The original lower cabinets may have been damaged at one time and replaced while the uppers were kept to decrease costs. Folks didn't used to totally gut just because one part was bad. I think it's interesting to see the mix of vintages in historic houses.

Our house is built the same time as yours. In our basement we think we have remnants of the original kitchen. The cabinet doors look just like yours but with mortised butt hinges and crystal knobs. when we remodeled we could see the placement of the original cabinets and there was no backs to them only painted walls with shelves. If your cabinets have a wooden back they might have put in a new cabinet but reused the doors.

We have a lower cabinet and it is more furniture like with legs and the first shelf is pretty high off the floor. There is a wood counter but that I don't know if it is original. It is not very easy to access the shelves so I can see why someone would have removed the cabinet from the kitchen.

The cabinets are pine (as opposed to QS oak builtins in other parts of the house) and probably always painted. I have a lake cottage 500 miles from here built just a few years later by the original owner (we bought it from the son so we have some dependable history). The cabinet doors are inset but slabs and have an outer decorative surface mount hinge and crystal knobs. THey were left as stained fir and had a wood countertop.

If you are really intersted in learning more about your house I would suggest subscribing to both Old House Journal and Old House Interiors. The old house forum on GW is also a good source if you have questions.

Talking to others who care in your area will also help since I think there is a lot of regional variations in buildings. I have learned a lot from tradespeople who do work in older houses and even many of the city inspectors seem pretty knowledgable and love to dish the dirt on other properties.

For some additional ideas on what original kitchen sinks looked like here is a link

Here is a link that might be useful: historical kitchens

Here is one of your pics. I think that if as you say that the design is repeated throughout the house then you have answered the question. I am not sure why your contractor would say otherwise in the face of this evidence. Has he worked on other historic homes? Are there other homeowners in the area that you can consult , people with similar era homes? That would be most helpful. Also contacting previous owners to get some history . Hope this helps. I hate destroying anything original if it can reasonably be saved. If you already have tons of unpainted moldings then looking at any painted ones as possibly being the original unpainted wood is easily done with stripping or sanding a small area to see. Good Luck, c

Here is a link that might be useful: kitchen cabs

At a guess?

Like you said: In 1913, it had a 1913 kitchen, probably with one of those sinks on legs.

At some point, probably around the 1940s or 1950s by the look of it, some delighted housewife got to upgrade her kitchen to what you have there. Those cabinets were probably built on-site.

Houses evolve. People used to used to reuse things and switch things around in their houses. It's even possible that if there were any lower cabinets, they were relocated to another part of the house. I have paneling in my house that was removed from a house down the street and reinstalled 100 years ago in mine. They were even moving whole houses with horses and immigrant labor 150 plus years ago, and raising wood and brick buildings up from the bottom to add extra stories -- you see it on historic plaques all over my city!

It is not uncommon for people rehabbing houses in my area to find stacks of doors and windows or hordes of trim and hardware deemed "old fashioned" and removed in the '50s or '60s in the barn or attic. God Bless New Englanders. They're too cheap to throw anything out!

Those are absolutely beautiful cabinets. I agree that you've probably answered your own question. However, another thing you might want to do is take off a hinge and see whether there is a date on the back. I took mine off to have them plated and was surprised to see the hinges were dated. (My house was built in 1923 and the date on the hinge predated my house.)

Contact your local historic preservation society and see if they can't answer some questions for you via phone or email. Here in Charleston they are very helpful in helping track down old owner info, pics, what have you. Historic preservationists love to do the research (I have a few friends that do it for a living), so they can be a huge help.

Your cabinets are gorgeous, BTW!

Those look original, and likely would have been painted, even though the rest of the house had stained woodwork. Painted surfaces were considered more sanitary. The lowers were probably removed because of the sink changing out and for more useful storage for more modern cooking. I just redid a house for a client that had original uppers. These craftsman/ foursquare houses were the first place that kitchen cabinets as we think of them appeared in a widespread form in this country. Kitchen cabinets get much harder use than those in other rooms, so it is not surprising that hardware/lowers were changed out over time.

I suspect those are original. Most of the remodeled kitchens I've seen in houses of that age are pretty definitively of their era---e.g., if it had been done in the 30s or 40s, you'd see a very different aesthetic. Ours screams 1940s, and you can tell which things they reused. :)

I'd note a few things:
- It was common to replace parts but not all of a kitchen for functionality. The lowers might have been replaced to get a new sink, for instance.
- Our 1915 Bay Area bungalow had cabinetry with the sink sitting on top per the blueprints, not a freestanding sink---even though those were common. Good to remember that just because it doesn't look like what was most common doesn't necessarily mean it isn't original! Our original sink was probably a big farm sink top sitting on the cabinets, based on the size and placement of what they drew.
- We have butterfly hinges on a cabinet that we know was put in as part of a 1939 remodel; they were floating around for years after their peak use (and still are!) So hard to say. In our house, we try to match the original hardware whenever we replace things, so if you had people like us living there at some point, it could screw up your guesswork. ;)

The fact that the doors match the rest of the house would be a big indicator to me that they are likely original. In our house all the original doors/cabinets match, and all the cabinets put in during a 1939 remodel match. You can tell the same cabinetmaker made each set of drawers, boxes, etc. Also, it looks like some of your cabinets are framed into the moulding between doorways? That would have been a pain in the neck to do afterwards, which would also seem to support their being original.

On the painted woodwork, it was common to paint woodwork in kitchens (white was considered "cleaner"), bathrooms, and bedrooms while leaving the "public" woodwork in the LR and DR unpainted. The stained woodwork was higher quality wood (oak and elm in our house---though all sadly painted now!), while the painted trim was cheaper (redwood here). But again, that's just what was common---not what everyone did. I've seen some higher-end homes in one of our city's planned bungalow neighborhoods from the 1910s where the kitchens have gorgeous original oak trim.

In any case, I love the doors! Are you keeping them?

To me, inset cabinets, before their recent popularity, were an older style while the slab doors on the lowers look like amid century thing. A sink could have been added -- or a water leak could have damaged doors and warped the wood to the point they did not function well. Easy fix is to put new larger doors over the top.

I agree with others that the matching cabinets in other parts of the house is a very good indicator of what was original, especially when you have one thing that is different. Not likely that anyone would replace that much and not do the kitchen bases.

There were a zillion bungalows built with lower cabinet runs that couldn't survive 'modernization'. One common feature was for the counters to decrease in depth to about 20 inches deep for much of the run - too shallow for a dishwasher.

I have seen many many bungalows around here from that era with just the base run replaced in places. Midwesterners are frugal but not so frugal to wash dishes by hand for decades when there was an alternative.