Historic Barns of Connecticut

Designations

• National Register

Historic Significance

Architectural description:

This is a 1 1/2-story field-stone carriage house with brick details. The east face is the main entrance and has five garage door openings. Each door is painted gray and has vertical wood siding. Framing each entrance is brick; the posts have horizontal laid brick and the lintel has vertical soldier course brick. There are also three six-over-six double hung windows above the central door openings, each framed in brick. The corners of the front facade of the structure have brick quoins. There is a pass-through door on the south gable facade close to the southeast corner, framed in brick. There is a window framed in brick just under the apex. Also on the south gable-end is a set of stone stairs on brick supports that lead to an entrance to the second level of the structure, also framed in brick. There are no openings or details on the west eave side of the structure, which is built into the slope of the hill. There appear to be no openings on the north gable-end which is also built into the slope which rises toward the north and west. The carriage house has a tin roof.

Historical significance:

Field stone is plentiful in New England. It is building material collected from the surface or just under the surface of fields where is occurs naturally. Farmers needed to remove the stone before they could plow the fields and the by product became a valuable resource for boundary walls, foundations, and even buildings.

Until the 1830’s, the horses used for riding and driving carriages were often kept in the main barn along with the other farm animals. By the 1850’s, some New England farmers built separate horse stables and carriage houses. Early carriage houses were built just to shelter a carriage and perhaps a sleigh, but no horses. The pre-cursor to the twentieth-century garage, these outbuildings are distinguished by their large hinged doors, few windows, and proximity to the dooryard. The combined horse stable and carriage house continued to be a common farm building through the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, until automobiles became common.

Field Notes

Behind a store fronting Main St., is a house, behind the house a stone and brick barn. Located in the South Coventry Historic District.

Use (Historic)

• carriage barn

Use (Present)

• carriage barn

Exterior Visible from Public Road?

Yes

Demolished

n/a

Location Integrity

Unknown

Related features

• Barn
• Carriage House
• Garden
• Stone Walls

Environment features

• Commercial
• High Density
• Residential

Relationship to surroundings

The site is located on the north side of Main Street in the village of South Coventry. Main Street heads roughly east-west, paralleling Mill Brook which runs on the south side of the street, and was the source of water power for a series of 19th-century mills. The street is lined with a mix of residential and commercial uses. This 1-acre property has a 1-story commercial building facing the street. Behind to the north is a 1 1/2-story house (c. 1900) with its ridge-line oriented east-west parallel to the street. It has a full-width 1-story porch across the south eave-side and a 1-story ell extending north at the rear. The stone and brick carriage house is located to thenorth of the house where the grade slopes up toward the west and north. A stone retaining wall along the west edge of the property aligns with the west wall of the carriage house, which is built into the slope.

Building Typology

• Carriage House

Materials

• Brick
• Fieldstone

Structural System

• Load-bearing Masonry

Roof materials

• Tin

Roof type

• Gable

Approximate Dimensions

1350 square feet

Date Compiled

08/17/2009

Compiled By

T. Levine, C. Hitchcock, reviewed by CT Trust

Sources

Photographs by Charlotte R. Hitchcock & Julie Rosen, 08/17/2009.

Town of Coventry assessor’s office
Assessor’s Record and GIS Viewer: http://ceo.fando.com/coventry/find.aspx?service=Coventry
Parcel ID: 025/0052/0038   1.03 acres   1350 sf

Aerial Mapping:
http://maps.google.com
http://www.bing.com/maps accessed 6/30/2011.

Andrews, Gregory, and Lewis, Barbara, Historic and Architectural Resources Survey of Coventry: the Coventry Village Area, 1980.

Andrews, Gregory E., South Coventry National Register Historic District Nomination No. 91000482, National Park Service, 1991.

Sexton, James, PhD, Survey Narrative of the Connecticut Barn, Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, Hamden, CT, 2005, http://www.connecticutbarns.org/history.

Visser, Thomas D., Field Guide to New England Barns and Farm Buildings, University Press of New England, 1997.