CHAPTER V

THE COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE OF THE SOUTH

A close student of the English language, thoroughly conversant with all the local peculiarities that characterise the speech of the several parts of our country comprised within the bounds of the original Thirteen Colonies, knows that different words and expressions, retaining their seventeenth or eighteenth century significance, have lingered in different communities. The mountaineers of Kentucky still replenish their pipes from “pokes” of tobacco; in Virginia and Maryland, insufficiently baked bread is said not to have “soaked” long enough, meaning that it has not stayed in the oven as long as it ought; in Pennsylvania we still “fetch” things when we go for them and bring them back with us; and the soles of outworn New England shoes are “tapped,” though they may be “half-soled” in other parts of the country, and New England nags are “baited” at inn stables. Now all these archaisms, if one chooses so to call them, are of impeccable English derivation, though many of them have long since fallen into disuse in England, and they were of common and correct usage at the time of the colonists’ emigration to the New World. The Colonies were always conservative--provincial places usually are--and our very retention of the virile forms of speech in ordinary use in the England of the Stuarts and the House of Hanover has contributed not a little to the foundation of our just boast that the English spoken today in Virginia, Maryland, parts of the Carolinas, eastern Pennsylvania and New England is better and purer than most of the English now spoken in England itself. The only feature of this phenomenon of speech persistence not fully explicable is the fact that certain parts of linguistic tradition have been perpetuated in some parts of the country while others are to be found only in localities far removed so that a Virginian’s allusion to bread insufficiently “soaked” would be unintelligible in Massachusetts.

If the vitality of usage is so noticeable in a fluid and mutable thing like language, it is not surprising that architecture, which is visible and comparatively permanent in its manifestation, should exhibit in a markedly obvious manner an adherence to traditional forms. Nor is it surprising, considering the diversity of the speech forms singled out by chance for perpetuation in different parts of the country, to find a similar diversity in the retention of local architectural forms, though all may be of purely English origin.

The greater part of the South, like New England, was wholly English in blood and the small element of foreign extraction was not sufficient to exert any appreciable influence upon architectural types. The South had no numerous Welsh, Swedish or German contingent, such as there was in Pennsylvania, and no Dutch majority, as in New York, either to create an exotic bias and modify the expression of its architectural heritage or to seek independent utterance in the same territory. It was English to the core and so was the architecture. Only, as in the matter of speech, we find that traditions somewhat different from those manifested in New England were chosen for preservation. This was partly due, no doubt, as has already been pointed out, to the preponderance of the Saxon strain in the South while New England settlers could trace some of their hereditary preferences to the fact that so many of them came from the Danish parts of old England. The traditions transplanted to American soil by the Southern settlers flourished not only during the period antecedent to the advent of the Georgian mode but persisted concurrently with it and their influence is plainly to be detected in houses erected within the memory of people still living. They are so distinctly individual and so different from the forms to be seen in the Northern or the Middle States that they may be readily recognised at a superficial glance from the windows of a speeding railway carriage. Judging from the light thrown on the subject by recent research and restorations, it is not at all improbable that the colonists of the South and the colonists of New England adhered, at first, to not a few architectural practices identically the same. As an instance we may refer to the chimney built to its full height outside the house wall. This feature endured in the South, while in New England it was practically discontinued at an early period. The reason is not far to seek. The rigours of New England winters demanded the conservation of all available heat and it was simply common sense to enclose the chimney within the house walls, and let none of the warmth, emanating from the heated stones or bricks of the chimney breast and flue, escape into the outer air and be wasted. The more moderate climate of the South did not require such careful conservation and so the outside chimney retained its old form. So it doubtless was, also, with other features so that the divergence in local forms, apart from the matter of hereditary choice of materials and the modes of craftsmanship thereby involved, already alluded to, soon became pronounced and created a crystallised type. What were the distinguishing characteristics of this type, we shall shortly learn. It will, however, be helpful to our general understanding first to get a glimpse of the social life of the period when the Southern Colonial house was in process of evolution.

