The Ephraim Hawley House is a privately owned

Colonial America The colonial history of the United States covers the history of European colonization of North America from the early 17th century until the incorporation of the Thirteen Colonies into the United States after the Revolutionary War. In the ...

n wooden

post-and-beam Timber framing (german: Holzfachwerk) and "post-and-beam" construction are traditional methods of building with heavy timbers, creating structures using squared-off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large wooden ...

timber-frame Timber framing (german: Holzfachwerk) and "post-and-beam" construction are traditional methods of building with heavy timbers, creating structures using squared-off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large wooden ...

saltbox house A saltbox house is a gable-roofed residential structure that is typically two stories in the front and one in the rear. It is a traditional New England style of home, originally timber framed, which takes its name from its resemblance to a woode ...

situated on the ''Farm Highway'', Route 108, on the south side of ''Mischa Hill'', in

Nichols Nichols may refer to: People *Nichols (surname) *Nichol, a surname Places Canada * Nichols Islands, Nunavut United States * Nichols, California, an unincorporated community * Nichols Canyon, Los Angeles, California * Nichols, Connecticut * Nich ...

, a village located within

Trumbull, Connecticut Trumbull is a town located in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. It borders on the cities of Bridgeport and Shelton and the towns of Stratford, Fairfield, Easton and Monroe. The population was 36,827 during the 2020 census. Trumbul ...

, in the

New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces ...

region of the U.S. It was expanded to its present shape by three additions.W.P.A. Federal Writers Project, State of Connecticut 1935-1942
/ref>Geoffrey Rossano PhD, ''Historic and Architectural Resource Survey of Trumbull, Connecticut'', produced for the Connecticut Historical Commission, Hartford, CT, 2002Heather Jones and Bruce Harvey,PhD, S&ME, Inc., ''Historic and Architectural Survey of the Town of Trumbull, Fairfield County, Connecticut'', Produced for the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, Hartford, CT, 2010 The house is unique, it has been located in four different named

townships A township is a kind of human settlement or administrative subdivision, with its meaning varying in different countries. Although the term is occasionally associated with an urban area, that tends to be an exception to the rule. In Australia, Ca ...

in its past, but has never been moved; Stratford (1670–1725), Unity (1725–1744), North Stratford (1744–1797) and Trumbull (1797–present).

Research

The ''Hawley Homestead'' was dated to 1690 during the

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...

Federal Writers' Project The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It ...

conducted during the

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

. Joan Oppenheim created a research report on the house while studying at the

Yale School of Fine Arts The Yale School of Art is the art school of Yale University. Founded in 1869 as the first professional fine arts school in the United States, it grants Masters of Fine Arts degrees to students completing a two-year course in graphic design, painti ...

in the early 20th century. She concluded after examining the structure and researching land records, probate records and the Hawley record, that the house was built between 1683 and 1690 by

farmer A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer mig ...

and

slave owner The following is a list of slave owners, for which there is a consensus of historical evidence of slave ownership, in alphabetical order by last name. A * Adelicia Acklen (1817–1887), at one time the wealthiest woman in Tennessee, she inh ...

Ephraim Hawley who had married Sarah Welles, granddaughter of

Connecticut Colony The ''Connecticut Colony'' or ''Colony of Connecticut'', originally known as the Connecticut River Colony or simply the River Colony, was an English colony in New England which later became Connecticut. It was organized on March 3, 1636 as a settl ...

Governor A governor is an administrative leader and head of a polity or political region, ranking under the head of state and in some cases, such as governors-general, as the head of state's official representative. Depending on the type of political ...

Thomas Welles Thomas Welles (14 January 1660) is the only person in Connecticut's history to hold all four top offices: governor, deputy governor, treasurer, and secretary. In 1639, he was elected as the first treasurer of the Colony of Connecticut, and from ...

in 1683. The date of construction was not only based upon architectural details of the house, but also upon comparisons with other homes of the period, facts given to her by the Curtiss family, who owned the house at the time, and information from the ''Hawley Record'', published in 1890, which stated that Ephraim resided in ''Trumbull''. Oppenheim also stated the dating of the house compared with that of ''S.S.'' on file at the School of Fine Arts at Yale. The Trumbull Historical Society dated the house to between 1683 and 1690 in 1964 when they organized. The house was dated to 1671–1683 in the 2002 Historic and Architectural Resource Survey produced for the Connecticut Historical Commission by Geoffrey Rossano, PhD. The 2010 Historic and Architectural Survey of the Town of Trumbull, Connecticut produced by Heather C. Jones and Bruce G. Harvey PhD for the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism dates the house to 1670–1683.

