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Hunt Farm

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18th century and later. 228 West Main Rd.

This is one of the town's most intact farm complexes. The two-story, five-bay shingled house with simple five-light transom over a centered door retains several shingled nineteenth- and twentieth-century outbuildings, plus a stone barn, all with a winding road into stone-walled fields. It provides an ideal introduction to what is typical of Little Compton—including the farm's present use as a leisure-time residence. Dormers suggest twentieth-century reworking.

The next several miles of West Main Road offer a gamut of shingle houses ranging in date from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century and in massing from compactness to picturesque sprawl. Varied shapes are more characteristic than varied detail, which testifies to the unpretentious aspects of even the biggest houses in the area. Only Jamestown offers a comparable array of the shingle houses which played such a significant role in Rhode Island seashore design of the late nineteenth century. In Little Compton they are juxtaposed with their eighteenth-century inspiration, and derive substantially from the contained quality of their precedents. In the other towns, they tend more to porches and to nineteenth-century vacation cottage design.

Writing Credits

Author: 
William H. Jordy et al.
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Data

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Citation

William H. Jordy et al., "Hunt Farm", [Little Compton, Rhode Island], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/RI-01-LC1.

Print Source

Buildings of Rhode Island, William H. Jordy, with Ronald J. Onorato and William McKenzie Woodward. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 489-489.

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