The earliest settlers in Virginia were, for the most part, gentle born. They were, in some cases, brothers, nephews or younger sons of peers of the realm. Such was George Percy, brother to the Earl of Northumberland. More commonly they were drawn from the families of the lesser nobility and from the untitled squirearchy of county families or else from the prosperous mercantile or professional classes. Either they personally or their relatives, who assisted in establishing them in their venture of colonisation, were in comfortable circumstances so that they could count upon having at least a reasonably advantageous start in the new land and were, therefore, from the outset in a condition soon to improve their estate by embracing the abundant opportunities fortune offered them. Besides this politically preponderant class, there were numerous indentured servants and artisans, many of whom, upon the expiration of their bonds, acquired land and became prosperous planters. Last of all, there were the negro slaves who were brought into the colony at an early period and rapidly increased in numbers. Social distinctions were quite as sharply defined and rigidly observed in Virginia and the other Southern colonies as in England and social customs remained unchanged by transference across the sea. The closest and most affectionate intercourse that circumstances would permit was maintained with friends and relatives in the Mother Country. In a word, Virginia was merely a detached and expanded bit of England and life went on much as though the Atlantic did not exist, save for the inevitable delay in communication. As was life in early Virginia, so was it substantially, at least so far as our present purpose is concerned, in the other Southern colonies, so that we may regard Virginia conditions as typical.

For all the ease of life, the abundance of creature comforts, the importation of personal and household luxuries and necessities by every ship that entered the capes and the general prosperity made possible by a kindly soil and climate in conjunction with favourable economic conditions, the measure of affluence, even among the wealthiest, was not sufficient during the first fifty or seventy-five years of Virginia’s existence to justify reckless or lavish expenditure upon the fabric of the dwelling house. The homes of the planters, therefore, though comfortably and even luxuriously appointed, according to the standards of the period, were modest in size and unpretentious in character. When Nicholas Hayward determined to establish one of his children on a plantation in Virginia and wrote to William Fitzhugh, one of the wealthiest and most influential planters, desiring information and advice, the latter replied, pointing out the course pursued by many of the other planters, that the wisest plan would be to import indentured bricklayers and carpenters from England who, in the course of the four or five years for which they were bound, could erect a substantial house, and, at the same time, by the performance of other labour for which they might be hired out, earn enough to pay for the cost of building materials and their keep as well. Fitzhugh also counselled Hayward not to build a large dwelling and even questioned the advisability of putting up “an English framed house of the ordinary size” as the charges for skilled artisans were excessive. He added that his own dwelling had cost thrice the sum a house of like size would have cost in London and that it usually took three times as long to complete the same amount of work as it did in England.

Notwithstanding his inherited preference for stone and brick as building materials, the early Virginia colonist had perforce to make a virtue of necessity and build his house of wood. Although, in the majority of cases, the Virginia colonist took to brick and stone when circumstances permitted--they were almost universally used so soon as the Georgian influence began to be felt and the accumulation of wealth conduced thereto--the necessary dependence upon wood at the outset created a precedent and launched a Southern tradition that has subsisted to our own day. In many parts of the Old Dominion there was practically no stone to be had and it was a difficult matter to secure even enough for chimneys. Often all dependence for this purpose had to be placed upon brick and brick was none too easy to come by at first. Good brick clay, to be sure, was abundant and the manufacture of bricks received encouragement from the first but there were serious difficulties in the way of transportation after the bricks were made and by the time these difficulties were surmounted many of the older houses had been built and it was hardly to be expected that the planters, after constructing substantial and comfortable abodes of timber would demolish them and replace them by others of brick, after brick was more plentiful, merely to comply with the arbitrary directions issued by the authorities in England when, in 1637, they instructed Governour Wyatt “to require every landowner whose plantation was an hundred acres in extent to erect a dwelling house of brick, to be twenty-four feet in length and sixteen feet in breadth, with a cellar attached. In the cases where the area of the grant exceeded five hundred acres, the size of the dwelling house was to enlarge in proportion.”

The earliest Southern houses in Virginia and elsewhere, after the brief log-cabin stage had been passed, we may feel assured were of wooden construction with brick or sometimes stone chimneys. All about was the greatest abundance of the finest pine, cypress, cedar, oak, chestnut, hickory, elm and ash timber which fully answered for all structural needs and the feather-edged plank or clapboard, nailed to the framing of posts, studs, girts and cills was in common use for building purposes. It was probably owing to the absence of stone and the comparative scarcity of bricks at an early date that we do not find evidences of attempted half-timber construction with clay and brick or clay and stone pugging as we do in New England at the same period.

