The Central Chimney Braced Frame House – Part 1
Three late Eighteenth Century Central Chimney Houses:
the MacDonald House at Monticello in Lot 42,
the House at Rock Barra,
and the Ronald R. McDonald House in Lot 43
Two central chimney houses used to stand along the north shore of Lots 42 and 46 where Scottish Catholics settled at the end of the Eighteenth Century, east of the larger settlement at Tracadie founded in 1772. They were located at Monticello and Rock Barra before they rotted into the ground in the 1980s and’90s. This detail from Meacham’s Atlas of 1880 shows the locations of the two houses I want to discuss in the first part of this post. Monticello is a modern name for that area just inside the east border of Lot 42 on where a MacDonald family settled. On Meacham’s map of the Lot the owner at that time is listed as Joseph H McDonald. Information provided by the MacDonald family still resident on the property suggests that Joseph H was preceded by Angus Owen and Angus J McDonald. As yet, I do not know the name of the family that built the Rock Barra house.
Detail from Lot 42, p. 109, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the Province of Prince Edward Island, From Surveys made under the direction of C. R. Allen, C.E., Engraved by Worley & Bracher, 27 South Sixth Street, Philadelphia, Pa.; Printed by F. Bourquin, 31 South Sixth Street, Philadelphia, Pa., Published by J. H. Meacham & Co., 1880.
Detail of East Lot 42 in Meacham’s ATLAS
This great pile of red sandstone, looking like the base of an Egyptian obelisk, is the heart of the central chimney frame house. On February 16, 2007, it was all that was left of a tidy and comfortable house built at Monticello by the MacDonald immigrants around 1795. It was a state-of-the-art design – already very ancient – imported from Scotland and built with locally available materials. In its ruin is its majesty – a colossal monument to hope in a new land increased by the knowledge that, what else may hit them in this adventure, it would not be the cold.
It had survived for nearly 200 years by the time I came upon it by accident in August of 1981 as I explored that unfamiliar part of the Island. I was cordially received by a descendant of the original MacDonald settlers and given tea and scones. The family was sure of its origins but did not have any details of the family story to tell me except for the probable date of the house. When I explored the house, the chimney was completely enclosed by the structure, only the fireplaces being visible. The chimney top protruded above a roof that still kept out the rain. The chimney was an integral part of the massive mortice and tenon frame kept tight by dowels or tree nails drilled through the joins. This system of creating a rigid wooden frame that could last for centuries is found all over western Europe and has been used without interruption since Antiquity. The Barbarians who destroyed the Roman Empire and who became our ancestors continued to use the wood structures of their ancestors until after the Middle Ages when stone and brick construction started to take hold.
Williams, p. 31.
Over the centuries a basic frame, incorporating a central chimney with multiple fireplaces, evolved. The study of this subject is complicated and subject to the vagaries of different national practices. However, the frame house brought to the New World tended to follow the pattern seen in the drawing below. Every timber has a name and a function.
Williams, p. 30.
There were exceptions to this design where the chimney stack was built against the end wall with the stones either exposed to the elements, where that was not harmful, or enclosed within the structure of the house.
I should mention at this early point in my narrative that what the Americans call the Cape Cod House, a term also used in the Maritimes, is the basic central chimney structure with existing beams and rafters extended at the back in a one-storey addition that provided more rooms on the ground floor. The design crept into Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in post-Revolutionary days but did not seem to have penetrated to the Island. One or two examples that I have examined were not Cape Cod but frame houses with additions built onto the back, not bothering to preserve the original slope of the roof.
This was the MacDonald house when I first saw it in the summer of 1981. Although it had been unoccupied for a long time it had not been vandalised in a destructive way except for the removal of the mantelpieces, overmantel panelling, and the summer boards. Thus, the great chimney face was visible upon entering the parlour and kitchen and the sense of Georgian style had fled.
The house was central plan in that it consisted of three bays with a central door that opened immediately upon the tortuous staircase leading to the attic. Paired gable window indicated that at one time there had been two bedrooms on either side of the chimney but all evidence for these had been gutted and there was now only a rough open space with the chimney in the middle going up through the roof. Even upstairs its diameter was very large.
On that first visit, in desperation, I recorded the dimensions of the house using my spiral bound notepad as a tape measure. Those converted measurement in my notes from that day indicate that the house was very small, only 16 x 22 feet.
If you have done any reading on the subject of early braced frame houses, you will see at once that this is the typical plan for such a structure, with little variation found all over British North America. The entrance hall is claustrophobic, as the door, having room enough only to open inward, leaves you facing the tight winding staircase.
