What is a saltbox house? The long back roof, the lean-to that made it, the central chimney, the 1650–1750 originals of New England, the Newfoundland saltbox and the tax myth

Architecture · 4 September 2026

A saltbox house is a timber-framed house of New England of about 1650 to 1750 with two storeys at the front and one at the back, so that its gable roof is asymmetrical, short and steep on the front slope and long and low on the back, sweeping from the ridge almost to the ground; the name is from the wooden box with a sloping lid in which salt was kept by the kitchen fire, and was given in the 19th century. The shape began as a repair: the two-storey hall-and-parlor house of the 1600s, with its central chimney, gained a lean-to across the back for a kitchen, a buttery and a bedroom, its roof continuing the main roof down at a lower pitch, and by 1700 the lean-to was built with the house as one frame, the "integral saltbox", the long roof turned to the north wind; the type spread through Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire, went to Newfoundland with the fishermen as a different house of the same name, was revived in the 1930s and again in the 1970s, and is the house the word "Colonial" first calls to mind. Below: the shape and the name, how the lean-to made it, the chimney and the plan, the frame and the walls, the originals and where to see them, the Newfoundland saltbox, the revivals, the differences from the Cape and the Colonial, and the tax myth, with the other New England houses in what is a Cape Cod house and the oldest survivors in the oldest buildings in America.

The shape and the name

From the side, a saltbox is a triangle with one long side: the ridge of the roof is well forward of the centre of the house, the front slope drops two storeys' worth in a short steep run, and the back slope runs down over the one-storey rear at a shallower angle, often reaching to a height a man can touch; from the front the house is an ordinary two-storey Colonial of five bays with a central door and a central chimney, and the profile shows only from the side or the back. The salt box was a wooden box with a lid that sloped, hung on the wall by the hearth to keep the salt dry, and the resemblance gave the house its name sometime in the 1800s, by which time no one was building them; in Connecticut the shape was also called a "catslide" roof, the word the South uses for any roof that continues down over a lean-to, and in England, where the form exists in the cottages of Kent and Essex the settlers came from, it has no name at all. Saltbox house.

How the lean-to made it

• The hall-and-parlor house. The English settlers of the 1630s built two-room houses of one storey, and by the 1650s the better ones had two storeys: a hall for cooking, eating and living and a parlor for the best bed and the guests, either side of a huge central chimney with a fireplace in each room, a tiny entry and a winding stair against the chimney, and two chambers above; the frame of oak, cut and pegged, the walls of clapboard over wattle or brick nogging, the roof of shingles, the windows small casements.
• The lean-to. As families grew and the kitchen moved out of the hall, a lean-to was added across the back, one storey, under a roof that continued the main roof down, holding the new kitchen with its own fireplace built against the back of the chimney, a buttery or dairy on one side and a "borning room" or bedroom for the old or the sick on the other, with a loft above for storage; the lean-to's roof was lower-pitched than the main roof, so the profile shows a kink at the eave line of the old house.
• The integral saltbox. By about 1690 builders framed the lean-to with the house from the start, with a continuous roof from the ridge to the back eave at one pitch and no kink, and a chimney with three fireplaces built at once; this is the classic saltbox, of 1690 to 1750, five bays wide and two rooms deep on the ground floor, with the long roof faced north so that the snow slid off it and the wind went over.
• The end. After 1750 the Georgian house with two full storeys front and back, a central hall and chimneys at the ends replaced it, and the saltbox was a farmhouse of the past by the Revolution.

The chimney, the plan and the frame

The central chimney is the saltbox's engine: a mass of brick or stone 3 m square at the base, with three or four fireplaces opening from it, the hall's for cooking before the lean-to and the kitchen's after, with its bake oven in the back wall, the parlor's, and the chambers' above, sharing one stack so that all the heat stayed in the middle of the house and the outside walls could be thin; the entry in front of it is a metre deep, with the stair turning up around the chimney in three flights, and the front door opens straight onto it. The frame is oak, with corner posts that flare at the top, "gunstock" posts, to carry the girts and plates, summer beams across the ceilings of the hall and parlor, and the whole cut and marked on the ground and raised by the neighbours in a day; the walls are studs with clapboards outside and plaster on riven lath inside, the roof rafters without a ridge beam, pegged at the top, and the shingles of cedar or pine. The windows of the 1600s were casements of diamond panes and were replaced by sash windows of small squares after 1720, which is what the surviving houses show; the clapboards were left to weather or painted with red ochre, the "Indian red" of the old farmhouses, and white paint came with the Revolution.

