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Second floor · Double

The Ledger Room

The smallest room in the house, and the one with the most paperwork. A double bed, a good lamp, and the old desk where three generations of this house kept their accounts and then, apparently, forgot them.

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The Ledger Room: a double bed with a plaid wool blanket beside a built-in desk in a paneled alcove, a green-shaded lamp

What was under the floor

This was always a working room. In Josiah Crane's day it was a small chamber off the stair, likely for a clerk or a relation; by the time Abigail was running the house alone it had become what she called, in a letter, "the counting room." The desk is built into an alcove beside the chimney: a slant top, pigeonholes and a deep cupboard below, made of pine and painted the same dark red it is now. Over the next two centuries nearly everyone who ran the house seems to have used it.

In 1993, while the Fairweathers' crew was repairing the floor in front of the alcove, a carpenter lifted a loose board and found a tin box wrapped in oilcloth, sealed and dry. Inside was the Crane account book: the house's own ledger, begun in Josiah's hand in March 1748 with a list of timber, brick "for the chimnies" and sash glass from Boston, and kept by the family until 1803. The later pages are Abigail's, in a small neat hand: tea, candles, wages for the hired girl, and lamp oil, a great deal of lamp oil, bought every week for the lantern in the top window. Why the book went under the floor, and who put it there, nobody knows.

The account book went to a conservator, and then it came home: it lives here, in the desk, in an archival box in the locked cupboard, and Samuel will bring it out for you if you ask. Facsimiles of a few pages are framed on the wall. The room got its name, and later so did the restaurant downstairs, and so did a three-legged cat.

An old account book lying open beside a quill pen, columns of handwritten figures
The Crane account book, 1748–1803. Abigail's pages are mostly lamp oil.

What's in the room

The Ledger Room is about twelve feet by eleven, and we've furnished it the way a ship's cabin is furnished: everything earns its place. The bed is a double (54 inches wide, a little narrower than a queen) with a maple frame, a firm mattress, wool blankets from a mill in Maine and a plaid throw. The desk is the original, and it is a real desk, not a display: the slant top folds down to a writing surface big enough for a laptop and a notebook, the pigeonholes hold inn stationery and a few old pens, and there's a green-shaded lamp, a power strip hidden in the cupboard and the strongest Wi-Fi signal on the second floor. A Windsor chair, a luggage rack and a row of pegs complete the furniture. There is no room for anything else, and that's fine.

The single window looks west over the side garden, and gets the afternoon light. The bathroom is small and new, with a tiled shower, a narrow vanity and good water pressure, which in an old house is not to be taken for granted.

We think of the Ledger Room as the writer's room. A surprising number of guests come alone, for a few days in winter, to finish something. One left us a signed copy of the novel she finished at the desk; it's on the shelf above it.

Room facts

Floor
Second floor, off the main stair
Bed
Double (54 inches)
Sleeps
1 or 2 adults; best for one, cozy for two
Bath
Private, shower only
Size
Our smallest room, about 12 × 11 feet
View
West, over the side garden
Stairs
One flight
Also
The original desk, desk lamp, Wi-Fi, air conditioning, robes, tea tray

Rates

SeasonDatesFrom, per night
WinterJanuary – March$199
SpringApril – May$229
Summer & early fallJune – September$259
OctoberAll month$299
Late fall & holidaysNovember – December$239

Rates vary by season and day of the week. Taxes not included. Breakfast included. The Ledger Room is a good fit for our Midweek Quiet package.

Good to know

  • It really is small. Two people with two large suitcases will be friends by the end of the weekend, or not. If you need space, look at the Captain's Quarters down the hall.
  • The bed is a double, not a queen. Tall guests should know there is a footboard.
  • The desk is original and a little fragile. Please use the slant top for writing rather than sitting on it, and don't go prying at the floorboards; there's nothing under them now but a note from the carpenter, dated 1993, wishing you luck.
  • The room shares a wall with the main stair. Footsteps go by in the evening, and the ghost walk passes at about 8:15 pm on its way upstairs.
  • It is the quietest room in the house to the ghost-minded. In twenty-nine years nobody has reported anything here except a stubborn feeling that the numbers ought to add up.
  • Ledger the cat is named after this room, not the other way around. He lives in the carriage loft and patrols the ground floor by day, but he never comes into the guest rooms, whatever he tells you.

Four days alone in February, three pots of tea a day, and forty pages I'd been stuck on for a year. Samuel brought the account book out of the cupboard for me on the last night. She wrote down every candle. I went home and started writing everything down.

— A guest, the Ledger Room, February 2025