page_title: Nationality Rooms
section_title: Early American
hierarchical_section_title: Nationality Rooms / Classrooms / Early American
caption_attribution_description: Early American Room, Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 75001608
context_page_description: The Nationality Rooms are a collection of 31 classrooms in the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning depicting and donated by the national and ethnic groups that helped build the city of Pittsburgh. The rooms are designated as a Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation historical landmark and are located on the 1st and 3rd floors of the Cathedral of Learning, itself a national historic landmark, on the University of Pittsburgh's main campus in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Although of museum caliber, 29 of the 31 rooms are regularly used as functional classrooms that are utilized daily by University of Pittsburgh faculty and students, while the other two are mostly used as display rooms viewed through glass doors and are otherwise utilized primarily for special events and can only be explored via special guided tour. The Nationality Rooms also serve in a vigorous program of intercultural involvement and exchange in which the original organizing committees for the individual rooms remain as participants and includes a program of annual student scholarship to facilitate study abroad.
context_section_description: The Early American Room is one of two display rooms not used as a functional classroom, although it is opened for guided tours.  The room was commissioned by longtime University Pittsburgh trustee George Hubbard Clapp, a descendant nine generations removed from Roger Clapp, an English captain who sailed into the New England port of Hull on May 30, 1630. The kitchen-living room of the early colonists was chosen to portray the sturdy simplicity of life in America during the 1650s. The room's focus is a nine-foot fireplace constructed from 200-year-old handmade bricks with "fixings" of a log hook, heavy iron kettles, a spider, gridiron, longhandled waffle iron, bread shovel, skewers, ladles, and forks. A small recess in the brick wall served to bake bread. A tapered pole swings out from the end of the fireplace to be used for drying laundry or to hang a quilt to keep the cold draft from those gathered near the fire. Massive hand-hewn pine beams used in the seven-foot-high ceiling and the fireplace were collected after a careful search in Massachusetts. White pine is used for the heavy seminar table, benches, and chairs. Wrought-iron candelabra are hinged with clasps to hold lighting tapers. Other light fixtures are of specially designed pierced tin. The colonial-style windows were designed by glass artist Charles Connick. Decorative items include a collection of 17th- and 18th-century American coins, a working spinning wheel, and a hand-stitched sampler. The small closet between the blackboard and fireplace contains a secret panel and once the concealed latch is discovered, its release causes the wall to swing open, revealing a hidden staircase to the upper loft, which has been furnished as a 19th-century bedroom.  Included in the bedroom is a four-poster rope bed and small cradle, both of which belonged to pianist and composer Ethelbert Nevin. The bedroom also includes several personal items, including an 1878 wedding quilt, which belonged to Waitman Worthington McDaniel and his wife Martha Jane Poe, a distant relative of Edgar Allan Poe and the grandmother of Nationality Director Maxine Bruhns. The room is associated with various stories of unexplained incidents that have resulted in claims that the room is haunted.
caption: The Early American Classroom
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