On the left is the parlour where extra time and money were spent to take an elegant room decorated with mouldings around the doors and windows, wainscoting along the walls, and a fireplace overmantel arrangement that was part of the Georgian tradition in building that was at its height. There is a small room at the back which could have had many purposes from bedroom, a room for guests, or the place where the old and decrepit came down to die. In Kings County it is still common in the country to hear people label such a room the “dead room” and even I, it was pointed out, have one off the dining room of my circa 1880-85 house.
The kitchen side is much more complicated, and like the parlour, lit by two windows. It has a door leading to a small porch that in some books is referred to as the coffin door. Aside from removing a window sash there was no way to take a coffin away for burial as there was simply so space in the entrance hall.
At the back of the kitchen there is a pantry where dry food was stored. In many houses of the time, even one as small as this, there was a second pantry for dishes and crock ware. This is a tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages (Aslet, Chapter 1). The central portion of the back of the house contains a large room that could have served many purposes from family bedroom, birth room or storage – or all three.
Orientation of the door.
Observing seemly formalities, the front door had been oriented towards a road which at that time was in the optimistic process of being built and which appears for the first time in Ashby’s 1799 map on which the name of Ile Saint Jean is changed to Prince Edward Island. This was an act of optimism toward the day when there really would be a road for wheeled traffic from Saint Peter’s to East Point. For most travel, a boat would be used, and the focus of comings and goings would be the shore. The house was for the most part approached from the Gulf.
Detail from 1798 – Prince Edward Island/ divided into/ Counties & Parishes, / with the Lots, / as Granted by Government, / Exhibiting all the/ New Settlements, / Roads, Mills/ &c &c., 18.3 x 35 cm. London, Publish’d as the Act directs March 1, 1798, by H. Ashby, King Street, Cheapside. [Also called the Stewart map after use in 1806], Robertson Library, UPEI.
Missionary Work among the Scottish Catholic Settlers
As an interesting aside providing an insight into transportation in those days, there survives – now in a glass case in the Basilica in Charlottetown – a curious combination of boat and sled built in the early 1800s by Bishop Angus Bernard MacEachern (1759 – 1835) who had arrived as a missionary priest in 1790. He would have served the spiritual needs of the Scottish Catholics who lived in those central chimney houses.
Scottish Catholics, plate after p. 56
To get around, and to transport all the precious and valuable things absolutely required to say Mass and administer the Sacraments, tradition has it that he built this strange vehicle, only 8 feet long, which could be used as a boat or hauled by a horse on land or ice on a set of iron-covered runners.
Robert Harris (1849-1919)? – Bishop Angus Bernard McEachern,
oil on canvas, lifesize, Saint Dunstan’s Basilica, Charlottetown.
One can’t help but speculate if this kind of useful contraption was not used by other people in those days. The bishop used it all his life and it was seen everywhere he went from one end of the Island to the other. Is it possible that this is not unique to the bishop, but perhaps there were others like it in one form or another?
This talk of arriving most probably from the side of the house facing the sea relates very powerfully to decorative corner boards found on the Monticello house. There were only two of them, on the north corners of the side facing the sea, and there is no doubt in my mind that they were there as a formal design statement to present a cultivated face – a memory of the sophistications of Scotland? – on the side of the house where nearly every visitor arrived.
As you can see this wide corner board was a compound pilaster consisting of a wide base on top of which was applied what was to represent a classical column whose intended style one could argue about. Scotland was in the midst of building in the Greek Style and was referred to as the Athens of the North. What classical order does this represent? Is it even meant to be classical?
The top of the capital is finished with a half round or torus moulding framed by two narrow fillets. This ran along the eaves as the crown moulding. It is only 1 3/4 inch square.
For some time I have wondered about that concave flaring out of the capital ornament at the top of the pilaster. The 1790s was the time of the spreading of the Greek Revival and everywhere columns were topped with a Doric capital like this one.
Here, as is proper, the echinus, or soup bowl at the top, flares out. At Monticello it is concave.
The mystery deepens when, forty years later at Howe Point, the Dingwells use the same basic motif in their much more elaborate capital – the echinus is still concave. What does it all mean? More research in Scottish sources is required.
My readers should have no doubts that these Scottish immigrants had a knowledge of what a respectable house should look like, even in the wilderness of the Island, and that they would, as far as memory served them, imitate similar design elements on houses they had left back home. In their tool chest would be a number of essential hand planes that could be used to create decorative mouldings. I will discuss this subject at greater length in a future post.