Structure

;Began as a Cape Cod cottage The house was built as a -story Cape Cod cottage thirty-six feet wide by twenty-six feet deep with an eight-foot-wide central stone chimney with three fireplaces. There were three rooms on the first floor; a

parlor A parlour (or parlor) is a reception room or public space. In medieval Christian Europe, the "outer parlour" was the room where the monks or nuns conducted business with those outside the monastery and the "inner parlour" was used for necessar ...

, dining room and

kitchen A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation in a dwelling or in a commercial establishment. A modern middle-class residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a ...

. The second floor was an undivided

loft A loft is a building's upper storey or elevated area in a room directly under the roof (American usage), or just an attic: a storage space under the roof usually accessed by a ladder (primarily British usage). A loft apartment refers to large ...

. ;Oak frame and siding The

white oak The genus ''Quercus'' contains about 500 species, some of which are listed here. The genus, as is the case with many large genera, is divided into subgenera and sections. Traditionally, the genus ''Quercus'' was divided into the two subgenera '' ...

frame has eight by ten inch girts, eight by eight inch plates and eight by ten inch splayed posts. The common

rafter A rafter is one of a series of sloped structural members such as wooden beams that extend from the ridge or hip to the wall plate, downslope perimeter or eave, and that are designed to support the roof shingles, roof deck and its associated ...

s are eight by eight inches and taper to six by six inches at the ridge and have six by six inch

chamfered A chamfer or is a transitional edge between two faces of an object. Sometimes defined as a form of bevel, it is often created at a 45° angle between two adjoining right-angled faces. Chamfers are frequently used in machining, carpentry, fur ...

collar beam A collar beam or collar is a horizontal member between two rafters and is very common in domestic roof construction. Often a collar is structural but they may be used simply to frame a ceiling. A collar beam is often called a collar tie but this ...

s. The floor

joist A joist is a horizontal structural member used in framing to span an open space, often between beams that subsequently transfer loads to vertical members. When incorporated into a floor framing system, joists serve to provide stiffness to the s ...

are six by six inches and are twenty inches apart. The six inch by ten inch summer beams, or

tie beam A tie, strap, tie rod, eyebar, guy-wire, suspension cables, or wire ropes, are examples of linear structural components designed to resist tension. It is the opposite of a strut or column, which is designed to resist compression. Ties may be ...

s are parallel to the façade, dovetailed into the girts and concealed within the

plaster Plaster is a building material used for the protective or decorative coating of walls and ceilings and for Molding (decorative), moulding and casting decorative elements. In English, "plaster" usually means a material used for the interiors of ...

ceiling A ceiling is an overhead interior surface that covers the upper limits of a room. It is not generally considered a structural element, but a finished surface concealing the underside of the roof structure or the floor of a story above. Ceilings ...

. The roof sheathing and

flooring Flooring is the general term for a permanent covering of a floor, or for the work of installing such a floor covering. Floor covering is a term to generically describe any finish material applied over a floor structure to provide a walking surface ...

is vertically

quarter sawn Quarter sawing or quartersawing is a woodworking process that produces quarter-sawn or quarter-cut boards in the rip cutting of logs into lumber. The resulting lumber can also be called ''radially-sawn'' or simply ''quartered''. There is widesp ...

one-inch-thick oak boards with random widths between twelve and thirty inches. The flooring is laid directly over one-inch-thick oak boards that were not suitable to be used as flooring. The

mortise-and-tenon A mortise and tenon (occasionally mortice and tenon) joint connects two pieces of wood or other material. Woodworkers around the world have used it for thousands of years to join pieces of wood, mainly when the adjoining pieces connect at right ...

joints are held by wooden pins, and the flooring is nailed with large hand-wrought iron nails (see image). The four- to six-foot-length hand-riven oak

clapboard Clapboard (), also called bevel siding, lap siding, and weatherboard, with regional variation in the definition of these terms, is wooden siding of a building in the form of horizontal boards, often overlapping. ''Clapboard'' in modern Americ ...

siding is nailed directly to the oak studs with large flat rose-headed nails which was the typical material and application for the earliest New England homes (see images). ;Stone chimney The first floor of the house is at ground level. There is a partial dirt cellar located on the south side of the house. The eight-foot-wide stone fireplace has three

flue A flue is a duct, pipe, or opening in a chimney for conveying exhaust gases from a fireplace, furnace, water heater, boiler, or generator to the outdoors. Historically the term flue meant the chimney itself. In the United States, they are al ...

s with clay mortar. The kitchen

hearth A hearth () is the place in a home where a fire is or was traditionally kept for home heating and for cooking, usually constituted by at least a horizontal hearthstone and often enclosed to varying degrees by any combination of reredos (a lo ...