It was only at first, however, that there was a scarcity of bricks and even then the difficulty in obtaining them was more a matter of transportation than of supply. Brickmakers and bricklayers were among the first artisans brought over and from the very infancy of the colony, as just stated, brick-making was encouraged. Indeed, at an early date, bricks became an important article of export to Bermuda, whence limestone was fetched back in exchange. There was abundance of brick to supply the home demand and the obstacle in the way of its wider use by the first generation or two of planters was the difficulty of getting it from the kilns to the sites where it was to be used and not, as some suppose, the necessity of importing it from England. It is pointed out in another chapter that the so-called “English brick” was merely brick made according to English dimensions and so termed to distinguish it from brick fashioned after the Dutch pattern. Very few of the old brick buildings were constructed of imported material and, under ordinary circumstances, it would have been the height of folly to send overseas for it, even though it might come as ballast. In Virginia, bricks were rated from eight to fifteen shillings a thousand while, in England, between 1650 and 1700, their price was eighteen shillings and upward a thousand. As the seventeenth century advanced bricks became increasingly plentiful in the South. After Sir Thomas Dale’s arrival and the establishment of his new enterprise at Henrico City, the first-floor walls of the houses in that place were built of brick burned in the kilns that were there set up, but when Secretary Kemp, in 1638, built a brick house at Jamestown, it was probably the first dwelling entirely constructed of brick in the South. After this, other brick houses were erected in Jamestown and, subsequently, Governour Berkeley built himself a brick house at Green Spring, about two miles distant. It was not usual, however, to employ brick very extensively till towards the end of the seventeenth century or the beginning of the eighteenth when ample fortunes had accumulated and transportation possibilities had somewhat improved. Even then, the use of brick was by no means universal but was largely dependent upon local conditions, although there was unquestionably a preference for it over wood when it could readily be come by.

Whether wood was used or brick, the Southern houses of the seventeenth century and the fore part of the eighteenth conformed pretty closely to the same architectural type and even in the more ambitious dwellings, erected by the very wealthy towards the end of this period, there was generally no radical departure from the accustomed style. For the most part, the homes of even the most affluent planters were simple in plan and plain in appearance. The typical dwelling was an oblong structure with the house door on one of the long fronts, a steeply-pitched roof, a chimney at each end, and often had but one full floor with an attic above it, although a more commodious second floor was by no means uncommon. In 1679, Major Thomas Chamberlayne, a prominent citizen of Henrico, contracted with one Gates, a carpenter of the same county, to build him a frame house, forty feet long by twenty feet wide. The outside walls were to be boarded and there was to be no cellar, but the framework was to be supported on cills resting on the ground. Upper and lower floors were each to be divided by wooden partitions into two rooms. At each end there was to be a brick chimney. So many descriptions of similar houses and specifications for their erection occur in seventeenth-century documents that we are quite justified in regarding them as typical of the period. The Adam Thoroughgood house, built of brick in Princess Anne County, Virginia, between 1640 and 1650, presented the same general contour. The roofs were customarily of cypress shingles although tiles were subsequently employed to some extent. The pitch of the roof closely resembled the pitch of some of the earliest New England roofs but in both the South and North there is observable, as the years go by, a general tendency to depart from English precedent and flatten the pitch so far as conditions would permit. In this connexion it must also be remembered that thatch was a common roofing material in England and required a steep pitch in order to shed the rain quickly while the use of shingles

permitted a less abrupt angle without impairing the water-shedding qualities of the roof.

One of the most strongly characteristic features of these houses was supplied by the outside chimneys at each end. They were of brick or of stone, when by chance it could be secured, and occasionally, in some of the later houses built according to this early tradition, they are of brick and stone combined, the stone being used for the heavy base while the stack is made of brick. Throughout their whole height, these chimneys were built outside the house wall, whether the house was of timber or brick, and were broad at the base narrowing down by successive stages of sloped weatherings and offsets, in much the same manner as a Gothic buttress, to the bottom of the stack which rises straight and slim by comparison with its substructure. The chimney of the Thoroughgood house is an excellent example of this method of chimney treatment. The Southern exterior chimneys, in many cases, had the sloped weatherings and offsets both at sides and back while the few early New England chimneys of the same type were usually flat at the back and were graded off only at the sides.

