as evidence of the equivalence of virtue and right building. A.J. Downing seems also to have taken a cue from Dwight when he wrote in 1849, "show us a Massachusetts village adorned by its avenues of elms, and made tasteful by the affection of its inhabitants, and you also place before us the fact, that it is there where order, good character, and virtuous deportment most of all adorn the lives and daily conduct of its people."²⁶

A very explicit justification for the concern of the middle classes with the appearance of their homes and outbuildings was written by William Ranlett in his 1847 The Architect,

The republican equality of our institutions, offers to all the opportunity of being the proprietors of their own houses.... Our mental and physical tastes are equally the product of Divine Power and Wisdom, and equally designed by the Creator to be exercised in lawful gratification: hence aesthetics, or the science of beauty, is as legitimate a study as the culinary art .... But the most important feature of this subject, is its moral aspect. There is so intimate a connection between taste and morals, aesthetics and Christianity, that they, in each instance mutually modify each other: hence whatever serves to cultivate the taste of the community, will be likely to improve their morals....²⁷

This sentiment, which blossomed into the so-called cult of domesticity, was not new in the 1840s, though it had been modified for the times with the addition of Christian values and their expression through Gothic buildings. The argument that beauty or its lack had the power to influence morals had been part of the popular literature for more than a century. Its manifestation as order and cleanliness was a notion that was just beginning to gain acceptance in rural Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century.

Virtue was evident, too, in what was termed convenience or economy. Robert Morris equated beauty and convenience or utility in a mid-eighteenth-century publication when he wrote, "Your structure must answer the End for which it was erected, and the Ornament be suited to the Dignity of the Inhabitant."²⁸ The closer one came to achieving these results, the more nearly perfect the building would be. Beauty and convenience had become inextricably intertwined by the early nineteenth century and were common themes in popular literature. S.W. Johnson equated the two in his 1806 Rural Economy, "Buildings standing alone should appear longer than they are high, and they will be more convenient. One rule dictated by utility is, that they be firm and stable. Another dictated by beauty is, that they appear so to the eye...."²⁹

In the early nineteenth century achieving convenience or economy required that no time, space, or materials be wasted. Frugality was the watchword of reformers. Nathan Fiske, a Brookfield minister, advocated social punctuality long before industry and railroads made most people conscious of clock time,

To be punctual in fulfilling their promises and engagements, would have a happy effect upon all the civil and moral intercourses of society.... What would become of all the inhabitants of the earth, as well as the promise breakers, if the sun and seasons were as fallible, and as little to be depended on as they?

Punctuality, then, has the sanction of heaven upon it, and the order and analogy of nature to recommend it.³⁰

Moral obligations of punctuality are easily translated into being morally obligated not to waste time. In an 1829 Massachusetts Yeoman article a poor farmer was characterized as one who "has a place for nothing, and nothing in its place." In searching for his tools he wastes more time than the job would take. This lack of order and the consequent loss of time made the fellow "a poor creature—he is a poor husband and a poor citizen."³¹

Agricultural reformers believed that the conservation of time, space, and materials all went hand-in-hand. They advocated cultivating small farms, contending that too many acres lay in waste when a farmer of average means owned much land. A man who cultivated a small farm was portrayed as the source and embodiment of virtue, for he wasted nothing. An 1829 article cautioned that

a firm and independent spirit is better nourished among that rank of men by whom small farms are cultivated. They are actuated by the same spirit....their simple virtues will give its character to a country, and uphold in the hour of danger, the rights and liberties of all.³²

Farmers with not more than fifty acres could "rear large and respectable families, pay all their debts and taxes promptly, and live independently, well-clothed, and comfortably housed" because they wasted no time.³³ The writer noted that, "Economy is wealth, and system affords ease."³⁴ These respectable small farmers, using their time wisely, had no need to hurry except at harvest time. Even during bad weather or long dark winter nights they were profitably occupied with making brooms or shoes, or following trades such as carpentry, coopering, or tailoring.

