The old Hunt house

September 21.

Stopped at the old Hunt house with Ricketson and C. 

The rafters are very slender, of oak, yet quite sound; the laths of split cedar (?), yet long and straight and as thin or thinner than our sawed ones. 

Between the boards and plastering, in all the lower story, at least, large-sized bricks are set on their edges in clay. Was it not partly to make it bullet-proof?  They had apparently been laid from within after boarding, from the fresh marks of the boards on the clay. 

An Egyptian-shaped fireplace or frame in the chamber and painted or spotted panels to the door.  Large old-fashioned latches and bolts, blacksmith-made? 

The upper story projects in front and at ends seven or eight inches over the lower, and the gables above a foot over this. No weather - boards at the corners. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 21, 1855

See February 21, 1853 ("Dr. Bartlett tells me that it was Adam Winthrop, a grandson of the Governor, who sold this farm to Hunt in 1701. I saw the old window, some eighteen inches square, of diamond squares, four or five inches across, set in lead, on the back side the house."):  February 17, 1857 ("To the old Hunt house. . . .This house is about forty-nine feet on the front by twenty."); December 20, 1857 ("The cellar stairs at the old Hunt house are made of square oak timbers "); February 9, 1858 ("The stairs of the old back part are white pine or spruce, each the half of a square log");  March 11, 1859 ("To Hunt house. I go to get one more sight of the old house which Hosmer is pulling down, but I am too late to see much of it."); March 13, 1859 ("The Hunt house, to draw from memory, . . .looked like this :

March 14, 1859 ("I judge by my eye that the house is fifteen feet high to the eaves. The posts are remarkably sawn and hewn away on account of the projection of the upper story, so that they are more than twice as large above as below."); March 18, 1859 ("I, with others, saw by the frame of the old Hunt house that an addition had been made to its west end in 1703."); March 27, 1859 ("Those chalk-marks on the chamber-floor joists and timbers of the Hunt house, one of which was read by many "Feb. 1666,""); September 22, 1859 ("I went past the Hunt cellar, where Hosmer pulled down the old house in the spring, I thought I would see if any new or rare plants had sprung up in that place which had so long been covered from the light. ); The Succession of Forest Trees ("In the spring of 1859  the old Hunt house, so called, in this town, whose chimney bore the date 1703, was taken down. This stood on land which belonged to John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts  and a part of the house was evidently much older than the above date, and belonged to the Winthrop family. ") 

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