is nine feet six inches wide by five feet seven inches deep. There is a one-foot crawl space around the chimney foundation below the first floor and a fieldstone foundation. A forty inch deep brick

beehive oven A beehive oven is a type of oven in use since the Middle Ages in Europe. It gets its name from its domed shape, which resembles that of a skep, an old-fashioned type of beehive. Its apex of popularity occurred in the Americas and Europe all ...

is built into the right rear wall of the kitchen fireplace and its opening has a wrought iron

lintel A lintel or lintol is a type of beam (a horizontal structural element) that spans openings such as portals, doors, windows and fireplaces. It can be a decorative architectural element, or a combined ornamented structural item. In the case of w ...

. The brick are seven and one-half inches long by three and one-half inches wide by two inches thick. In October 1685, because a variety of sizes of brick were being used, the Colony of Connecticut ordered that all future brick be nine inches long by four and one-half inches wide by two and one-half inches thick. There is a small tinder box in the left wall of the kitchen firebox. The fireplace inside dimensions are four feet four inches high by six feet ten inches wide and is spanned by the original ten-by-ten-inch oak

, which rests on oak blocks. The side walls of the kitchen firebox are roughly dressed

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained (phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies undergro ...

. Cooking pots were hung from a lug pole. Above the ridge, the chimney flue outside measurements are forty eight inches wide by thirty eight inches deep with a course of three inch thick dripstones in the front and back. ;Interior finish The original stairs were parallel to the front wall of the house situated behind the wall separating the parlor and the kitchen. There is poplar

paneling Panelling (or paneling in the U.S.) is a millwork wall covering constructed from rigid or semi-rigid components. These are traditionally interlocking wood, but could be plastic or other materials. Panelling was developed in antiquity to make ro ...

alternating in width of thirteen inches and fifteen inches. The ceilings and walls are

, made up of calcined oyster shells with red cattle hair. The plaster was applied on riven oak lath attached with small hand wrought iron nails. McKee writes about a Massachusetts contract dating to 1675 that specified the plasterer, “Is to lath and siele (seal) the four rooms of the house betwixt (between) the joists overhead with a coat of lime and hair upon the clay; also to fill the gable ends of the house with ricks (bricks) and plaster them with clay. To lath and plaster partitions of the house with clay and lime, and to fill, lath, and plaster them with lime and hair besides; and to siele and lath them overhead with lime; also to fill, lath, and plaster the kitchen up to the wall plate on every side. The said Daniel Andrews is to find lime, bricks, clay, stone, hair, together with laborers and workmen… .” Records of the New Haven colony mention rates for plaster and lath as early as 1641. The ceiling heights are between six feet two inches and seven feet two inches on the first floor. The rear exterior door opening is five feet three inches high. An original

casement window A casement window is a window that is attached to its frame by one or more hinges at the side. They are used singly or in pairs within a common frame, in which case they are hinged on the outside. Casement windows are often held open using a cas ...

opening located on the east rear wall, in the kitchen, is twenty two inches square and is fifty four inches from the floor. This small opening was plastered over when the lean-to was built behind the wall in 1840. The upstairs ceiling height is six feet. The surviving oak

sash window A sash window or hung sash window is made of one or more movable panels, or "sashes". The individual sashes are traditionally paned window (architecture), paned windows, but can now contain an individual sheet (or sheets, in the case of double gla ...

frames have dimensions of twenty eight inches wide by forty six inches high with the studs forming their

jambs A jamb (from French ''jambe'', "leg"), in architecture, is the side-post or lining of a doorway or other aperture. The jambs of a window outside the frame are called “reveals.” Small shafts to doors and windows with caps and bases are know ...

. The original interior doorways are twenty eight inches wide by five feet eleven inches high and the interior partitions are made of -inch-thick vertical oak boards. ;Additions The first lean-to was built shortly after the main house was completed and is used as a

buttery (room) A buttery was originally a large cellar room under a monastery, in which food and drink were stored for the provisioning of strangers and passing guests. Nathan Bailey's ''An Universal Etymological English Dictionary'' gives "CELLARIST – on ...

pantry A pantry is a room or cupboard where beverages, food, and sometimes dishes, household cleaning products, linens or provisions are stored within a home or office. Food and beverage pantries serve in an ancillary capacity to the kitchen. Etymol ...

