Zedekiah Drury House
About This Tour
This bridal chamber is skillfully stenciled with a variety of heart and flower motifs. It is attributed to the stenciler Moses Eaton, Jr., who chose to paint green and red designs against a gray background.
The Zedekiah Drury House in Temple, New Hampshire is a classic New England center-chimney cape with several additions.
The Zedekiah Drury House
Members of the Drury family were early residents of the town of Temple, New Hampshire. In the mid-eighteenth century, Zedekiah Drury (1716–ca. 1790) purchased this property and constructed a house (no longer standing) where Temple’s first town meeting was held in 1768. This well-preserved cape, the second house on the property, was built ca. 1807 and the interior was stenciled sometime later. By 1858, this second Drury House was owned by the Jewett family, who ran a coffin business and even manufactured them here.
A stenciled oakleaf is a motif commonly associated with Eaton and is found in his stencil kit. The second color element,red in this example, is occasionally a heart rather than the geometric design found here.
About the Artist
The nature of stencil art — an art form that is based on replication, and thus inherently easy to copy — makes it difficult to definitively identify the artist without a signature. Temple is not far away from Hancock, New Hampshire, the home of the Eaton family. Moses Eaton, Sr. (1753–1833) and Moses Eaton, Jr. (1796–1886) were active stencilers who painted many walls throughout New Hampshire and Maine — a cluster of which are located in Temple.
In the early twentieth century, Eaton researcher and author of Early American Wall Stencils, Janet Waring, was given Moses Eaton, Jr.’s stencil kit after it was found by his descendants in his Harrisville, New Hampshire home. The stencils now reside in the collections of Historic New England and can be viewed online. This discovery allows scholars today to compare painted designs with stencils from his kit in efforts to formulate an attribution. It is important to note that all of the motifs found in the Zedekiah Drury House match the stencils found in the stencil kit of Moses Eaton, Jr. As a result, it is likely that it was Moses Eaton, Jr. who painted these walls.
This basket-and-flowers element was painted in two colors, using a separate stencil for each color. These stencils are found in the Eaton stencil kit, now in the collections of Historic New England.
The well-preserved bedchamber has an original chair rail, fireplace surround, and chimney cupboards. The stenciled decorations cover the entire surface of the walls.
At one time, the door, mantelpiece, and chimney cupboard door were grained to resemble natural wood. These elements have since been painted over.
This stenciled design is found in the Eaton stencil kit and was used on many walls attributed to Moses Eaton, Jr.
In general, the room follows a standard layout of folk art stenciling. There are three horizontal borders: the frieze, the chair rail border, and the baseboard border. A vertical green border divides the walls into panels. Geometric and leafy fillers were then painted to fill in the space in between the vertical borders.
A close inspection of this wall helps provide insight as to whom this room might have belonged. The stenciled heart within the acanthus leaf ceiling border, or frieze, was a motif typically used only within the decorative scheme of a bridal bedchamber. Other motifs within the room also serve as a form of well-wishes, including the overmantel’s basket of flowers symbolizing friendship, and the weeping willows signifying long life.
Compare this stenciled room to the bridal chamber of the Colburn House, also in Temple. How might they differ? At first glance, their designs look exactly the same. A closer examination, however, reveals that there are many differences. For example, while both walls have vertical borders with angled lines in green and a rosebud horizontal border, the friezes are unique to each house. The artist even embellished some filler stencils differently; he placed a red heart in the middle of a leafy circle in the Colburn House but painted a pointed red circle within the same stenciled shape in the Drury House. These distinctions demonstrate that, while the artist used many of the same stencils, he found ways to make each design unique as he cleverly worked with the architectural elements of the room before him.
About the Art
Close-up view of a stenciled willow tree. This example is unusual as the trunk and limbs are stenciled, while the foliage is stippled.
This fully stenciled wall shows the use of uprights to divide the wall into panels, much like rolls of wallpaper.