Before the decision was made, we struggled with the evidence. The question seemed relatively simple: “Should we install gutters on the Stone House?” The earliest photograph we have of the log side of the house seems to show that there were no gutters installed on that side of the structure at that time. Nevertheless, that does not prove there were no gutters installed at an earlier time, nor does it preclude the possibility of there being gutters on other parts of the house at that time, or at an earlier time in the history of the structure.

Historical written sources and physical evidence of gutters on circa 1830 houses in western Virginia are hard to find. It is likely that those who had gutters on their homes in Newtown/Stephensburg during that period had installed wood gutter systems that employed boards fixed in a V-shape. Some wealthier homeowners may have had these V-shaped wood gutters lined inside with tinplate iron sheet metal. At first, only the wealthiest members of society could afford gutters made entirely of tinplate iron sheets. Terne sheet metal is a form of tinplate that is thin iron or steel coated with an alloy of lead and tin. The earliest half-round metal gutters were made of terne sheet. They were also rolled on both edges. (See the image below.) Our historic structure consultant Doug Reed has a collection of antique gutters and downspout segments that he has saved over the course of his career working on old buildings. We would like to thank him for sharing this collection with us and allowing us to take the photograph featured here.

The way gutters were held in place on buildings in the 1830 period included wrought iron brackets. Our President Linden Fravel had seen examples of period wrought iron gutter brackets during a visit to Old Salem in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In turn, we contacted their Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts to request photographs of examples from their collection. Among the examples they had was a gutter bracket designed to be mounted under the shingles and attached to the side of a roof rafter. (See images below.)

In the end we decided that in the interest of preserving original building fabric and protecting the restored parts of the structure, it would be best to install period-appropriate gutters on the Stone House. Those reproduction gutters have arrived. (See image below.) We are having gutter brackets (similar to the one pictured here) made by Williamsburg blacksmith Mark Sperry.

As we await the delivery of our 4,900 handmade shingles, there is good news and progress to report. In the course of the work to prepare for the installation of those shingles we are restoring features that will touch on or interface with that new roof. This includes the tops of the north and south gable ends with their rake boards, beaded weatherboards, and windows. The weatherboards we installed on these gable ends are copies of the original weatherboards we discovered under the roof of the circa 1869 shed addition behind the log side of the house. The windows are based on the evidence recovered by Doug Reed during his forensic investigation of those areas of the house. They are also based on other surviving historical examples of windows from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that have survived locally in this town and region. Nails and nail holes in original studs were the only clues we had to work with for the south gable window. With the north gable window we were fortunate to combine nail hole evidence with “ghost” lines on the original studs. These lines showed weathering and oxidation shadows where the original window frame and its trim used to be.

We are also restoring the soffits, fascia, and crowns at this time because of their relationship with the roof. One of the biggest challenges with the soffits and crowns is the way the building’s walls have settled and warped over the last two-hundred-plus years. While they were originally built plumb and square, they are now quite out of line in some places. This is particularly the case with the east wall of the stone side of the house. The evidence we have discovered implies that there was significant work done to this east wall of the stone side of the building during the just after first quarter of the nineteenth century. This is also the wall that we have had to construct buttresses alongside to bolster it until we can build a lean-to porch against it as a permanent solution. The bulges and lack of straightness across the top of this east wall are most visible where the crown and soffit meet the top of the stone. (See photo below.)

We also have restored our chimneys, and there is an interesting story about the main chimney top in the center of the house. Historically chimney tops needed maintenance every 30 to 50 years. Hot, dry smoke meeting cold, wet air produces acidic condensation that dissolves mortar. Combined with the freeze-thaw cycle, this moisture causes masonry to deteriorate. For this reason we were fairly certain that the brick top of the main chimney had been reworked since 1830. During our initial investigations we could not tell if that main chimney top had originally been completed in brick or stone when the roof over the log addition was raised in 1805. When our mason Edward Ashby and his men were removing the old brick chimney top, they discovered that the bricks transitioned to stone unevenly below the roofline up to the ridge. (See photo to the below.)

If it had been originally executed in brick, the masons would have simply started from a level stone surface. This uneven transition was a clear indication that the original top of the 1805 chimney was built in stone and that sometime later (probably during Henry Dinges’ 1869 renovations to the log side of the house) that stone top was replaced in brick. Please check out our posts on our social media pages for more photos of the work that has been completed.