Another noticeable characteristic of the early Southern houses is to be seen in the long dormers with sharp-peaked gables that often pierced the roofs, quite in contrast to the comparative rarity of dormers in the early New England houses of similar date. The same manner of introducing a sharp-peaked dormer or small gable into the side of a pitch roof is to be seen over the doors of some of the old Southern barns. The occurrence of the gambrel is not nearly so frequent as in the North nor do we find evidences of framing with the overhang. It may be that this last mentioned point of difference between the South and North can in part be accounted for on the ground that the overhang in England lingered longest and met with most favour in towns while in the open country it was less in evidence. As many of the New England colonists came from towns while a great proportion of those in the South came from rural surroundings, it was but natural that both should perpetuate the features to which they were most accustomed. This hypothesis, of course, is purely conjectural but it is by no means impossible since very slight and trifling matters often serve to determine choice. In the smaller and humbler dwellings of the South were to be found the same general method of construction and the same features of contour as in their larger prototypes.

It would be exceedingly difficult to lay down any specific generalisations regarding the interior plan of the early Southern houses inasmuch as they varied widely in different instances according to the individual requirements of the occupants, the size of their families and the manner in which they saw fit to make additions from time to time as necessity dictated. We have seen that Major Thomas Chamberlayne’s house had two rooms upstairs and two rooms down, divided by wooden partitions which may or may not have been covered with tenacious clay stucco and whitewashed. In this manner walls were sometimes finished, at others they were wainscotted. The windows were glazed with small panes set in lead. In the house of Governour Berkeley at Green Spring were six apartments while that of William Fitzhugh, which however had undergone sundry additions, numbered twelve or thirteen. The Stratton house in Henrico had three chambers above stairs and one below along with a hall, kitchen, and pantry. In York County we are told of houses that had only a hall or dining room, a kitchen and a bedchamber which were probably all on one floor. Then, again, there were houses with a hall and kitchen on the lower floor and a chamber above, while some of the wealthier people had commonly three or four rooms on each floor. In all events, the houses followed the same general plan and where there were many apartments they were apt to be in the nature of ells or extensions clustered in a rambling manner about the central core which was of the type common to the country.

Three features are deserving of particular attention in the plan of the early Southern house, however varied its internal arrangements might otherwise be, and the more so because they persisted and found a recognised place in the plan of the Georgian house as it was developed in the South. In the first place, the hall, which was also referred to as the dining hall or parlour hall, was wide and afforded ample space and circulation of air. It was the place where meals were commonly eaten and where the family sat. The house door opened directly into it and it exactly corresponded with and fulfilled the functions of the great hall in the small manor houses of England. This interior disposition of the house was suited to the climate and when the Georgian mode rose in the ascendant the wide hallway, often extending the full depth of the building and used more or less as a living room, was retained. It was quite in contrast to the small entry or the narrow stair-hall of New England houses which the rigours of New England winters made it desirable to have as a protection for the rest of the house when the house door was opened. In the second place, the Southern housewife often found it convenient and desirable in the scheme of her domestic economy to have the kitchen in a separate building somewhat removed from the body of the house. There were servants enough to make this arrangement practicable and the mild climate favoured it also. Besides, this plan fitted in well with the practice of having the servants’ quarters outside the house. This feature of detached kitchens was also perpetuated in the Georgian era and not only was its influence felt in the South but we find instances of it in Pennsylvania. Such was the arrangement at Graeme Park, Horsham, near Philadelphia, built in 1722 by Sir William Keith, whom we know was favourably impressed by the manner of living in the South where he had visited prior to establishing himself at Horsham. We also find the detached offices and servants’ quarters at Stenton, the home of James Logan; at Hope Lodge, Whitemarsh and at Mount Pleasant, the home of that doughty and ingenious old sailor man and merchant, Captain John Macpherson, afterwards the scene of much lavish entertainment by Benedict Arnold and his bride when they occupied it for a brief season. The same arrangement also obtained at Cliveden and was not improbably suggested to Chief Justice Chew by the recollection of a similar plan in the homes of his Southern kinsfolk. This feature of the detached kitchen forms an interesting point of connexion between the domestic Georgian architecture of the Middle Colonies and that of the Southern. In the third place, the majority of the Southern Colonial houses had one or more bedchambers on the ground floor. This feature proved itself of practical convenience and, like the other two just enumerated, was often perpetuated in the Georgian mode. Indeed, the practice has continued in favour to our own day.

