Gambrel Roof

A gambrel roof is an architectural feature frequently cited in the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. A roof with a steeply sloping section below a section with a gentler slope--think of the profile of the classic barn--the style is characteristic of 17th and 18th century architecture, an era for which Lovecraft had a great fondness.

In Lovecraft[]

"The Unnamable" (1923):

The crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of the witch-haunted old town [of Arkham] that stretched around, all combined to rouse my spirit in defence of my work....

"The Festival" (1923):

I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars.

"The Ghost-Eater" (1924, with C. M. Eddy, Jr.)

“Then he sent to Mayfair[, Maine] for the Count—his name was Feodor Tchernevsky and he had bought the old gambrel-roofed Fowler place up State Street—to come out and see him...."

"He" (1925):

About me in my exhaustion I could see [in New York City] only strange walls and windows and old gambrel roofs.

"The Silver Key" (1926):

Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor.... [Coming upon the old Carter place outside Arkham:] And dogs barked as the yellow light of small-paned windows shone out at the farther turn, and the Pleiades twinkled across the open knoll where a great gambrel roof stood black against the dim west.

"The Strange High House in the Mist" (1926):

Granny Orne, whose tiny gambrel-roofed abode in Ship Street [in Kingsport] is all covered with moss and ivy, croaked over something her grandmother had heard at second-hand.... They do not wish the souls of their young men to leave the pleasant hearths and gambrel-roofed taverns of old Kingsport, nor do they wish the laughter and song in that high rocky place to grow louder.

"Pickman's Model" (1926):

I don’t believe there were three houses in sight that hadn’t been standing in Cotton Mather’s time—certainly I glimpsed at least two with an overhang, and once I thought I saw a peaked roof-line of the almost forgotten pre-gambrel type, though antiquarians tell us there are none left in Boston.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927):

At the last, he was very certain, the seeker would long only for the early remembered scenes; the glow of Beacon Hill at evening, the tall steeples and winding hill streets of quaint Kingsport, the hoary gambrel roofs of ancient and witch-haunted Arkham, and the blessed miles of meads and valleys where stone walls rambled and white farmhouse gables peeped out from bowers of verdure.... Arkham is there, with its moss-grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it; and antediluvian Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables, and the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.

"The Colour Out of Space" (1927):

On the gentler slopes [west of Arkham] there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927):

He would hesitate gingerly down vertical Jenckes Street [in Providence] with its bank walls and colonial gables to the shady Benefit Street corner, where before him was a wooden antique with an Ionic-pilastered pair of doorways, and beside him a prehistoric gambrel-roofer with a bit of primal farmyard remaining, and the great Judge Durfee house with its fallen vestiges of Georgian grandeur....
Great Bridge idlers likewise had much to say of [Joseph] Curwen’s town house in Olney Court; not so much the fine new one built in 1761, when the man must have been nearly a century old, but the first low gambrel-roofed one with the windowless attic and shingled sides, whose timbers he took the peculiar precaution of burning after its demolition....
At the Essex Institute [in Salem], which was well known to him from former sojourns in the glamorous old town of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs, he was very kindly received, and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen data.

"The Dunwich Horror" (1928):

Across a covered bridge [in Dunwich] one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region.... Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931):

The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables [in Innsmouth] conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in.... Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church.

"The Dreams in the Witch-House" (1932):

He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the Province.

"Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (1932-33):

In Carter’s boyhood the venerable gambrel-roofed homestead [outside Arkham] was still standing and tenanted by his great-uncle Christopher.... That evening little Randolph ate supper with Uncle Chris and Aunt Martha in the old gambrel-roofed farmhouse.

"The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933):

What lay behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which we lived—witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.