Distribution of Architectural Material at Col. Paul Wentworth Site, Rollinsford, NH

After graduating from Salem State University this May with a B.A. in Art with a concentration in Art History, this June I’ve joined Dr. Alix Martin and Dr. Tad Baker at Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire for the Strawbery Banke Archaeology Field School. The school was broken into two parts and spanned four weeks in June and while I didn’t attend the two-week field session, I was able to participate in the lab session. During these two weeks, I’ve been able to gain hands-on training in archaeological lab methods by processing, cataloging, researching and interpreting finds.

This coming fall I will be attending the University of Vermont as a graduate student in Historic Preservation, so naturally, I focused my research at Strawbery Banke on the distribution of building materials excavated by field session students at the Colonel Paul Wentworth site in Rollinsford, New Hampshire: nails, window glass, and brick. 

The Colonel Paul Wentworth house was built circa 1701 in Rollinsford, New Hampshire, moved to Dover, Massachusetts in 1936, and then returned to Rollinsford in 2002— now sitting in its own original backyard. This tumultuous history opens the door to an interesting archaeological record from which we can extract artifact distributions to hopefully reveal patterns of an architectural history of the site. 

Historic American Buildings Survey R.A. Waugh, Photographer October 1936 SOUTH WEST POST Last of Structure to be taken down. Looking East - Colonel Paul Wentworth House, Dover Street (Salmon Falls, NH) (moved to Dover, MA, and then to 47 Water Street, Rollinsford, NH), Rollinsford, Strafford County, NH 

After carefully processing and cataloging thousands of rusty nails and shards of window glass with my fellow students at Strawbery Banke, I was able to gain experience with Microsoft Access and ArcGIS Pro to organize and map spatial data involving these architectural elements.

Artifact concentration varied remarkably across units at the Wentworth site and thus utilizing the correct method to effectively visualize the symbology was important. Ultimately, using a Geometric Interval proved the most functional method of presenting data, as it creates class breaks based on geometric series and balances changes across middle and extreme values, particularly in the case of nails—while one unit contained a mere 48 nails and most units fell in a middling range, another unit had 1,129 nails.

The New England connected farm, sometimes referred to as the “big house, little house, back house, barn” configuration is characterized by the arrangement of a big house and a barn that are “joined through a series of support structures to a continuous building complex,” most commonly found in southwestern Maine and portions of New Hampshire (Hubka 1984).

Nineteenth-century maps of the Wentworth site vary as a result of the agricultural improvement movement— modernizing and reforming agriculture in New England, and perhaps fire safety precautions that concern timber-framed connected farms. 

As William Badger, the governor of New Hampshire, put it in 1836: “There is no pursuit that tends more directly to the independence and happiness of the people than agriculture” (Taylor and Loftis 1981). The big house in particular is the symbol of home and the focus for domestic pride on the New England connected farm. There were two major periods for big houses on the connected farm: those built before 1830 which featured a fireplace chimney containing a kitchen in the big house, and houses built after 1850 with stove chimneys and a kitchen located in an attached ell. 

In regards to the Wentworth site, there is evidence of this pre-1830 style of central chimney big house and separate barn. Maps from 1834 and 1835 of the Wentworth site (below) include illustrations that closely resemble a big house with a lean-to, meaning an attached kitchen within the home, not an ell or a small house, with adjoining houses west of the barn. This creates the southern yard configuration popular of the connected New England farm of the nineteenth-century.

 

The map of the site from 1936 shows no structures northeast of the main house structure.

 

While the densest deposits of window glass and nails were uncovered directly next to the foundation of the original main house structure, it is no surprise, due to the destructive nature of taking apart a house to have it moved. Broken glass and nails along the central block and northern block potentially suggest the presence of buildings northeast of the main structure. 

Historically, it was not uncommon to move buildings from one location to another— whether they were moved within their own property lines or moved to an entirely different state. Thus the presence of an early nineteenth-century connected farm is not unlikely. While a rudimentary understanding of building structures stands from this analysis, doing a similar analysis with other types artifacts from the site may reveal more information to specific activities or functions of these historic structures— furthering our understanding of the history of the site.

Works Cited

Hubka, Thomas C.

1984    Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Taylor, Paul S., and Anne Loftis

1981    “The Legacy of the Nineteenth-Century New England Farmer.” The New England Quarterly 54(2): 243–254.