Two upstairs rooms pose intriguing questions. The Insurance Survey of 1821, our earliest source, calls them a "closet and apartment." One is now interpreted as a servant room, and the other is closed to the public, but is small, long and narrow, like a closet.

The larger room, the "apartment" had been interpreted as a storage room for trunks. Physical examination determined that the original access to the attic (previously in the closet) had been in this room. The attic stair has now been reconstructed. (Not shown in current photo)

But what of the closet beyond? What does closet mean? At the time of the Insurance Survey, it meant a small room, either for storage or other purposes. Clothes closets as we know them were rare in houses of the period.

Closet was also a shorthand way of referring to a "water-closet." Thus, OHS investigators have explored the possibility that this room could also have been a water-closet attached to a dressing room.

That there might have been a water-closet at Adena is made more likely because Latrobe designed the house. Indoor plumbing was rare two hundred years ago, but Latrobe included in several English houses a "Dressing Room" with an attached indoor privy. Typically this room adjoined both a chamber and a hall and was approximately 8 x 12 feet in size. Latrobe's Markoe house, designed in 1810 for a Philadelphia family (since demolished), included a bathroom with fixtures for waste elimination and bathing. Latrobe also included a water-closet in a proposal for re-modeling the President's House.