09/20/2026
Thomas Hubka spent years documenting the connected farmsteads of Maine and New Hampshire and found the same four part chain repeated on thousands of properties, always in the same order: big house, little house, back house, barn. ๐๏ธ
The big house was the formal front, two stories, with the parlor nobody used. The little house was the kitchen ell where the family actually lived. The back house held the woodshed, the privy and the workshop. The barn was the barn. All four were joined roof to roof so a farmer could walk from the breakfast table to the cows in February without putting on a coat.
Outsiders assume it was built that way for warmth, and that is only half right. Hubka found most of these farms were assembled between 1800 and 1880 by dragging existing buildings across the yard on rollers behind oxen teams, then framing a connector between them. Nothing got torn down. A shed from your father's time became your back house. That is the frugality showing through. Wood was not free, labor was not free, and a sound building was worth more moved than burned.
The trade was fire. One chimney fire took the entire chain, house, shed, barn, animals and hay together. Insurance agents hated them. Plenty of families lost everything in a single night, which is why you still see lone barns standing in Maine fields with nothing attached anymore.
If you grew up in a connected farmhouse, what was the back house actually being used for by then? ๐