The originals and where to see them

• Hoxie House, Sandwich, Massachusetts (about 1675). Often called the oldest house on Cape Cod, a saltbox with a lean-to added, restored to the 1600s and open in summer.
• Josiah Day House, West Springfield, Massachusetts (1754). The oldest brick saltbox in the country, a museum.
• Boardman House, Saugus, Massachusetts (1692). An integral saltbox almost untouched, of Historic New England, with its lean-to of 1696.
• Ephraim Hawley House, Trumbull, Connecticut (about 1690), and the saltboxes of Guilford, Madison and the Connecticut shore, where the type is thickest.
• Comfort Starr House, Guilford (1645–46). One of the oldest houses in Connecticut, with a lean-to.
• Fairbanks House, Dedham (1637–41). The oldest timber house in America, with lean-tos and wings added; the saltbox profile on one side.
• Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts. The Fenno House and others moved and restored, with the working kitchens.
• Thomas Lee House, East Lyme, Connecticut (about 1660), the Stanley-Whitman House in Farmington (1720), the Ogden House in Fairfield (1750), the Hempsted House in New London (1678), Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the Sherburne House there (1695).

The Newfoundland saltbox

In the fishing outports of Newfoundland the "saltbox" is a different house that took the same name in the 20th century: a two-storey wooden house of the 1800s and early 1900s, square or rectangular, with a flat or very shallow roof, no eaves, clapboards painted in bright colours, and a small porch, built by the fishermen from ship timber on the rocks above the harbour and lived in with the family in the upper floor and the "linhay", a lean-to at the back, for the kitchen; the Newfoundland saltbox has the New England lean-to and none of the roof, and there are thousands in the outports and in St John's "Jellybean Row", where the colours are the tourist picture. The British "saltbox" of the same period, in Bristol and the West Country, is a New England saltbox brought back by trade; the Bermudan and Nova Scotian houses have the shape too.

The revivals and the modern saltbox

The Colonial Revival of 1900–40 built saltboxes in the suburbs of Connecticut and Massachusetts as the most "colonial" of the colonial houses, with the long roof at the back and a modern plan inside; Royal Barry Wills drew them alongside his Capes, and the plan books of the 1930s and the FHA offered "saltbox Colonials" with a garage in the lean-to. In the 1970s the saltbox came back as a form for solar houses, since a long roof facing south holds a large solar collector and a short north wall loses little heat, which is the settlers' logic reversed, and as the shape of the vacation house and the "contemporary saltbox" of the New England ski towns, with the roof and no chimney; the modern saltbox is a shed roof with a step, and the profile is what survives.

Saltbox, Cape, Colonial, garrison

• Cape Cod. One and a half storeys with a symmetrical roof and a central chimney; a Cape with a lean-to has a small saltbox profile at one storey, and the two are cousins from the same frame.
• Colonial, or Georgian. Two full storeys front and back under a symmetrical roof, with a central hall and end chimneys after 1750; a saltbox is the Colonial's older brother, with the back cut down and the chimney in the middle.
• Garrison. The two-storey house of the 1600s whose upper floor overhangs the lower by 30 cm on the front, the "jetty" of Tudor England; some saltboxes are garrisons in front, and the 1950s revival called any overhang a garrison.
• Catslide. The Southern name for the saltbox roof, on the brick houses of Virginia and the Carolinas of the 1700s, and for any roof extended over a lean-to.
• New England farmhouse. The connected "big house, little house, back house, barn" of the 1800s, in which the saltbox's lean-to grew into a chain of buildings to the barn.

Versions and theories

• The tax myth. The story is that Queen Anne taxed two-storey houses, or houses by their number of storeys, and that New Englanders built the saltbox, one storey at the back, to be assessed as a one-storey house; there was no such tax, in England or the colonies, and the lean-to was for the kitchen and the wind. The same story is told of the mansard roof and the closet, and is as false.
• The roof faces north for the wind. True of the integral saltboxes, whose builders turned the long roof to the weather and the front to the south and the road; the added lean-tos went where the yard was.
• Saltboxes are the oldest American houses. The hall-and-parlor houses they grew from are, of the 1630s and 40s; the saltbox as a type is of about 1690, and the oldest surviving are lean-to additions of the 1670s.
• The name is colonial. It is 19th-century; the settlers called the house a house and the lean-to a lean-to or "linter".
• Saltboxes were painted white. They were unpainted or red ochre; white lead paint became common after 1780, and the white saltbox is a Colonial Revival picture.
• The chimney was for warmth. For warmth, cooking and the frame, which was built around it; the fireplaces of a saltbox burned 30 to 40 cords of wood a year and heated the rooms badly, and the Rumford fireplace and the stove of the 1790s were the answer.

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