The Sherman Parsonage "The House with Sixty Closets"

THE ROGER SHERMAN PARSONAGE

Fairfield, Connecticut
by
S.C. Whitaker

December, 1961

The Judge Roger Minot Sherman House, commonly known today as the Sherman Parsonage, is a large, quiet yet imposing house situated at 500 Old Post Road in Fairfield, Connecticut. Judge Sherman, nephew of Roger Sherman, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; graduate of Yale College; and described as an orator on par with Daniel Webster[1] was in his time “undoubtedly the most eminent and conspicuous citizen of the town.”[2] A modest and reserved man who preferred the quiet of his study and the society of his cultivated friends to the burdens of public office, he nevertheless served the state in several capacities for many years, first as a member of the State Assembly and Senate and later as an Associate Justice of the State Supreme Court. He might have been a U.S. Senator but for his participation in the Hartford Convention of 1814.[3]

Born in 1775, he entered Yale at the age of fifteen, and in 1796 he married into another prominent Connecticut family when he took Elizabeth Gould as his wife. After living in New Haven for several years, the Shermans moved to Fairfield in 1807 and one year later acquired the main block of the property upon which the house stands from Abraham D. Baldwin along with several other small parcels to make an area of about nine acres.

The earliest mention of the property itself is 1653 when a Robert Hawkins described the boundaries. Henry Lyon became the first owner of the property and in 1670 sold it to a Thomas Wilson. After passing into several other hands, the land was sold to Mr. Baldwin. There is no mention of the building or buildings that existed on the property prior to the present one.[4]

The house, which was begun in 1814 and completed in 1816,[5] stands about fifteen feet from the street, and the plot slopes down from the road so that the house has an exposed basement about ten feet high at the rear. Built at a cost of $15,000, it was the largest and most impressive house in Fairfield at the time.[6] There is no record of the architect’s or builder’s names, and it appears as if Mrs. Sherman did most of the floor plans leaving only the final design and details to the architect.[7]

The plan of the original block is the traditional central hall type with two rooms on either side and has outside dimensions of 45 feet by 34 feet. It is built in the post colonial or Federal style, and the outside is very simple and plain (photos # 1, 2, 6). Plain flat boards frame each side. The pitched roof is low and has a balustrade on the front of the roof at the eaves, and the white of its shingled walls contrasts with the dark green of the wooden shutters. Instead of the present porch extending across most of the front, it had a colonial porch about six feet square.[8]

The house did not retain its original form long. Additions were begun almost immediately. Tradition says that when the velvet Wilton rugs for the two front parlors arrived from England, it was found that they were about seven feet too long. But instead of cutting the rugs off, Mrs. Sherman insisted that small wings be added to the two rooms to accommodate them.[9]

A few years later, Mrs. Sherman became a semi-invalid (probably about 1825).[10] This required that she have a first floor bedroom, and so the dining room (where the first floor bedroom is now) was moved into the room where the kitchen was originally, and an annex was built at the rear to accommodate the kitchen, a back porch and a dressing room for Mrs. Sherman’s bedroom along with a small chimney in the Northwest corner of the kitchen.

At the same time the two-story library wing with its separate porch and entrance was added, and the passageway from the front hall to the library was made by moving the bedroom wall back a few feet, and a new chimney was built to accommodate both Mrs. Sherman’s bedroom and the library. On the first floor, the library wing was really two rooms consisting of a large study with a small library to the rear. Bookshelves lined all available wall space in these two rooms and the woodwork of the library was stained red.[11] Originally the only entrance to the library was from the study, but a small stairway led from the library to another library on the second floor (the present Northeast rear bedroom), which had no other means of access.[12] The Ionic column was installed then also. Upstairs, the north wing included the above- mentioned library along with another bedroom and several huge closets.

The final addition made by the Shermans was the hall off the dining room and kitchen, made to add to the kitchen conveniences sometime before the Judge died. This consisted of several rooms and halls and had its own entrance too (probably for tradesmen) as well as a small outside porch and stair that descends to the backyard.[13]

The Judge died in 1844, and Mrs. Sherman followed him four years later. In his will the Judge, who was a lay theologian of some note, bequeathed the house, its furnishings, and its land to the First Congregational Church of Fairfield to be used as a parsonage after Mrs. Sherman died.[14] From 1848 until 1950, when the church acquired a new parsonage, a series of distinguished ministers occupied the house, including Dr. Frank S. Child, who lived in the house from 1838 to 1915.

