To continue the tour, please walk through the doorway on the right end of the room into the pantry.
The area in which you are now standing was part of the addition put on the house by the Gammells, and while Marsden Perry lived here, he transformed this small space into a butler’s pantry, which remains today much as he had it. The gallery space, which we’ll enter into next, used to be Perry’s white-tiled kitchen. Like his state of the art bathrooms upstairs, Perry made sure to have the most modern culinary amenities. He installed an early GE refrigerator and gas-powered warming trays behind those lower cabinets to your right.
Look into the glass-front cabinets that surround you. The sets of china displayed in the cabinets are pieces from the Historical Society’s collection. The blue and white sets displayed in front of you were both owned by John Brown and his family. One interesting piece in this room is the water buffalo’s head soup tureen displayed in the corner of the cabinets. It was used by opening the head and filling it with hot soup; steam would flow out of the bull’s nostrils and mouth when the soup was piping hot.