. The exterior walls are solid two-inch-thick oak boards. When the lean-to was built, the roof was extended, without a break, to within six feet six inches of the ground and gave the house its

saltbox A saltbox house is a gable-roofed residential structure that is typically two stories in the front and one in the rear. It is a traditional New England style of home, originally timber framed, which takes its name from its resemblance to a woode ...

shape. The second lean-to addition was added before 1881 when stairs were installed in front of the kitchen fireplace, the front roof was raised to a full two-stories in height, the second floor was partitioned into five rooms, turning the house into a two-family residence. The original hand-riven oak

exterior

siding Siding may refer to: * Siding (construction), the outer covering or cladding of a house * Siding (rail) A siding, in rail terminology, is a low-speed track section distinct from a running line or through route such as a main line, branch l ...

and original rafter feet are preserved in the leant-to attics.

Close-up of original quarter sawn riven oak clapboards in leanto attic

;Captain Robert Hawley In 1787, Captain Robert Hawley gifted the house to his son Eliakim when he married his second cousin Sally Sara Hawley. Sally Sara Hawley lived in the house for 60 years until her death in 1847. ;Truman Bradley In April 1881, Schaghticoke

Indian Indian or Indians may refer to: Peoples South Asia * Indian people, people of Indian nationality, or people who have an Indian ancestor ** Non-resident Indian, a citizen of India who has temporarily emigrated to another country * South Asia ...

Truman Mauwee, or Truman Bradley, bought the house from Charles Nichols Fairchild for $450 ($100 in cash and a $350 mortgage to Fairchild) and completed the second floor

Colonial Revival The Colonial Revival architectural style seeks to revive elements of American colonial architecture. The beginnings of the Colonial Revival style are often attributed to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, which reawakened Americans to the archi ...

renovations. In October 1882, Bradley sold the house to his neighbor Clarissa Curtis for $525 ($175 cash and Curtiss assumed the $350 mortgage to Fairchild). Ephraim Hawley House original rafter north

Ephraim Hawley House original rafter north

Farm Highway

On December 7, 1696, the ''Farm Highway'', present-day Nichols Avenue

Connecticut Route 108 Route 108 in the U.S. state of Connecticut, locally called Nichols Avenue and Huntington Turnpike, is a two-lane state highway that runs northerly from U.S. Route 1 in Connecticut, US 1, Boston Post Road in Stratford, Connecticut, Stratford, throug ...

, was laid out by the Stratford selectmen to the south side of ''Mischa Hill''. The highway was 12 rods wide, or 198 feet, where Broadbridge Brook runs off the south side of Mischa Hill, at Zachariah Curtiss, his land, and at ''Captain's Farm''. Broadbridge Brook runs off Mischa Hill west of the present-day intersection of Route 108 and the

Merritt Parkway The Merritt Parkway (also known locally as "The Merritt") is a limited-access parkway in Fairfield County, Connecticut, Fairfield County, Connecticut, with a small section at the northern end in New Haven County, Connecticut, New Haven County. ...

and flows southwesterly to Broadbridge Avenue in Stratford. In October 1725, when the Connecticut Colony approved the Parish of Unity, they referred to the Farm Highway as ''Nickol's Farm's Road''. The Nichols Avenue portion of Route 108 in Trumbull is the third-oldest documented

highway A highway is any public or private road or other public way on land. It is used for major roads, but also includes other public roads and public tracks. In some areas of the United States, it is used as an equivalent term to controlled-access ...

in Connecticut after the Mohegan Road,

Connecticut Route 32 Route 32 is a primary north–south state highway in the U.S. state of Connecticut, beginning in New London and continuing via Willimantic to the Massachusetts state line, where it continues as Route 32 in that state. Route des ...

Norwich Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with ...

(1670) and the

King's Highway King's Highway or Kings Highway may refer to: Roads Australia * Kings Highway (Australia), connecting Queanbeyan to Batemans Bay Canada * King's Highways, an alternative designation for the primary provincial highway system in Ontario * King's ...

, or

Boston Post Road The Boston Post Road was a system of mail-delivery routes between New York City and Boston, Massachusetts that evolved into one of the first major highways in the United States. The three major alignments were the Lower Post Road (now U.S. Ro ...

Route 1 (1673).Kurumi Connecticut Roads retrieved on 2008-04-11
/ref>

1964 house tour

The Trumbull Historical Society organized its first historic house tour on October 24, 1964. Tickets to the event were $2.00. The society printed a brochure with historical information on each house on the tour, which included the Ephraim Hawley House. The brochure proclaimed ''the Ephraim Hawley House was unequivocally the oldest house in Trumbull''. It was presumed that the house was ''built by Ephraim Hawley between 1683 when he married and 1690 when he died''. Mr. Elliott P. Curtiss owned and was residing in the house at this time, and put many of his 17th and 18th century

antiques An antique ( la, antiquus; 'old', 'ancient') is an item perceived as having value because of its aesthetic or historical significance, and often defined as at least 100 years old (or some other limit), although the term is often used loosely ...

on display. The Hawley house was also featured on the cover of the first modern street map of the town of Trumbull published in 1965.