The work on the Stone House roof restoration has begun. In preparation for the installation of the side-lap shingles, we are addressing the structural problems in the rafters, collar beams, and their support framing. The roof structure over the log side is in relatively good condition and has required comparatively minimal reinforcement. It is in the structure over the stone side of the house that we found the most serious problems. That timber-framed system is the oldest part of the house that has sustained the greatest damage from the elements and from man-made alterations over last 250+ years. This article will focus on the important work we are doing to save this original timber-framed roof structure over the stone side.
Before work could begin on the roof, we needed to address the structural integrity of the east wall of the stone side of the house. This east wall leans out too much at its top and away from the structure’s center of gravity. To temporarily solve this problem we have constructed a system of wooden buttresses along the outside of that east wall to support it and prevent any more movement. (See photo below.) Eventually we will be reconstructing a lean-to porch along two-thirds of that east stone wall. It will serve as a permanent buttress and prevent future structural problems.

With the east stone wall stabilized we then turned our attention to the roof structure over the stone side of the house. To make it possible to document the structural problems and to have access to the rafters, collar beams, and their supporting frames, we had to remove the remaining plaster and lath in the second floor over the stone side of the house. That plaster most likely had been installed during Henry Jackson’s period of ownership. This was a difficult but necessary step to take in our efforts to save the house. We already could see there was serious deterioration in sections of the east wall rafter tails and soffit framing. (See left photo below.)

With the plaster off we also found considerable decay and structural cracks in some of the joints of the rafters and collar beams. (See right photo above.) Two of the collar beams simply fell to the floor during the work on the structure. We also found that the rafters at the roof ridge were out of alignment in some places. This required the sistering of all the rafters and collar beams with new framing boards as well as cross bracing. (See the photo below.) The roof structure over the Stone House is now stabilized and ready for the future. We would like to thank the crew of Vintage Renovation & Construction, Inc. for their hard work and the careful execution of their talents as craftsmen.

We were hoping that by this time we would be able to report on the installation of our side-lap shingle roof. Unfortunately, the contractor who is making the 4,900 shingles by hand has run into problems with the wood supplied to him for the job. With shingle making the quality of the wood is critical. When warping and splitting of shingles happens, it leaves you with nothing but what our contractor calls “expensive firewood.” Our contractor is still working on getting the job done as soon as possible while we prepare the roof structure that will support them.

In the meantime there was one more discovery that we made in our forensic examination of the stone side of the structure that is worthy of our attention here. As our historic structure consultant, Mr. Doug Reed, removed plaster, wood trim, and framing from around the rear doorway in the east wall of the stone side of the house, he discovered clear signs that the opening in that wall had been altered from a window to a doorway. The evidence included the use of bricks to fill in gaps left where stones were removed as the opening was extended down to the floor level. (See photo below.)

 

Sandwiched in between the courses of infill bricks are wooden blocks that served as nailers for an earlier door frame to be mounted in this opening. These bricks and the wood nailer blocks have whitewash on them, as do the stones on the other side of this doorway opening. The whitewash is typical for the former exterior surfaces of the Stone House. As we have said previously, we have found whitewash on all the historical outer wall surfaces that were later covered or encapsulated. Because these whitewashed surfaces were protected from the elements they were preserved for us to study today.

This discovery of a window becoming a rear door means that the original design of the Stone House was not the way we had previously believed it to be. It did not have opposing front and rear doorways in the main room of the first floor. This was a bit odd. One of the most common features of Virginia’s Georgian vernacular architectural tradition is the use of ground-floor doorways that are situated in the front and rear of the structure. These doorways were typically positioned to line up, and make it possible to pass directly in a straight line through the house from one side to another. It is recognized by architectural historians that this allowed for better air circulation on hot summer days when a cross breeze through the building would be very welcome. The original rear window opposite the front door in the stone side of the Stone House no doubt performed a similar service, except with smaller volumes of air.

