connected farm
The connected farm – a rambling complex of attached houses, barns, and animal sheds – is indigenous to northern New England. The supplementary buildings were usually added one by one over time, often as frugal Yankee farmers moved older, obsolete outbuildings from elsewhere on their property closer to the main house for reuse. While the frigid winters of the region might explain this folk type, connected farms were not common until the mid-1800s and never appeared in other regions of the country that get just as cold as the Northeast. Rather, the connected farm probably developed in response to economic needs. As the 19th century progressed, the poor New England soil couldn’t support the more progressive, large-scale family farms with cottage industries, such as needlecrafts and canning, and adopted a convenient arrangement of buildings to serve agriculture and home industry under the same roof. (Carley, 1994)