If the kitchen was sometimes used as a sleeping room, it was almost universally used as a living room. It was the vital point of the household whence radiated all domestic energies. It was spacious and was made as bright and cheerful as it could possibly be. Around the great open fireplace, where the cooking was done, centred all in-door activities from carding, spinning and weaving to corn husking. Here the family circle, eldest in places of greatest comfort, children and servants about the outer edge, gathered in the firelight of the long winter evenings; here the neighbour or chance traveller was entertained, and here lads and lasses, in the full glare of family publicity, did much of their courting, sometimes whispering their sweet nothings, from opposite sides of
PAUL REVERE HOUSE, STREET FRONT, AFTER RESTORATION.
PAUL REVERE HOUSE. GREAT ROOM, GROUND FLOOR.
The old wall paper is not coeval with the house.]
the fireplace, through a “courting-stick,” a wooden tube six or eight feet long with mouth and ear pieces at each end.
In houses sufficiently spacious to admit of a living room or a “keeping-room” separate from the kitchen--such a room was analogous to the old English “hall”--the kitchen was still a cheerful room of great importance and the scene of many domestic fireside industries. It was a common thing to make lean-to additions to the original structure and the kitchen was often put in such an addition or in an ell extension. It was only the houses of the affluent, like that of Governour Theophilus Eaton at New Haven, built about 1640, that could boast what we should nowadays consider a very moderate number of rooms on the ground floor. Besides the great hall or living room in Governour Eaton’s house, there seem to have been a large kitchen and a pantry or buttery on one side, and on the other a parlour and a counting-house or library. Of the appointments of these rooms we may gain some idea from the inventory of Governour Eaton’s effects at the time of his death in 1657. In the hall or living room there were “a drawing Table and a round table; a cubberd & 2 long formes; a cubberd cloth & cushions; 4 setwork cushions, 6 greene cushions; a greate chaire with needleworke; 2 high chaires set work; 4 high stooles set worke; 4 low chaires set worke; 2 low stooles set work; 2 Turkey Carpette; 6 high joyne stooles; a pewter cistern & candlestick; a pr of small andirons; a pr of doggs; a pr of tongues fire pan & bellowes.” The other rooms were furnished in a comparable manner. Living rooms in less pretentious houses had similar equipment though, it is scarcely necessary to add, they were not usually so complete nor so elegant.