So the question this discovery raises is where was the back door in the original stone structure? The problem with this question is that its premise assumes that there had to be a back door in the original floor plan of the Stone House. Architectural historians who study late-medieval, and early-modern vernacular houses in Great Britain have found that small cottages of one or two rooms like the Stone House did not always have more than one entrance. In fact, the late Ronald W. Brunskill (1929-2015), one of the leading British academics who studied the historic vernacular architecture of his homeland, noted several examples of single-entry historic house types in his published works. Could it be possible that George Cabbage, the original builder of the Stone House, was following this custom that he knew from his homeland when he conceived of its floor plan? If so, it would not be the first time that a British immigrant to the American colonies built a house like they had previously known in their homeland.

Our historic structure consultant, Mr. Reed, has also discovered a blocked doorway behind the wall on the east side of the ground-floor fireplaces and chimney stack. This disused doorway once allowed passage between the stone side of the house and its log addition. Mr. Reed believes that also it originally could have been a doorway leading to the exterior of the stone side of the house before the log addition was constructed. While this theory remains controversial, it could answer the question about where a back door of the Stone House was originally located.

Ultimately, these discoveries do not have any bearing on our restoration of the Stone House to its 1830 appearance. The rear window on the stone side of the house had already been turned into a door by then, and the doorway to the east of the ground-floor fireplaces was also already blocked off by that time. Even so, these discoveries are interesting and worthy of our attention.

In our last post we began to explain how the nails discovered in the dado panels of the first floor south room of the stone side of the house are helping us know when those panels were installed. We also discussed how dating the installation of those panels relates to the construction of the rear bulkhead entrance to the cellar. In this second post on this subject, we will address the other nail evidence that we have discovered and analyze what it might mean. To do this we will focus on the nails that were made with machine-cut shanks and mechanically stamped heads during the long period from the 1810s to circa 1900. (See figure 1 below.)

It can be very difficult to determine the manufacturing date of nails like this because they all can superficially appear to be very much alike. Despite their similarities in appearance, there are certain characteristics that distinguish the early cut nails with machine-stamped heads from the ones made later in the period. To begin to recognize the earliest cut nails with machine-stamped heads from later ones, readers need to understand the difference between wrought iron and steel. Today almost all nails are made with steel. Steel is primarily an alloy of the elements iron and carbon. Prior to the invention of the Bessemer process in the 1850s, the manufacture of steel was relatively time consuming, labor intensive, and more expensive. Thus, steel was used sparingly where it was needed. Nails were not made of steel until the late 1870s.

Wrought iron is an alloy of elemental iron with very little carbon in it. Its manufacturing process was less complicated than the way steel was made in that period. It involved heating and hammering or hot-rolling smelted iron. The principal difference between wrought iron and steel for our purpose here is that wrought iron has siliceous slag inclusions that are layered in such a way as to form what resembles grain in wood. Steel does not. This grain-like characteristic in wrought iron runs lengthwise through a bar, and these siliceous slag inclusions tend to cause weaknesses in the iron’s molecular bond where they are located. Bars intended for nail manufacture were sent to rolling and slitting mills to be made into plates before they were cut into nails. At first the plates from which cut nails were made were rolled and cut so that the grain ran perpendicular to the nail’s shank. This caused the earliest cut nails to sometimes break in half (instead of bending) where the siliceous slag inclusions caused inherent weaknesses in the nail. By the early 1820s the nail-manufacturing technology had improved. The plates that the best cut nails were made from were rolled so that the iron grain ran parallel to the nail’s shank. This made it possible to bend or clinch a cut nail of this type. By the early 1840s nail manufacturers stopped making cut nails with the iron grain running perpendicular to the nail’s shank, as they were too easily broken.

Along with the nail we discussed in our last issue, we found these two types of cut nails in the dado panels. The ones that were used to nail the dado panel to the wall were the type with iron grain running perpendicular to the shank. As expected, the tips of these nails were all broken off due to the weaknesses in their molecular bonds around the siliceous slag inclusions. These nails could not bend or be clinched without breaking. (See image below.)

The other cut nails used in the dado panels are the type with their iron grain running parallel to their shank. In other words, these nails could bend without breaking. They were used to fasten the panel’s baseboard to the individual repurposed cabinet doors that were lined up side by side to make up the dado panel. They were driven through the baseboard and then clinched so their tips were bent over and driven into the wood. (See photo below.)