A man with a strong feeling for American History, he was one of the founders of the Fairfield Historical Society and wrote several books and pamphlets about the house including a children’s Christmas story called The House with Sixty Closets and another book called A Country Parish. Though his writings are more concerned with the people who have lived in the house than the architectural features and are vary vague concerning dates and descriptions, they do help give a general picture of much of the house’s history. (There were no documents of Judge Sherman’s that this author could find that concern the house other than an inventory or deed of land transfer when the church acquired the land that is now in the Probate or Land Records of the Town of Fairfield.) The only other real sources of information are the brief citation in Old Houses of Connecticut and a letter written by Caroline Rankin, a daughter of Dr. E. E. Rankin, a minister who occupied the house from 1866 to 1880, describing the house as it stood in 1866. This letter is in the files of the Fairfield Historical Society. A detailed drawing of the house plans done in 1938 by the H.A.B.S. is in the files of the Yale University Art Library.

Few changes have been made to the house since Judge Sherman died. The present front porch replaced the original porch in 1856,[15] and the front hall was probably enlarged to extend the whole width of the house at about this time. By any means the hall had been enlarged before 1866, for the letter by Caroline Rankin describes the hall as extending the width of the house. By 1866 also, a rather wide stairway had been built to lead from a carriage drive to the back porch, and a photograph of 1895 shows the porch as it was then.[16] The stairway has subsequently been removed.

The last major change was made in 1905 when the ladies of the parish raised $7,000 to refurbish the house. Hardwood floors were laid in the first floor to replace the old vari-width pine boards. Plumbing along with various other modern conveniences was installed and several of the huge closets were made into rooms, and the upstairs hall running from the back hall to the old nursery was narrowed to make a bathroom. The exterior was changed very little. The shingling of the roof was replaced by tin sheathing, and the front veranda was widened and given Doric columns to support it. A balustrade was placed over the porch, and the broken lines of the numerous wings at the rear were straightened into an unbroken roofline stretching about seventy feet.[17]

DESCRIPTION AND CONSTRUCTION.

The front facade (photo #1) of the original block has the usual five bays of the Federal style. The front entrance is in the center of the block and has an elliptical fan light and side lights after the McIntyre style. The whole is framed and supported by thin, shallow pilasters below a very thin broken entablature. The front windows, as are most of the windows, are very large (3’4” x 5’10”) and simply framed without cornices. They are six over six and have very large panes separate by very thin muntins.

The front facade of the North addition with its Ionic column (photo #2) that seems somewhat incongruous in relation to the rest of the house has its own entrance. The door framing follows the same general design as that of the main entrance, but the pilasters are fluted. The windows of the door and its transom are leaded in a diamond design, and the other windows are narrower than the main front windows though the pane size and height are the same.

With the many additions to the house it is hard to say how the sides of the house were originally, although from the untouched part of the second story of the South side (photo #3) and the symmetrical layout of the front, it may be inferred that the sides were likewise originally symmetrical with each side having four windows. The gable ends (photo #4) have medallioned cornices carried across ends and medallions under the eaves. (When the North addition was made, the South gable was copied with the exception that the framing of the vertical elliptical windows was made a little more ornate.)

The rear of the house has been changed so much that it is impossible to determine how it looked originally. It is now very plain and rather austere, and the long roof line of the back addition, along with the exposed basement, heightens the impression of great size. The roof overhangs of the additions have a much greater projections than those of the rest of the house, and those windows without shutters are much later twentieth century additions (photo #5).

The final note of interest about the exterior does not really concern the house at all. Farther to the South about fifty feet from the house stands a little outbuilding (photo #6). Though not much could be gleaned from the available facts concerning the house about the building, it appears that it was built at about the time that the original block of the main house was constructed, for it served the Judge as his law office before the growth of his library forced him to build the North annex. As seen in the photo, it takes a simple pitched roof building and clothes it with classical ornament. Like the main building it is of timber frame construction and has a wooden exterior. On the front and back the boards are mounted flush to try to give the illusion of stone, while the sides are clapboarded. It is an attempt to symbolically recreate a Doric temple. It takes the general form of a temple but does not try to copy one exactly, for instead of columns there are rectangular pilasters. The pilasters “support” an entablature, but there are no triglyphs or metopes. And the pediment has an ornament that suggests a half elliptical window with fan-shaped reeding that is in the Federal style.

The simplicity of the exterior is generally carried over to the interior, and the hallway is the most ornately decorated room in the house. Almost every room on the first floor may be reached directly from the front hall. The staircase dominates the hall. It is ovaloid in the plan and turns out at the bottom. The balusters are two to a tread and are very simple and well-proportioned, but they may not be original (photo #7). The newel post certainly is not original. Up the wall runs a brown velvet rope that may be original. The stringer is beaded and the tread ends are moulded. Originally a series of closets were beneath the stairway.