In addition to running a small farm with "clock-like regularity"³⁵ the farmer who heeded the principles of economy lived in a small house. In his 1819 address to the Massachusetts agricultural society Josiah Quincy exhorted Massachusetts farmers to pay heed to neatness, comfort, and order, but not to let "the sound, practical good sense of the country be misled, by the false taste and false pride of the city."³⁶ A farmer touched by this taste,

will throw up a building thirty, or forty, feet square, two, or two and a half, stories high, four rooms on a floor, with an immeasurable length of outbuilding behind....for years the house will not be wholly glazed; or if glazed, not clapboarded; or, if clapboarded, not finished; the destined portico is never put up; the destined front step is never put down; and the ragged clapboards, on each side of the front door, there they stand.... and the 'best room', as it is called in the original plan of the mansion, there it stands, the lumber room of the family, for half a century...full of old iron and old leather; the stuffing of decayed saddles; the ragged relics of torn bed quilts; and the orts and ends of twenty generations of corn cobs.... Never should his dwelling be splendid at the expense of his farm.³⁷

Quincy's audience was undoubtedly suitably horrified by the mental picture painted by the orator. Such a house embodied disorder, dishevelment, and extravagence, a veritable assault on virtue. But the admonitions against them in the farm journals and the extant early nineteenth century landscape are evidence that versions of such a house were cropping up in increasing numbers.

In 1823 the New England Farmer counseled farmers not to begin by building a costly house unless they had a good deal of capital. In addition they advised against the common practice of building a farmhouse adjacent to sheds, barns, and other outbuildings— the ells that we saw in Sutton.³⁸ The Farmer cited the danger of fire and the unwholesomeness of manure heaps near the house as reasons to avoid the practice.

By 1825, the tone had become less advisory and more damning,

The practice which Farmers have unadvisedly fallen into of late, in building too large houses, besides impoverishing them, is at variance with correct taste.... There is nothing connected with a farm, considered either as an object of taste or economy, that is more pleasing or delightful than a small house.... The wish to be thought of more importance than we really are, and the notion that this importance will be estimated from the spacious mansions in which we may reside, is too prevalent among every class of society; but in no one is the consequence more prejudicial, or its influence more deeply felt, than in the agricultural community. There are few dwelling houses in the country two stories in height, which do not contain at least two rooms that seldom, if ever, are appropriated for any other use than the solemnization of a marriage or obsequies for the dead.³⁹

The writer concluded that had the farmer built a smaller house he would have been "encircled by many sincere friends, with a compentency of this world's goods to make life comfortable, imparting joy and content to a virtuous and happy family."⁴⁰

The journals continued their assault on the large farmhouses as rural New Englanders continued to build them. In 1832 the Farmer printed a cautionary tale about an entire country village being undone by the extravagence of one man building a large house. Having set the standard, the rest of the inhabitants follow his example and all working capital is absorbed by this "idle and useless show."⁴¹

Part of the practice of overbuilding was the predilection for attaching ells to dwellings that the Farmer had advised against in 1823. In 1834 the journal acknowledged the continued popularity of these structures when they wrote, "It is disputed, whether the house ought to have either wings, or a lean-to behind, or whether the whole should not be under one roof."⁴² Judging from the near universal use of ells in the early nineteenth century dwellings of Sutton, the dispute may have been only between the reformers and those they were trying to reform. Their widespread appearance certainly suggests that there was no dispute raging among the working farmers. Begging the question of how the house should be arranged the Farmer concluded only that it should be neat and uniform so as to impart a sense of comfort and happiness, and that farm buildings should be a moderate distance from the house.