The presence of these three types of cut nails in this dado panel implies that the carpenter who hammered them in was working at a time when all three types of nails were still commonly in use. That time was around 1830, at the end of the period when the earliest cut nails were being replaced by the new cut nails that could be clinched like the nail pictured above.

In our earlier posts we addressed the dado panels in the first floor south room of the stone side of the house. The significance of these dado panels became apparent when we discovered that the one on the east wall had been in place before the exterior stone wall behind it was reworked to create the rear bulkhead opening to the cellar underneath. In other words, this meant that we would know when that rear bulkhead entrance had been created in that stone wall if we could also come to a more certain conclusion about the age of the dado panels inside. In this article we will address the dado panels in greater depth and explain the significance of the evidence that has come to light since our last issue of this newsletter.

To begin, what is a dado panel? Dictionary definitions of the term dado basically say that it is from the Latin word datum, and it can refer to the architectural section of a pedestal between its base and crown. It also refers to the lower part of an interior room wall that has been decorated differently than the upper part of that same wall. In this case, these lower wall decorations consist of panels. Sometimes called wainscot paneling, they are situated under the dado rail (or chair rail) and above the baseboards. The panels we are dealing with at the Stone House were made by cutting skillfully crafted cabinet doors down to the length needed for the height of the panels and then nailing them together between the dado rail and the baseboard. Some of the graffiti we discovered on the reverse side of one of those dado panels most likely dates to the time when they were still serving as cabinet doors. Because the panels in question were repurposed materials from an earlier period, we need to rely on a more certain method to determine the date when they were constructed and installed. One of the most reliable methods of dating architectural work is the study of the nails that hold together the materials in question. As noted above, this paneling is constructed with nails.

Nail manufacturing technologies have developed quite rapidly over the time that has elapsed since the first part of the Stone House was built in the 1760s. Beginning in the Iron Age and on through until about 1800, nails were made by heating the end of a long, thin iron rod and hammering that section into the shape of a nail. The nail was then broken off the rod and finished with a tool that allowed the blacksmith to hammer the head of the nail into shape. These all-hand-made nails are sometimes called rose head nails because their planished heads resemble petals on a rose. (See Figure 1.) By the 1790s new technology was being developed that made it possible to mechanically cut and shear off a section of a thin bar of iron to form the shank of the nail. This machine operation reduced the amount a labor required to make the nail, but the head was still hammered out by hand. (See Figure 2.) By the beginning of the second decade of the 1800s, new technology was being developed that made it possible to employ two machine operations to manufacture an iron nail completely without skilled hand labor. This type of nail had a cut shank and a machine-stamped head, and it was used into the first decade of the 1900s. (See Figure 3.) The round wire nail that is still in use today was introduced in the 1890s. These nails are entirely manufactured by machine operations and are made of mild steel instead of iron.

 

Figure 1 – Hand-forged nails like this were made until circa 1800.

 

Figure 2 – Nails with machine-cut shanks and hand-forged heads like this were made from the 1790s until the 1820s.

 

Figure 3 – Nails made with machine-cut shanks and mechanically stamped heads like this were made from the 1810s to circa 1900.(Illustrations above are by the author after the work of Thomas D. Vasser, University of Vermont.)

 

We can see that the nails used to construct the dado panels are cut nails. The first nail we pulled is like Figure 2 above and formerly held the dado panel to the east wall of the stone side of the house. (See photo below.) As already noted, nails like this were made from the 1790s until they were replaced by cut nails with machine-stamped heads in the 1820s. If the other nails we find in the dado panels date to this same period, we will have the answers to a number of our questions about the history of the Stone House. In our next post we will have more to report.

Sometimes things survive on old buildings that would have been lost long ago to the elements if they had been left uncovered. Such is the case with some original siding that was left under the roof of the shed addition behind the log side of the house. This siding was historically called weatherboarding. Unlike clapboards, which were generally split, or riven, from sections of cross-sawn logs, weatherboards were sawn lengthwise out of long planks and then planed smooth on their outside surfaces. The weatherboards that survived on the Stone House have a decorative bead planed on the bottom edge of each board. (See image below.)