It is in the hall that the most elaborate mouldings of the house are found, but even here they are reserved and conservative. The interior of the front entrance is supported by pilasters which run up to a broken entablature. Note the simplicity and stylization of the pilasters (photos #8 & 9). The only real attempt at ornamentation is in the spiral design of the beading of the pilasters except in the pilasters of the passageway leading from the front hall to the library (photo #9) where they are fluted. The only other moulding of any interest is the flat, thin cornice around the two front parlors at the ceiling.

The two front parlors are very large and almost identical except that the North window of the North parlor is very high, stretching from the floor to almost ceiling height. There were originally two windows at this end,[18] one of which lead to a closet that then opened into the vestibule of the library and is now a door. In both rooms there are fine identical fireplaces of black Italian marble[19] veined in yellow (photo #10). The design here too is very simple being only a post and lintel construction. The baseboard around each room (as in all the rooms) is rather high without ornamentation. The ceiling cornices are very flat though they are sharply in a graceful curve at the ceiling.

The dining room is reached from the South parlor through a short arched passageway containing a closet (photo #11). It too is a rather large, high ceilinged room and has no ornamentation. The fireplace here, however, is the most elaborate of the marble one (photo #12). It is very heavy, of black-veined marble, and was probably installed after the house was built since the dining room was first the kitchen. The room has two closets, one of which contains the dinner plates and has a door with a leaded window (photo #11). From this room leads doors to the modern kitchen and pantry and to the rooms of the well which are unfinished. There is an enclosed stairway that gives access to the basement and serves as a back stair to the second floor.

The first floor bedroom behind the North parlor, as noted before, has been completely changed. There is a vary simple wood mantel (photo #13) and the chief point of interest is the large closet reaching from the floor to ceiling where Mrs. Sherman kept her hats. The library has likewise been completely changed, and the two rooms, study and library, are now one room.

The upstairs is very plain. The original variwidth pine floorboards are still in place. The framing of the doors and windows is very plain and the doors themselves are of the usual design. The chief architectural features of the second floor are the wood mantels of the two front bedrooms (photo # 14). Though they cannot begin to compare with the elaborate mantels of Robert Adam, Charles Bulfinch or Samuel McIntyre, they do try to follow the pattern of McIntyre’s mantels of the Gore House in Waltham, Massachusetts, for example, or Bulfinch’s Pingree House in Salem. The mantels are supported by pilasters broken up about three-quarters of the way up by a horizontal band; they divide the architrave into thirds with the center panel the predominate one; and the mantel ledge itself has little vertical reading running around it and is broken where the pilaster meets the ledge. But of course the richness and intricacy of McIntyre’s designs, as in all other cases in the house where the McIntyre inspiration is present, is missing. Only the general outlines, which a much less talented local carpenter could execute could followed.

The rest of the upstairs is very unornamented and utilitarian. The small Southwest bedroom has a small fireplace (photo #13) with the same design as that of the downstairs bedroom and library. On the interior wall of this room in the back hall is the back stairway, which originated from the dining room and continues up to the attic. The nursery at the other end of the building also has a fireplace of the same design and leads into a small low-ceilinged bedroom over the library and into another bedroom, which was once the upstairs library, at the back of the house. The bathroom in the center of the hall was once a servant’s room. The only other thing of interest on the second floor is the profusion of closets leading from the masters bedroom over the North parlor. These closets once had very wide shelves, and the children of Dr. Rankin used to pretend that these were ships berths.[20]

As may have been noticed before, this house has an enormous number of closets. In fact, at one time the house had a total of some sixty of them; these were the inspiration for Dr. Child’s book The House with Sixty Closets. Through the years many have disappeared and many of the larger ones made into rooms, but about forty closets still remain. The reason for such an enormous number of closets seems to lie in the fact that the Judge and Mrs. Sherman were very charitable and needed the large number of closets to hold all of the articles they eventually gave away. The story goes that the house was even designed around the closets, and that even though Mrs. Sherman was an invalid, she knew by heart, without an inventory of any kind, just what each closet contained.[21]

