20 
House & Garde 
DOORS and SHUTTERS of the COLONIAL PERIOD 
The Structure, Measurements and Panel Dispositio7i 
Which Make for Colonial Perfection 
H. D. EBERLEIN 
A ^IAHOGANIZED door, with 
a full-length, bevelled plate 
glass panel and a plated-silver knob, 
set within a fine old Georgian door¬ 
way is a brutal shock and a glaring 
anomaly. It jars one’s sense of the 
eternal fitness of things. It is a 
clumsy misfit and nothing can ever 
reconcile such a door with its 
setting. 
A little more than a year ago the 
writer was making a special study 
of the fine 17 th and 18th Century 
houses in a part of the country 
where dwellings of that sort abound. 
Time and again he was confronted 
by just such offensive anachronisms, 
mahogany and plate glass dead flies 
in pots of otherwise purest architec¬ 
tural ointment. It set him to won¬ 
dering whether all the people of that 
neighborhood had gone architec¬ 
turally blind since they had so ut¬ 
terly failed to appreciate their sur¬ 
rounding architectural glory and 
could deface it with such monstrous 
improprieties. And the same inex¬ 
cusable phenomenon may be found 
to a greater or less extent in plenty 
of other places, too. 
The points to note and compare 
in examining the door and shutters 
of the Colonial period are: 
Structure and type. 
Measurements of stiles and rails. 
Arrangement, size and number of 
panels. 
Measurements and profiles of the 
moldings enclosing the panels. 
Character of the hardware. 
Doors and shutters are of two 
sorts of construction, battened and 
paneled. The former are neces¬ 
sarily more massive than the latter 
but possess the merit of direct and 
vigorous simplicity. They consist 
of two layers of boards, usually 
grooved and often beaded on one 
edge, which are laid at angles each 
to the other. The boards of one side, 
usually the outer, are set vertically; 
the boards of the other or inner side 
may be set either horizontally (at 
right angles to the outer layer) or 
diagonally; sometimes, if there be 
two doors, herring-bone or chevron- 
The affinity between the door frame and the 
door itself can be seen in this example oj late 
l&th Century work found in New Hampshire 
□ □ 
Periods are based 07i panel arrangement. The 
eight panel design on the extreme left is mid- 
\Uh Century type from Barnstable, Mass. 
On the right, the two panel door is late nth 
Century and comes from South Yarinouth, 
Mass.; the next is late \Uh Century, and the 
third, with small top panels, early \Uh Century 
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Among the unusual types found in Bermuda is this folding door 
with an all-over latticed light. Plaster columns at either end 
Early nth Ccjitury doors are to be found at Graeme Park, Hors¬ 
ham, Pa. This Colonial woodwork is an especially fine example 
