James House Museum

The James House is the first-period survivor — Benjamin James's 1723 farmhouse on the Hampton salt meadows, the weaver's apprentice who married the tailor's daughter and built a house so fine it took three hundred years to understand it. The three-post bent framing, the center chimney plan that became New England's standard — Garvin called it the most important first-period house in the state, a time capsule that kept the seventeenth-century craftsman's workshop intact.

The house that predates the Revolution has its ghosts too — the hymnal that fell through the ceiling hole in 2001, the door slams and the laugh the paranormal team recorded, the visions in the windows the neighbors report. Three hundred years of the James family and the salt-marsh farm, the weaver's prosperity preserved in the frame that taught the region how to build — the oldest house type in New Hampshire, still standing on the Drakeside.

The file keeps the James House: the 1723 first-period frame, the James family, the hymnal through the ceiling, and the house that taught New England to build.

The James House is the archive's first-period file — the 1723 weaver's house and the ghosts in the frame.