THE ARCHITECTURE OF
COLONIAL AMERICA

DOORWAY OF WYCK, GERMANTOWN, PHILADELPHIA.

An excellent example of the Pennsylvania Colonial type. Built 1690.

Frontispiece.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF
COLONIAL AMERICA

BY
HAROLD DONALDSON EBERLEIN
ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
By MARY H. NORTHEND
AND OTHERS

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1915

Copyright, 1915,
By Little, Brown, and Company
———
All rights reserved
Published, October, 1915
Norwood Press
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

FOREWORD

IT is the purpose of this volume to set forth a brief history and an analysis of the architecture of Colonial America, in such wise that they may be of interest and value both to the general reader and to the architect.

The subject will be treated with reference to the close connexion existing between architecture and the social and economic circumstances of the period, so that some additional light may fall upon the daily conditions of life among our forefathers. At the same time, there will be a careful critical analysis of the origin and development of the several seventeenth and eighteenth century styles that have left us so wealthy an architectural heritage, an heritage based upon a groundwork of traditions brought across the Atlantic by the early craftsmen and artisans.

Such an analysis, it is hoped, will materially contribute to a broader appreciation of our possessions and will not be without value in the interpretation of modern buildings in which the traditions of the past have been perpetuated. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that a more exact knowledge of early achievements may even supply a measure of inspiration and guidance to those who purpose building homes for themselves.

In thanking those who have so courteously assisted in the preparation of this book, acknowledgment must first of all be made to Miss Mary Harrod Northend, to whose suggestion the undertaking was entirely due, and whose illustrations have, in large measure, made it possible of realisation. The author gratefully records his indebtedness also to Messrs. J. B. Lippincott Company, of Philadelphia, for permission to use a number of illustrations of Pennsylvania houses that appeared in “The Colonial Homes of Philadelphia and its Neighbourhood”, by H. D. Eberlein and H. M. Lippincott, and likewise for permission to reproduce an illustration of the Adam Thoroughgood house from “Historic Virginia Homes and Churches”, by Robert A. Lancaster, Jr.; to the Architectural Record for permission to incorporate, in chapters IV, VIII and XI, parts of papers contributed to that magazine; to Dr. George W. Nash of Old Hurley, for generous assistance in supplying many illustrations drawn from a wide geographical area; to H. L. Duhring, Jr., of Philadelphia, for suggestions that bore important fruit in the progress of the work and for the illustration of the Saal at Ephrata; to Messrs. R. A. Lancaster, Jr., G. C. Callahan and Joseph Everett Chandler for sundry items of assistance; to the Librarian and staff of the Library Company of Philadelphia, and to the Librarian and staff of the Pennsylvania Historical Society for continued courtesies while the following pages were in course of preparation, to the Brickbuilder, to Mr. Edmund C. Evans and, finally, to Messrs. Horace Mather Lippincott and Philip B. Wallace for valuable help in the matter of photographs.

HAROLD DONALDSON EBERLEIN.

Philadelphia, August, 1915.

CONTENTS

LIST OF PLATES

THE ARCHITECTURE OF
COLONIAL AMERICA

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

ARCHITECTURE is crystallised history. Not only does it represent the life of the past in visible and enduring form, but it also represents one of the most agreeable sides of man’s creative activity. Furthermore, if we read a little between the lines, the buildings of former days tell us what manner of men and women lived in them. Indeed, some ancient structures are so invested with the lingering personality of their erstwhile occupants that it is well nigh impossible to dissociate the two.

But it is rather as a revelation of the social and domestic habits of our forebears that the story of architecture in Colonial America concerns us immediately at this point. As the naturalist can reconstruct the likeness of some extinct animal from a handful of bones or tell the age and aspect of a sea creature that once tenanted a now empty shell, so can the architectural historian discover much concerning the quality and mode of life of those who dwelt aforetime in the houses that form his theme. The indisputable evidence is there in bricks and stone, in timber and mortar, for us to read if we will.

What can be more convincing than an early New England kitchen in whose broad fireplace still hang the cranes and trammels and where all the full complement of culinary paraphernalia incident to the art of open-fire cookery has been preserved? The fashion of the oven attests the method of baking bread. A mere glance at these things brings up a faithful and vivid picture of an important aspect of domestic life. Or, turning to another page in this book of the past, we read another tale in the glazed lookout cupolas—“captains’ walks” they were called—atop the splendid mansions of portly and prosperous mien in the old seaport towns. Thither the merchant princes and shipowners of a by-gone day were wont to repair and scan the offing for the sails of their returning argosies, laden with East Indian riches or cruder wares from Jamaica or Barbadoes.

The old Dutch houses of the Hudson River towns reflect an wholly different mode of life. The living rooms, in many instances, were all on the ground floor and the low, dark, unwindowed attics proclaim the custom of laying up therein bountiful stores of grain and other products of their fruitful farms. In the same region the manors and other great houses bespeak a fashion of life that cannot be surpassed for picturesque interest in the annals of Colonial America.

The spacious country houses in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia, with their stately box gardens and ample grounds, tell of the leisurely affluence and open hospitality of their builders whose style of life often rivalled in elegance, and sometimes surpassed, that of the country gentry in England. In the city houses there were the same unmistakable evidences of the courtly social life that ruled in the metropolis of the Colonies. Round about the city, and throughout the Province of Pennsylvania, were substantial stone and brick farmhouses that fully attested the prosperity of the yeoman class and also indicated some striking peculiarities in their habits and customs.

Going still farther to the South, we read in the noble houses that graced the broad manorial estates of Virginia and Maryland of a mode of existence, socially resplendent at times and almost patriarchal in character, which had not its like elsewhere.

So it goes. One might multiply instances indefinitely to show how architecture was a faithful mirror of contemporary life and manners and how the public buildings of the day represented the classic elegance of taste, then prevalent, that found expression in a thousand other ways. We shall also learn why it was that New England, with all its ready abundance of stone, preferred to rear structures of combustible wood while Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, with all their vast and varied wealth of timber, chose to build of brick or stone, often at the cost of great inconvenience and expense.

Our patriotic, historical and genealogical societies have done much to make us regard the men and women of by-gone years with a keener veneration than we, perhaps, formerly paid them. This book, it is hoped, in the same way, will be of some avail to increase our appreciation of the architectural wealth back of us. We have a history of which we may well feel proud and we have an architectural heritage, dating from the time when that history was in the making, which we may view with deep and just satisfaction.

The worthy record of structural achievement during our Colonial period ought to fill us with high respect for the ability and energy of the men who, while they were building a nation and subduing a wilderness, found time also to rear

SENATE HOUSE, KINGSTON-ON-HUDSON, N. Y.

Exemplifying early Dutch peculiarities. Built 1676.

Copyright, 1912, by Baldwin Coolidge.

WARD HOUSE, NEAR SALEM, MASS.

Characteristic of seventeenth century New England type.

HOUSE AT YORKTOWN, VA.

Showing steep pitch roof and outside chimneys proper to the Southern Colonial style.

EXTERIOR OF THE LEE HOUSE, MARBLEHEAD, MASS.

Representative of the second phase of New England Georgian. Built 1768.

a vast aggregate of structures, both domestic and public, that to-day command our unfeigned admiration and are fit to afford us no small degree of inspiration for our own architectural guidance.

But we must turn also to another aspect of the subject and consider the architecture of Colonial America from a more purely technical point of view as well. The historical side of the question, embracing social and economic relations, it must be remembered, however, is vastly important and will conduce to a more intelligent grasp of the whole situation. Indeed, without adequate historical knowledge, many architectural phases will be inexplicable of character or origin. As an example we may cite the New England frame tradition. Blood tells in architecture quite as much as it does anywhere else and unless we know the history of the early colonists, unless, in fact, we know their historical antecedents in England, we cannot expect to understand fully their hereditary preference for timber buildings. Thus we see that history and architectural expression go hand in hand and one must study both to have a full comprehension of either.

Keeping ever before us, then, the full significance of history, we shall examine the architecture of the Colonial period in a far more sympathetic and intelligent spirit than we could possibly expect to do if we were to eliminate the historical background. Of course, in the present volume the historical background must be a background, architectural matters must have the preponderance of attention and history, however fascinating it may be, must be referred to only to elucidate architectural phases.

Near akin and closely linked to understanding is the quality of appreciation and it is necessary for us to understand our architectural past that we may fully appreciate it. It is likewise absolutely essential for us to understand and appreciate our architectural past in order that we may appreciate our architectural present. A thorough acquaintance with the work and ability of the architect who reared the buildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will give us a truer perspective and better enable us to judge the merits of contemporary performances. Widespread intelligent appreciation inevitably leads to the betterment of public taste, so that our study of the past is bound to have a favourable reflex action upon the architectural activities of our own day.

