S. Winsor House

This began as a so-called end-chimney half house with a customarily simple transomed door. The brick chimney end is, however, clapboarded over (in contrast to its exposure in the Clemence-Irons House; see JO3). “Half house” means that its three-bay front roughly halves that of the standard two-and-one-half-story, five-bay, central-chimney type. Often such a house was intended as a partial building, to be completed when required by family size and permitted by financial conditions. More often, probably, it was meant to stand as is, and if an addition was made it might well be a one-and-one-half-story ell rather than completion as a full-height, five-bay block. (Two other early eighteenth-century half houses in Johnston, neither as handsomely restored as this, make the point: the East House, 325 Cherry Hill Road, has a one-and-one-half-story gabled addition to a modified half house; the Clemence House, 475 Greenville Avenue, has a one-and-one-half-story gambrel addition.) Inherently ad hoc as compositions, most such additions are awkward. This, however, with its complications of a gabled door shed at one end and the still later addition of a second floor at a new pitch to the rear, is quite satisfying, offering up a picturesque record of successive enlargement.