The Salt-Box House: 18th Century Life in a New England Hill Town by Jane de Forest Shelton (Rvive Books, $16.95 paperback, 9780980190953/0980190959, September 2008)
This utterly charming book is the story of a salt-box house built in 1758, from its construction through its early 19th century history. Jane de Forest Shelton, a historian and writer for Harper's Monthly, published The Salt-Box House in 1900, basing her account on family papers and stories. Shelton grew up in the 1850s and knew children of witnesses to the American Revolution, not to mention slaves. Her account of domestic economies, slave labor, travel, family, food and church customs is a fascinating history of a small New England town. She sets the stage for the house and its inhabitants:
"The old house looks as if it had stood in the path of a tornado. But is has only yielded to the pressure of the hand of Time weighted with the vagaries of New England's climate. Even the pyramids of Egypt could not long have held their majesty if they had been set on Connecticut's hills with her extremes of heat and cold to try their temper; and the old house, though firm in its foundation and staunch in its uprearing, after bearing itself bravely for a hundred and thirty years, fell, as a man falls by the wayside--when the knees give way and the head drops forward--all of a heap!
"The house seemed to lose heart when Miss Mary died. She was the last of her line, and her next of kin, being well placed elsewhere, cared not for removal. After a brief period of desolation the alien came to work the land on shares. But, as the strange burr dropped from his tongue, and he set up his cheap modern furniture, the old walls stood aloof and the ceilings withheld their benediction. At the end of the season he complained that the stairs were awry, the cupboard shelves aslant . . . when all these incongruities, animate and inanimate, were safely outside the great door, the latch gave a happy click as it fell into place, leaving the house alone with its secrets and its mysteries."--Marilyn Dahl