Twin sister to appreciation is discrimination and as we appreciate the architecture of Colonial America we shall also learn to discriminate between the different local manifestations and attribute each to its proper origins. In this connexion a word of explanation should be offered in answer to a question that some readers, no doubt, have already asked themselves regarding the title chosen for this volume—“Why was it not called Colonial Architecture in America?” Solely because such a title would have been misleading. Indeed, there is no more commonly misapplied term than “Colonial Architecture.” Colonial America had two varieties of architecture, one of which is correctly called Colonial and the other is not. The one is entirely distinct from the other and it is mischievous to confound them. The second variety is Georgian and it is illogical and indefensible to call it anything but Georgian. The Colonial architecture evolved its distinctive forms in America subject to the dictates of local necessity while the Georgian was directly transplanted from England and, although it showed marked tendencies to differentiation in the several parts of the Colonies, preserved its unmistakable likeness in every instance to the parent stock from which it sprang.

The Colonial architecture which is really Colonial presents several distinctly different forms of local manifestation, each of them pronouncedly characteristic. One form is to be found in New England, and outside of New England it is not to be met with. Another type, of wholly diverse aspect, is peculiar to the parts of New York State settled at an early period by the Dutch colonists and to the parts of Long Island and northern New Jersey where Dutch influence was paramount. Still another and altogether distinct Colonial type of architecture is to be seen in numerous examples in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. A fourth type, with yet other clearly defined peculiarities, may occasionally be discovered in Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas. The scarcity of examples of true Colonial architecture in the last-named section is explicable by the fact that the southern planter, when his wealth increased, chose to live in more sumptuous manner than his first built dwelling permitted. He therefore built himself a stately Georgian house, better suited to the more elegant style and equipage he now found himself able to maintain. The “fair brick house” in Georgian mode, with porticoes and pillars, often stood upon the site of the earlier house, which was either partially incorporated with it or demolished to make way for it because the first chosen location was the most eligible on the estate and best suited the fancy of the owner.

All these types of Colonial architecture possess an healthy, indigenous flavour that smacks of the manly vigour and robust hardihood of the pioneers who had the courage and the initiative to forsake their wonted paths of comfort and known conditions at home and face unflinchingly the dangers and difficulties of an untamed wilderness as the founders of a settlement whose future was by no means assured and of whose ultimate greatness they little dreamed. This tone of staunch, native originality was due to the local forms, evolved in response to local exigencies, dictated by resourceful motherwit and engrafted upon an inherited stock of architectural traditions which the first settlers, hailing from this or that part of the old world, had brought hither with them. In other words, it was the logical and necessary outcome of architectural precedent, modified by contact with a new environment, and all its forms are clearly traceable to typical antecedents on the other side of the Atlantic. Edward Eggleston has somewhere said that “it is difficult for the mind of man to originate, even in a new hemisphere.” He is oftentimes coerced into originality by force of circumstances. So it was in our early architectural efforts. The first settlers followed tradition so far as they could and essayed original departures only under stress of necessity or expediency.

While the several forms were full of the grace that was inherent in the early builders’ spirit of construction and design, they were also strong because they were so thoroughly utilitarian and because nearly every feature was produced in response to some specific local need. The vital quality of the early and truly Colonial architecture has not been exhausted and after nearly three hundred years we turn to it to find it still rich in adaptability to many of our present requirements. Owing to its essentially utilitarian characteristics, Colonial architecture in all its forms is wholly unpretentious, informal, and, one might almost say, fortuitous, but it suited the manners and estate of the majority of the people for whom it was devised.

On the other hand, formality, as an element in American architecture, came in with the advent of the Georgian influence. For the most part it was not a chilling, hard, rigid formality but rather the formality of ordered symmetry and concurrence with the elegant genius and refinement of classic architectural conventions. It was, if one chooses so to put it, formality tempered with domesticity and common sense. The American colonists of the eighteenth century adopted the Georgian style, when they were able to afford it and had acquired the desire for it, and adapted it to their own ends. These adaptations took shape in divergent forms in the several parts of the Colonies, exhibiting certain local peculiarities in New England and others quite as distinct

PINGREE OR WHITE PORTICO. SALEM, MASS.

Showing the delicate detail and attenuation that came with the last Georgian phase.

Copyright. J. B. Lippincott Co.

LAUREL HILL, FAIRMOUNT PARK, PHILADELPHIA.

Belonging to the second type of Middle Colonies Georgian. Built 1762.

TYPICAL HOUSES. OLD HURLEY, N. Y.

With thick walls and small eaves.

ELMENDORF HOUSE, OLD HURLEY, N. Y.

Early Dutch type before local modification.

in the Middle Colonies or the South. Notwithstanding their minor differences, however, the specimens of Georgian work in America all bear an unmistakable family resemblance which proclaims their common ancestry from a British classic origin. The later Georgian work in America followed the later phases of the style as they developed in England and hence we find a great many variations attributable to differences in date as well as to differences in locality, but in all its divers manifestations, whether temporal or local, American Georgian is true to the spirit and traditions of its strongly individual parent stock of inspiration.

Economic and social conditions made possible the introduction and development of the Georgian style in America and the same conditions nurtured and kept it alive so long as its influence continued to dominate the public taste. When its latest phase passed over into the forms of the Classic Revival, a new order of society, actuated by different ideals, had arisen. An era of general peace and growing prosperity in the early years of the eighteenth century permitted and encouraged the colonists to pay more heed to the material amenities of life than had previously been their wont and it was but natural that, with favourable domestic conditions, they should seek to emulate the luxury and more polished manner of life obtaining in the mother country, and the adoption of contemporary British architectural modes was one way in which that filial emulation found expression. When the period of Georgian influence came to an end and the Classic Revival type held the first place in popular esteem, new economic, social and political circumstances existed with which the prevailing architectural mode was more in keeping. Widely distributed affluence, coupled with a general spirit of independent self-sufficiency and a disposition to follow French inspiration, found fit environment in the pomposity of neo-classic settings whose vogue is mainly attributable to influences that arose in the train of the French Revolution, the same influences that gave us the Empire type of furniture so largely copied in both England and America.

Surveying thus the history of architecture in America, from the beginning of the Colonial period down to the end of post-Colonial activity, a continuous and logical process of development can be traced of which each succeeding phase was a faithful exponent of contemporary local manners and modes of life. Truly indigenous architecture was non-existent. Architectural derivations, modified and often obscured as they were by force of circumstances, are not always obvious and occasionally, in order to detect them, careful analysis and some knowledge of history are necessary. Nor need the student of American architecture be perplexed at discovering certain hybrid types. It is but natural that such should be evolved by a resourceful people with a genius for adaptations and possessed of a variety of models, a combination of whose features expediency suggested. In spite of all the bewildering multiplicity of manifestations which the architecture of Colonial America affords, the derivations from hereditary European sources may be identified by the expenditure of a little effort and the threads of continuity and growth then become clearly apparent. A detailed elucidation of the genesis and progressive stages of the several types will be the content of the ensuing chapters.

CHAPTER II
THE DUTCH COLONIAL TYPE
1613-1820

THE Dutch Colonial house is at once a mystery and a paradox. It is a mystery because it seems to defy the law of physics about two bodies occupying the same space at the same time. It is a paradox because, despite its apparent simplicity, it is most complex in its texture and varied in its modes and expression.

We have all heard it said of the Dutchman’s breeches that they could be made to contain whatever objects could be forced through the pocket apertures, and the number of things that the Dutchman could stow away in the baggy recesses of his nether garments has always been a source of wonder to the foreigner. It is precisely the same with his house. It really seems to be elastic. Viewed from the outside, it gives the observer the impression that its extent is small and that the space within must necessarily be limited. On stepping across the threshhold, however, a surprise awaits one. Room seems to open out from room in a miraculous manner, and there is apparently no end to the space that can be made within the four walls. At times, baffling despair fills the mind at the attempt to master the anatomical intricacies of the Dutch abode. The early Dutch house is practically all upon the ground floor, but the attic, occasionally, is almost as complex in its mysterious arrangement. The Dutchmen and their wives were past masters in ordering the economy of space. The bulk of household gear they could stow away in compact style always excites our wondering admiration. Perhaps their familiarity with canal boat life, and the attendant necessity of compressing their belongings within strait limits, suggested many of their household arrangements. At any rate, the Dutch houses are a standing example showing how much can be done within closely restricted bounds.

The Dutch house in America is to be found in the valley of the Hudson, in Long Island, and in the counties of northern New Jersey, particularly Bergen and Essex, settled at an early period by the Dutch. The purest forms of the early type are to be found along the Hudson. In Long Island, certain modifying influences began to work at an early time and in portions of Long Island, especially in the neighbourhood of Hempstead and towards the Eastern end of the Island, where settlements were made about the middle of the seventeenth century by New England colonists, we find a curious combination of Dutch and English characteristics in the local architecture. In northern New Jersey, while the type is thoroughly Dutch, the majority of houses are of a somewhat later date than those along the Hudson and exhibit features not to be found in the houses erected by the first colonists of New Netherlands.

Notwithstanding certain minor differences that will be brought to our notice by comparison, there is an unquestionable continuity of type that differentiates the houses of Dutch architecture from all the other structural creations of the American colonists. The style of the first Dutch houses contained within itself the seeds of development, and while the earliest expression of Dutch Colonial architecture was practically the same as that in vogue in Holland at the time of the colonists’ emigration, the later examples disclosed new features which local necessity and native ingenuity had suggested and achieved. By this very flexibility and elasticity the Dutch colonial style has shown its adaptability to varying conditions, and in that adaptability lies no small share of its fitness as a resource for present-day needs.

