With its double-pile, laterally expanded plan and Dutch framing system, the one and one-half story farmhouse typifies the region’s early domestic architecture.  Its main block may date in part to before the Revolutionary War and is undoubtedly no later than the early 1800s.  Despite extensively remodeling in the Victorian era and again in the Colonial Revival mode around the middle of the last century, the house retains some notable early fabric like the beaded clapboards attached with hand-wrought nails visible in the attic, and more may remain intact behind later finishes.

The western, and earliest, portion of the house, with its three first-floor rooms and two fireplaces, conceivably is Kennedy’s dwelling.  Certainly, features like the bead-edged clapboards surviving on what was the original east gable of the western portion of the house, mud and straw nogging in the north wall of the living room and a beaded edge on the visible southwest corner post upstairs are suggestive of an early construction date. As is the hewn-timber common rafter/pegged wind brace framing assemblage present in the east half of the barn. (courtesy of Historic Building Architects, LLC and Dennis Bertland Associates)