The exterior walls of the first houses were made of heavy boards laid vertically on the framework, without studding. Before long, the wood was laid horizontally, each board overlapping the one below it. This clapboarding and siding was used without interruption through all the various changes in other details. Much later, the shingle was adopted for the sides of the house as well as for the roof. A larger shingle, however, was used on the walls, with a wide exposure of surface. These were made of pine or cypress.
Although the walls of most old houses follow a straight line from one story to the next, there was a type, copied by the colonists from the buildings of the mother country and used somewhat freely before the Georgian era, in which the second story extended beyond the first. This overhang was generally used only on the front and back and not on all four sides, as in the European counterparts. The girders and cross beams were framed into the second-story posts, which frequently ended in an ornamental knob or drop, as it was called. The gables, too, occasionally had a slight overhang. In altering a pre-Georgian house, it is therefore permissible to make use of this overhang feature, and it may solve some otherwise knotty problems of required extra space.
A house which shows unusually clever handling of these points is situated in the little village of Charles River, not so many miles outside of Boston. Within the last few years, this locality has been opened up, and many modern homes have been built and farmhouses remodeled. They are situated along charming woodland roads and seem to nestle in their picturesque surroundings. This particular one stands on the road from Boston to Dover, invitingly shaded by graceful elms that have watched unnumbered generations pass. It suggests to passers-by a typical, seventeenth century farmhouse, ingeniously remodeled, through the plans of the late Philip B. Howard and F. M. Wakefield, architects of Boston, into a twentieth-century summer home. This old farmhouse was built in 1647 and was of the rectangular type, built about a central chimney, with four rooms and a hall on the lower floor. When Mr. Frederick H. Curtis selected it for his home, it had already been materially altered from the original simple structure by various succeeding tenants. And many of these had not added to its charms. The exterior was most uninviting in a vicious shade of red paint with white trim. In front was a small lattice porch entirely out of keeping with the architecture of the house. But in spite of all these unattractive features, there was an insistent appeal about the old place that made it seem worth venturing to restore.