The Ephraim Hawley House is a privately owned Colonial American wooden post-and-beam timber-frame saltbox house situated on the Farm Highway, Route 108, on the south side of Mischa Hill, in Nichols, a village located within Trumbull, Connecticut, in the New England region of the U.S. It was expanded to its present shape by three additions. The house has been located in four different named townships, but has never been moved; Stratford (1670–1725), Unity (1725–1744), North Stratford (1744–1797) and Trumbull (1797–present).
Research
The Hawley Homestead was dated to 1690 during the Works Progress Administration Federal Writers' Project conducted during the Great Depression. Joan Oppenheim created a research report on the house while studying at the Yale School of Fine Arts in the early 20th century. She concluded after examining the structure and researching land records, probate records and the Hawley record, that the house was built between 1683 and 1690 by farmer and slave owner Ephraim Hawley who had married Sarah Welles, granddaughter of Connecticut Colony Governor Thomas Welles in 1683. The date of construction was not only based upon architectural details of the house, but also upon comparisons with other homes of the period, facts given to her by the Curtiss family, who owned the house at the time, and information from the Hawley Record, published in 1890, which stated that Ephraim resided in Trumbull. Oppenheim also stated the dating of the house compared with that of S.S. on file at the School of Fine Arts at Yale. The Trumbull Historical Society dated the house to between 1683 and 1690 in 1964 when they organized. The house was dated to 1671–1683 in the 2002 Historic and Architectural Resource Survey produced for the Connecticut Historical Commission by Geoffrey Rossano, PhD. The 2010 Historic and Architectural Survey of the Town of Trumbull, Connecticut produced by Heather C. Jones and Bruce G. Harvey PhD for the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism dates the house to 1670–1683.
Structure
Began as a Cape Cod cottage
The house was built as a -story Cape Cod cottage thirty-six feet wide by twenty-six feet deep with an eight-foot-wide central stone chimney with three fireplaces. There were three rooms on the first floor; a parlor, dining room and kitchen. The second floor was an undivided loft.
Oak frame and siding
The white oak post-and-beam frame has eight by ten inch girts, eight by eight inch plates and eight by ten inch splayed posts. The common rafters are eight by eight inches and taper to six by six inches at the ridge and have six by six inch chamfered collar beams.
The floor joist are six by six inches and are twenty inches apart. The six inch by ten inch summer beams, or tie beams are parallel to the façade, dovetailed into the girts and concealed within the plaster ceiling.
The roof sheathing and flooring is vertically quarter sawn one-inch-thick oak boards with random widths between twelve and thirty inches. The flooring is laid directly over one-inch-thick oak boards that were not suitable to be used as flooring. The mortise-and-tenon joints are held by wooden pins, and the flooring is nailed with large hand-wrought iron nails (see image).
The four- to six-foot-length hand-riven oak clapboard siding is nailed directly to the oak studs with large flat rose-headed nails which was the typical material and application for the earliest New England homes (see images).
Stone chimney
The first floor of the house is at ground level. There is a partial dirt cellar located on the south side of the house. The eight-foot-wide stone fireplace has three flues with clay mortar. The kitchen hearth is nine feet six inches wide by five feet seven inches deep. There is a one-foot crawl space around the chimney foundation below the first floor and a fieldstone foundation.
A forty inch deep brick beehive oven is built into the right rear wall of the kitchen fireplace and its opening has a wrought iron lintel. The brick are seven and one-half inches long by three and one-half inches wide by two inches thick. In October 1685, because a variety of sizes of brick were being used, the Colony of Connecticut ordered that all future brick be nine inches long by four and one-half inches wide by two and one-half inches thick.