Joy Homestead

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In 1917 these too, were relinquished and in 1918 the bodies of the Joys were removed to other resting places.

In 1921 Albertus Colvin purchased the Joy Homestead and in 1959 it became the property of the Cranston Historical Society, a typical 18th century house, the home for three generations of typical 18th and 19th century people, people struggling to make a living, making good and starting the next generation off with a heritage of something a little better each than they had lived.


No event of great historical importance took place here. George Washington never slept here. Lafayette, if he passed this way did not single it, or its inhabitants, out of special attention to add to its glamour in the coming years, but the Joy Homestead, restored, is an honest, a typical example of 18th century construction and 18th and 19th century life so far as we can make out.


From their inventories we know their live stock, their crops, their tools and the kind of furniture they used. This will all be a great help. The gambrel roofed house of ten rooms has many interesting features to be preserved. There is the deep cellar where the farm products could be preserved below the frost line. The walls are of field stone cemented in places. The wooden cradle on which the great central chimney rests is plainly visible. The cellar stairs are the open stairs of that era, steep and narrow.


A center front door opens into a tiny hall the width of the door. On either side are the parlor to the right and the old keeping to the left. Straight ahead as one opens the door is the stairway to the second floor, accommodated in the remaining space between the front door and the central chimney. The space is small which necessitates a turn to the right in a step or two and the risers are high and the treads narrow with pie shaped treads at the turn. No door shuts off this staircase as occurs in some houses of this type, but a door to the right of the stairs gives entrance to the cellar.


The central chimney behind this stairway provides three fireplaces on the first floor, one in each of the two front rooms and one in the room at the back of the house. That in the keeping house a brick oven with ash pit below. The hearth is stone and the mantle utilitarian.


Opposite this fireplace in the parlor is another with a more pretentious mantle, dentil trimmed, each square dentil pegged on with a tiny wooden peg. The parlor has an open cupboard with shelves for the display of china and family treasures.