So how do we know that this siding dates to the restoration period of 1830? The nails. The majority of the nails that held these boards on the exterior wall of the log side of the house were hand forged. In other words, they were made by hand. These hand-forged nails date to around 1800 and before. (See image below.) After 1800 they were being replaced on the market by nails with a machine-cut shank and a hand-forged head. Those nails that were partly made by a machine operation were soon replaced around 1820 by nails that were manufactured completely by machine. A few other nails that were found holding the weatherboards were all machine made and were clearly from later campaigns of repair prior to the time when the shed addition was added in 1867. At that time these weatherboards were covered up and enclosed under the roof of that shed addition.

These weatherboards were originally whitewashed. (See image below.) Unlike historical paints, whitewash is a solution of water and lime (slaked lime or calcium hydroxide) as well as chalk dust (calcium carbonate) that was brushed on surfaces. While paint will eventually chip and flake off, whitewash simply dissolves and weathers away. Surface preparation for a new coat of whitewash is minimal compared to the preparation required for a new coat of paint. Often whitewash can be applied directly on a relatively clean, dry surface without any scraping, sanding or priming as is typically needed for a new coat of paint.

Because of the way whitewash dissolves as it is exposed to the weather, we also discovered evidence of a rear porch with a gabled roof that once existed over the back door of the log side of the structure. The “ghost” of that missing porch’s roof apex is in the surviving whitewash on these weatherboards. (See image below.) We are very happy that the workers who built the shed addition behind the log side did not remove these weatherboards.

Standing-seam rolled metal is today the most common vernacular roofing material in the Valley of Virginia. This was not always the case. From the time the earliest European settlers came to this region in the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century until the decades after the Civil War, the most common way to roof a house or an outbuilding was with wooden shingles. Even so, how do we know that the Stone House had a wooden shingle roof on it in 1830? Apart from the original wooden roofing laths we have found nailed to the rafters in both sides of the house, there is other evidence that tells us that there was a wooden-shingle roof on the structure in 1830. When the owner of the Stone House Henry Jackson died in 1833, an inventory of his estate was taken for the court probate records. Among the things he owned at the time of his death listed in that inventory were two lots of roof shingles. One of these lots was estimated (or “supposed”) by the appraisers to contain 5,000 of what they called “Joint shingles.” The other lot was estimated to contain 1,000 of what they termed “lap shingles.” (We will discuss the difference between these two types of shingles below.) These shingles were among other building materials that Jackson owned when he died. In addition to this textual evidence we also have an historical photograph (see detail below) of the front of the log addition to the Stone House taken around 1885, when it was owned by the Argenbrights. It confirms that the structure still had a side-lap, wooden-shingle roof, though it was clearly in very rough shape at that time. It was probably about to be replaced with its first standing-seam rolled-metal panel roof.

The two types of shingles that Jackson owned when he died were the most commonly used in that era. Joint shingles are perhaps the ones we are most familiar with today. Also called “butt shingles,” they are laid flat on the roofing laths so that the side edges are closely abutting each other. They are nailed down in a pattern where the joints between the shingles are covered by the next course running above the one beneath. Sometimes their exposed ends are rounded to give a decorative “fish scale” appearance to the roof. (See image below.) This kind of shingle tends to be found most often in this region on structures that were associated with immigrants from Eastern Virginia who were of British extraction.

 

On the other hand, lap shingles are associated with those of German extraction. Architectural historians today often refer to the lap shingles used in this region by the name: long biaxially-tapered side-lap shingles. This term is more descriptive of their appearance. They are long. The ones we are having made will be at least thirty inches long. They are biaxially tapered, or wedge-shaped in profile, because they are split out of large red oak logs and then finished by shaving them smooth with a drawknife. The finished shingle is free of sapwood and core-heartwood.

The illustration above (based on a sketch first published in an article by Robert C. Bucher in Pennsylvania Folklife, Summer 1969) shows the way these side-lap shingles are installed. If things go as planned, we will begin to install a roof like this on the Stone House in the summer of 2019.

