North Andover half-house meant to grow, but never did
A look at the framing of a colonial center entrance farm house often reveals that one side of the house was built before the other, that the original house looked like this house, a half-house.
A half-house was usually just the beginning. As the family grew, as fortunes improved, the matching side of the house was added. But some, like the William Giles House, above, never grew. You can see where the rest of the house would have been added, to the right, but it never was.
William Gile, a mason, had this house built about 1838, on Osgood Street in North Andover. The popular style at the time was Greek Revival, here seen in the doorway - in the design of the sidelights and in the pilasters with all their column parts: base, shaft, capital and entablature, and finally the cornice which becomes a roof over the front door. similar door ways can been seen at 179 Andover Street and 83 Academy Road. No one is certain if the carpenter of those houses, Thomas Russell, built this one too. Perhaps someone just copied.
The doorway is Greek Revival, but the house is built on Georgian lines, the accepted way to built since the early 1700's. The chimney is the only part of the traditional design which has been changed. It would ordinarily dominate the roof, rising above the ridge, serving a fireplace in each room. Here the chimney is small, a chimney for a stove, and it moved to the back of the house.
I haven't seen the framing here. Perhaps the central chimney was there originally. I suspect, however, that because William Giles was a mason he would have know about the latest heating systems. Inside his old-fashioned house he would have put the newest thing, an up-to-date cast iron stove.
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