About 1870 the one-story gabled area on the west side of the house was altered to make a large bedroom on the second floor over the area and the roof was extended upward to make two full stories with attic above. The room faces the pond. Also a small room was made for a cistern to store a water supply before the days of automatic pumps. Downstairs, in addition to the living room is a sitting room, once used as a dining room with an original fireplace, a small borning room on the front, now used as a den, and the kitchen. The kitchen has five windows and two glass Christian type doors, providing lots of morning and afternoon sunlight with open views. The kitchen was thoroughly done over in 1961 without changing its essential appearance, pine paneled and with a brick wall for oven and small hearth and new pine cabinets. A new subfloor was laid and the original wide pine boards restored to their pristine natural color and relaid. The floor and subfloors throughout the house were made of thick wide white pine boards of the 1760 era. For generations they were covered with many layers of dark green paint. The paint did help to preserve their surface. It has been a project of mine over several years to remove the paint and restore them to their natural warm golden color. At some time earlier in the life of the house, probably before the 1850’s, a small ell was brought down from their neighbor’s house to the north, as recounted earlier. This had a dirt floor and was used partly for a woodshed and storage area. It has now been made into a bathroom, utility room and area with closets, with outside door north to the barn. A little more than two hundred years later the house, with its alterations is now basically the same as it was in its first decades, a tribute to the good workmanship of its builders and their materials. Its beautiful setting on a rise of ground has been enhanced by the planting over many years of a variety of trees by the Burgess family. In fact the house has outlasted many of the first trees, such as a huge apple tree outside the kitchen door, once as high as the house. There is a tall catalpa between the house, planted by Mary Burgess, which is covered in July with white blossoms. There is a tamarack or larch tree, very tall now, a tree which the settlers called a candle tree, for when its leaves become yellow after a frost the setting sun shining through it gives it the appearance of a lighted candle. This tree is unusual in that it is a deciduous conifer. In the spring it has tiny ruby blossoms that grow into small brown cones. It drops its needles after frost.