Earlier this year we promised to address some historical graffiti and the remaining questions raised though our forensic study of the stone side of the house. To understand how these remaining questions have been formulated, we need to first discuss the limits of what our study can reveal. It is worth noting that we have called these investigations a forensic study. Forensic science is normally used to help criminal investigators uncover and interpret legally admissible physical evidence from a crime scene and to determine what happened at that place. In large measure what we have been doing at the Stone House has been similar to what crime scene investigators do in their work. In both cases the effort involves uncovering evidence that has, at times, been deliberately concealed or inadvertently left behind by those involved in an action or an event. In both cases the deliberate, or unwitting, destruction of evidence as well as inconclusive discoveries or ambiguous physical details can lead to reasonable doubts about a proposed scenario of events. In the case of the Stone House, these remaining questions are not so much about if things were done, but more about when things were done.

In our previous update about our forensic work we also introduced what we discovered behind a dado panel on the east wall of the stone side of the structure. Behind this paneling we found that most of the plaster was missing and that the stones there had been re-laid after the dado paneling was installed. The essence of this discovery was that there is a definite relationship between the time the dado panel was installed (it coming first) and the subsequent date the rear stone wall above the bulkhead entrance was re-laid. The stones laid behind the dado paneling also implied that the rear window on the east wall had been raised higher in that wall so that the dado panel could fit below it. Therefore, theoretically, if we can date the time that the rear cellar entrance was created, we could also get a better idea about when the dado panels were installed. As we have addressed in the past, and again in our previous post, there is a stone in the exterior wall with “1828” pecked into its facial surface above that bulkhead entrance and to the left of that window. If this date stone tells us when that rear wall was reworked for the installation of the back bulkhead entrance, then we also can be relatively sure that the dado panels inside were in place by 1828.

The problem is that there is also graffiti on the back of one of the dado panels from the west (front or street-side) wall. Examination of all these panels has indicated that they were originally cabinet doors constructed with mortise-and-tenon joints. When they were made into dado panels, they were cut down and nailed together with machine-made cut nails that were typically used between 1820 and 1890. Some of the graffiti in question appears to date to the time when the dado panels were still being used as cabinet doors. One panel has the names of Ellis Long, R. Wells, and A. Pitman. These individuals were contemporaries who lived in Stephensburg during the later half of the 1700s and the early decades of the 1800s. There were two men with the name Ellis Long. The father who lived from 1758 to 1837 was likely the one that inscribed this graffiti. The “R. Wells” was most likely Richard Wells, who lived from 1779 to 1846, and the “A. Pitman” was most likely Andrew Pitman (the potter) who lived from 1760 to 1838. These were all prominent businessmen in Stephensburg at the same time that Henry Jackson owned the Stone House from 1802 to 1833.

The graffiti on another one of the old cabinet doors that makes up this same panel is less clear. It includes doodling and what appears to be a signature followed by a date. The most discernible part of this graffiti is what appears to be the year 1837 or 1887. (See images below.) Could this mean that the dado panels were installed after this inscription was made, or could this inscription date to a time when the panel was temporarily removed by a worker? We may never know, but we are continuing to work on deciphering this inscription in hopes that it may tell us more. We also continue to prepare to install a new roof. In our next post we will address what this new roof will be like.

We have finally begun the restoration work on the Stone House. On the 19th of June a crew from Dominion Traditional Building Group began the infill of a doorway that was knocked through the rear wall of the stone side of the structure during the 1960s. This doorway was created during Mildred Lee Grove’s period of ownership to give access to the second floor of the rear ell addition from the stairway in the original front section of the house. (See photo and floor plan insert below.)

Not only was this infill work necessary for bringing the house back to the way it looked in 1830, it was also required to stabilize the northeast corner of the stone side of the structure and serve as a foundation for the base of the roof structure frame.
The job was made slightly more complex by the fact that two floor joists had been cut off in the early twentieth century to make way for the current staircase . When the staircase is removed as part of the future interior restoration work, the floor joists will need to be replaced. Pockets were left in the masonry at the right spots for the replacement floor joists to rest.

The crew from Dominion Traditional Building Group was composed of Mike Ondrick (wearing the hat in the photo below), David Wood (without a hat in the photos below), as well as Glenn Courson, and Danny Mason.

We are grateful for their enthusiasm and professional skills. We would also like to thank Tim Winther, Dominion Traditional Building Group’s Senior Project Manager, for overseeing this undertaking.

The next steps we will take in the restoration will focus on the roof structure, the manufacture of shingles for the roof, and the chimney top. We will keep you up to date as we move forward.