House history · March 3, 2022 · By Maren Alcott
What we found in the walls
You'd think a house that was taken down to the studs in the 1990s would have run out of surprises. You would be wrong.
Last winter we finally renovated the shared hall bath between the Garret East and Garret West. If you stayed up there before 2021 you'll remember it: a clawfoot tub, a sink with two separate taps (scalding and arctic), and a radiator that sounded like a ship's engine. The Fairweathers had done a careful job on it in 2003 with what they had, but the plumbing was tired, the floor had a lean you could roll a marble on (we checked, for science), and it was time.
I spent fifteen years restoring old houses in Maine before Theo and I bought this one, and the first rule I learned is that every old wall is a filing cabinet. People drop things through floor gaps. Carpenters seal up their lunch. Children post treasures behind baseboards. Somebody always stuffs something into a cavity to stop a draft. So when we opened the garret walls I put down drop cloths, got out a box of zip bags and a marker, and told the plumbers that nothing was going in the dumpster until I'd looked at it. They were very patient.
The finds
A sailor's ditty bag. Wedged between the rafters and the knee wall on the west side was a small canvas bag, stiff with age, tied with tarred twine. Sailors kept their sewing kit and small treasures in a bag like this. Inside: a wooden fid for splicing rope, two sail needles in a leather palm, a horn button, a lump of beeswax and a folded scrap of paper with what might be a list of ports, too faded to read. Mrs. Keane let the garret to sailors between voyages in the 1870s and 1880s. One of them, it seems, went to sea without his kit. I hope he had a spare.
A postcard. Tucked behind a loose board above the old window frame was a picture postcard of Salem harbor, postmarked 1908, addressed in pencil to "The Lady at the Lantern House, Mercy Lane, Salem, Mass." The message on the back says, in full: "Saw your light from the water again tonight. Thank you. — C." By 1908 the house was the Hollis & Vane funeral parlor, Abigail Crane had been dead nearly a century, and as far as we know nobody was keeping a lantern in the window. Samuel has read it a hundred times. So have I. It's now framed in the front hall, and we've stopped trying to explain it.
A child's slate pencil and three clay marbles. Under the floor at the top of the garret stair, sitting in the dust as if they'd been dropped yesterday. They are the same unglazed clay as the marbles the Fairweathers found behind the Nursery baseboard in 1997, one floor down. We have put them in the case with the others. The Nursery log, I'll just mention, had a quiet month afterward.
Newspaper insulation. Pages from a 1947 newspaper, crumpled into the gap around the window. This was from the apartments era, right after the house was cut up; someone was cold. There's a full-page advertisement for a refrigerator that Theo would like to have.
A dried lavender sprig. Just one, slipped into a crack in the plaster beside the stair. The lavender sachets the Fairweathers found in Abigail's room and on the main stair were stitched linen; this was bare, a single stem, gone gray and brittle. It could have come from anyone, from any year. It still smelled, very faintly, of lavender.
Assorted. A 1964 dime, two clothespins, a pewter thimble, a bottle cap from a local soda bottler that closed in the 1950s, eleven square nails, a horseshoe nail, and one very old, very dead mouse, whom we buried in the herb garden with dignity.
What we do with things like this
Every find gets photographed where it was found, before it's moved. We log the room, the exact spot, the date and what it was sitting in, the same way the Fairweathers did, so that their log and ours read as one long record. Anything fragile goes to a conservator friend in Maine for advice before we clean it, and most things don't get cleaned at all. A few things we put back: the Fairweathers left the concealed shoe beside the kitchen chimney where they found it, and I left the lavender sprig in its crack in the plaster, behind a small glass panel at the top of the garret stair. You can see it on your way up to bed.
The rest live in the glass case in the Library, alongside the 1997 marbles, Dr. Pell's bottles and the Hollis & Vane mourning card. Samuel brings out the ditty bag and the postcard at his Thursday history talk, 7 pm in the Library, free, all welcome. People always want to know who "C." was. We don't know. We'd love to.
And the bath?
It's lovely now: heated floor, a proper walk-in shower, a new clawfoot tub, taps that agree with each other. The radiator is quiet. The floor is level. The marbles we rolled across it to check went in a straight line and stopped where they should, which is more than we can say for the ones on the third floor.
— Maren