Thomas Lee House: Oldest Wood-Frame House in Connecticut

The Thomas Lee House in East Lyme, built between sixteen sixty and sixteen sixty-four, is widely considered the oldest surviving wood-frame house in Connecticut and one of the oldest in New England. Thomas Lee was a prosperous farmer and town official who built this two-story saltbox on land in the area where his family had settled. The house is constructed in the medieval English tradition, with massive hand-hewn oak timbers, small casement windows, and a steeply pitched roof that drops nearly to the ground in back.

It stayed in the Lee family for generations, and in nineteen fourteen preservation groups bought it to save it from demolition. Stepping inside is a direct encounter with the material world of seventeenth-century Connecticut: low ceilings, enormous cooking hearth, and floors worn smooth by three and a half centuries of daily life.