Let us return to our discussion of the central chimney. If we could see its base, five feet into the ground today, but when built, a great presence in the cellar, it would be even more massive and impressive. This photo, taken when the Dingwell (1838) house at Howe Point was demolished, shows what the base would have been like.
Photo courtesy Claude Arsenault
The sad disintegration of the MacDonald house has given us vital information about how a central chimney with back-to-back fireplaces was constructed. Three major elements were required to frame and give depth to the fireplace. Two solid upright posts, the height of the opening and also its depth, were capped by a massive lintel stone, rather in the manner of Stonehenge. The finely chiseled face of the fireplace opening visible in the room was covered with decorative woodpanelling. A suitable curved fireplace back was constructed of smaller stones to project the heat into the room and also that when the very intense heat generated by the burning wood caused any element to disintegrate, it was easy to replace it with another small block of stone cut to size. As is plainly visible in this photo, the chimney was then built on top of the fireplace of substantial but not finely squared stones that were kept in place by lavish use of the brick clay mixture they used as mortar.
Since a fireplace was needed for the kitchen, the same process was repeated but on a larger scale because the opening had to be much larger to accommodate the iron suspension system called cranes for swinging pots over the fire. At Monticello this complicated iron work had long ago been removed, but a piece of iron, lodged in the joint, was still visible.
The Fireplace Throat
If you have ever lived with a functional fireplace, and used it often, you will have observed that unless you set your fire kindling to blaze furiously so as to warm the chimney to create a draft, your room will have filled with smoke quite quickly. Imagine the difficulties that might manifest themselves if you have two or more fireplaces exhausting into the same chimney. You start a fire in your sitting room and upstairs, your bedroom fills with smoke. Over the centuries certain construction practices emerged that would ensure that there would be no backup into other spaces whose fireplaces used the same chimney. This diagram gives you an idea of the complexity of construction located in the throat of the chimney, where baffles of various heights and shapes would ensure that the smoke went where it was supposed to go – up the chimney!
Williams, p. 48.
The masons who constructed these early fireplaces in Island homes would have known all about controlling the direction of the smoke and ensuring a proper draft that would exhaust properly up the chimney. If there were problems, it was a simple, but informed, matter of adjusting the height of baffles or the angle of flow. They could experiment until the proper balance for all fireplaces was obtained.
Mortar
Thus far I have not said anything about the mortar used in this masonry. The Island is composed almost entirely of sandstone with pockets and runs of polished cobblestones left over from the rivers caused by the decaying glaciers 12,000 years ago. You can see these snake through the landscape, especially in the eastern part of the Island. There are no limestone deposits which is the vital element in making lime that causes mortar to set. I should qualify this by saying that at Miminigash Harbour, near the tideline, there was a most curious outcrop of limestone. When Father Peter McIntyre was building his great brick church at Tignish in the late 1850s, his workmen mined all that limestone and burnt it in kilns so that it provided all the lime needed to build the church. With coastal erosion this depleted deposit is now covered by Northumberland Strait.
The MacDonald chimney was put together with very liberal amounts of brick clay, since antiquity, a substitute for lime. Here the mason seems to have added a quite a bit of crushed mussel shells and also what appears to be straw. This mortar substitute can be clearly seen in this photo.
What did the finished fireplace look like? As you can see in this photo of the parlour chimney stripped of its decorative wood covering, the finished stone surface goes up to the ceiling where the chimney then begins its gradual taper until it reaches the roof. None of this stone, except the fire surround, would have been visible when the house was constructed. Following a tradition that goes back at least to the Fifteenth Century, all this stonework would have been covered over with two elements. At the bottom would be the mantelpiece topped by a mantel shelf. In some central chimney houses this mantel shelf was an extension of a reenforcing beam that was part of the house construction called the chimney girt. These great piles of stone, even though they were resting on a base that went five feet into the ground, were potentially unstable, especially if the quality of the mortar was poor or non-existent as in the Island houses built at this time. Stones could shift and leaks develop that could affect the draft or allow sparks to escape and set the house on fire. Water seeping in from a poor roof join could dissolve or soften the mud mortar. At the least suspicion of fire, or a shifted or fallen stone, the decorative panelling was so designed that with the removal of a few pegs the whole assembly came off providing access to the chimney.
