Cloverfields as of February 2020: On How An 18th-Century Beehive Oven Was Rebuilt
/Rebuilding An Eighteenth-Century Kitchen
In the video above, architectural historian Willie Graham tells us about a recently reconstructed beehive oven. The oven can be found in the also reconstructed back kitchen.
The Cloverfields house was built c. 1705, and we are restoring it to the year 1784. Rebuilding the back kitchen and its beehive oven was one of the most challenging aspects of the restoration, mainly because at the beginning of the process we had so little information about them.
The back kitchen was added to the house in the early 1780s. A hyphen (small enclosed structure) connected the kitchen to the back of the house. By the 21st century the kitchen and the hyphen had been demolished, so all we knew about it derives from archaeological and documentary research.
We knew of the existence of a back kitchen because a 1784 tax report mentioned it. The tax report was found by historian Sherri Marsh-Johns, who is still conducting research on the history of the house and its inhabitants. The kitchen was added in the 1780s and was demolished in the 19th century.
The archaeologists of Applied Archaeology and History Associates excavated in the area in the back of the house where the kitchen once stood and found the footprint. Then the architects of Kimmel Studio Architects worked with the archaeologists and with architectural historian Willie Graham to produce the floor plans and the other construction documents necessary to recreate the kitchen.
3d Rendering of the Back Building and kitchen. The kitchen (furthest part of the building to the left) was demolished in the 19th century.
In the video above, Graham tells us how the team put all the information together:
So, we have several pieces of evidence that give us the full arm of the back kitchen. And obviously the big one was the archaeology; we got the footprint from archaeology; we have the footprint of the chimney.
We had a couple other features that showed up with the archaeology and fortunately we also have some documentary research that points to what was taking place back here in the kitchen. So the best thing we have is the 1798 direct tax and it lists all the parts of the building, their sizes; we know how many dormers, you know, the back building had, we know the door.
So, we had these pieces to put together with the archaeology to kind of create a 3D, a real 3D, you know, full-size version of what had been here.
Kimmel Studio Architects also produced the 3D rendering of the historic kitchen that you can see below:
recreation of the 1784 kitchen.
The rest of Graham’s presentation concentrates on the beehive, or oven of the kitchen. During the eighteenth century, ovens like these ones were exceptional; in the 1870s, most ovens were located outside. Graham tells us how he figured out that the firebox was actually a beehive.
So, in terms of the fire box, we know that it was as wide as we reconstructed it. We know the size of the jambs on either side of it. And there was this unusual brick feature that was located on this side [right] of the chimney, that the archaeologist uncovered. It was very fragmentary, but it looked just like the base of what you would expect for an upscaled gentry kitchen to have, that is a base for a beehive oven. Not all kitchens have ovens, that’s clear, but if you’re going to have another masonry piece that goes with a kitchen, outside a firebox, the next most common thing is an oven. And in fact, the location of this brick feature, the way it’s set back from the front of the fireplace, fits nicely within the pattern of where beehive ovens were located in kitchens in the Chesapeake in the 18th century.
building section drawing through the reconstructed 1784 kitchen looking toward the fireplace and beehive oven (on the right).
Graham then goes on to explain how the beehive was rebuilt using 18th-century construction methods:
We tried to replicate exactly how they would have built the beehive oven. This beehive oven is fairly complicated, you have the oven itself which has a dome over it, and that dome was created, the masons built a big pile of sand on the floor of the oven and then they shaped it, and then they laid their bricks for the dome on top of the sand, and then once that set they pulled the sand out of it. So that’s how they actually created the dome.
He then tells us how and why the preservation specialists working at Cloverfields decided to make the fireplace and oven functional:
In the kitchen we’ve decided to make the fireplace and the oven functional. The rest of the house we are not going to burn fire in the fireplaces because we want to make sure we don’t burn the house down, it’s not good for collections, there’s a lot of reasons to not build fires in the place. But here in the kitchen we decided to make this one fireplace, it’s reconstructed, it’s at the end of the house as far away as everything else as possible, away from where antiques might be placed or ones that are or would be negatively impacted by having these fires go on. So, this fireplace and its oven could be used should museum staff decide to do that later on.
Here is an image of the recreated 1784 fireplace with beehive oven (to the right) while under construction earlier this month. Photograph by pete albert
Finally, Graham tells us about the wood lintel:
To have a big fireplace like this you got to find a way to span it, but it’s a kitchen so they want to do it in a very cost-effective manner, and using traditional ways to solve those kinds of problems ends up being the cheapest way to do it. And so, they could have built a big brick arch over this thing, put iron lintels in somehow and carried a big brick arch and done it. But, that’s much more complicated, it requires getting these iron lintels in and wood lintels are the very early way of spanning openings anyway. In 16th century English houses, you’re going to find wood lintels, and actually if you go into early Maryland houses, you’ll find wood lintels over fireplaces, just like we have them in the main house here in 1705. Those originally, those fireboxes were spanned with wood lintels, it’s just a simple way of doing it.
The wood lintel is kind of cleverly designed, it looks like it’s a large, you know, 9 by 12 hewn timber that sits across the opening. But in fact, the back side of it is beveled to help, you know, with the smoke, it’s helping to guide the smoke up into the flue. It’s square on the two ends where it rests over the masonry, but it bevels behind that. It also sits on these smaller wooden members that are buried into the brickwork that are called tassels and those tassels gave it something to sit on, it’s another traditional way seating these lintels.
Ongoing Restoration At The Site
The images below illustrate how the restoration process is moving along.
here is a photo of the reconstructed 1705 chimney and fireplace in the first floor parlor. The next photo shows the fireplace directly above this one. Photograph by pete albert
this image shows the complete reconstruction of the 1705 chimney and fireplace in the 2nd floor bed chamber directly above the parlor. photograph by pete albert
This image shows the ongoing restoration and preservation of the exterior brick on the main house. This is one of the windows on the front facade. Photograph by pete albert
By: Devin S. Kimmel, of Kimmel Studio Architects
For: Cloverfields Preservation Foundation