Old Hurley near Kingston-on-Hudson—to

VAN DEUSEN HOUSE, OLD HURLEY, N. Y.

Built early in eighteenth century.

HALLWAY, VAN DEUSEN HOUSE.

HOFFMAN HOUSE, KINGSTON-ON-HUDSON, N. Y.

Built shortly after middle of seventeenth century.

CHARACTERISTIC OLD DUTCH HOUSE, KINGSTON-ON-HUDSON, N. Y.

select a striking concrete example—discloses the style in its earliest form. Although Hurley was not settled until about 1660, the houses erected there showed practically no departure from the styles with which the settlers were familiar in Holland before their emigration. To show their absolute fidelity to the traditional type of Dutch house, we may refer to the amazement created in the mind of a Dutch diplomat who, when taken to visit Hurley two or three years ago, declared that it was more Dutch than almost anything left in Holland. Ever since its foundation, Hurley has slumbered peacefully on, disturbed only at times by Indian raids and the alarums of war. Physically it has changed scarcely at all since the founders settled on the rich lands by the Esopus. It is one of the backwaters of our civilisation that has preserved intact the exterior aspect and much of the inward character of the date of its settlement. The lapse of time has wrought little change in its fabric and the swirling eddies of feverish American progress have raced past it, heedless of its presence, so that it has preserved for us a refreshing bit of the days and ways of the New Netherlands of Peter Stuyvesant and his sturdy colleagues.

Old Hurley is just as Dutch as Dutch can be; Dutch in its people, Dutch in its houses, Dutch in its looks, Dutch in everything but name, and that was Dutch for the first few years of its history when it was known as Nieuw Dorp, that is, New Village. To understand, therefore, the mode of life and the comfortable, easy-going informality with which the architectural style fitted in, we cannot do better than take a brief survey of this picturesque community.

Hurley cheeses and Kingston refugees have given Hurley most of its renown in the outside world. So plentiful and so famous, at one time, were the former, that Hurley was popularly credited with having “cheese mines.” The following old Dutch jingle, done into English by a local antiquary, tells of plenty at Hurley, not only of cheese but of many other kinds of foodstuffs as well:

What shall we with the wheat bread do?
Eat it with the cheese from Hurley.
What shall we with the pancakes do?
Dip them in the syrup of Hurley.
What shall we with the cornmeal do
That comes from round about Hurley?
Johnnycake bake, both sweet and brown,
With green cream cheese from Hurley.

Does not this reflect the reign of peace, plenty and contentment? The old Dutch, indeed, is truly realistic as the question comes “Wat zullen wij met die pannekoeken doen?”, and at the answer, “Doop het met die stroop van Horley,” one involuntarily licks his chops over the dripping sweetness of “die stroop.” The very mention of cheese and cheese making brings to the mind visions of fat farming country with sleek kine feeding, knee-deep in pastures of heavy-matted clover, from whose blossoms the bees are distilling their next winter’s store. Such a mental picture for Hurley town is not far amiss. Lying in comfortable contentment in the rich bottoms along the banks of the Esopus, its horizons both near and far bounded by the Catskills and their foot-hills, it approaches the ideal of bucolic felicity, and one freely admits that “Nieuw Dorp exists a pastoral or else Nieuw Dorp is not.”

Comfort, solid comfort, is the keynote of Hurley, indoors and out. Its houses, built along the one village street, their farm lands stretching back beyond them, have an aspect of substantial prosperity and cheer. Long, low buildings they are, with thick stone walls, whose roofs jutting just above the windows of the first floor, begin their climb to the ridge pole, enclosing with their shingled sides great, roomy garrets that seem like very Noah’s arks, with everything under the sun stowed away in their recesses. Such portion of this second floor as the old Dutchmen saw fit to spare from storage purposes, they made into chambers for their families, and pierced the roof slope with tiny dormers. Oftentimes, however, the only light came in at the gable ends, through windows on each side of the massive chimneys. It was not at all unusual to give over the whole upper floor to the storage of grain and other food supplies, while the family lived altogether below on the ground floor. The cellars were not one whit behind the garrets in holding supplies. The people of New Netherland were valiant trenchermen before whose eyes the pleasures of the table loomed large, and they used up an amazing lot of victuals. Such overflowing store of potatoes and carrots, turnips, pumpkins and apples as went into those cavernous bins! Rolliches and headcheeses were there a-many, with sausages, scrapple, pickles and preserves, to say nothing of barrels of cyder. These all contributed their share to the odour of plenty that rose up through the chinks and pervaded the rooms above. Only those who have met them face to face, in all their substantial corporeality, can realise the indescribable cellar smells of old Dutch farmhouses. Everywhere economy of space was practised, and things were tucked away in all sorts of odd corners. Some of the bedchambers were scarcely as large as a steamer stateroom, and these ofttimes had little pantry closets beside the bed—a truly convenient arrangement for those disposed to midnight pantry raids. Tradition says that the good people of Hurley even took their cheeses to bed with them that the heat of their bodies might help to ripen them.

Hurley’s gardens were, and are, a source of genuine delight. They are charmingly inconsequent and unconventional. There is not a jot of plan or pretence about them. Hurley vegetables grow side by side with gentle flowers in a most democratic promiscuity. Cabbages and cucumbers rub elbows with roses and lilies. Plebeian sunflowers and four-o’clocks stand unabashed beside patrician boxwood and blooms of high degree, while onions and lavender, in sweet accord, send their roots into the common ground within a foot of each other. The Dutch gardens, if not grand, are, at least, comfortable and useful, and have an air of sociability about them that puts one immediately at ease.

What the people were in Holland, that were they in New Netherland, and what they were elsewhere in New Netherland, that were they in Hurley only, perhaps, somewhat more conservative and tenacious of old customs and ideas, as is apt to be the case in places remote from the active scene of events. The Dutch of the Hudson were not the slow, stupid, fat-witted louts that Washington Irving and his copyists pourtray, although, to us of English blood, many of their ways seem strange, and some amusing. They were broad-minded, alert, wholesome, human people who took life pleasantly and got whole-souled enjoyment in their frequent festivals. They were incapable of stiff formality, and the architecture of their houses was exactly suited to their mode of life.

When we remember how tenaciously the English settlers clung to tradition in selecting the materials for their houses, those in New England holding by the timber tradition while the stone and brick tradition prevailed in the Middle Colonies and the South, one might expect to find among the Dutch colonists the same adherence to Dutch traditions in the case of materials, especially as the early Dutch houses so closely followed their prototypes in Holland. In this respect, however, the Dutchman made a virtue of necessity and quickly learned to be governed by expediency, using with good effect whatever materials the locality most readily provided. Although brick was in most cases the hereditary material which Dutchmen might have been expected to prefer, with natural thrift and common sense they used stone when bricks were not to be had, or wood when they could not get stone. Thus, for instance, we find the early Dutch houses of the Hudson Valley built of stone. Those in northern New Jersey were likewise built of stone of different colour and character from that found in the Hudson region. Again, in Long Island, where stone was not available, they built of wood and covered their houses with shingles, often leaving as much as fourteen inches to the weather. Dutch quickness in utilising readily available material is also seen in the willingness to use field stone for walls, while the New Englander, despite the abundance of the same material, merely used it for the divisions between his fields.

Furthermore, the Dutchman did not restrict himself to any one material for the whole fabric of his house. He was not in the least averse to using a variety of materials in the same building and this he often did with excellent effect. It is no unusual thing to find two or three materials used for several parts of the same small building, and it is not a hard matter to find instances in which stone, brick, stucco, clapboards and shingles all occur in the one structure and the result is usually felicitous, possibly, perhaps, because of the naïveté with which the several materials are employed, necessity and common sense being obviously the causes dictating their presence.

The stone used was sometimes carefully squared and dressed and, at others, the walls were of rubble construction without any attempt at careful arrangement. Occasionally the front of the house would be of dressed stone laid in orderly courses while the sides and back showed rubble walls. Then, again, where circumstances permitted, brick quoins and window and door trims, as in the Manor House at Croton-on-Hudson, might be used while the body of the walls was rubble. In this connexion it should be stated that the walls were carefully laid so that the stonework would hold together without much dependence being placed on the mortar, for the earliest mortar was of rather poor quality. In this respect the masonwork approached the ideal of a good wall construction.

When stucco was used it was generally plastered over a rough stone surface and whitewashed or washed with some colour. When this stucco is removed it will often be found that the wall underneath is of admirable rubble construction and that the stucco coating was apparently added as a ground work for white or coloured wash. Some years ago, the stucco coat was removed from the walls of the Manor House at Croton-on-Hudson, and the stone walls beneath presented a far more interesting surface than the plaster, which seems to have been added at a date considerably subsequent to that of original construction.