Below is the fireplace for the kitchen. It is taller and wider than the one in the parlour because it not only provides heat but accommodates all the hardware used to swing pots over the fire to bring them to a boil, then to raise them or swing them out to achieve a simmer, and so on. Bread was also baked in the fireplace in a cast iron pot called a Dutch even.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_oven
Tightly sealed it could be used to bake bread, cook stews and roast meat. It was very versatile, and it too was used over the open fire of the fireplace. Imagine the skill a cook would have to develop to prepare in a predictable manner all the dishes put before a family.
Imagine also this fireplace with all its stonework covered by simple but elegant panelling with mouldings based on ancient classical models that had survived through the centuries.
This photograph off the internet shows a very basic arrangement of kitchen fireplace such as would have been used on the Island in pioneer days.
Pinterest.com
The floor of the upstairs in the MacDonald house was mostly removed so that it was possible to get this wonderful photograph of the throat of the chimney narrowing slightly as it went up through the roof. The heat provided by the perpetually hot stones of the chimney would have provided a comfortable temperature, even on the coldest winter nights, for those who slept upstairs. If it was very cold the people could, in the manner of piglets around their mother’s belly, wrap themselves around the warm stones and be very comfortable.
The round holes you see punched through the chimney breast all date from a later period when airtight stoves began gradually to replace fireplaces, whose throats were bricked up. The day of the fireplace was over.
The Chimney Top
As you have seen in the preceding photos, the entire central chimney was constructed of Island sandstone, some of it hard, some soft. It was crucial for two reasons to have special stones for the chimney top that protruded through the roof. First, it had to be good quality stone that would withstand years of foul weather with wild temperature extremes. Secondly, like the trim on the corners of your house, your chimney said something about your taste and your quality. It was not unusual, for both reasons, to go to great lengths to obtain blocks of Nova Scotia sandstone – Pictou was a handy source in those days – to have very weatherproof stone, and to tell your visiting neighbours that not only were your house corner boards elegant and tasteful, but you could afford the best Nova Scotia stone for your chimney top.
This plan of the upstairs clearly shows the space to which you had access to create private bedrooms with the necessary upstairs hall articulation to move about comfortably, and move beds and chests of drawers and chamber pots about.
There was not much room, and most significantly of all, there was no light in the hall. In future posts we will see how this was solved, and in the process, added elegance to necessity.
The Staircase
The central chimney house did not provide for a grand sweeping staircase often associated with old buildings. There was only enough space to squirm your way upstairs in a narrow passage that turned sharply at ninety degrees. And yet, this miserable passage was finished with fine planed boards and even the inside door trim had simple elegant moulding or trim. That was how they thought; that was what they did.
These two views show you how elegant the parlour could look with wainscoting and a shallow cupboard with a door in which to store precious things like the religious books and family heirlooms.
The kitchen had semi built-in cupboards of various kinds. Today these large pieces of furniture, ripped out of old houses and stripped to the bare pine – something that was NEVER intended – grace the finest homes in the country.
There is one more house – a neighbour and exact contemporary – that we must examine briefly because when I first saw it, the parlour fireplace mantel and panelling had not been ripped away by the vultures who supply antique dealers.
The House at Rock Barra
In the late Eighteenth Century Catholic Scottish settlers sailing along the north shore to their destination remarked that a great rock detached from the cliff (a stack) reminded them of Barra in the Outer Hebrides. Raeburn says (pp 105-106) “Tradition has that a first settler, McIsaac, exclaimed to other that “you might as well be on the rock of Barra” in reference to the barrenness of the land.” Two hundred years later, the Roca Barra landscape has not changed a great deal, except for the fields cleared by those early Scottish settlers. The road included on the 1799 Ashby map has been built but still runs through what is mostly wilderness.
Google Maps – Rock Barra area.
This is how the settlement of Rock Barra on the north shore of Lot 46 got its name, and it is here, not very far from the MacDonalds of Monticello, that they built a central chimney braced frame house, almost identical to that built by their neighbours.
The house would probably have been located on one of these properties in Lot 46 where the house was built on the shore side of the road. I have yet to identify that property.
Detail from Lot 46, p. 117, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the Province of Prince Edward Island, From Surveys made under the direction of C. R. Allen, C.E., Engraved by Worley &nd Bracher, 27 South Sixth Street, Philadelphia, Pa.; Printed by F. Bourquin, 31 South Sixth Street, Philadelphia, Pa., Published by J. H. Meacham & Co., 1880.
One suspects that in the manner of the times the local settlers chipped in and left their homes to go help erect the heavy frame, dig a cellar in which the great base of the chimney would sit, and then assemble the back-to-back fireplaces of the parlour and kitchen. These cellars were as important to the British colonists as they had been to the Acadians before them, for that is where they stored their root vegetables and grains during the winter.
When I visited this house forty years ago there were signs that it had been occupied perhaps into the 1960s, and so various details of construction had been obscured by the liberal application of that paper fibre board called tentest, until the 1970s liberally laced with asbestos. There were remains of modern partitions to make bedrooms in the cramped upstairs.
This is how the house looked front. Of course, its front door was oriented to the theoretical road that would one day host generous wheeled traffic.
(Please remember that all these photographs are scans of forty-year old colour slides and that detail may not be sharp or colour quite on.)
Like Monticello the house was three bays with a central doorway opening immediately onto the tight staircase winding to the loft. Some time after construction, probably in the 1880s, the 6 over 6 window sashes had been replaced by 2 over 2 sashes and the front door replaced by an Italianate model with double windows. On the east side of the building was a porch, much like Monticello but about four times larger. It had its own door and a window beside it. I do not know what such a larger porch would have been used for.
The back of the house has also three bays, carefully measured out to provide a sense of symmetry.
The same window treatment of 2 over 2 had been installed during the later renovations. Because the great central chimney was being dismantled the sashes of the central window were removed to allow the stones to be thrown out onto the ground.
When we look at a three-quarter view of this house, we get a feeling for what these kinds of pioneer houses were like. It would be a most important adjunct to the cultivated landscape to discover if any of the plants – flowers, herbs and shrubs – brought from Scotland had survived in spite of the encroaching wilderness.
These houses are very tidy, and so tight in their design that the message comes across that this is a structure not for gracious living, but for a determined concentration on survival with as much comfort as possible.
And there must have been considerable comfort when we look at the floor plan of the house. It is almost identical to the house at Monticello except for the large porch addition. Lacking full documentation of the exact plan of Rock Barra the Monticello plan was used as a working base to produce a credible plan of the house. Both houses had identical dimensions. (My 40-year-old records have not yet revealed the dimensions of these houses. They will be provided when I find them. ☹).
When I came upon this house the process of dismantling the great chimney to recycle the stone had already begin. The top of the stack projecting above the roof had been taken down to the level of the attic floor.
It is shocking to view the massive size of the chimney throat at that level and the massive timbers guarding it to keep it from movement. If you look closely is chimney throat opening is so massive that a broken kitchen chair is about to be swallowed. Two such chairs would fit in easily.
In this avalanche of dislodged stones that tumbled into the kitchen fireplace mouth you can see how rough stones were bonded in the chimney with brick clay mortar and little attention was paid to squaring.
The beautiful beaded smoothed boards that in both vertical and horizontal arrangements, provided a sturdy and handsome wall surface were covered with tentest. This diagram shows how, using moulding planes, the edges of the panelling and wall boards were shaped and fitted together.
Looking up in various parts of the house where the wall and ceiling cladding had been ripped away the complex arrangement of beams that supported the attic floor while serving as powerful binding elements to keep the structure of the house stable. All the rooms would have had beamed ceilings.
The rooms of this house were once embellished with door and window frames that ignored the more conventional and traditional flat moulding designs. This builder created a very handsome, and probably unique, door and window frame with a central element that points up in a diamond shape.
The frames are treated in the traditional classical manner, all of which is based on the Greek and Roman column, which has a base (here a slightly larger block), a shaft (here the mysterious diamond moulding on the board), and the crowning element a simple block. In the not-too-distant future this block would be ornamented with turned concentric circles and would be called a “rose”.
My final picture – and perhaps the most precous – is of a relatively intact mantelpiece, overmantel panel and summer board to close up the fireplace when it was not in use. There would have been a similar, but plainer, arrangement in the kitchen. It was the very vital focus of the room. It was the domestic altar where a mirror would eventually reflect back the face of the master and mistress, or where a print of a familiar Scottish scene would hang above the mantel, flanked by polished brass candlesticks. A rifle, just like in American cowboy log cabin movies, might also be supported by brackets, ready to advance on any hostile or dangerous intrusion.
Since about the Fifteenth Century this had been the soul of every house where the family gathered for warmth, entertainment, conversation, and prayer. It was the high altar of domesticity.
Shortly after I took this photo in the early 1980s the antique robber barons had been at work and all the fireplace elements had been ripped out and trucked away. Even the door and windows were stripped of their mouldings.
