HOUSE AND GARDEN 
June, igio 
217 
Three more views of “The House with the Well Sweep”—the path to the barn showing the picturesque service end,the house from the garden 
with the stone wall at the right, and the old front entrance 
all accrue to the landlord’s benefit at the 
end of the lease. As a purchase these 
houses are good investments, too; I have 
been offered considerably more than I 
paid for my house, and a neighbor has 
been offered double what he paid for 
both house and improvements. 
There are many neglected farmhouses 
in the lanes and highways of this hilly 
rock - bespattered Connecticut country. 
They are elsewhere too; west of New 
York, along the Hackensack Valley, or 
scattered throughout Long Island, are 
the low-eaved Dutch houses which have 
been the inspiration for much of the new 
country house work as described in the 
recent February issue; Boston has her 
prim clapboarded houses, as through 
Lexington or Salem; Philadelphia her 
stone farmhouses and their great barns 
with sturdy whitewashed pillars; the 
cities of Ohio, Tennessee or Kentucky, 
each has its square farmsteads—these 
Connecticut houses are only examples of 
what may be found around any large 
Eastern city. They are alike in their quiet and unobtrusive 
dignity; one does not tire of them as he does of their more 
ostentatious neighbors. 
Most of them stand behind old elm trees, close to the road¬ 
side, with a straight path to the road in front; the rear is given 
over to tangled briars and ash-heaps. It is strange how the past 
generation seems to have found its 
amusement in watching passing neigh¬ 
bors from the “piazza" it generally 
strung along the house-front, careless of 
the old gabled entrance porch or “por¬ 
tico,” destroyed to make room for it. 
What the last owners did we must undo; 
the part they neglected we must develop 
into the living portion of the house. 
Happily the days of “front” and “back" 
are over, and now there is a return to 
the wiser English tradition of entrance 
front and garden front; the garden is 
no longer between the house and the 
road, but behind or at the end, screened 
in some way from the automobile dust 
and curious gaze of passers-by. The 
kitchen is eagerly seized for one of the 
living-rooms (it was really a living-room 
in the old democratic days), and a new 
scientifically planned kitchen is built at 
the end perhaps, out of the way. 
The House with the Well Sweep is 
of a type built shortly after the war of 
independence, steep-gabled with delicate 
cornices unaffected by the later Greek revival. It interests me 
particularly, because it is most like my own house, but it retains 
the original small entrance porch while mine has gone to make 
way for the almost inevitable “piazza.” The columns, however, 
have been replaced by square posts (notice the columns of the 
Round Hilf House; these are of the same original type). The 
The rear of the house pictured below com¬ 
mands a magnificent view over a large 
orchard sloping down to the Mianus river 
One of the more pretentious types showing the effect of the Greek 
Revival and corresponding to a southern “mansion” 
The same house from the garden which is hidden from the road by 
the white fence. Photographed too early to be at its best. 
