Originally published February 2017
Carriage ring for tying up horses
The Lamson House was built in 1899 and the first mass produced car rolled off the line in 1901. These two facts mean that The Lamson House was not built with car culture in mind. In fact, the preferred mode of transportation would have been horse and carriage with wheels in the summer and sleigh runners in the winter. And signs of this are all around the house.
The more obvious signs of this are most apparent on the porch. The portico off the porch would have provided a sheltered location to get on and off from a carriage. The original ring to tie the horses to is still on one of the pillars of the portico and the carriage step, which would have made it easy to step into and out of the carriage, still juts off the end of the porch. We recently had to add a railing to the carriage step because people kept walking off it and it is a long step down if there is no carriage there to step into!
Even inside the house there are small signs that this a pre-car era house. The biggest one being that the front foyer use to be two rooms. Though the original wall was masterfully removed, if you look closely at the current walls and floor, you can see where the original wall was. The now missing room would have been an unheated entryway where family members and guests could enter the house and remove coats and other outerwear with as little heat loss as possible in the rest of the house. As modern cars (with heating systems) developed, entryways like that were no longer needed as travelers needed fewer pieces of outwear when they traveled in winter and so needed less time to remove them. I imagine one of the early owners of the house realized this and decided to have the entry wall removed in order to make a more immediate grand impression on the arriving guests.
Seeing little details like these survive over 100 years fires the imagination. On snowy nights, when the traffic on Center is reduced and muffled, one can almost imagine they can hear sleigh bells and neighing horses announcing the arrival of a horse and carriage sleigh to the front porch of the house.