The Lovering Farmhouse

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

A house built around 1755 in Kensington, New Hampshire, and measured two centuries later by draftsmen who came with rulers instead of cameras. The Historic American Buildings Survey went out across the country during the Depression and after it, recording old American buildings before they disappeared. Most of the records they left behind are photographs. The Lovering Farmhouse file is not. It is seven sheets of ink drawings — plan, elevations, sections, the framing laid open, the mouldings drawn at full size — and no photograph at all. So what survives of this house in the national record is a house explained rather than a house seen. You can read the width of the floorboards off the page. You can count the joists. You can see the great chimney sitting in the middle of the plan the way New Englanders built them, so that every room could borrow its heat, and you can see the shape of a life organized around that one warm stone core: kitchen behind it, parlor in front, a steep stair wound around it going up. Nothing in the drawings tells you who was cold in that house, or which of them sat closest to the fire, or what the winter of 1780 sounded like from the room over the kitchen. The survey does not record that. It was never meant to. A house is a machine for holding a family, and this one held somebody's for a very long time. Two hundred years of ordinary mornings happened inside these lines. If you know Kensington — if your people farmed Rockingham County, if you have a photograph of this house or one like it, if there is a story about a New Hampshire farmhouse that has been handed down in your family — this page is unfinished on purpose. Add what you know. Drawings: Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS NH-46 (call number HABS NH,8-KENSI,1-), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain.