When houses speak, history is told

TILTON — John Ciriello is not your average sleuth. He uncovers bits and pieces of bygone eras that live in older buildings on main streets, side streets, dirt roads, in fields and behind stone walls.

Small towns across the Lakes Region and mill cities such as Franklin and Laconia are treasure troves of old houses, barns, factory buildings and municipal offices worth saving and restoring, he said. But their value and vintage may not be immediately obvious.

The joy comes from discovering history in overlooked, seen-better-days structures.

“Sometimes you can’t tell it was an old home because it’s been updated so many times, and reincarnated so many times. It takes a trained eye” to spot clues in materials and construction methods, which requires peeling back layers. “If you know how to listen, the house will tell you,” Ciriello said.

New Hampshire is a state where past meets present almost everywhere. That means a bounty for people interested in historic homes and barns and preserving them for future generations. It’s a passion that’s surged in popularity during and after COVID. When more people were sequestered at home, home improvement projects spiked and urban expats moved to New Hampshire seeking homes in rural towns with country charm.

“We definitely did see an uptick in calls and emails,” said Beverly Thomas, program director for the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance. In the past, the organization held its two-day “Old House and Barn Expo” twice a year at hotel conference center in Manchester. Since March of 2021, NHPA has held 14 virtual sessions, with 50 to over 100 people online attending breakouts that have included researching your old house, assessing your old barn, and maintaining and repairing older buildings without sacrificing their historic integrity. 

“Folks are moving out of cities to these beautiful rural towns in New Hampshire. Some have experience, and some are new to older homes and want some guidance,” Thomas said. “It’s so encouraging to see folks interested in rehabbing these older places. Once they get into it, they really appreciate what’s there, all the historic features and craftsmanship.”

Ciriello, a professional landscaper in Boston, has restored several old houses from different eras in Tilton and Northfield.  He bought his first in Woburn, Massachusetts , a "For-Sale-By-Owner" with antique-ish features and a sloping backyard with a pond.

He had no idea that he had purchased an historic home until he dug up the lawn and found buried garbage from the late 1700s.

The yard had been the trash pit for a tavern owned by a Revolutionary War lieutenant – a member of the Tay family that helped construct the Middlesex Canal – “Boston’s original big dig,” said Ciriello.

“I started turning up so much pottery, stacks of pots and glasses. I turned up pottery with every shovel of dirt. I thought these people were really messy. I had five-gallon buckets full of pottery,” he recalls.

Ciriello researched town history and land records to find out what taken place in his house, which was eventually placed on the register of historic places – a selling point that netted higher offers when he finally sold it.

To commemorate its history, he made a large mosaic with a swirl of cup handles, pottery fragments and pieces of pipes he exhumed from the lawn, which he fashioned into a cover for the house’s kitchen fireplace.

“Almost all older homes have a chance of having some historic interest,” said Mae Williams of Center Harbor, an architectural historian who assesses old buildings for historic value and advises municipalities throughout New Hampshire on how to preserve local landmarks. The Lakes Region is chock full of structures that document different eras, she said. Some built in the 1940s are now considered historic and worth preserving.

That may mean prying off more modern paneling, chipping off brittle horsehair plaster, and sometimes dendrology – which involves taking core samples from wooden beams that support the house and comparing rings in the wood to a catalog of timber, which will indicate when the tree was cut to provide the beams.

“Usually the poorest communities have the most intact houses, because the people who lived there were too poor to do renovations,” said Ciriello. “They never had a chance to remodel because they didn’t have the money.”

Ciriello said port cities along the East Coast, such as Portsmouth, were settled first, followed by the Lakes Region in the mid-1700s.

Some of the major hints of age are cobblestone foundations, which may reveal that that early owners didn’t have the money to upgrade them, or the buildings had a different use, such as a workshop or stable, which changed over time.

 “If you have stone walls it means there was early activity,” said Ciriello. “Your house may or may not be an original home.”

Critical hints include the design of wood trim, architectural style, types of building materials and “anything that makes it unique or stand out,” he said. Sometimes a house was a place to eat or change horses on a well-traveled route – “George Washington slept here, that kind of thing,” or a location where important history occurred.

Outside his current four-square style home (meaning four rooms downstairs, and four above), Ciriello combed the earth with metal detectors and turned up children’s spoons, buttons, an emblem with an owl on it, and a fragment of a clay smoking pipe.

Unraveling the past requires micro-examination, said Williams, who has studies building practices through time. “What kind of nails were used?” Tool marks in the wood can show whether a power saw, circular saw, or a water-powered up and down saw was used, or the lumber was cut by hand. “Sometimes you have to crawl through the building and look at what the building says,” she said.

Assessing the value of a horse-drawn fire station in New Hampshire required her to take a course in horse-drawn firefighting machinery. 

In general, to have historic preservation value, commercial buildings and houses should have “a degree of integrity” visible from the outside, Williams said. “If someone from the past were plopped down in front of the building, would they recognize it? If the owner was here now, would he say, ‘That’s my house’ or would he scratch his head and say, ‘Maybe?’”

“All of a sudden you’re looking at a piece of history,” Williams said. The challenge is to divine history from what’s left.

“I feel like a kid in a candy shop, a cross between Agatha Christie and Indiana Jones in the nerdiest of ways. Figuring out the mystery of a house, how did this building evolve, and what are the ways it did. It takes a certain person to find that fascinating,” said Williams. The payoff is “You can give the next generation that lives in this house a lot of information such as what’s important and why. So the new owners will understand and take the same amount of love and care.”

That interest blossomed during COVID, when people were working from home. “More people contacted me, said Williams. “More people were interested in learning about the walls they were staring at.”

Williams advises owners interested in their home’s history to start by doing research at town hall, which means looking at the tax cards online or in person at the assessor’s office. Dates listed are often estimates. Contact the local historic society or library, which may have collections of historic photos of the town or surrounding area. Historic maps online can show properties located on individual streets and the name of the person who lived there. Census records for the town can also help.

For restoration advice and a directory of suppliers and contractors with experience preserving and restoring older barns and houses, go to nhpreservation.org. For questions, contact the New Hampshire Preservation Alliance at 224-2281.