An examination in detail of the characteristics of the earliest Dutch houses discloses the following features of importance. As previously stated, almost all the houses were low, the eaves coming down to within a few feet of the tops

ACKERMAN (BRINCKERHOFF) HOUSE, HACKENSACK, N. J. 1704.

Local adaptations have begun to develop.

VERPLANCK HOUSE, NEAR FISHKILL LANDING, N. Y.

Showing genesis of porch from eave extension.

HALL, BOWNE HOUSE, FLUSHING, LONG ISLAND, N. Y.

With typical woodwork.

DINING ROOM, VAN CORTLANDT MANOR HOUSE, CROTON-ON-HUDSON, N. Y.

With Dutch interpretation of Georgian motifs on mantel.

of the first-floor windows. In many instances, the roofs were unbroken by dormers as the garrets were used largely for storage purposes and the bedchambers were on the ground floor. If families were large, one or two bedrooms would be partitioned off in the garret, the major part, however, being reserved for the storage of grains, household effects, and various supplies. Even then, the roofs were not interrupted by windows but the light would come from windows in the gable ends beside the chimneys. In many cases the stone walls at the gable ends did not rise above the line of the eaves and the portion above that would be hung with clapboards. Of course there were instances in which houses rose to a greater height and contained second floors as a visible part of the plan. Such was the old Hoffman House in Kingston-on-Hudson, built not long after the middle of the seventeenth century. It is to be noted, also, that, in that case, the stonework in the gable ends was continued to the top of the gable and there was no wall of overlapping clapboards.

The earliest houses were covered with roofs of the ordinary ridge type and presented the appearance outwardly of one-storey buildings, though in effect they often contained two floors. The gambrel roof of the Dutch houses was of later evolution and was probably suggested by force of circumstances. The gambrel construction made it possible to give more room in the garrets so that chambers could be accommodated with greater ease and there would not be so much waste room just inside the eaves, as the slope of the roof was at a steeper angle. It has been suggested that the gambrel roof came into being as an ingenious method of beating the devil around the bush, when a tax was laid upon houses of more than one storey in height. Technically and legally the gambrel roof house was but one storey high although, as a matter of fact, the gambrel made it possible to have an additional storey in the roof which served all practical purposes quite as fully as though the walls had been carried up to enclose a second floor. In the older Dutch houses with gambrel roofs, the pitch is never steep and the contour presents somewhat the lines of a flaring bell.

Although the gambrel roof was known in New England as early perhaps as 1670 and was, in all probability, borrowed from the Dutch, there is a wide difference in appearance between New England and Dutch gambrels. Generally speaking, the New England gambrels have the pitch from the eaves much steeper and shorter while the top pitch is longer than in the Dutch houses. In the Dutch gambrel roof, on the other hand, the steeper slope usually makes an angle of forty-five degrees, or less, and is by far the longer, while the top slope is quite short and has an angle of about 25 degrees. This difference in angle gives the Dutch gambrel roofs a rarely beautiful quality, especially when the lower end of the long slope just above the eaves was made with a kickup to avoid darkening the windows or possibly to throw the rain-water farther away from the walls. Whatever may be the origin of the gambrel,—and many ingenious theories have been suggested—whether it originated as previously suggested, to avoid the tax on two-storeyed dwellings, or whether the desire to increase the breadth of the span, by piecing out rafters, was the underlying cause, it is an exceptionally agreeable form of house covering and so closely associated with the dwellings of the Dutch Colonial period that we may properly identify it as a characteristic feature of that style.

Before leaving the subject of roofs, the development of the wide-projecting eaves, as we find them in the New Jersey and some of the Dutch Long Island houses of the eighteenth century, must be considered. The earliest Dutch houses as, for example, those at Kingston or Hurley had not the flaring eaves. Neither had the earliest Dutch houses in New Jersey. It has been ingeniously suggested that the projection was evolved to protect the walls and prevent the rain from disintegrating the mortar which, in the early part of the Colonial period, was frequently not of as good quality as it was later. This theory would seem to explain, to some extent, the habit of carrying the masonry at the gable ends only to the height of the first floor joists, filling in the space between that line and the peak of the gable with clapboards. In such cases, where the mortar of the exposed gable walls was damaged by the weather, it was an easy matter to re-point. Mr. Embury has still further suggested, coincidentally with this theory, that the desire to protect the masonry suggested the penthouses on two-storeyed structures. There is something to be said both for and against this hypothesis, but as the discussion does not materially affect the subject immediately before us it must be reserved for another place.

To the Dutch Colonial house may probably be attributed the origin of that essentially American institution, the porch, or at least one form of the porch as we now have it. “The porch has been evolved and developed in response to a distinct and manifest need in our mode of life imposed by climatic conditions. It falls in with our habits bred of love of outdoors; our seasons invite, nay even, at times, compel its use. True, the porch has its prototype in certain architectural features found in England and on the Continent (especially in some of the Southern countries), but, as we now have it, it is a peculiarly national affair and its evolution has been due to American ingenuity in an effort to meet the demands of local requirements. The earliest American houses, from New England to the Southern Colonies, faithful to prevailing precedent and tradition, had no porches, porches, that is, as we ordinarily understand the term. It was only as our domestic architecture developed along lines marked out and prompted by peculiarly American conditions and needs that precedents were forsaken, adaptations made, and porches appeared, at first in a rudimentary and tentative form and then finally, after the lapse of years, reached the full fruition of their growth in the form familiar to us. That growth varied widely in the course it followed, according to the several sections of the country and consequent diverse requirements and preferences,” but one form at least may be traced to the growth of plans in the houses of the Dutch Colonial type. This growth started with the projecting eaves at the front which, eventually, were carried out long enough to make a porch roof and supported at their edge by pillars or columns. An excellent example of this may be seen in the piazza of the Manor House at Croton-on-Hudson where the flaring slope of the roof is thus carried out and forms a porch covering. The same process may be traced in some of the later Dutch houses of New Jersey and Long Island.

Almost synchronously with the development of the porch as a distinct feature, we find a tendency to carry the walls a trifle higher and pierce them with a row of small, low windows above the porch roof and immediately below the line of the eaves which have now become distinct, the porch roof being cut off and made an independent member. These low windows, which were usually on a line a few inches above the floor inside have been rather facetiously called “lie-on-your-stomach windows.”

The doorway of the early Dutch houses was not a feature of any architectural pretension. It was approached by one or two steps only, as the houses were close to the ground, and sometimes a small platform, or a stoop with settles on either side, gave an inviting appearance indicative of the hospitality within. The doorway was rectangular without attempt at adornment further than occasionally a narrow transom with small, square lights. Even this was often lacking. The Dutch door divided in the middle shared the honours with solid, undivided batten doors. Both types were in common use, although preference was given the Dutch or divided door for the main entrance and the corresponding back entrance at the opposite end of the hall.

As the Dutch Colonial style developed in the eighteenth century more attention was paid to the adornment of the entrance and about the time of the Revolutionary War, which made the Colonists more fully aware of each other’s presence and served to spread and popularise ideas, we find that Georgian motifs were borrowed and adapted to local needs with a broad freedom of treatment that imparted a good deal of individuality to them and removed them at times almost altogether from the Georgian category from which the first inspiration had sprung. Up to this time the Dutch Colonial type had been singularly free from the working of outside influences and had developed independently along lines suggested by its inherent qualities. But even after this infusion of Georgian feeling the treatment was so typical and original that the newly introduced and adapted motifs were perfectly congruous with the parent stock upon which they had been engrafted.

Finally, in making the survey of the distinctive exterior features of the Dutch Colonial style, it should be remembered that the dormers, which so frequently appear, were not characteristic of the earliest dwellings but were a later development dictated by expediency when it was found desirable to use more fully the attics for sleeping rooms than was customary in the earliest houses, where all the light necessary was admitted from the gable ends and where the attics were storerooms and workshops for domestic operations such as weaving and spinning, often carried on by the slaves.

Ordinarily the Dutch house in ground plan was a long rectangle with an ell extension at one end. Oftentimes the roof of this ell extension swept down to within a few feet of the ground. There was no attempt at symmetry of plan in the arrangement of these houses but the walls were pierced with doors and windows wherever convenience dictated their presence. The Dutch house was almost invariably set close to the ground and it is this fact, together with their restful roof lines, that gives so many of the old Dutch dwellings their aspect of thorough repose. As stated before, the Dutch preferred to live downstairs and only used the attic for bedchambers when force of circumstances made it necessary. The two chief rooms of the house were the kitchen and the best parlour. In the one, not only was the cooking done but all the ordinary household life of the establishment was concentrated and there the family both played and worked. In the other the household gods were stored away and the best furniture and china of all sorts were displayed in proud array. Ordinarily a wide hall ran through the house from front door to back door and the rooms were on either side of this. Small bedrooms were tucked away back of the parlour and kitchen, while sometimes a great living room took the place of the kitchen on one side of the hall and the kitchen was pushed into the ell extension at the rear. Thanks to the lack of formality in the plan of the Dutch house, it was capable of indefinite growth and in that respect the architecture was profoundly affected by the mode of life of the occupants. It not infrequently happened that a larger addition was built to the old houses and this addition was again added to by another smaller addition when a married son or daughter came home to live and share the protection of the paternal rooftree.

