The brick-floored milkhouse at these early plantations was a separate building. Besides the milk pails, bowls, skimmers and churn, this house was a storage place for pewter that needed repairing, powdering tubs for salting meat, rum casks, spinning-wheels, chamber pots, fish kettles, stillyards, hides, tanned leather and so on.
Brooms were made at home, and turkey wings were saved for brushing the hearth.
Perhaps another duty of Ursula and her indentured maids was the picking of the tame geese. Their feathers were more valuable to the colonists than their meat. Goose feathers were prized for beds and pillows, which were handed down as heirlooms. The feathers were stripped from the live geese three or four times a year, but the quills, which were used for pens, were never pulled but once. Ursula probably dreaded goose-picking because it was a hard and cruel work. Feathers from wildfowl were also carefully saved for beds and pillows.
Probably the last chore on a winter's night was the warming of the beds. The brass or copper warming pan with its long handle hung by the fireplace where it reflected the firelight. At bedtime, which was early, the pan was filled with hot coals and thrust within the beds and moved rapidly back and forth so as to warm the bed but not burn the linen. Sometimes a large chafing-dish was used in the bed-chambers for "knocking the chill off" the ice-cold room.
And so at last, after the last chore had been attended to, Ursula could crawl between the warm sheets, pull up her quilt, or leather coverlet, and fall into a well-earned sleep.
The surroundings of a seventeenth century planter's house, such as Coan Hall, were simple, lacking in ornament of any kind.
Near the back door was a garden in which vegetables and a few simple flowers grew side by side. Real flower gardens were not developed until the next century.
Some flax and hemp were probably included in the garden at Coan. And herbs, such as thyme, rosemary and marjoram were considered almost a necessity at that time.
There was usually an orchard, containing a few apple, pear, cherry and peach trees.
There may have been a dovecote at Coan Hall. There must certainly have been a tall pole in the yard with a bee-martin's house on top, for these birds notified the settler and his household of the approach of hawks and other enemies of the poultry. They were the watch-dogs of the yard. There may have been a few birdhouses made Indian fashion of gourds.