Farmhouse Vernacular

The South Fork's nineteenth-century houses were built by local carpenters for farms and villages, not by architects for summer residents. They kept the region's old habits: heavy timber frames, wood shingle walls, simple gable roofs. Over the decades they added the trim of whatever was current: a Federal transom, a Greek Revival door surround, Italianate brackets, a Victorian porch. "Vernacular" here means a local building tradition, not a named style. These houses line the old Main Streets of Amagansett, Bridgehampton, Water Mill and East Hampton, and some still stand beside their barns.

How to recognize it

• Plan and massing. Two common types. One is a two-story house with a center entrance and a balanced five-bay front. The other is a smaller one- or two-story house with a three-bay front, a side hall and chimneys at one gable end. From about 1875, steep cross-gabled houses, some on L-shaped plans, appear.
• Frame and walls. Heavy timber framing and wood shingle until new framing methods and mass-produced materials arrived in the 1870s and 1880s. Later houses are light frame, often still shingled. Clapboard appears, usually painted white.
• Doors. Most of the decoration is at the front door. The Amagansett guidelines single out the "elaborate doorways of the Greek Revival and Italianate-period houses" on Main Street.
• Windows. Six-over-six sash on Greek Revival and Italianate houses; two-over-two sash on later Victorian houses; paired windows in front gables on simpler farmhouses.
• Porches. Front porches with turned posts and brackets. On Amagansett's Main Street, thirteen houses built between 1870 and 1913 keep their original porches.
• Outbuildings. Barns, and on Southampton Town farms, potato barns. The Town survey treats potato barns as a distinct building type tied to the local shift from cattle to potatoes.

Where it concentrates

• Amagansett. The Amagansett Historic District on Main Street. The Town's guidelines identify 27 historic residences as defining the residential part of the district, plus historic barns and commercial buildings.
• Bridgehampton. The Town survey's potential Bridgehampton Historic District is its largest at 176 properties, running from early farmhouses at the edges to the commercial core. A separate potential multiple-resource district includes farms and potato barns.
• Water Mill. Early-nineteenth-century houses with Greek Revival influence and a set of potato barns and farm buildings in the survey's potential Water Mill districts.
• East Hampton Village. Mid-nineteenth-century center-entrance and side-hall houses scattered through the village, and the Buell's Lane Historic District of small shingled late-Victorian houses.
• Sagaponack and Springs. Both have historic districts built around farmhouses and barns; see those pages for the designation details.

Documented examples

• Judge Abraham Topping Rose House and Nathaniel Rogers/Hopping House, Bridgehampton. The two Greek Revival houses at the main crossroads, named in the Town survey.
• Corwith House, Bridgehampton. A vernacular house influenced by Greek Revival, now the Bridgehampton Historical Society, open to the public. The property also keeps a jail, a blacksmith and wheelwright shop and several barns.
• Hendrickson Farm (Hillview Farm), Bridgehampton. A farmhouse built in 1866 with an apparently intact complex of barns and outbuildings.
• Baldwin Cook Talmage House (c. 1840), East Hampton Village. A center-entrance house with contributing farm buildings, nominated individually.

Renovation and historic review

• Town of East Hampton (Amagansett, Springs, other hamlets). In the Amagansett Historic District, the Architectural Review Board reviews exterior work, with most attention on the front facade. The guidelines exempt a long list of items: all painting, roof material, gutters, storm windows, back-yard work except additions, and low picket or split-rail fences. They protect front doorways, original windows, original porches and shingle or clapboard walls. Additions should be smaller than the house and stepped back on the rear or side. Buildings put up after 1950 are classed nonhistoric and get a lighter review.
• Town of Southampton (Bridgehampton, Water Mill, other hamlets). Designated landmarks and district properties need a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Landmarks and Historic Districts Board. The board also reviews demolition and construction applications for any building put up before 1941, so a nineteenth-century farmhouse can come before the board whether or not it is designated. The Town's "Hamlet Heritage Resource Area" title is honorary and carries no added regulation.
• Village of East Hampton. The Design Review Board's certificate is required for exterior changes in the four village districts and for removing any member of a pre-1880 timber frame.

The Town of Southampton survey's districts are proposals. Being listed in the survey is not designation.

What the assessment roll does not tell you

A farmhouse may be coded "Old Style," "Colonial," "Cape Cod" or "Cottage" depending on the assessor. On the South Fork records the Research Desk has reviewed, the style field reads "Unknown." The style comes from the house and its records.

Year built is unreliable for these houses in particular. Many were enlarged in stages, moved, or rebuilt around an old frame. The State manual keeps actual year built, effective year built and year remodeled as separate fields, and allows estimates where the assessor did not get in. Historic maps (the 1873 Beers and 1916 Hyde atlases the Town survey relies on), the survey entry and the permit file date a farmhouse better than the roll.

Related: Half-Houses and Saltboxes, Colonial Revival, all style guides.