Keeping Room

Here is the Keeping Room. See the small, cast iron doors on the right of the fireplace? They are still operable and a nice place to bake bread, a pizza or keep food hot. Note the wrought iron hooks in the beams where the cook would hang herbs to dry in front of a roaring fire. The wood box to the right was built by a crafty visitor to the house one winter, Michael Goelet, with his wife, Hallie and their daughter Anne in 1970. Ann Marie Maguire says, "Under the disintegrating plaster and lathe in the keeping room lurked an original beaded paneling wall, painted with the old brick dust and buttermilk paint."