What the old house hid
Every old building has historical artifacts within its walls, some placed there for future inhabitants to find
A scorched red corset. Half of a dog’s skull. A 19th-century clay pipe. A mastodon. Once you start digging — whether excavating long-populated urban land for a commercial project or tearing down the walls of a house — you never know what you’ll find. It might be a ritual object placed there to ward off evil spirits 300 years ago, or a few decades ago. It might have been put there on purpose or left by accident. Unless it’s a time capsule with a note enclosed, you’ll never know for sure.
Every building has history within its walls, ceilings, floors and foundations. The very wood, plaster and stone can contain powerful secrets, even talismans, some of which were placed there for future inhabitants to find — a thread linking past and future.
Consider Michelle Morgan Harrison, an interior designer who is renovating her home, a house built in 1816 in New Canaan, Connecticut. Her general contractor, Patrick Kennedy, recently found a skull buried beneath an old white oak beam. “At first, I thought: It’s human!” said Harrison, who was relieved to discover that it wasn’t. Then they thought it might be a horse’s skull, one of the objects that Irish builders traditionally placed inside homes.
It turned out to be that of a dog, although half of the skull is missing.
“I’ve seen a bit of everything” while renovating, said Kennedy, a contractor and carpenter for 20 years. “But the skull was unique, and there’s no way it could have fallen in there the way it was buried. It was placed almost exactly in the centre under the doorway, and there were no other bones with it. I immediately thought it was something superstitious.”
So much so, he said, that he plans to rebury it in the same place in the house after renovations are complete.
“The practice of burying or concealing items in the structure of a house is called immurement,” said Joseph Heathcott, an architectural historian and urbanist who teaches at the New School in New York.
“It is actually an ancient practice that cuts across many cultures and civilizations,” Heathcott said. The most famous examples are artifacts entombed with Egyptian pharaohs in the pyramids, but he said that ritual objects have often been found in the walls of Roman villas and ordinary houses during archeological excavations. “The history of Freemasonry traces its origins to the rituals of concealment by masons, sealing up secrets in their buildings,” he said.
Objects were often hidden away as a way to bring good luck to inhabitants. This was the case in Ireland, he said, “where it was common when building a home to bury a horse skull in the floor or under the hearth, a Celtic practice that dates back centuries. Sometimes it would be the entire skull, other times just the front section or the top without the lower jaw.”
In England and Ireland, it was also customary in many regions to bury dead cats in the walls or under floors of houses to ward off malicious spirits, Heathcott added.
It all sounds like ancient history — until you or your work crew find something.
When Rob DeRocker, a marketing consultant in Tarrytown, New York, began gut-renovating his 1843 home, known as the Ice House — it was used to store ice in the 19th century — several objects appeared. He found a clay pipe and a tobacco pouch inside a window frame, a player-piano roll in a ceiling, a child’s alphabet flash card and several handpainted ceramic tiles. He dreamed of “Antiques Roadshow” riches, but he discovered the items are more historic than valuable. Nonetheless, DeRocker relishes his home’s material history: “When this house was built, Abraham Lincoln was still a lawyer,” he said.
People who think they’ve found something old and valuable frequently contact the New-York Historical Society, said Margaret K. Hofer, a vice-president of the society and director of its museum. “We get calls like that all the time,” she said. Museum staff members typically ask for a photo by email before deciding to look more closely.
“Some definitely think they’re going to strike it rich — they’re usually quite wrong,” she said. Common finds include old newspapers, sometimes used for insulation, and firearms and munitions, like the Revolutionary War cannonball found in a Brooklyn backyard in August. That one actually did prove to be historically valuable, she said, marking a key battle, albeit “a major loss for the American army.”
A house doesn’t need Revolutionary credentials to be a trove.
“In my 30 years of architectural practice we’ve found many different things under floors and inside of walls, most left there inadvertently,” said Marvin J. Anderson, a Seattle architect. “Newspapers were used for years as insulation, and regularly help us date when an addition was built or an improvement was made.” In a recent renovation of a 1914 Seattle house, he found a layer of 1924 newspapers under the floorboards in a maid’s room.
“While renovating a 1902 house several years ago, we came across a fire-scorched red corset inside a wall,” he said. “It certainly stopped construction for several hours and raised many eyebrows, but we never figured out the story behind it.”
When Kennedy began working on Harrison’s 1816 house, a carpenter’s signature from 1921 was found on an attic window frame. Also discovered: a time capsule from the 1990s that included a note from the 9-year-old girl then living there.
Kim Gordon, a designer in Los Angeles who specializes in renovating 1920s-era homes, collects items she finds in the process and creates a small package she places in a wall when the project is done, sometimes with the owner’s knowledge, sometimes not. Inside a wall in a house from 1905, the oldest she’s renovated, she found a small sterling-silver medallion of the Virgin Mary, on a bit of chain.
“It was very detailed, a beautiful, beautiful piece,” she said. After completing the renovation, she placed it into a small fabric pouch, added some crushed seashells, pebbles and a clay figure, and tucked it back inside a wall.
She collects small objects at flea markets “that speak to me” and keeps them for use in future packages during renovations. “It’s an anchor in the space,” she said. “I’ve given the house an intention.”