Saltbox Houses in Massachusetts

What is a Saltbox?

The Saltbox is one of the oldest house shapes in America, born in colonial New England in the late 1600s. It is named for the wooden boxes that held table salt: tall in front, low in back, with a long sloping lid. The house has the same outline, with two full stories facing the street and the back roof sweeping down in one long line to a low wall. Most were not planned that way. They began as a smaller first-period house, the kind that grew into the original Cape, and a family added a lean-to across the back for a kitchen and bedroom. By the 1690s carpenters were building them from scratch.

Why it’s special

A Saltbox tells the story of how a colonial family lived and grew. Before furnaces, the great central chimney was the kitchen, the heat, and the gathering place. These are some of the oldest standing houses in the country. The Whipple House in Ipswich, begun in 1677, grew into a Saltbox by about 1700 and is now a museum; the Boardman House in Saugus (1692) and Browne House in Watertown (1698) are nearly as old. A real one is roughly three hundred years old and very rare.

What it’s like to live in one

A Saltbox feels gathered and warm: modest rooms, low ceilings, soft light through small old windows. They cluster where colonial New England settled first. Essex County has the densest supply, in Ipswich, Newbury, Rowley, and Topsfield, and the South Shore (Hingham, Marshfield, Duxbury) and Plymouth area have their own, often later and plainer. Expect to update the heating, wiring, and plumbing, and to budget for the care an old house asks for.

Is it the real thing?

Agents use “Saltbox” loosely for almost any colonial with a back addition. A genuine original has the long back roof and a big chimney centered in the oldest part of the house. Revival Saltboxes, built from the 1920s on to copy the look, give themselves away with a chimney at the end wall and larger, more uniform windows. For a documented classification the house must appear in MACRIS, Historic Ipswich’s First Period census, or Historic New England records, or carry a build date in the colonial range. Look-alikes we mark as claimed and keep separate.