The stairway in the majority of Dutch Colonial houses was not an important feature and was not made much of. It merely led to the attic where some of the children or servants slept, if there was not room enough below stairs, and where all sorts of materials and provisions were stored or where spinning and weaving were done. Consequently, little decoration was bestowed upon it. The hand-rail might or might not be of mahogany and supported on straight, slender spindles. It was often boxed in to prevent the heat from rising to the attic and thus being lost.

The chief feature in the old Dutch rooms was the fireplace, and many of these old fireplaces are of cavernous proportions. The chimney breast almost invariably extended well into the room and the spaces on either side were often filled with built-in cupboards, or else with deeply embayed window seats. Very little attempt at decoration was made in the panelling of the over-mantels and indeed there was often no panelling at all but the rough plaster of the wall was whitewashed. The walls were exceedingly thick, often two feet or more, and this gave deep reveals to the windows. All the woodwork in the earlier houses was ordinarily plain and was usually painted a spotless white as it so often was in Holland and this made a striking background for the hinges, latches, bolts and other hardware whose decorative value the Dutch thoroughly appreciated and which they accordingly fashioned in graceful shapes. It was not until a later period, towards the middle of the eighteenth century and later, that any attempt was made to embellish the woodwork by carving or turning and even then the adornment often consisted of only simple but well-proportioned mouldings. Towards the end of the eighteenth century when the Georgian influence, particularly in its Adam phase, began to be strongly felt, one finds adaptations of current motifs such as oval fans, swags, drops, flutings, reedings, sunbursts and divers other decorative forms in vogue at the period. All of them however were handled with a surprising degree of freedom and independent of English precedents and the manner in which they were used seems to be thoroughly original. It is at this period of elaborated woodwork that we also find the doorway assuming importance as a decorative feature of the house. Slender turned columns—some of them ought rather to be called spindles—were added at the sides, occasionally there were glass side lights with leaded tracery and fanlights in elliptical door heads or tracery in square transoms were all used to add a note of state to the doorway that had hitherto been very plain and unpretentious. In the fanlights, as well as in the side lights, it was not unusual for the tracery to be formed in delicately-moulded lead work. In a very able study of ornamental detail of the older Dutch houses by John T. Boyd, Jr., published in The Architectural Record, the author says: “The first thing one notices about these details is their freedom. It is an architecture absolutely without orders. In some rare cases, there are mantels with little Tuscan columns, but they are not among the finest examples and are found side by side with freer forms. The over-mantels often ... show a very rare use of fluted pilasters.

“A freer and very exquisite channelling was often used, which is found in many houses with slight variations. The theory of all these Dutch mouldings is a series of many fine parallel lines and shadows made by hollows, beads, and fillets, beautifully varied in proportion, all very delicate in scale.”

It has been stated that the interior woodwork was generally painted white and that the rough walls were ordinarily whitewashed, but while speaking of the paint it should not be forgotten that the Dutch had a wonderful eye for colour and, though the interiors of their houses presented an aspect of spotless white, the exteriors rejoiced in chromatic brilliancy that at times was positively dazzling and, even in its weatherworn stages, presented a lively appearance that could not fail to attract the attention of the most unobservant. Greens, blues, and reds were used with the greatest freedom and, just as in Holland to-day, gave a touch of kaleidoscopic interest that served to throw all the delightfully intimate and fanciful details of the Dutch house into strong relief.

The shutters of the earlier Dutch houses were usually of the batten type and at the top often presented the curious saw cuts intended to admit a ray of light or for ventilation. These saw cuts were made in almost any pattern from that of a half moon or a five pointed star to a heart or a pot of flowers. This same conceit of decorative saw cuts has been perpetuated in the shutters of modern houses patterned after old Dutch models. Shutters of a later period were pannelled.

Of all the types of domestic architecture that have been either evolved or modified in America during the Colonial period, none more generally commends itself to the favourable consideration of the modern home builder than that which the Dutch settlers of Manhattan, North Jersey and Long Island worked out as the most satisfactory solution for their needs. Although the body was sturdy and stout, the ornamental details, which were developed in the later period, were often extremely graceful, the proportions throughout the type are agreeable and in every instance, whether early or late, we find the omnipresent charm of domesticity, which in the long run is more valued by the majority of people than a stately formality which sacrifices a measure of comfort to the exacting purity of proportion.

CHAPTER III
THE COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE OF NEW ENGLAND

THE Colonial houses of New England are of singular interest because they fill a gap in our architectural history, a gap regarded for a long time as embarrassing and awkward to bridge over. They are also peculiarly interesting because they are so full of surprises that open up with increasing frequency to repay diligent investigation on the part of the architectural student, the historian or the antiquary. They are still further interesting because they supply us with important and ample material for comparative study.

The gap alluded to is the apparent hiatus in the connexion between domestic architectural precedents and tradition in old England, on the one hand, and Colonial manifestations, as popularly conceived until very recently, on the other. In order to avoid an undue extent of introductory explanation, it will be assumed that the reader is reasonably familiar with the general characteristics of outward appearance displayed by seventeenth-century English houses and knows something of the structural methods employed in their erection. To appreciate fully and understand the spirit and peculiarities of the earliest Colonial architecture of New England, we must seek, in the course of our examination of the subject, to find a fundamental and close correspondence between it and the architecture of old England, no matter how far the visible traces of that intimate relationship may have been obscured by subsequent alterations and additions to the original houses whose fabric affords our basis of comparison. If we keep our eyes and wits alert, we shall not be disappointed in the results of our search.

While pursuing our quest for evidences of architectural descent or consanguinity, we should keep constantly in mind three things. Indeed, we must keep these three facts before us to understand not only the early phases of architecture but many other aspects of seventeenth-century New England life as well. First of all, the men who built the early New England houses and the men who lived in them were Englishmen, and, as Englishmen, they were naturally disposed by temperament to be strongly conservative and to cling tenaciously to precedent and tradition, particularly in a matter of such vital importance as the fashioning of houses. They were, in short, proving the truth of Edward Eggleston’s dictum that “men can with difficulty originate, even in a new hemisphere.” In the second place, all their training in craftsmanship was English and it was but reasonable that they should continue to work in a new land with the same tools and to fashion their materials in precisely the same manner as they had been wont to do in the land of their birth. It was but natural, too, that they should perpetuate the technicalities of the trades they had learned in old England in the training they gave their apprentices. This identity and continuity of craft traditions may be clearly seen in the furniture of early New England, which is exactly the same as contemporary furniture in England in contour, joinery, and the technique and pattern of the carving. Identity and continuity of craft characteristics may also be traced in the turning of baluster spindles, in the chamfering of beams, in the framing of house timbers and in a dozen other ways. Lastly, those early American Englishmen were possessed of no mean degree of clear-headed, practical common sense and were eminently resourceful, as pioneers in a new and untamed land must needs be if their efforts at colonisation are to be crowned with success. If local exigency seemed to demand that they modify their methods to fit current needs, they were prompt to devise a suitable adaptation to meet the requirement. But these adaptations and

HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES, SALEM, MASS. 1669.

Showing overhang and corner pendant.

Courtesy of Henry I. Fairbanks, Dedham, Mass.

FAIRBANKS HOUSE, DEDHAM, MASS. 1636.

WHIPPLE HOUSE, IPSWICH, MASS.

The latticed casements are restorations.

WHIPPLE HOUSE, IPSWICH, MASS.

departures from precedent were not indulged in from mere caprice or with any deliberate and conscious intent to develop a new and original mode of architectural expression. The adaptations in each case, before they became precedents for subsequent repetition elsewhere, were suggested by obvious necessity and originality was left to take care of itself, with the usual happy results arising from the observance of the principle that the safest and truest originality comes by a gradual process of evolution, elimination and adaptation to local needs.

In view, then, of the foregoing considerations, one not unreasonably expects to find the early New England house identical or almost identical in appearance and structure with the contemporary English house of a like size, only such differences being evident as local expediency occasioned. If one could only see several such houses now as they unquestionably were at the date of their erection, this chapter would be altogether unnecessary, for the resemblance between them and their prototypes in our old home beyond the Atlantic would be so striking that the veriest dolt would be sensible of it. In nearly every instance the alterations and accretions of centuries have blurred and often hidden the points of likeness, but, by the judicious employment of archæological surgery, we may readily trace all the steps of evolutionary development from the well-known old English type to a type that became peculiarly American and local, that is to say, peculiar to New England. The steps are all logical and we can see how the early colonists began by building houses as they were accustomed to see them built in old England and ended by building a type whose characteristics were generally determined by local conditions and expediency. We can see how, by successive steps, mediæval English peculiarities of structure and design gradually gave way to methods of more recent contrivance or of foreign origin. Indeed, among all the colonists, whether of English, Dutch, Swedish or German blood, directly they had passed the temporary log-cabin stage, there was a virtual identity between the architectural forms of the parent countries and their own earliest permanent architectural attempts, and the process of differentiation did not begin until new environment and new necessities pointed the way to the adoption of new modes and forms. It is exceedingly important to recognise the strong current of continuity and to realise that the architecture of Colonial America, in its sundry manifestations, was not, as some are pleased to contend, an wholly independent growth without old-world antecedents or clearly marked historical background.