The framing contains nothing unusual and is timber frame construction throughout. In the four corners of the original block the corner posts are exposed and cased. In the basement the hand-hewn framing timbers may be easily seen with the girts mortise-and-tenoned into four summer beams. The foundation is of rough field stone held together with lime mortar and has cut blocks above the surface of the ground. The chimneys are of red brick with fieldstone foundations and are solid and well constructed. In the basement of the South stack there are the remains of a cooking fireplace with a baking oven. In the same stack in the attic there was originally a small smoking chamber that existed until the twentieth century.[22] The roof framing uses the “rafter roof” construction method. The vertical common rafters carry the horizontal roof boards, and two sets of purlins run under the common rafters to be framed into the principal rafters. There is no ridgepole.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The house as a whole must be considered typical of its period and place, for the Puritan influences was still very strong in New England when this house was built and the English traditions lingered on. It is very poor in decoration, and its modest architectural effects depend very much on mass and disposition of parts. But the Judge showed himself to be aware of the new force in American architecture which was beginning to sweep the country, as the design of his little law office shows. It is as if symbolic eclecticism is beginning to influence the thinking of the good Judge too. Indeed, the Ionic column of the entrance to his new office is another example of symbolic thinking, and one wonders that if the Judge had begun his house a few years later, when the Classic Revival had gathered full momentum, whether he would have built in the Federal style it all, for the Greek Revival style with all of its democratic identifications would have been ideal for a man with the profession and stature he had.

But the house was not built in that style, and Judge Sherman contented himself with only a few subtle hints of symbolism, so such speculation must not be carried too far. However, the house does in large measure reflect Judge Sherman’s thinking; a man with an austere, intellectual temperament and a deacon in the church, the Judge would not or perhaps could not in a town of Fairfield’s nature build a house after the fashion of the ornate mansions of Salem or Boston. Nor did he have craftsman of the caliber of McIntyre or Bulfinch nearby, though he was in a position to import them if he had so desired, for he certainly did not stint to import many of his interior furnishings from England.[23]

As mentioned earlier, the plan is very conservative, perhaps too much so at this time when plans are growing freer. The exterior attempts to be light though the close proximity of the windows on the front with their heavy shutters dampens the effect there. But elsewhere, the thin rows of shingling and the thin strips of plain wood which frame the corners of the house offset this. The outbuilding represents in a small way the attempt to imitate stone forms in wood. The projections of the main roofline are restrained as are all external projections, and the roof line is suppressed and has a balustrade adorning the front caves.

The windows are large with large panes and thin muntins. It has the typical fan lights and oval windows. The framing of the exterior and interior of the windows tries to be thin and delicate, and pilasters from all important doors. The ceilings are very high (a little over nine feet) to give the rooms an open and airy feeling. The interior wall surfaces are simple, though wainscoting and chair rails never seem to have been present. (Whether the walls were painted or had wallpaper originally is not known). The use of elliptical arches such as the one at the junction of the front hall and side passageway (photo #9) and over the passage from the South parlor to the dining room (photo #11) are also typical.

In such ways then does the house show its typicality. It shows itself to be a very conservative Federal style house where the attempts at refinement and delicacy are made with simple forms. It attempts clean, sharp, ordered forms. It is a very good example of provincial architecture, where the styles and patterns set by the leaders of fashion in the big cultural centers are imitated in a general, but often very good, way by a local carpenter. And as seen in the rather haphazard fashion in which the house grew, with additions being added here and there as necessity and desire dictated, comfort and utility were the main objectives and any other merits the house might attain become more or less secondary byproducts.
[1] Frank S. Child, Fairfield Ancient and Modern (limited printing by the Fairfield Historical Society 1909), p. 38.
[2] Ibid., p. 38.
[3] Ibid., p. 38.
[4] Frank S. Child, A Country Parish (Boston, 1911), p. 196.
[5] Old Houses of Connecticut, ed. Bertha Trowbridge (New Haven 1923), p. 153. (Various books of Dr. Child.)
[6] Ibid., p. 153.
[7] Frank S. Child, The House with Sixty Closets (Boston, 1899), pp. 19-21.
[8] Old Houses of Connecticut, op. cit., p. 153.
[9] Old Houses of Connecticut, op. cit., p. 154.
[10] Frank S. Child, A Country Parish, p. 56.
[11] A letter written by Caroline Rankin in 1904 describing the house as it stood in 1866.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Frank S. Child, A Country Parish, p. 54.
[14] Ibid., p. 72.
[15] Old Houses of Connecticut, p. 153
[16] Frank S. Child, An Old New England Town (New York, 1895), p. 205.
[17] Frank S. Child, A Country Parish, p. 211.
[18] Miss Rankin’s letter.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Miss Rankin’s letter.
[21] Frank S. Child, A Country Parish, p. 40.
[22] Miss Rankin’s letter.
[23] Old Houses of Connecticut, p. 152.