Could We Switch Places And Survive In The Past?

By Kendra Bobowick

Painted first with historians’ words and later captured on camera beginning in the late 1800s are images of Newtown’s earliest homes and residents from the 1700s. Despite the more than 250-plus years between then and now, the largely forgotten post-and-beam construction, floor-to-ceiling cooking hearths, and plaster and lath designs still form a home for residents who like opening a front door to careful construction from the past, a doorway slightly askew, and fieldstone stoops worn at the center where decades of footfalls have come and gone. (See related story in this week’s Home & Garden section.)

Familiar to most residents are the low ceilings and boxy rooms inside the Matthew Curtiss House — currently serving as the Newtown Historical Society Museum — that took its place on Main Street in 1750. In a town likely populated by less than 2000 people during the 1700s, another Curtiss house dated two years earlier still stands guard at the corner of Glen Road and Walnut Tree Hill Road.

Unlike Matthew Curtiss, who was not his home’s builder according to town historian Daniel Cruson, cousin Benjamin Curtiss built his similar but larger house within sight of the steel bridge spanning Lake Zoar. Private homeowners Jean and Lincoln Sander live there today.

Both homes are among the many memories of the town featured in history books that create a deceiving image of the past. Based on photographs alone, life was scenic and simple. From old photographs come the impressions of earlier inhabitants who had once shouldered through rocky soil alongside workhorses, stepped around dogs asleep inside the general store, and in one documented instant in 1890, the long-gone residents had looked across the otherwise smooth horizon spiked by silhouettes of two little boys with their trousers rolled to the knee and their bare feet in the water. The 1890 photograph, specifically, from Images of America Newtown by Mr Cruson, finds the little boys as they were 118 years ago — anticipating a big catch as they stared into Johnson Mill Pond with fishing line tied to the end of a stick. The impression is deceiving.

Smiling to himself while choosing pieces of Newtown trivia filed in his memory, Mr Cruson explains the contrasts between modern living and habits of the past — differences as stark as stepping into a snow storm toward an outhouse perched over running water, compared to indoor plumbing. Conveniences aside, the differences in day-to-day living were stark.

The absence of privacy, a modern concept, is not evident in the black and white snapshots in Mr Cruson’s books, nor is it clear in the rough hewn original beams still supporting the Matthew and Benjamin Curtiss Houses. Revealing the lack of barriers between family members — young boys and their fathers, and girls and mothers — Mr Cruson offered one example that removes any doubt that modestly was not always practical.

Bluntly, Mr Cruson described a scene where circumstances erased boundaries. He said, “father” might turn to the bedpan on a cold night as the family roused at dawn rather than risk a walk in the snow. Girls helping their mothers with the monthly laundry also found life’s lessons in mother’s soiled skirts. By comparison, he said, “We’ve become very delicate. [They] didn’t need sex education and didn’t need to go to the outhouse in the snow, but used the chamber pot with five people in the room.” Even patterns of cleanliness were different, he said. “You bathed in the kitchen, there was no deodorant or mouthwash.” The past was “a different culture, divided by time and space,” Mr Cruson explained.

“Privacy is a modern concept,” Mr Cruson said. Why?

“Think of the Matthew Curtiss House,” he instructed. “It’s got a kitchen, parlor, dining room, and two bedrooms upstairs.” He then counted off family members on his fingers and explained, “Two bedrooms, five people, and one bedroom was actually a work room.” Looms and a spinning wheel fill one of the two rooms at the top of the banked stairway.

During winter months especially, the entire family slept by the dying fire in the one remaining bedroom. He said, “There was no privacy.” The preference for a little solitude is a modern expectation built in to daily life. Casting a stark light on the past, Mr Cruson reached back to the family asleep in the larger bedroom of the Matthew Curtiss House that looks out on Main Street. “Things were more candid,” he said. Privacy outside the home is also a new invention. “They understood that you’re part of a community and if you’re obnoxious they threw you out — people were more responsible for themselves.”

Life by comparison was also filled with labor. The Matthew Curtiss House does not appear to be a difficult place to live, but its looks are misleading, as one of the historian’s friends once discovered.

“He tried living the lifestyle,” Mr Cruson said — every detail, every day. No electricity, no insulation, no furnace for heat or boiler for hot water. Able to see the trap from a distance, Mr Cruson explained, “He was trying to take a 20th Century mindset and squeeze it into the 18th Century.” Was life really so hard? Mr Cruson removed the glare cast by modern conveniences to expose the often cold and rugged life of circa 1700 to 1800 — not an easy place for a man from the 1900s to live.

Long johns, for example, were a necessity. “Stepping back, if you lived there, houses were not insulated. Long johns were a way of life and you kept them on in bed where there were curtains to keep the heat in,” he said. People needed to provide for themselves. “They were self-sufficient and for good reason,” Mr Cruson said. “There were no stores.” Aside from the occasional traveling trader who “had what you couldn’t produce — cloth, paper, books, sugar,” Mr Cruson said people maintained family-run blacksmiths, mills for grist or timber. Farming and fishing were prevalent. The time period had no need for alarms clocks.

“You worked on a schedule of light and dark,” Mr Cruson explained. Life was devoid of “labor-saving devices,” he explained. “When a woman went out to wash it was a full day job.” Daily rounds of activity were based on a weekly schedule because tasks took most of a day, he said. Sunday was a break in the work. “You still had to tend the animals, but it was your day to rest. You attended church — that was also social,” Mr Cruson said.

Death from a 20th Century point of view often goes on privately, unlike 200-plus years ago. Mr Cruson asked, “How many of you have been there when someone dies?” Explaining the implications, Mr Cruson said, “There was a hard lesson here: ‘You’re going to have to face this as well.’ It’s a startlingly different mind-set.”

No television, no telephone, no iPod, no computer, he said. What did people do? “We talked. We had dinner together — that would be foreign today,” he said. Parents could be running on different work schedules, children have their own rooms where they could close the door. “That’s alien to the 18th Century. There was no going to your room and closing out the family,” he noted.

What did people do? “People wrote letters. People talked face-to-face.” Body language and facial gestures held deeper meaning. They were part of ways people interpreted a conversation. Telephones would have been regarded with suspicion, he guesses. “In Puritan New England Satan’s purpose was to sow misunderstandings among people, so telephones [lacking the face-to-face element] would sow misunderstanding. It’s the instrument of the devil,” he said.

Mr Cruson’s thoughts jumped to other small examples of differences between now and then. Even the simplest details from the 1700s are literally out of joint with today’s surroundings. Picturing the dwellings alone, he said, “There was no such thing as a right angle in an old house.” Regardless, the homes were overbuilt, he said. The Curtiss houses are just two of the many preserved antique houses in town. Stepping inside the plaster walls of the Matthew Curtiss House offers residents a glance back at a time the season’s rainfall and average temperature could add up to a bounty or a long, lean winter. Also evident within several steps of the front door is Mr Cruson’s warning about 90-degree angles. No surface in the house could hold a level.