Everts, Caleb, House

The Caleb Everts House is architecturally significant as an intact nineteenth-century farmstead that includes a variety of farm buildings as well as a large and architecturally interesting Greek Revival house. It is historically significant for its long associations with a pioneer Oakland County family. Caleb Everts purchased this farm in 1840 after immigrating from New York State. After living in a log cabin on the site for two years, he added a frame wing, which may still be extant as part of an outbuilding. The family prospered and in 1856 the present house was built. By the 1870's Everts owned 1165 acres in Michigan. He had seven children, of which six survived. The property passed to his son Caleb who died in 1919. It descended in the Everts family until about 1941 when it was sold to satisfy the debts of William T. Everts who was judged incompetent and residing at a state mental institution at the time. The simple Greek Revival house Everts' built reflects his humble origins and the simple tastes of a farmer. There was no attempt when the house was planned to provide for formal spaces or ornamentation. The arrangement of the rooms is straight-forward and functional. Absent is the carefully defined circulation system of halls, stairs and separate rooms necessary for a more formal lifestyle. All of the rooms connect with each other in such a way that it is necessary to pass through the major spaces to reach other parts of the house. The fact that the front door leads directly into the only ornamentally trimmed room in the house, the front living room, perhaps makes a statement on the residential aspirations and living patterns of the Everts. Nowhere in the building is there any attempt at conscious display or pretension. Nevertheless, the house is architecturally significant as a little-altered example of a vernacular Greek Revival dwelling. Taken as a complex, the farmstead is significant for its variety of farm buildings of different periods. Intact, in its unspoiled rural setting, the Everts Farm is a rare surviving nineteenth century farmstead that presents an accurate picture of life in rural Michigan during the mid-nineteenth century.

The Caleb Everts House is located in rural Oakland County about five miles south of the village of Holly in Rose Township at the intersection of Hickory Ridge and Demode roads. The farmstead occupies a tract of approximately twenty acres and is surrounded by cultivated fields and wood lots. Only the 10.06 acre parcel on which the buildings stand is being nominated. The property consists of a large farmhouse, with attached carriage shed, two barns, a grainery, chicken coop, a wagon shed, two silos, a workshop, a stone smoke house, an iron hog scalder with stone fire pit, and a small, partially ruined, wooden storage shed. The farmhouse is a large, rambling, clapboarded, Greek Revival structure with several wings. It was begun in 1856 and had assumed its present form by 1877 when it was pictured in the History of Oakland County by Samuel Durant. It has not been altered on the exterior since that time, with the exception of the loss of the porch roof railing. The exterior of the house is simply finished with a deep entablature and plain pilaster strips on the two-story end-gabled main block. The porch across the front and the south side porch have square posts with banded capitals and pilaster responds. The side porch also has flush-boarded walls. It is likely the wall of the house sheltered by the front porch is also flush-boarded and according to the 1877 drawing may have panelled window aprons, but this cannot be verified until the asphalt shingling is removed. With a few exceptions, the original fenestration throughout the house consists of six-over-six symmetrically-arranged sash/windows. There are half-lunette windows in the end gables and nine-over-six sash windows in the kitchen wing. The original six-panel exterior doors on the front of the house have an unusual configuration of four small panels at the bottom with two long vertical panels above. The same doors are used on the interior of the rooms they open into - the parlor and living room - while throughout rest of the house, exterior and interior, the more typical Greek Revival doors divided into two, long, vertical panels are used. The original wrought-iron latches and bale handles can still be found on most of the doors. The interior is divided into several large rooms per floor with smaller ones opening off them. The floor plan is very informal. There are few hallways and most of the rooms simply open into each other in a random manner. Even the staircase, typically the focal point of a building's floor plan, is relegated to a narrow, enclosed space opening from a back room. There is no newell post, balustrades or architectural articulation. In fact, the house contains none of the usual ornamental features. There are no fireplaces, plaster cornices, ceiling medallions, or built-in cabinet work. Even the door and window casings consist only of flat boards except for the living room which has moulded casings with corner blocks. The house has been so little altered that the kitchen still retains its nineteenth century character. It still has an old cookstove with a wood box built into the horizontal board wainscoting next to it. There are no built-in cupboards. The floor plan has been somewhat altered over the years by the removal of some interior partitions. About 1930 the wall separating the living room and the small southwest bedroom was removed so that the spaces could be combined. Probably about the same time, the partitions separating the second floor front bedroom from the two small rooms at the south end were removed to make one large room. Other alterations include the conversion of the first floor pantry to a bathroom and the enclosure of the small rear porch. In addition to the house, there is a modern barn and silo built about twenty years ago. Next to this barn is a nineteenth century barn with an attached, monitor-roofed, open, wagon shed. The grainery and attached shed (now the chicken coop) both date from the nineteenth century. They are vertical-boarded gable roofed structures with wood shingle roofs. The workshop closest to the house is believed to be the oldest wooden farm building and may pre-date the house. It is a simple, one-story, gable-roofed, clapboarded structure with a wooden shingle roof. The carriage shed adjoins the kitchen wing of the house and was apparently part of the original construction. It is a clapboarded gable-roofed building with eaves returns and old, surface-mounted, sliding doors. It has a dirt floor and a loft above that continues over the kitchen wing. The only other farm structures of significance are the smokehouse, a small field stone structure with a shingled gable-roof, and a large, iron scalding kettle built into a field stone fire-pit.