WALL TO WALL WILBORS
What does one farmhouse times four centuries divided by seven generations of Wilbors equal? What else, but a fascinating architectural equation.
By the wayside of what was once an ancient trail in Little Compton, Rhode Island there is a three hundred year old house that was, without a whisker of Yankee doubt, built to last. Last it has -- lived in, added onto, divided in half, updated with brick hearths, fine wallpaper and fancy woodwork, and finally, sold off by the one family that owned it for seven generations, every window, door, wall, floor and ceiling is the architectural record of the lifestyle of America’s hardworking farmers. It is considered to be the best-preserved early building in town, and after five decades of ongoing restoration to make it into a museum, the Little Compton Historical Society is in the process of listing the Wilbor House at 548 West Main Road on the National Register of Historic Places.
Samuel Wilbor (also spelled Wilbore, Wilbour, Wilber and Wilbur just to confound historians) built his timber frame home around 1690. He had purchased land that had been bought from the Sakonnet tribe about 17 years earlier by the town’s proprietors. Legally, he and his few fellow settlers were homesteaders in the hinterlands of Plymouth colony because Little Compton would not be officially incorporated as Rhode Island territory for another 56 years.
Samuel’s plain and simple dwelling, typical of most 17th century vernacular structures along the New England seaboard, consisted of two rooms each with a fireplace: The rooms, more or less square, were one above the other, with a steep staircase and a low attic. He and his few other neighbors throughout the “Sagonate land,” as it was known in Samuel’s day, angled their residences so that the front doors faced southward, taking advantage of the warming sunshine.
By 1712, Samuel’s wife Mary had given birth to eleven Wilbors in this house. Defying all odds, every one of her second-generation American-born babies lived to adulthood. The Historical Society believes that a rustic backroom along the north side, called the long kitchen, was added in the early years for obvious reasons – growing Wilbors. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the women who lived there bore ten or more children. The space-saving press bed, a fold-up rope bed that the couple slept in on display in the lower great room, is a reminder that in such a tiny house, no room was reserved for a single person or purpose. Moreover, since it was a 122-acre working farm, there may have been a hired field hand or two and, perhaps, a country girl helping with infants and women’s work – all joining the family for meals and all sleeping under the same roof.
By the mid-1800s, the house was still owned and occupied by Wilbors – two sixth generation brothers named Oliver and William. Their sister, Deborah, lived there, too. Both brothers married, but rather than tossing a coin to determine who took his bride and left and who stayed put on the nearly 200-year old family farm, they each occupied half of it. To accommodate their spouses, as well as their sister, the brothers each built a separate kitchen addition. These were the last rooms added to the house, but not the last interior alterations.
It seems peculiar that after many generations in which there were bountiful babies, both couples and the sister were childless. Oliver was the last blood relative of Samuel Wilbor’s to live in the house. When Oliver’s widow Abby Manchester Wilbor died, ownership passed to nieces and nephews living elsewhere. The heirs sold the property out of the family for the first and last time in the 1920s, leaving the Wilbors who had been born there, lived and worked there and who eventually died there to rest in peace in the family graveyard beyond the old barn.
The place was a dairy farm for the next 30 years, but Manuel DeAlmo, the owner and dairyman, never lived on site. He divided the residence into multiple apartments, used by as many as six families, at times, until about 1950. When the Little Compton Historical Society acquired the by then-forlorn Wilbor House five years later, the restorers revealed that there was still no indoor plumbing. DeAlmo’s tenants had, like the Wilbors for nearly three hundred years before them, been using outhouses. (Six of them, in fact, but fear not – if you have to go when you go there, there are now modern facilities.)
Unlike Route 77, which is a fairly direct route, passing by the Wilbor House on down to Sakonnet Point, the restoration of an old house is a winding path, wrought with hidden twists and tortuous turns. During the continuing work on the building, the Historical Society has come to expect puzzles about where original doors and windows might have been and the members look forward to discussing the many clues discovered in every partition and panel. Half a century later, they are still quite delighted to uncover more secrets about the structure and forgotten tales about the family. While it is obvious that big changes occurred in this house, thanks to the old-fashioned frugality and the make-do way of life of Wilbor after Wilbor, there seems to have been little progress after all.
For the visitors who listen to the docents’ thoughtful interpretations of this house-museum and who study the hundreds of artifacts on display in the seven rooms open to the public, the surprise is that time has, in fact, stood still at least once every century at this scenic, quiet farm.
The Little Compton Historical Society, PO Box 577 Little Compton, RI. The Wilbur House Museum, 548 West Main Road, is open Thursday through Monday, June through September, or by appointment Visitors may tour the entire house, plus several of the outbuildings, the corncrib, a historic outhouse, and the 2-acre grounds. These are some of the things you will learn about the house and family.
The Little Compton Garden Club has been tending the herb garden at the Wilbor House for more than 40 years. Club members cultivate a variety of common herbs that were grown in Colonial times, some of which were used for cooking and others for home remedies. A garden at the north end of the house is dedicated to Dorothy Paine Brayton, the nearby neighbor who donated the funding for the Historical Society to purchase the Wilbor House.
The hand-hewn timbers are the most eye-catching feature of the oldest rooms of the Wilbor House – note the exposed corner posts and the large overhead beam, called the summer. The unplastered ceiling would have been typical of the late 1600s, as well as the stone – not brick – fireplace and chimney. The lower great room was used by Samuel and Mary Wilbor and their 11 children for just about every activity: cooking, eating, sewing, entertaining, washing, giving birth and sleeping. The seven daughters probably played together and slept close to the hearth on cold nights in the upper great room, as it was called, on the second floor, while every evening, the older boys may have climbed up to the attic above where there was no fireplace for warmth.Samuel’s son William Wilbor added a living room, or parlor, about 1740 on the southwest side of the first floor of the house. It has many gentrified details, such as cased beams, larger windows, painted moldings and floors and a brick hearth. All of the furnishings in the house-museum, some owned by the Society and some on extended loan from area families, have a Little Compton connection. The split banister back chairs by an unknown maker have finials and crests in a style seen here and nowhere else.
The crewel embroidery (preserved on new backing) on the bed hangings in the west bedroom was the status symbol of the 18th century chamber. Such well-appointed bedrooms were often used for entertaining guests, say, for tea or supper. The refined colors on the woodwork and floor replicate the original paint, found under many layers of other colors during restoration at the Wilbor House.
In the 1860s, Oliver Wilbor built a new Victorian kitchen on the north side of the house, and his brother William who lived in the other half of the house, built a matching one on the easterly end. (William’s kitchen later became the Historical Society’s reception room and office.) Being fellows well-accustomed to country ways, neither brother ever saw the need to install modern plumbing, however they did pamper their wives with the conveniences of iron cook stoves, iron sinks with
hand pumps, oil lamps, and ice boxes.
