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The Saltbox

a New England Original

Salt was a valuable commodity in Colonial America. To prevent it from caking, colonists kept salt in a wooden box with a slanted, hinged lid and hung it by the fireplace.

The saltbox-style house represents an architectural form that originated in Colonial New England. It earned its name because of its resemblance to the saltboxes colonists hung by their fireplaces. This particular architectural style was born out of the need to expand a house to accommodate a growing family. Colonists found a simple way to expand a rectangular 1-1/2- or two-story house: build a single-story addition across the rear. The resulting extended rear slope of the gable roof is a defining feature of a saltbox.

Our nation’s second president, John Adams, was born and reared in a saltbox in Quincy. The house was built in 1650 and modified in 1720. Now part of Adams National Historical Park, the house is open to the public for tours. Local examples of early saltboxes include the Hoxie House (c. 1675) in Sandwich, the Jethro Coffin House (c. 1686) on Nantucket and the Josiah Dennis Manse (c. 1736) in Dennis. All are museums, and all are open to the public for tours.

In architectural terms, saltboxes are frame houses having two stories in front and one in back and a pitched roof with unequal sides—short and high in the front and long and low in the rear. The front of the house is flat, and the rear roofline is steeply sloped. The saltbox of the 17th century was built around a large central chimney with a massive fireplace used for heating and cooking. The exterior siding usually consisted of unpainted clapboard, while the roof consisted of hand-split wooden shingles. Saltboxes today are often painted.

Houses in 17th-century New England generally fall into three design categories, according to Hugh Morrison’s Early American Architecture: the one-room plan, the two-room plan and the added lean-to plan. The majority of New England’s early settlers were hard-working, thrifty, middle-class English people. Their houses in the colonies imitated the styles they had become familiar with in their English villages.

The cottages that the Pilgrims built in Plymouth reflect the one-room plan. Generally, the front door opened into a small vestibule, known then as a “porch,” with a steep staircase up against a large chimney. The main room was a combination living-dining-cooking room, called the “keeping room” or “hall.” The staircase led to one large sleeping room upstairs, which was either under sloping rafters or in a full-fledged second story. Examples of these one-room cottages can be seen today at Plimoth Plantation museum.

The two-room plan is simply the one-room plan with a parlor added on the other side of the chimney and front entry. Upstairs were two sleeping rooms. This house style is sometimes referred to as the “I” house.

The added lean-to plan resulted from an addition to the back of the house, with roof rafters “leaning” from one-story eaves at the back against the top of the wall of the main house. The lean-to seldom had the same roof pitch as the main house. The added space contained the kitchen and a bedroom.

Either added or original, lean-tos became common in New England. And because of the short roof pitch in front and long pitch sweeping close to the ground in back, these houses became known as saltboxes. They were favored in New England until about 1830, when Georgian and Greek Revival styles came into vogue. In the 1800s, the saltbox became popular in the South, where it is referred to as a “cat’s slide.”

The saltbox-style house enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the mid-20th century in New England and beyond, when homeowners sought to replicate Early American architecture. Today saltboxes can be found in such far-flung locations as California, Oregon and Texas.