The Kinne house illustrates several early trends in the culture and domestic building of central Vermont. Captain John Kinne, from Preston, Connecticut, moved to Plainfield in 1793 and built a small, one-story, two-room cabin. Reputedly the first wood-frame building in town, it is now the ell of this house. In 1799 Kinne invited clergy from the surrounding counties to his home to witness the organization of “The Church of Christ in Plainfield,” a union of Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists, and the first church in town. Although untrained, Kinne served as preacher for the church. He led services in his cabin and probably shortly after 1800, and certainly by 1819, when the Congregationalists erected their first church in Plainfield village, he moved the cabin northeast to a site farther within his farm property. He then erected a larger, one-and-a-half-story central-chimney house attached to the cabin. Notably archaic in its framing, it has a prominent exterior end girt, a feature more common in the Connecticut of Kinne's youth. In the 1850s, his son, Chester, took over the farm. He removed the house's central chimney, clad its exterior in brick with granite foundation facing, and added a new front entrance with sidelights. This type of remodeling was evidently popular locally, as there are several dozen similar brick-veneered houses in the Cabot, Calais, East Montpelier, Marshfield, and Plainfield area.