Brigham House and Gale Barn

With its high-style house and New England bank barn, this hillside farm is representative of two important phases of rural architectural development in the West River Valley. In the 1790s Townshend settlers and brothers Ephraim and Ebenezer Brigham built competing houses on land they farmed on East Hill. Ephraim's house burned early in the twentieth century, but, to judge by Ebenezer's, they were talented builders. The two-story, wood-frame Federal house has a fanlit central entrance with tapered pilasters and a broken pediment, and modillions and triglyphs at the eaves and above first-story windows. Inside similarly refined mantelpieces and window surrounds grace the front parlors, and a series of ells, now much remodeled, extend to the rear. Later in the nineteenth century, Horace O. Gale redeveloped the brothers' four hundred and fifty acres into a stock farm with a sugaring sideline that tapped nine hundred maple trees. About 1899, he constructed a handsome New England bank barn behind the house, which has a gable-end covered bridge to the third-floor haymow, a stock entrance below it, and a manure basement with sheep pens on the ground story. In his new barn Gale tended fifty sheep and seventy cattle and also bred Morgan horses.