Drumnahunshin Farmhouse

Location and construction

Built around the early 1830s, the farmhouse was originally a single-storey, two-roomed house with a thatched roof and earthen floors. A road divided the site; on one side the farmhouse and several outhouses and on the other side a cow byre and a stable. It is presented at the museum in this way. Sometime after the 1911 census the farmhouse was substantially improved as the family’s fortunes progressed – it was 'raised and slated’, creating three bedrooms upstairs, and it was also expanded lengthwise to provide a dining room on the ground floor (the existing ground floor bedroom was turned into a parlour). Despite these improvements, neither an electricity supply nor a water supply were ever installed in the farmhouse.

Farmhouse interior

Drumnahunshin is a comfortable well-furnished house with mock panelling, decorative fireplace surrounds and good mahogany furniture in the parlour and dining room. The bedrooms are plainly furnished with a mixture of brass and iron or wooden bedsteads and two substantial, well-made cupboard ‘clothes presses’ or wardrobes. In the kitchen, a cast-iron, coal-fired, ‘American’ stove is placed into the wide hearth alcove, a typical feature of many Ulster farm kitchens in the early 20th century. In earlier times this space housed an open turf fire, lit directly onto the hearth floor. One side of hearth had an upright, iron, chimney crane, a vertical crook bar and pot hooks.

A reminder of this earlier arrangement is the hand-operated, cast-iron fan bellows partly hidden in the floor close to the hearth. The metal casing contained a rotary fan which, when operated, directed a draught of air at floor level towards the turf fire which helped to keep the fire alight. Often a narrow draught channel was dug into the kitchen floor leading to the hearth fire. Connecting directly into the parlour is the cart shed which has a large rear window. The connecting door and window suggests that this may have been originally intended to be an extension of the dwelling. The house has no toilet or bathroom – the privy was in the field by the stable.

The Patterson family

Drumnahunshin was the home of the Patterson family, a local farming family, over several generations. The family were Presbyterian and were members of Kingsmills Presbyterian Church. The Patterson family were initially tenant farmers. They were tenants of the Acheson family, the Earls of Gosford. The Patterson family later purchased their land under Land Purchase Acts of late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Patterson line can be traced back to at least the early 1800s with James Patterson. He was succeeded by his son Henry Patterson, followed by Henry’s son John. John married Esther Robb in 1874. They went on to have six children, four of whom survived into adulthood. Esther is believed to have been married previously, though her 1874 marriage record records her as a spinster. She purportedly had at least one child (William James Gordon) through her first marriage, who immigrated to Chicago and became a mechanical engineer. John and Esther’s youngest surviving child Margaret, or Maggie as she was known in the family circle, was the last person to live in the house. Maggie’s American niece, Mrs. Ester Gay Kocmich, inherited the farmhouse from her via her father David when she died.