The evolution of local architecture, of course, not only mirrors the social and economic development of the colonies but also presents numerous edifying variations within the confines of New England which show how strongly the course of architectural growth in the new land was influenced by conditions locally prevalent in the old home. It can oftentimes be seen how the artisans from one particular place in England perpetuated certain idiosyncrasies of craftsmanship within limited Colonial areas and that those peculiarities are found nowhere else. In both its economic and purely technical aspects, the mode of domestic architectural expression devised in Colonial New England has many admirable features to commend it and is due partly to native Yankee mother wit and shrewd practicality quickened by the spur of necessity, and partly to the spirit of true British conservatism and attachment to long-established custom, a spirit that was strong in the early Puritans and often determined their actions in spite of themselves.

A brief survey of seventeenth-century manners and men, within the bounds of New England, will greatly assist us in forming an intelligent appreciation of the houses erected in this pioneer period. The log-cabin of the first few years of colonisation we need scarcely consider, for the rude huts erected at first were merely temporary shelters, were soon replaced by more substantial structures, and were not really representative in any sense. The houses built as soon as the colonists had an opportunity to become accustomed to their new environment and get their economic bearings, reflected a condition of society in which a modest degree of simple comfort, resulting from rigorous thrift, rewarded the majority while prosperous affluence fell to the lot of comparatively few. Well built dwellings were comfortable but not pretentious. They were apt for all ordinary domestic requirements but, save in exceptional cases, there was no approach to luxury. They usually had rooms enough for all essential purposes but rarely were any special or extra rooms set apart for distinctive uses, with the exception of the parlour or “best room,” which often held the best bed and served variously as state bedroom for most honoured guests, repository for the most treasured household gods and the choicest items of domestic equipment and, finally, as the gathering place for the more worthy visitors at times of weddings, funerals or other important occasions.

The number of bedchambers provided in most cases would nowadays be deemed totally inadequate for the people to be accommodated and, to cite only one instance thoroughly typical of innumerable others, the members of the Revere household, if we may believe the statistics of tradition, must have been packed away at nights in sardine-like and most unsanatory proximity, or else some of them slept in the cellar or on the roof. This was well on towards the latter part of the eighteenth century, too, when habits in this particular had certainly not fallen below the standards of the seventeenth century. Besides the members of the Revere family, there were various apprentices and domestics, all of whom found shelter beneath the roof of this typical seventeenth-century house. It was no uncommon thing for two or three children or young persons to sleep in one bed and there was often more than one bedstead in a room. Truckle or trundle beds for children were frequently put in the bedchambers of their elders, while indentured servants and apprentices oftentimes slept in the kitchen, or else master and mistress slept in the tempered atmosphere of the kitchen fire and underlings took to the frigid regions above. Wherever the kitchen was put into commission as a sleeping apartment, there was the folding or “let down” bed or slawbank, which Mrs. Earle describes as “an oblong frame with a network of rope. This frame was fastened at one end to the wall, with heavy hinges, and at night it was lowered to a horizontal position, and the unhinged end was supported on heavy wooden turned legs which fitted into sockets in the frame. When not in use the bed was hooked up against the wall, and doors like closet doors, were closed over it, or curtains were drawn over it to conceal it.” What though the sleeping arrangements of the seventeenth century, and indeed of much of the eighteenth century, for that matter, would often have called forth the sharp condemnation of a modern tenement house inspector, the colonists, nevertheless, made shift to get along in tolerable comfort and raise large families of children, with a due regard for the amenities of life, who became the most exemplary of citizens.

If the kitchen was sometimes used as a sleeping room, it was almost universally used as a living room. It was the vital point of the household whence radiated all domestic energies. It was spacious and was made as bright and cheerful as it could possibly be. Around the great open fireplace, where the cooking was done, centred all in-door activities from carding, spinning and weaving to corn husking. Here the family circle, eldest in places of greatest comfort, children and servants about the outer edge, gathered in the firelight of the long winter evenings; here the neighbour or chance traveller was entertained, and here lads and lasses, in the full glare of family publicity, did much of their courting, sometimes whispering their sweet nothings, from opposite sides of

Copyright, Detroit Publishing Co.

PAUL REVERE HOUSE, STREET FRONT, AFTER RESTORATION.

Built 1676.

Copyright, Detroit Publishing Co.

PAUL REVERE HOUSE. GREAT ROOM, GROUND FLOOR.

The old wall paper is not coeval with the house.

the fireplace, through a “courting-stick,” a wooden tube six or eight feet long with mouth and ear pieces at each end.

In houses sufficiently spacious to admit of a living room or a “keeping-room” separate from the kitchen—such a room was analogous to the old English “hall”—the kitchen was still a cheerful room of great importance and the scene of many domestic fireside industries. It was a common thing to make lean-to additions to the original structure and the kitchen was often put in such an addition or in an ell extension. It was only the houses of the affluent, like that of Governour Theophilus Eaton at New Haven, built about 1640, that could boast what we should nowadays consider a very moderate number of rooms on the ground floor. Besides the great hall or living room in Governour Eaton’s house, there seem to have been a large kitchen and a pantry or buttery on one side, and on the other a parlour and a counting-house or library. Of the appointments of these rooms we may gain some idea from the inventory of Governour Eaton’s effects at the time of his death in 1657. In the hall or living room there were “a drawing Table and a round table; a cubberd & 2 long formes; a cubberd cloth & cushions; 4 setwork cushions, 6 greene cushions; a greate chaire with needleworke; 2 high chaires set work; 4 high stooles set worke; 4 low chaires set worke; 2 low stooles set work; 2 Turkey Carpette; 6 high joyne stooles; a pewter cistern & candlestick; a pr of small andirons; a pr of doggs; a pr of tongues fire pan & bellowes.” The other rooms were furnished in a comparable manner. Living rooms in less pretentious houses had similar equipment though, it is scarcely necessary to add, they were not usually so complete nor so elegant.

The very plan, or rather plans for there were several, of early New England houses proclaimed an English origin. The house of Governour Eaton, just mentioned, is said to have been built in the form of a capital E. The “E” plan was a very common form in the manor houses and even in the larger cottages of the England of Eaton’s time. It was also a very old form, “dating from the thirteenth century, if not from the twelfth, or even earlier, and it had, in its long career, come to be the expression of a regular and well-recognised arrangement.” “Other houses of this plan were built in different parts of New England for men of consequence and substance.”

“The common houses,” according to Edward E. Lambert, the antiquary, “at first were small, of one storey with sharp roofs, and heavy stone chimneys and small diamond windows.” Many of the early dwellings also had two floors. One type of these small houses commonly found in Massachusetts and Connecticut consisted of two rooms with a chimney between them. The house door opened into a small entry containing the staircase, opposite the door and carried up beside the chimney. The chimney was the core around which the house was built and projected above the middle of the ridgepole. Each room had a fireplace. To this type of house was frequently added a lean-to across the whole rear and this addition usually accommodated the kitchen. Sometimes the lean-to was incorporated in the plan when the house was built. In either case, the long, narrow lean-to room contained a fireplace which generally had a flue in the central chimney. When dwellings of this description had two rooms on the ground floor, one would be the kitchen and general living room and the other the parlour containing the “best bed,” an arrangement alluded to in a previous paragraph; where there was the additional lean-to room for the kitchen, the two other rooms would be living room and parlour.

In northern Rhode Island there was another common type that contained one room, at the end of which “was a vast stone chimney which appeared on the outside of the house.” Beside the fireplace and in the offset made by the chimney jamb, was a winding staircase—in the earliest houses it was sometimes a ladder—leading to the upper room or loft, as the case might be. An amplification of this “stone-end” type of house was occasionally found with two rooms placed side by side and a fireplace in each room in relatively the same position. That these types of floor plan were part of the common English architectural heritage we shall presently see by comparison with subsequent chapters. The position of the chimney served to all intents as an exterior indication of the internal plan of the house. Of course, many departures from these two original plans are to be met with in the early Colonial houses of New England but it will usually be found that such departures are due to later additions to a structure based, in the first instance, on one or the other of them.

We are so accustomed to thinking of the old New England houses as structures covered with clapboards that we are in danger of forgetting what is underneath this outer coat. In fact, it is safe to say that the majority of people do not know what is underneath, and many would be greatly surprised if they did. After all, the clapboard casing is a disguise, and the people of New England are so thrifty and, as a rule, have been so careful to keep their buildings in good condition that the clapboards hide the traces of age that would otherwise be visible and put the oldest buildings on a par with those of later date. The clapboard casing masques different things beneath its surface. If we rip it off many of the oldest buildings, we shall find behind it nothing more nor less than an old English half-timber house, built precisely as were the half-timber or “black and white” houses in the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts. The exigencies of climate soon made it evident that such a mode of structure was not altogether suited to the rigorous winters of New England and then, too, something must be attributed to the desire on the part of subsequent owners to follow prevalent fashion which prescribed the clapboard jackets. In houses of more recent date, of course, the clapboard shell may be regarded as an integral part of the structure but, in the earlier buildings, it is nothing but a masque, put on at a later date, to protect the walls and give added warmth when the first-adopted method of wall building was found insufficient, or in some cases, perhaps, to comply with the dictates of a passing fancy.

