A term usually applied to colonial buildings constructed in America by English immigrants to the New World; often classified according to region in America. In early colonial New England, the typical house was timber-framed with hewn-and-pegged joints; exterior walls were sometimes covered with hard plaster, then clad with clapboard or weatherboards. Unpretentious houses commonly had a single room with a loft space above; more prosperous houses, often one and a half or two stories high and one or two rooms deep, usually were built on the hall-and-parlor plan, with one room on each side of an interior wall containing a massive, centrally located fireplace and a large high chimney; on the facade, drops were often suspended from the underside of an overhanging second floor. Many of these early houses had a steeply pitched gable roof and a side gable, or a hipped roof with eaves having no significant overhang; unglazed window openings were covered with solid-wood shutters, later replaced by narrow casement windows having small quarrels; heavy battened doors. Also see saltbox house, stone ender, whale house. Occasionally called Early Colonial architecture. In the colonial South and along the mid- Atlantic coast, single-room houses of the early settlers were often similar to the one-room plan houses in New England, with a clay-and-sticks chimney. Later, as the houses became larger, they usually followed a hall-and-parlor plan or a center-hall plan. Exterior walls were usually brick, with hand-split shingles on the roof; a massive decorative brick or stone exterior chimney at one or both gabled end walls, with corbeled chimney caps. Pent roofs were common in
the mid-Atlantic area. For colonial architecture constructed by immigrants other than the
English, see Dutch Colonial architecture, French Colonial architecture, German Colonial
architecture, Spanish Colonial architecture.