Inside Roxbury’s Dillaway-Thomas House, an archeological approach to restoration lays bare a succession of styles

Inside Roxbury’s Dillaway-Thomas House, an archeological approach to restoration lays bare a succession of styles

Inside Roxbury’s Dillaway-Thomas House, an archeological approach to restoration lays bare a succession of styles

By Robert Campbell

GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

The story of anyone’s house. They started with not enough money and just added things as they could afford to. “

Robert Olson, a Boston architect, isn’t talking about your house or mine. He’s describing what’s believed to be the oldest surviving house in Roxbury, the Dillaway Thomas House of 1750. 

The house was a wreck, a burned-out hulk, until recently. But it’s now alive again. It’s a Heritage Center, funded by the Commonwealth. It is host to community meetings and school groups and exhibits, many of them on black issues and history. And it preserves and displays the history of the Roxbury community in documents and exhibits. But its most remarkable display is itself. 

Olson did the restoration. He preserved what hadn’t burned and recreated what had, then added a new library wing behind the house. But he did something else that is much more surprising. He converted the old house into what can best be described as an archeological dig. He literally dug into its walls, floors and ceilings to expose a hidden past. 

Chunks of the interior are carved away as you might peel the covering from a mummy, revealing older layers of construction beneath them -sometimes several such layers, going all the way back to the 1750s. In one place, where a Federal mantel of the 1790s was attached over a Georgian mantel of the 1750s, Olson has hinged the newer mantel so you can fold it back like a piano cover and see the old one behind – still with its original paint on it.

You can duck into the kitchen fireplace and look up the chimney, which is spotlighted so you can see it all the way up. It’s 1750s. You can see where, in the 19th century, someone changed the shape of a wood post to allow new curving plaster to cover it. You can compare old hand-split wood laths in one place with sawn versions in another.

“The idea of a ‘dig’ just evolved as we worked,” says Olson. ”When the house burned in 1979, layers of old construction were exposed, things no one had seen in centuries. Along with our consultants and the presentation agencies, we decided to use the house as a lesson about how things get built and change over time.“

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