Whenever this clapboarding is torn off for repairs, original conditions become obvious and may readily be studied. The writer has seen such old houses, when partly denuded of their clapboard casing, reveal typical half-timber constructional methods, similar in every particular to the methods pursued by the half-timber builders in England. The cills, the studs, the diagonal timbers and all the other parts of the frame are set and joined, tenoned and pinned, just as they were in England and the spaces between the studs are “pugged” with rough brick or stones and coarse clay stiffened with chopped straw, also in the time-honoured English manner. It is quite possible that in some instances the spaces between the studs may have been “pugged” with “wattle and dab”—thick clay daubed on a loose mesh of interwoven wattles or withes—for the tradition of this process certainly crossed the Atlantic and appeared in some of the early clay chimneys of Connecticut.

So many people have expressed surprise when told of the unbroken persistence of the half-timber tradition that it will be in order to mention specific instances which, however, may be regarded as typical of many other buildings of contemporary date. For much painstaking and scholarly investigation in this field, and for much accurate restoration, the public is indebted to Joseph Everett Chandler, of Boston, whose restorations of numerous historic buildings have won him well deserved esteem and confidence.[A]

DOTEN HOUSE, PLYMOUTH, MASS. BUILT 1640.

Very early type with low eaves and central chimney.

NARBONNE HOUSE, SALEM, MASS.

The long slope of roof on one side shows persistence of old English tradition.

Copyright, by International News Service.

WYNNESTAY, PHILADELPHIA. 1689.

An intact example of Pennsylvania Colonial, of Welsh workmanship.

Copyright, by International News Service.

SOUTH FRONT OF WYCK, GERMANTOWN, PHILADELPHIA. 1690.

Pennsylvania Colonial type with German influence apparent.

It was the writer’s privilege to see the old Bake House in Salem just after it had been rescued by private generosity from impending demolition and moved to its present site hard by the House of the Seven Gables. In the course of making necessary repairs and restorations, the clapboard casing had been entirely removed and it was possible to see fully the whole structural scheme. The timbers and pugging were as just noted. Although the windows were, at that time, of the sash type, with small panes, the traces were clearly visible of alterations that had been made at an earlier date, probably somewhere about 1720, when the sash window rose into high favour and was generally substituted for the leaded casement with small diamond-shaped panes. The timbers gave unmistakable evidence that the window apertures in the sides of the house had originally been wide enough to accommodate a range of casements and that they had been neither so high nor so low as the sash or double hung windows that took their places. In other words, the timbers showed that the apertures had been narrowed to a considerable extent and, at the same time, extended both upwards and downwards.

Inside the house, the heavy oak studs, when the laths and plaster were torn off, showed chamfered corners, usually stopped at the ends with a stop that was thoroughly mediæval in character and might be found duplicated in the beams of trussed roofs in any old building in England dating from the sixteenth century or earlier. The tops of the studs, in some cases, showed a peculiar splay outward at the sides and rough notching by way of ornament. Surely here were touches of mediæval English workmanship that had been perpetuated in the new land by a workman who had served his apprenticeship in an English village where all the old joinery traditions were preserved intact.

The overhang on the second floor projecting some distance beyond the walls of the first is another striking instance of the survival of half-timber building traditions in not a few of the old houses. We see it in the House of the Seven Gables, in the Bake House, in the Paul Revere house in Boston, in more than one old house in Marblehead, and in plenty of other ancient dwellings, some of them recently restored, throughout the land, where restorations have been intelligently undertaken and carried out. It has almost invariably proved the case either that the pendants were intact beneath the clapboards, or that the stumps of them were there, clearly showing the existence of the feature. In not a few cases the overhang has disappeared because the clapboard casing has been carried down flush with the outside of the upper storey. This was the case with the House of the Seven Gables, and it was only when the clapboard casing, in which it had been jacketed for many years, was removed that the overhang once more came to light and the stumps of the original pendants were forthwith restored. The finding of such pendants and such overhangs coupled with the frequent occurrence of such features as just noted in the case of the Bake House afford us irrefutable evidence of the perpetuation of the English half-timber building traditions. It has been fondly supposed by some that the overhang was meant for purposes of defence. It may have been turned to that use when occasion required, but defence was certainly not the original idea, for in that case the projection would doubtless have been carried all the way around the wall, as it was in the case of the block houses, where, of course, this feature was meant primarily to facilitate defence and cover the occupants as they dropped boiling oil, hot lead, or other missiles on the heads of their assailants whenever they approached near enough.

From the early New England houses, that embodied so many old English architectural traditions, was gradually evolved, under stress of local expediency, a type that met the needs of the colonists. That type was not only intensely practical in its characteristics but its simplicity and straightforwardness gave it a vital artistic interest that still commends it to our favourable consideration.

CHAPTER IV
PRE-GEORGIAN ARCHITECTURE IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES
English, Welsh, Swedish and German Influences

FROM the very outset, Pennsylvania was the most polyglot and conglomerate of all the English colonies or provinces in America. West Jersey and Delaware, which latter State was originally a part of Pennsylvania and known as “the three lower counties on Delaware,” in some degree shared this miscellaneous character, and together the three formed a practically distinct unit in the Middle Colonies, peculiar in composition and without parallel elsewhere. The diversity in nationality and speech among the early settlers was directly reflected in architectural manifestations and the variant types were never wholly welded together into one distinct style and, even long after the advent and almost universal prevalence of the Georgian mode, they continued in use concurrently. Just as similar phenomena were to be detected in the several parts of New England, they displayed local peculiarities of artisanship attributable to the different traditions obtaining in the respective parts of the Old World from which the individual artisans had come. The two most noticeable features in the early population of Pennsylvania were the diversity of elements and the clannishness and consequent isolation of the people who composed the several distinct parts of the colony. These elements remained distinct from each other both from preference and interest, and natural conditions favoured this division.

First of all in date of settlement on the shores of the Delaware were the Swedes, whose successful efforts at colonisation began in 1638. The Dutch, it is true, had previously made some slight attempts at settlement. In 1616, in pursuit of the exploration essayed but abandoned by Hudson in 1609, Captain Hendrickson, in the “Onrust” (“Restless”), had sailed up the Delaware to the mouth of the Schuylkill and, in 1623, under Captain Cornelius Mey, Fort Nassau was built at what is now Gloucester Point, nearly opposite Philadelphia. In the main, however, the Dutch preferred to stay down the bay and, in 1650, Fort Nassau was abandoned. They were traders rather than settlers, so far as their connexion with the Delaware was concerned, and the first real settlements, therefore, are to be credited to the Swedes who were home-loving, industrious farmers, proud of their homesteads and capable in the management of their dairies but possessed of little inclination towards commercial activity. The Swedish foundation was permanent and, though the Swedish population was eventually absorbed by the more numerous elements brought hither a few years later by Penn’s “holy experiment,” it left an indelible and significant mark upon the corporate composition of the colony and the traces of Swedish influence are still distinct and unmistakable, not only in much of the local architecture, in the names of places and persons, and in the strong strain of Swedish blood in many Pennsylvania families but in humbler and less obvious matters as well. As an instance of the latter may be mentioned the common strain of red cattle to be seen everywhere on the hills and in the valleys of eastern Pennsylvania. These same red cattle are the descendants of the Swedish kine, brought hither nearly three hundred years ago by the hardy colonists who planted their farmsteads along the waters of the Delaware and its lower tributaries.

Attracted by the prospect of religious liberty, by the liberal inducements offered them, and by the fatness of the land, a great variety of settlers, following in the wake of Penn’s pioneers, flocked to the colony on the Delaware and found there a safe and happy refuge after the troublous existence many of them had led before their departure from their old homes. Besides the English, who were almost altogether Quakers, there were, in this second wave of immigration, both Welsh and Germans. Later still, a small Dutch element was added and then came the Scotch-Irish. Each of these elements naturally perpetuated its own peculiar architectural traditions, and why those traditions continued so long a time distinct in their expression we shall presently see.

While the English Quakers were numerically preponderant, counting the neighbourhood of Philadelphia and West Jersey as a unit of population, and were politically in supreme control until late in the eighteenth century, the Welsh and Germans dwelt close beside them and were accorded so large a measure of practical independence in the management of their own affairs that their communities were virtually imperia in imperio. For twenty or thirty years after the founding of Pennsylvania, “the Welsh were the most numerous class of immigrants” and in place names, in blood, in local history, and in architecture their enduring influence is plainly discernible. Before they migrated from the land of their birth, they had entered into an agreement with Penn by which he promised them “a tract of forty thousand acres, where

GLORIA DEI GLEBE HOUSE.

