I met several work deadlines last week so now it’s officially summer road trip season: about time! So yesterday I drove south to Rhode Island to see a very distinct form of its early architecture: stone enders. This is a very descriptive term: stone enders are late 17th century houses which feature one exterior and interior wall consisting entirely of an expansive side chimney. They are rare because they are so old, but also because in several documented cases the chimney walls were assimilated into an expanded house, rendering them central: stone enders were and could be hiding in plain sight! Often there are interesting house detective stories associated with stone enders, and for those that do survive, there is always a restoration story. Both cases were true with the two stone enders that I visited, the Clemence Irons house (1691) in Johnston and the Eleazer Arnold house (1693) in Lincoln, both owned by Historic New England.

Clemence-Irons (top) in Johnston and the Arnold house in Lincoln.

The Arnold House, one of Historic New England’s (then the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) earliest acquisitions in 1918, survived through adaptation and expansion in the back with its chimney wall always exposed but still there were mysteries to solve about its original appearance. It went through several restorations, which are discussed in a great little article that Abbot Lowell Cummings wrote for the magazine Antiques in 1960:

• The Eleazer Arnold is one which students have loved for its persistent puzzles, not all of which were entirely solved by laying bare nearly every scrap of structural evidence the house had to offer. As early as 1895 Norman M. Isham (in his Early Rhode Island Houses) was concerned about both the original plan and the window arrangement. From what he could then see of the structure he assumed that the house had originally been built, as the rear slope of the stone chimney indicates, as a two-story house with lean-to and with its present full length, providing for two rooms at the front on the ground floor and two rooms behind them in the lean-to. The roof had been finished with an impressive facade gable, the valley rafters of which remain in the attic (though not restored). Without having full knowledge of evidence concealed in the frame of the house, Mr. Isham suggested the possibility of single casement openings in the front or south wall. By the time his Early American Houses was published in 1928 he had had a chance to explore enough of the hidden frame to know that the pattern of original wall studs there confirmed his supposition about these windows.

The Isham restoration is characterized as one of “exploration and stabilization” while the later restoration was far more ambitious, focused on returning the house to its seventeenth-century appearance, however, apparently “inauthentic fenestration” was introduced at this time. As Isham was also involved with the Clemence-Irons house, I went off on a midnight deep dive into some of his books, and I have to say that Early Rhode Island Houses is absolutely charming with its wonderful architectural drawings by Albert Frederic Brown. The later book, Early American Houses, is less charming as no Brown but it does have several photographs and some discussion of Salem houses.

I had a very detailed tour which focused on the Arnold family and the evolving roles of the house before taking us inside to examine its interiors from ground floor great room to the garret, where a succession of contractors signed their names on its beams. Obviously, one (or two or three) conspicuous interior detail of a stone ender are its expansive hearths. The Arnold house is pretty large for a stone ender, and became larger still over time, and its scale and convenient location along the Great Road in Lincoln made it a logical choice for a tavern and it still felt very taverny to me.

The Clemence-Irons house is about a twenty-minute drive south from Lincoln, but I realized that there was actually another stone-ender in town, the Valentine Whitman house (1696), which was not only currently for sale but had a scheduled open house in my window of opportunity between Historic New England tours! So I popped right over there, of course. This house was restored under the auspices of Preserve Rhode Island several years ago, and I was quite impressed by its combination of modern livability and traditional details. It’s even bigger than the Arnold house—at one point it was actually a four-family house. Beautiful lot too, further along the Great Road. I admitted that I wasn’t going to buy it to the listing agent, and she was really nice and said that I could take as many pictures of the interior as I liked but she wanted to request permission from the owners before I posted them. I promptly lost her business card, so I couldn’t ask permission, but the listing is here if you want to peek inside.

So then I was off to Clemence Irons in Johnston, where I had a very informative tour (along with two ladies from the Arnold tour—it’s a great idea to do these together, and not just because of their proximity) from a guide who was a historic preservationist. Clemence Irons is interpreted a bit differently than the Arnold house, more as a 1930s restoration of a seventeenth-century house than a seventeenth-century house. After the last owner/occupant of the house, Nellie Irons, died in 1938, it was sold to a trio of wealth Rhode Island siblings who wished to restore it to its original appearance and operate it as a museum. They hired Norman Isham to supervise the restoration, and he oversaw a great stripping of the structure down to its studs, following by a rebuilding with original materials as well as newly-sourced ones. The result is a bit of reverential and romanticized Colonialism, in keeping with the Colonial Revival era: Isham also fashioned seventeenth-century furniture for the museum, a practice that began by George Francis Dow right here in Salem when he created the first “Period Rooms” for the Essex Institute. I love the photograph of the house circa 1910 below: I think it’s the first “adulterated” house which I find aesthetically pleasing but it became even cuter after its restoration/recreation. The house was gifted to Historic New England in 1947, and it represents an important acquisition not only because it is a stone-ender, but also a well-documented example of mid-twentieth century restoration theory and practice.

There are more stone enders to see in Rhode Island: Preserve Rhode Island estimates fourteen in all though more may be hiding in plain sight. But I was focusing so hard on all of the architectural details of these two houses that I was exhausted by the middle of the afternoon so I headed north towards home. But I’m going back!