The earliest stick built house hereabouts is this one framed in ’46 if memory serves.

http://www.tupelohall.com/TourTupelo.html

A presenter at the Rindge conference had been given the ledger books of the carpenter who framed it. Interestingly he kept the timberesque raising bee in play and framed walls ahead and stood up both the house and barn in one day when the extra manpower was available. All this is known through his highly detailed ledgers.

It stuck in my mind because the same carpenter continued to timberframe barns churches and townhalls and framed the town hall in my home town, after the above house was built.

It is pictured here scroll down to the last picture - http://www.greatnhhomes4sale.com/Litchfield

The next town over from where the stickbuilt house stands. If any of you have read Thoreau’s, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers you may have seen a photo of the church which shares the same parking lot, though formerly sat across the road and had to be moved when the Merrimack changed its course (it used to be a commonly told ghost story when I was a boy that the empty graveyard was haunted by those whose bodies had been allowed to wash down the river as the riverbank was washed away) I grew up in the woods on Watt’s Brook about a half mile from its confluence with the river, the town encompasses the finest bottom land in the state and still has farms aplenty despite its population expanding multi-thousand fold since my boyhood – 400 souls then 8,000+ now.

All these buildings are I’m sure, plumb full of cut nails, as was the 1821 timberframed Parsonage we restored this past year, everything from teeny 5d’s attaching the clapboards to 5” spikes in the framing holding butt cogs in their housings


"We build too many walls and not enough bridges" - Isaac Newton

http://bridgewright.wordpress.com/