The parlor, called "the foreroom" at a later time, was the room where guests of station were received. The best bed hung with curtains and valance and covered with a rug, stood in a corner. In those days rugs were not used on floors but as bed furnishings. Even the baby's cradle had its rug. Carpets, likewise, were too fine for wooden floors and were used as table covers. Of bedsteads there were many kinds--high and low, canopy, close, corded, half-headed, joined, side, standing, inlaid, and wainscot, and slipped under the higher bedsteads during the daytime, were trundle or "truckle" beds in which the children slept at night. Lionel Chute, the schoolmaster, had an "old darnkell coverlet" on his bed while some of his neighbors possessed branched and embroidered coverlets and several had coverlets made of tapestry.
Among the better families the parlor and chamber windows had curtains hung from rods or cords. In the parlor stood chests in which were stored the family clothing and bedding, for closets did not exist in the seventeenth century house. There were great chests and small chests, long boarded and great boarded chests, chests with a drawer, carved chests, wainscot chests, trunks, and boxes. A few stools and chairs, a looking-glass, a small table, and perhaps a cupboard completed the furnishings of the well-supplied parlor. In Capt. George Corwin's best room there were chairs with leather bottoms and straw bottoms, a clock valued at £2, a screen having five leaves, a napkin press, and a "Scriture or Spice box." White calico curtains hung at his chamber windows and the maid had a "Calico Cuberd cloth" in her room. Parlor walls were whitewashed and bare of ornament. The first families owned a portrait or two in oils and here and there a map in unglazed frame decorated a wall. The Puritan character did not warm to the fine arts and austere living was the aim if not always the achievement of the time.
The chambers in the second story must have been curiously furnished rooms, containing a huddle of stores of all descriptions. Henry Short, the town clerk of Newbury, died in 1673 leaving a goodly estate valued at nearly £2,000.[27] He owned a negro slave and his house was large and well furnished. There was an old parlor and a new parlor containing beds, chests, chairs, trunks, and boxes. In the chamber over the new parlor there was a good feather-bed and bed clothing but no bedstead. Wool and yarn were stored in this room together with boxes, tubs, some feathers, and miscellaneous "lumber"--the phrase of the period for odds and ends. The chamber over the kitchen, a comfortable room of course, in winter, had its bed and bedding, also "5 hogsheds, 6 barrels, 5 Iron hoopes, a pair of stockcards, meale trough & other lumber, a parcell of old Iron, a pike, a bed cord & other cordage." Small wonder in such a clutter that the rooms frequently had other tenantry than the human occupants.