Was there an oven in the kitchen at Hammond-Harwood House when it was built in the 1770s? This is a question frequently asked by visitors to the museum, and it’s also a hot topic for researchers and preservationists who work on colonial-era houses. There’s no oven at Hammond-Harwood House now, and photos of the kitchen from the 1950s on do not show an oven from its earlier days as a museum.
The narrative that the docents giving tours provide is that the original kitchen at HHH did not have an oven and that instead the ovens at the Chase House annex (the small brick house facing King George Street) served as community ovens. While some items could be “baked” in an iron kettle in the HHH hearth, other baking would be done at the community ovens, with an enslaved woman walking across the street with the prepared dough or batter for baking in the Chase oven.
However, a photograph from the late 1930s of the HHH kitchen shows a mysterious brick contraption to the right of the hearth – an oven. This follows the period when St. John’s College owned the house, which was after the death of the last Harwood sister in 1925. In the present, the remnants of a flue are visible inside the hearth on the right wall of the lower chimney – this would have connected to the brick oven on that side of the hearth. The brick oven is not present in later photos of the kitchen – it must have been removed at some point during a renovation. We are looking through our files to find out when.
Researchers at Colonial Williamsburg worked on the same question about the presence of an oven at the Governor’s Palace. A report from 1956 notes: Only one documentary reference to an oven was found, the date of which was 1779 and it is an item in Humphry Harwood’s ledger which simply records repairing oven for Palace. The interpretation of the kitchen was handicapped by the absence of baking facilities and in 1954 the Administrative Officers directed Research and Architecture to make a further study of baking at the Palace and offer recommendations. This study resulted in the recommendation that an oven similar to that reconstructed in the south room of Raleigh Tavern Kitchen be built; the work was accomplished in 1955. The oven built at Williamsburg is similar in design to that in the old HHH photograph.
