Old Homestead, Clintonville, Pennsylvania

Got to snoop around this old place while I was on my recent writing retreat.  It's a lopsided stone house with an ugly cinder block addition.  It was popular sometime after the Civil War to plaster over exterior stone walls and draw a fake brick pattern into the plaster.  Stone houses were considered old fashioned and provincial, so they would try to make them look like painted brick.  You can see that effect at this place, where the white facade is wearing away.  But it only succeeds in making the house look like it was built out of cinder blocks.

The fellow who owns the house has found tax records dating back to 1805, and he guesses that there was originally a log cabin on the spot, and that the current house was built between 1810 and 1820.  He says the plot was laid out in 1794, and that the original owner was a judge.  It has fallen on hard times indeed.  Note the child's swing dangling from the tree in the left of this photo.  As always, click on any photo to enlarge it.

This is just inside the front door, which faces north.  I'm guessing that this house is of the old "hall and parlor" design, which would have meant that there were two large rooms on the main floor: a "hall" (or kitchen) just inside the front door, where most of family life would have occurred, and a "parlor" where you see the sunken windows, and where the master and mistress of the house would have slept and entertained guests.  Strange to think that the fanciest room in the house used to double as the master bedroom.  But this floor design has long since been replaced with the more modern living room, dining room, kitchen combo.

The stairs bore my weight with no trouble, and the second floor seemed somehow much larger than the first.

But before we go up there, this is the inside of the ugly addition that someone added to the place in the 40s or 50s.  It's a garage with perhaps the world's spookiest cellar door.  See below.

Not "No," but "HELL no," I'm not going down there.

Here's the staircase from the old "hall" up to the second floor, where there are three bedrooms.

This is the largest of them.

It didn't occur to me until too late that I was actually exploring this old house on Halloween day.  See how the vines have fount their way inside.  There was also a hive of bees someplace inside the walls, though I have no idea why they would still be swarming in October.

See how the windows are so deeply set into the thick stone walls.

The first floor has two closed-up fireplaces, one at each end of the house.  I also went up the the attic, which was brightly enough lit with the natural light of a single window.  There's a slate roof that's seen a lot of damage from vines and rot.  Somehow I thought I'd snapped more photos of this house, but I'm not finding them just now.