The house today

Over the last few centuries, the appearance of the house has evolved as each family has left their mark while expanding, adapting or preserving the house to accommodate changing ideas about space, function, comfort, privacy, cleanliness and fashion. Many original architectural details remain preserved including; partial dirt cellar, field stone foundation, oak post and beam frame, oak roof sheathing, stone chimney with brick beehive oven, oak interior walls, wide-board quarter-sawn oak flooring, calcined oyster shell lime plaster walls and ceilings over riven oak lath, poplar paneling, oak batten doors, oak window frames and the original riven oak clapboard siding preserved in the lean-to attic.

Images

Image:Bake oven.JPG, Brick beehive oven Image:Ephraim Hawley brick oven ceiling.JPG, Brick beehive oven ceiling Image:Ephraim Hawley House oak flooring 2010.JPG, Original 16" wide quarter-sawn oak flooring ;See also *

List of the oldest buildings in Connecticut This article lists the oldest buildings in the state of Connecticut, United States of America. The dates of construction are based on land tax and probate records, architectural studies, genealogy, radio carbon dating, and dendrochronology. Buildi ...

* History of Trumbull, Connecticut *

Nichols, Connecticut Nichols, a historic village in southeastern Trumbull in Fairfield County, Connecticut, is named after the family who maintained a large farm in its center for almost 300 years. The Nichols Farms Historic District, which encompasses part of t ...

* Nichols Farms Historic District *

Stratford, Connecticut Stratford is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. It is situated on Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Housatonic River. Stratford is in the Bridgeport–Stamford–Norwalk Metropolitan Statistical Area. It was settled ...

Thomas Hawley House The Thomas Hawley House at 514 Purdy Hill Road in Monroe, Connecticut, is a historic Colonial American wooden post-and-beam saltbox farm house built in 1730. Hawley was the great grandson of Joseph Hawley (Captain) of Stratford, Connecticut, ...

Notes

References

* Reverend Samuel Orcutt
''A History of the Old Town of Stratford and the City of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Volume 1''
Fairfield Historical Society, 1886 * Reverend Samuel Orcutt
''A History of the Old Town of Stratford and the City of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Volume 2''
Fairfield Historical Society, 1886 * ''History of Trumbull Dodrasquicentennial 1797–1972 Commemorative Book'', Trumbull Historical Society, 1972 * Connecticut General Assembly, ''The Public records of the Connecticut Colony 1636–1776'', Press of the Case, Lockwood & Brainard, 1885 * William Cothren, ''History of Ancient Woodbury Connecticut'', Bronson Brothers, Waterbury, 1854 * Frederick Haines Curtiss, ''A Genealogy of the Curtiss Family'', Rockwell and Churchill Press, Boston, 1903 *

William Richard Cutter William Richard Cutter (August 17, 1847 – June 6, 1918) was an American historian, genealogist, and writer. Life Born in Woburn, Massachusetts on August 17, 1847, he was the son of Dr. Benjamin Cutter and Mary Whittemore Cutter. He attended ...

, ''New England Families, Genealogical and Memorial'', Lewis Historical Publishing, NY, 1914 * Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ''Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College'', Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1896 * Elias Sill Hawley, ''The Hawley Record'', Press of E. H. Hutchinson & Co., Buffalo, NY, 1890 * D. Hamilton Hurd, ''History of Fairfield County Connecticut'', J. W. Lewis & Co., Philadelphia, 1881 * William Morgan, ''The Cape Cod Cottage'', Princeton Architectural Press, 2006 * Joan Oppenheim, ''Yale University History of Art-53a-Research Report'', New Haven, CT, 1950 * Nancy O. Phillips, ''Town Records of Derby, Connecticut 1655–1710'', Sarah Riggs Humphreys Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution, Derby, 1901 * Albert Mack Sterling, ''The Sterling Genealogy'', Grafton Press, NY, 1909

External links

The Society of the Hawley Family, Inc.

Ephraim Hawley House Archiplanet

Trumbull Historical Society Nero Hawley

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hawley, Ephraim Stratford, Connecticut Trumbull, Connecticut Buildings and structures in Trumbull, Connecticut People of colonial Connecticut Connecticut Colony Saltbox architecture in Connecticut Houses in Fairfield County, Connecticut Colonial architecture in Connecticut Houses completed in 1683 Houses completed in 1690