West Wing (1820-1829)
- Oct 4, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 9
Hyde Hall was built to impress. As it was an English custom to show off the entire house to guests, the service areas in the West Wing were attended to with meticulous detail. This large masonry structure was built between 1820 and 1824. The first floor was used for staff services or offices and the second floor contained bedrooms.
Privy Passage. This small hallway at the southern end of the West Wing gives access to an exterior door just beyond what was a ladies’ outhouse. One room was reserved for family members and guests, the other for female staff.
Still Room. Medicines and perfumes were made here, and because it had a stove with a small oven, it was used to supply breakfast, tea, coffee, and even desserts when the Main Kitchen was busy preparing large dinners. It was drier than the Main and Back Kitchens, so it was also used to store flour, salt, soap, breadstuffs, and cakes. It ceased to function as a kitchen in the 1880s but continued as a storeroom. Its last restoration was a new floor in the 1890s.
China Room. In 1824 the China Room was used as a formal, temporary dining room. When the Dining Room in the Great House was completed in 1833 wooden shelves were added to the walls, and the room was used to store four of the Clarkes’ five dinner services, numerous tea sets, and glassware. In the 1920s a cream separator was placed in the room as some of the shelves were convenient for setting the milk pans. Except for the floor replacement in 2012, the room has not been restored.
Housekeeper’s Room. The first housekeeper at Hyde Hall was Mary Ann Boyler. Her office was just off the Main Kitchen and was where she tracked household expenses, kept expensive foodstuffs and linens, interviewed prospective servants, and reviewed the daily meal plans with the cook. A housekeeper was no longer required by the 20th century, so the room became a pantry.
Main Kitchen. The first Hyde Hall kitchen was a wooden structure built between 1817 and 1819. It stood behind the Stone House and contained a kitchen pantry, butler's pantry, larder, laundry, bake and brew house, and a housekeeper's room. There were five staff bedrooms on the second floor. It burned to the ground in January 1824, just after the Main Kitchen in the West Wing was completed. All the contents were saved.
When it was completed in 1824, the Main Kitchen in the West Wing had a cooking fireplace with two cranes, a stew stove or masonry range with five burners, and a small cast iron cooking stove. Water for the stone sink came from a cistern that collected rainwater in the courtyard and from rain barrels near two exterior doors. The Back Kitchen to the north contained a brick oven, a copper boiler for hot water, and running water from a cistern at the Wash House.
Back Kitchen. In 1832 the West Wing was extended by 30 feet, and a second floor was added to create seven more rooms. The Main Kitchen cooking fireplace was replaced with a massive 2500-pound coal stove, and the Back Kitchen was doubled in size and fitted with a new cooking fireplace and brick oven and a second stone sink. It was used to receive, clean, and prepare all the foodstuffs. It served as a bake house, supplied roasted meat from the open hearth, and was the place to clean pots, pans, and the staff tableware.
Men Servants’ Hall. The last room on the north end of the West Wing is part of the 1832 to 1834 expansion. It served as a workplace for men servants to maintain the lighting devices in the Hall and to clean boots and shoes. It was also a place for the men to gather and relax. A staircase leads to seven staff bedrooms on the second floor.
Servants’ Hall. The Servants' Hall was used as a place for servants to have meals, do small tasks, and to relax. An iron template stove supplied heat as well as hot water for tea or coffee and had a small oven to heat food. The south wall had a board for 12 bells that summoned staff to the respective rooms where they were rang. It became a laundry in the 1890s and a dining room in the 1920s. The original blue paint on the walls and woodwork was restored in 2023.
Maple Stair Hall. This space has doorways to the Main Kitchen, the Great House, the Servants' Hall, and the first floor back passage. The elegant Tiger Maple staircase was built in 1830 and leads to guest bedrooms and the nursery on the second floor.
West Wing Second Floor. When the West Wing was completed in 1824, the southern end contained a guest suite of a bedroom and sitting room and an additional guest bedroom with a doorway to the Maple Stair. A hallway separated the guest rooms from the servant dormitories and the butler’s and housekeeper’s accommodations.
During the West Wing expansion (1832 to 1834), six new servant bedrooms were built over the Men Servants’ Hall and Back Kitchen. One of the two dormitories became a nursery for the youngest Clarke children, and a bedroom for a nursemaid and governess.