With progress, stability and some money from fishing and agriculture, these first substantial framed central chimney houses, with their ancient pedigree were abandoned. Sometimes they were incorporated into the new grand house as a kitchen wing, but often they became a shed, and in time rotted into the ground. Today there is nothing left but a few broken beams and scattered stones. In their day they were the epitome of wood and stone craft. May this essay, and the two that follow, help to immortalise their memory.
A Survivor
The Ronald R. McDonald house
at Monticello in Lot 43
Some central chimney houses still survive here and there but I have not been able to record them due to other commitments. In 2022 Stephen MacDonald brought this house to my attention as a still-standing, still-functioning central chimney house. He provided valuable photographs of the exterior and the gutted interior. These show plainly the structure of the chimney stack. Nathan Paton also provided photographic material and on April 24, 2022 (email communication) he graciously gave permission to publish this material in order to record this historic structure.
The house is typical central chimney plan as we encounter it in Eastern PEI. The interior, which is now gutted for renovations, was typical and similar in plan to the one seen in the houses described above. At a later date a porch was added, which is also typical of these central chimney houses as people settled and began to farm.
Here in Meacham’s ATLAS you can see where the house is located. It was on the south side of the Saint Peter’s to Souris road – so long awaited and vital to local communication – and the farm consisted of 50 acres in 1880.
Detail from Lot 43, p. 96, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the Province of Prince Edward Island, From Surveys made under the direction of C. R. Allen, C.E., Engraved by Worley & Bracher, 27 South Sixth Street, Philadelphia, Pa.; Printed by F. Bourquin, 31 South Sixth Street, Philadelphia, Pa., Published by J. H. Meacham & Co., 1880.
Because the interior has been cleared for renovations it is possible to walk around the chimney stack and see how three fireplaces – the kitchen, the sitting room and a bedroom – were all tidily incorporated in this tight mass of dressed sandstone. Modern mortar now covers the joins where originally there was a mixture of mud, seashell and straw.
The small bedroom only required a small fireplace and this was attached to the side of the two big back-to-back fireplaces. Note the enormous spaces between the stones above the beautiful big lintel stone. It looks like a later addition but it is original to the house, as can be seen in the above photo.
This fine photo shows how the throat of the chimney is located at the level of the ceiling and it tapers as it approaches the exit point at the crest of the roof.
Little by little, house by house, we are able to get a feel for the basic design of these extremely practical houses built by pioneers on an ancient model that would keep everybody warm in those violent winters and also keep the house and its contents dry during the year. The fire never went out in the kitchen.
Special Thanks
I am deeply grateful to Nathan Paton for allowing me to share these photographs of this house in this essay.
Stephen MacDonald, whose ancestral home this used to be, went and took photographs for this post that illustrate precisely those things I wished to discuss. Thank you both.
It is possible that Tyler Savoie now owns this house but confirmation and contact are still required.
Resources
____________ Memorial Volume 1772-1922, The Arrival of the First Scottish Catholic Emigrants of Prince Edward Island and After, The Journal Publishing Co. Ltd., Summerside, 1922.
____________ Souvenir of the Scottish Celebration, title and first two pages missing, probably published by the Journal Publishing Co. Ltd., Summerside, 1922.
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Rayburn, Alan, Geographical Names of Prince Edward Island, Energy, Mines and Resources Canada, Surveys and Mapping Branch, Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, Ottawa, 1973.
Rempel, John I., Building with Wood, – and other aspects of nineteenth-century building in central Canada. (Revised edition). University of Toronto Press, Chapter 2, (pp. 25-90), 1980.
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Rogers, Irene, Reports on Selected Buildings in Charlottetown, P.E.I., Manuscript Report Series, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1974, 1976. Pp. 124-125.
Rogers, Irene L., Charlottetown – The Life in its Buildings, The Prince Edward Island Museum and Heritage Foundation, Charlottetown, 1983.
Sloane, Eric, A Museum of Early American Tools, Ballentine Books, New York, 1964, 2002.
Sloane, Eric, A Reverence for Wood, Ballentine Books, New York, 1965, 1974.
Sloane, Eric, Diary of an Early American Boy – Noah Blake 1805, Ballentine Books, New York, 1965.
Smith, H. M. Scott, The Historic Architecture of Prince Edward Island, SSP Publications, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2011.
Williams, Henry Lionel and Ottalie K. Williams, Old American Houses 1700-1850 – How to Restore, Remodel, and Reproduce Them, Bonanza Books, New York, 1957.