These passages are very revealing. From the 1825 passage it is apparent that the practice of building two-story dwellings was widespread and a relatively recent phenomenon. We can conclude that those who were building these structures were ignoring the institutions that professed to serve them— the agricultural societies and farm journals. Taste and economy for the common farmer were to be expressed in a small dwelling, something suitable to their station and adequate to their needs. As the Reverend Fiske had counseled, they were to be content with their lot. As the source of the nation's virtue, rural areas especially had to be preserved from the corrupting influences of urban extravagences and unnecessary displays of wealth. Specifically, two-story houses were inappropriate habitations for common yeomen. Surely their simple needs were adequately met in humble, one-story dwellings on small farms.

The practice of building houses taller than one story did not abate and the scoldings continued in the popular press. As the Massachusetts Society for the Promotion of Agriculture turned its attention to horticulture in the late 1820s, the image of the proper farmer's house developed into something akin to an English peasant's cot. More than one writer compared the virtues of the English countryside with its convenient and beautiful cottages festooned with "the woodbine and honeysuckle," to the ostentation of the New England farmer who rears "a huge exterior, whose construction exhausts his resources, and leaves neither disposition or resources to complete the interior...." Such a one ignores the natural ornaments "richer than those which the chissel of the sculptor has ever worked" which might grace his abode. Instead, the slovenly garden "seems to call out shame on the listlessness which neglects its beauties."⁴³ A few years later the Farmer published a letter from J.S.M. of the Horticultural Society who noted that the lack of rural taste was evident throughout New England. The farm houses of the region, he wrote, lacked the picturesque gardens of English cottages. These might be provided if the money spent on spirits was instead devoted to "the embellishment of houses and farms."⁴⁴

These images of small English-type cottages that emerged in the American agricultural press in the late 1820s were as specific as examples of proper abodes for virtuous yeomen got until the late 1830s.⁴⁵ Prior to that forms of morally upstanding farm buildings were seldom made explicit. As we have seen, though, those building practices that were viewed as destructive of moral and economic order were described fairly clearly. They were precisely the practices that were prevalent among middle-class farmers in rural central Massachusetts.

From the rhetoric of reform we can conclude that the middle-class farmer in New England had overstepped his bounds. Houses, potent symbols of position in society, were being used by these farmers as expressions of taste, a quality that only gentle folk were supposed to possess.⁴⁶ The gentry were imposing their own Romantic notion of virtue on common farmers which held, among other things, that rural objects were imbued with virtue by their closeness to nature and distance from social convention. The more farmers' dwellings resembled those of urban dwellers with their "false taste and false pride" the more removed they were from their source of beauty. Furthermore, by over-building farmers removed that other component of virtue—convenience.

Taste and economy, or beauty and convenience, were the factors that architectural writers and reformers alike agreed governed building. For the middling and prosperous farmers of central Massachusetts good taste in architecture lay in the already widely accepted Georgian mode characterized by its order, symmetry and two-story height. The aura of improvement that permeated post-Revolutionary American culture dictated that utility or economy could be attained only in clean and orderly spaces. The Georgian house with its separate rooms for eating, sleeping, working, and entertaining certainly was well suited to bringing order to households where those activities had intermingled for two centuries. The ells, aesthetically related to Georgian service wings, further increased the convenience of the dwellings. At the very minimum they enclosed wells and woodsheds. Very often they provided spaces for a dairy room, and a bake oven and set kettle.

The two-story with ell farmhouses that thrived in early nineteenth-century Sutton fulfilled the criteria of beauty and convenience needed to demonstrate inner virtue. Beset with demands to improve their personal habits, their farms, and their souls the inhabitants of the rural town gradually incorporated the order, cleanliness, and economy that demonstrated their improved character. In Sutton the new aesthetic and utility materialized in stages. In the first decade of the nineteenth century older, established farmers like Bartholomew Hutchinson and Nathaniel Putnam (both born in 1734) added ells to their houses in response to family and farm needs, but did so in accordance with new notions of propriety. The generation that built anew in the 1810s was the first to have grown up and come of age in the Age of Improvement. Young men like Salmon Burdon and Timothy Burnap incorporated all the new principles into their houses from the outset, not expanding them over the years as their fathers and grandfathers had done.