page_title: Marblehead Colonial Raised House
section_title: Architecture and construction
hierarchical_section_title: Marblehead Colonial Raised House / Architecture and construction
caption_attribution_description: English: Front Street, Marblehead, MA; from a 1914 postcard.
context_page_description: The Marblehead Summer House is a house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, in the United States.
  There is evidence of it having been constructed as a one-storey building in 1717, and it was later converted to become an early three-storey building.
context_section_description: There is evidence that the existing third story of the house was the original one-story structure on the property, built around 1717.  Forty years earlier than the existing first and second stories of the house were constructed underneath it as it was lifted (raised) from the ground.  
  Like many other of houses built in the area at the time, the roofs on this colonial post-and-beam was much more complex than modern roofs made with trusses, plywood and asphalt shingles.  It was made with a superstructure of large, hand-hewed timbers joined together with long wooden spikes, purlins connected to the timbers, boards nailed on top of the purlins, and a covering of hundreds or thousands of handmade wooden shake shingles.  This was a lengthy, difficult process which required a great deal of materials.  Another reason it was preferable to raise the structure may have been that the posts in the existing structure could not be trusted to bear the weight of a second story built on top of it,  especially if two new stories were to be added, as they appear to have been in this case, at what was once known as the “Samuel Glover Mansion”, now the “Marblehead Summer House”, at 27 Front Street, Marblehead, Massachusetts.:
caption: View from a 1914 postcard
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