The Sgt. William Harlow House at 8 Winter Street is set on a gentle slope about 300 feet from the water of Plymouth Harbor. It is a wood-frame structure composed of two distinct parts: a main, 1½ story gambrel segment (ca. 1750-1710), ridge paralle to the street, anc a ca. 1000-10/0, 4 story, flat-roofed ell which extends from the back or northwest side of the earlier section. The gambrel house in its present form is five bays wide with an entrance 1o- cated slightly right (or east) of center. It is two bays deep. The existing ell replaced lean-to of unknown date, which ran along the back of the gambrel house and contained a summer kitchen, pantry, chimney, and inside stairway to the cellar.
The ell, which is four bays deep and two wide, terminates in a 1 story, windowed shed or enclosed; porch on a fieldstone founda- The building's roofs, the ell walls, and the rear wall of the main, or gabled segment, are all covered with cedar shingles. The remaining three walls of the gambrel are clapboard sheathed. Four dormers, two each in the longer slopes of the eastern half of the gambrel are also shingled. Pitched roofs shelter the dormers in the front while those in the back have shed roofs. The main entrance to the Harlow House is set slightly right of center in the southeast facade of the gambrel portion. It consists of a simple narrow door of vertical boards (on the exterior) with iron hinges, which extend about two-thirds the width of the door, and an iron thumb-latch. Above the door and directly below the building's cornice 1s a plain transom with four rectangular lights.
Door and transom are framed on either side by a single, vertical wide board. The assymetrical nature of the front facade of the Harlow House is due, apparently, to the fact that the eastern half of the gambreled section is earlier than the western half. The large, square, center chimney is actually, like the door, slightly right (or northeast) of center. It appears then that the right, or northeast, part of the gambrel house stood origin- ally as an end-chimney structure. Wide boards on the northwest side of the chimney may have been part of the original exterior wall. The interior layout of the building seems to support this theory of its structural development. The front door opens into a tiny vestibule.
Straight ahead, against the chimney, a stairway ascends for 6 steps to a landing then continues another four steps to the left and four steps to the right to respective second floor chambers. There is a large chamber at the front with a much smaller one behind it on each side. On the first floor, the entrance hall opens on a single room to the right. Behind both this room and the center chimney runs a long kitchen with a large fire place and oven. The entrance hall, the northeast room, and the kitchen behind them, along with the two second floor chambers above appear to have constituted the original house. At a somewhat later date, the size of the house was slightly more than doubled by the addition of four rooms, two on the first floor and two on the second, on the southwest side of the existing end chimney structure.
The two newer rooms on the first floor appear to have functioned from the beginning as a parlor (at the front) and a dining room behind it, although a room used only for dining 15 rare this early. A doorway was cut through to connect the new dining room and the kitchen in the older part of the house. First floor ceiling heights in the two halves of the gambrel house are different -6'7" in the northeast segment and 7'3" in the southwest, which would appear to be consistent with the two different periods of construction. Other minor alterations to the gambrel house include a second window cut at each end on the second floor to light the two small back chambers. The date for this change is unknown.
FHR-8-300(11-78) United States Department of the Interior Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service National Register of Historic Places Inventory - Nomination Form Continuation sheet Item number 7 For HCRS use only received MAR 1 8 1982 .... date entered APR 15 1982 Page 2 A small, square window was also added in the southwest end wall during the 1920's in order to provide ventilation and light for a closet beneath the gambrel slope. Beneath this window is a hinged panel of clapboard siding made to expose the wide vertical planks in the wall be- neath. This device was created during the mid-twentieth century when the house functioned as the Sgt. William Harlow-Holmes Family Homestead Museum under the direction of a ninth generation descendant of Harlow. Research conducted by the Harlow Family Association in 1958 makes it clear that there was a house, built by Sgt.
William Harlow, on the 8 Winter Street site by 1669 and quite probably as Harlow, am ty e early as 1653. The present gambrel structure has long been thought to be an enlargement of Harlow's original mid-seventeenth century house by the succeeding generations who have lived there. The tenth generation owner of the property finally sold it out of the family in 1979. William T. Davis, a nineteenth century historian reiterated the belief that the earlier part of the gambrel was St. Harlow's house in 1883 in his Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth. To date, however, no detailed characteristics of First Period architecture have come to light despite a careful examination of the structure by the leading authority on wood frame houses in New England during that period.
He has observed that details such as a shouldered post and beam chamfering, while conservative, still do not point to a date before 1750. This is not to say, however, that such details may not in fact lie hidden somewhere within or beneath the fabric of the house as it now stands. Evidence of this nature is usually obtainable only when a house is at least partially taken apart. Therefore, lacking any evidence to the contrary, it seems likely that the earlier half of the present gambrel structure succeeded Sgt. Harlow's seventeenth century house on this site and is in fact, about 100 years later than the earliest structure.
Block