In his valuable “Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century”, Philip Bruce gives a graphic pen picture of the ordinary surroundings of the seventeenth-century Virginia planter’s house, a picture that may equally well apply to the generality of houses in the other Southern colonies at the same period. After noting the usual plainness and simplicity of the environment, he goes on to say:--“The yard, as it was called, consisted of open ground, overshadowed here and there by trees. In the immediate vicinity of the house was situated the garden, devoted partly to vegetables and partly to flowers, thyme, marjoram and phlox being as abundant there as in England. Many of the flowers and shrubs had only recently been brought from the mother country. Byrd is discovered in 1684 writing to his brother in England, and thanking him for the gooseberry and currant bushes which had just been received; in the same year he expresses to a second correspondent his appreciation of a gift of seeds and roots, which had been planted and had safely flowered [iris, tulip, crocus and anemone]. The summer houses, arbours and grottoes, which Beverley declares were to be found near the residences, were doubtless generally situated in the garden, and were erected to afford a cool place of retreat in the warmest hours of the summer day; the garden itself was always protected by a paling to keep out the hogs and cattle which were permitted to wander without restraint. In the immediate vicinity of the dwellings of the wealthy landowners, there were, as a rule, grouped the dovecot, stable, barn, henhouse, cabins for the servants, kitchen and milk-house, the object of this in the last instances being to remove from the mansion the operations of cooking, washing and dairying. In many yards, a tall pole with a toy house at the top was erected, in which the bee martin might build its nest, this bird bravely attacking the hawk and crow, and thus serving as a guardian of the poultry.” It would not be difficult to find the counterpart of these conditions in many a place in the South today, that is to say, in places patterned after the Colonial tradition, in which the formal Georgian element has never played an important part nor led to the laying out of great, symmetrically-planned gardens.

Of the more elegant and substantially built brick houses that characterised the end of the period when the truly Colonial style still prevailed, it will sufficiently serve our present purpose if we refer specifically to two, one in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and the other on the Cooper River in South Carolina. The first is Cedar Park, on the shores of the Chesapeake, built about 1692. It consists of one full floor above whose window-heads project the eaves of the steep-pitched roof in which is contained a roomy attic or concealed second floor, if that designation seems more agreeable, lighted by dormer windows. Its exterior aspect coincides in all particulars with the features previously noted as characteristic of the Southern Colonial type of house whether constructed of brick or wood. It is in an excellent state of preservation and the additions and wings that have been appended in no wise obscure the contour and identity of the original type. There is not one feature about the house to suggest Georgian influence or Georgian formality. The internal arrangement, also, agrees with the plan of the type common to other domestic structures erected in the South during the seventeenth century. There is the great central hall into which the house door opens, a hall through which one could readily drive a coach and four if there were occasion and there are adjacent bedchambers on the first floor. The other apartments are grouped about as convenience has dictated their placing at the times when additions were made. At the opposite end of the great hall from the house door a flight of steps descends into an ancient hedged garden, bounded by the waters of the bay.

The other house is Mulberry Castle, built in 1714. While obviously not Georgian in its salient characteristics, Mulberry Castle certainly gives evidence of more ambitious design than was usual at the precise period of its erection. Certain details, it is true, such as the pillared porch with its pediment, sheltering the house door, or the cornice beneath the eaves, show a restrained classic influence which we are accustomed to associate, quite properly, with the architectural manifestations of the reign of Queen Anne or the first years of her Hanoverian successor, but the general contour of the house savours strongly of the one-floor Colonial type with its steeply-pitched roof. In the case of Mulberry Castle the attic or second floor has been so expanded that the roof has assumed approximately the appearance of a modern mansard or perhaps it would be more logical and truthful to say that it has become a hipped gambrel with a steep pitch. The internal plan, also, is sufficiently irregular to warrant its classification with the Colonial type. In certain interior details, such as the mantels and panelling, later additions and alterations have evidently been made which add to its Georgian semblance and emphasise its transitional aspect, but the unalterable features of mass and arrangement recall us to the contemplation of well known seventeenth-century peculiarities.

In the study of the great mass of all this truly Colonial architecture of the South two points strike one forcibly. The first is that it is wholly different from the typical later architecture of Georgian mode and is fully entitled to be classified by itself. The second is that there is much about it, especially in the case of such buildings as Cedar Park and Mulberry Castle, to command our sincere admiration and serve as a valuable model for modern emulation.