Built for clergymen of Weceaco and Kingsessing parishes.

OLDEST HOUSE IN DOVER, DELA.

Showing strong Swedish influence in contour of roof.

they could have a little government of their own and live by themselves.” Accordingly, upon their arrival, this tract was surveyed for them in the high, rolling lands embraced chiefly within the present bounds of Montgomery and Delaware Counties, a section that more nearly resembled in character their beloved Wales than did any other part of this new country of their adoption. The tract was called the Welsh Barony for the sturdy, “red-haired, freckle-faced descendants of the ancient Britons insisted that this territory, specially set apart for them, was a barony or county palatine and, in very truth, it was a manor with the right of court baron.” These Owens and Joneses, Evanses and Wynnes, Powells and Pughs and all their kith and kin, managed their affairs according to their own notions and, at first, dispensed with the usual system of township and county organisation. Civil authority was vested in the Quaker meetings until, in 1690, the three townships of Merion, Haverford and Radnor were formed and the civil jurisdiction of the meetings superseded. Welsh was the official language of the courts and records and Welsh was the daily tongue of all the people in the barony and very few of them understood English, so that when William Penn preached at Haverford, in 1701, his hearers could not have been much edified, so far as his words were concerned. Closely bound together by the tie of language and separated by the same means from the other colonists who spoke English, Swedish or German, these Welsh gentry and yeomen held aloof from outside affairs, content with a mode of life that was “unusual on a provincial frontier” for its “amount of enjoyment and expenditure for dress and entertainment.” Local independence and self-sufficiency were only broken down when the barony was thrown open to outside settlers because the Welsh occupants refused to pay quit-rents on more land than they actually used or held. Their strong feeling of nationality, however, remained and nothing could have been more natural than that the architecture for which they were responsible should have had, as it did, a characteristic local flavour.

The earliest German community was Germantown and, though it is now a part of Philadelphia, in 1683 and for more than a hundred years afterward, Penn’s “greene country towne” and the village of the Germans were separated by a long stretch of open country and the highroad between the two was oftentimes so bad that it was an obstacle rather than an aid to communication. The German settlers spoke their own language, printed their own books, pursued their own industries, worshipped in their own way, built their own schools and managed their own affairs of internal organisation without either interference or assistance from the powers in Philadelphia. As did the earliest settlers in Germantown, so also did their countrymen, who continued to come to America in ever-increasing numbers and travelled farther and farther into the interior of the land where the richness of the soil and the opportunity to follow their own inclinations without let or hindrance from interfering or antagonistic neighbours invited them.

Besides keeping aloof, during most of the early period, from the settlers of other nationality, the Germans were also subdivided among themselves. There were the Pietists or Rosicrucians, who had their settlement or community on the banks of the Wissahickon. Although they maintained some intercourse with the other German settlers, they nevertheless led a distinct existence. The people in Germantown, likewise, formed a complete community in themselves and the industries in which they engaged at an early date, namely, the operation of paper and knitting mills, are still flourishing in the neighbourhood, in some instances on the original sites. Again, the settlers in the Skippack region were far removed from those in Germantown and developed peculiarities of their own. The Moravians, in their turn, pushed still farther into the northern part of the province and founded settlements quite distinct from all other colonisation enterprises. Their ancient buildings are deeply interesting and have preserved permanently the traditions of the country whence the Moravians originally came. An examination will clearly show a similarity in many points to the Suabian modes of architectural expression, as one might expect from the close ties of kinship.

The isolation of the several elements of population in the colony was still further favoured by the fact that, at first, the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware colonists who followed Penn resembled their Swedish predecessors and were not commercial in their instincts like the Dutch, who were aggressively mercantile with their fur trade. What they needed for home consumption the early Pennsylvanians made for themselves, so far as they could, and in every way were essentially agricultural and diametrically opposed to the Dutch. For some years after the founding of the colony, Swedes, English, Welsh, and Germans alike turned their eyes inland. We might say that their policy of colonisation was introspective rather than expansive.

This introspective policy of colonisation did not tend toward the expansion or the prosperity of the colony and, while the colonists led lives of comfort in their own preferred seclusion, it was not until they turned their eyes to the sea and engaged in commerce that the prosperity of Philadelphia, and of the colony generally, increased by leaps and bounds. The roads, for the most part, were extremely bad and, in the winter and spring, were hopelessly miry. Where the settlers did not follow the course of the streams for the spread of their area of colonisation, they followed the Indian trails, and most of the old roads leading out from Philadelphia, the old arteries of traffic along which the colonists made their homesteads, and from which they pushed farther and farther into the interior, were originally the pathways worn by the red men through the forest.

While the Swedes chose the streams to determine their course of colonisation, the Germans usually stuck to the Indian trails which, in time, became the highroads to their various communities. In the earliest times, the German lads and lasses forded the streams and came on horseback along these roads, carrying their goods for market in the city in panniers. It was not long, however, before sufficient improvement was made in the condition of the highways to allow the great four, six, and eight horse wains to be driven to the city periodically from the more remote settlements. In these wains were contained the products of the six months’ or year’s labour on the farms and, with the money from what they sold, the farmers bought materials which they took home to be manufactured into the various articles of necessity or comfort required by the different members of their households.

Not until they learned, in the course of time, to appreciate the fundamental liberalism that characterised the principles of the colony as established by the Founder, and not until the gradual development of commercial industries tended to bring them more together had the different groups of colonists any common ground upon which they might meet without bringing their diversity of principles and prejudices into conflict. In the meanwhile, the architectural course of the province had fallen into several well-defined separate channels that are still easily recognisable. That these divers phases of Colonial architecture should retain their individuality side by side is not to be wondered at when we consider the early diversity and isolation of the various racial elements of the province, explained at length in the foregoing pages, and when we consider, also, the tenacity with which the people clung to their distinguishing racial peculiarities of every sort long after the barriers of antagonism or isolation had been broken down.

It is always well to be explicit, and it is easier to make the basis of contention clear when a

QUAKER ALMS HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA.

Built early in eighteenth century. Said to have been the place of Evangeline’s death.

LONDON (BRADFORD’S) COFFEE HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA. BUILT 1702.

From an old engraving.

OLD PHILADELPHIA COURT HOUSE. BUILT 1707.

definite instance is cited. We shall, therefore, use certain specified houses for the sake of example. The first of these to claim our attention is Wynnestay, shown in one of the accompanying illustrations, the ancient home of the Wynne family, on the borders of the Welsh Barony. When built in 1689, it was in deep country; now it is surrounded by a suburban growth. Practically the only alteration that Wynnestay has ever undergone was raising the ridgepole of the roof, on the oldest part, to the line of the 1700 addition at a time when it was found necessary to make some repairs. Save this, and what has been built at the back to meet increased domestic needs, Wynnestay remains to-day in its pristine state and is, therefore, valuable as a well-preserved example of Welsh Colonial work. Doors and windows are low, but of generous breadth, and capped by heavy stone lintels made of thick, oblong slabs that must have cost no ordinary exertion and energy to set them in place. The two dormers have the same sharply-pointed peaks that we shall see in another Colonial example. As might be expected, the walls are thick and everything about the building is of the most solid construction.

When Wynnestay was built, the colonists had had no time to evolve new architectural forms, so we may be sure that in erecting their dwellings they followed as closely as they were able all traditions and precedents with which they had been familiar in the old country. That Wynnestay and its contemporaries faithfully represent the farmhouses and small manor houses of Wales and England we may feel the more certain because capable artisans, both house carpenters and stone masons, accompanied the earlier settlers and by this time had arrived in considerable numbers in the colony, and of course were working by the principles instilled into them in their apprentice days.

The masonry of the Pennsylvania Colonial type has been highly admired time and time again by architects in all sections of the country. The same sort of masonry work is being done by local stone masons today, and so individual and characteristic is it that they are sometimes sent for to erect walls at a great distance from their own locality, because no other masons can be found to put quite the same touch into the face of the wall or lay the stones in quite the same way. But the charm for which their handiwork is justly famed is due to the fact that they are merely following the tradition handed down to them by the old Welsh and English masons who came over with the first settlers. The tradition has been faithfully perpetuated ever since. We find it in strong evidence in all the old houses of that type, in fact in all the old buildings. It will be adverted to, in the chapter on old Colonial churches, in connexion with St. David’s, Radnor. Again we see it in such a building as Waynesborough, which, by the way, is particularly interesting as marking the transition from the early Colonial type to the early Georgian.

Although Waynesborough was not built until a few years after Graeme Park or Hope Lodge, those striking examples of the first phase of the Middle Colonies’ Georgian, it has, nevertheless, retained in certain features a strong resemblance to the early Colonial Welsh type. The masonry is precisely the same, but more noticeable even than this are the lintels of the doors and windows, constructed of a number of stones vertically set in a flattened or elliptical arch. This form is to be seen in much of the early Welsh work concurrently with the great slabs noted at Wynnestay.

In general character Wynnestay is similar to the other Welsh houses near by, such as Pencoyd, at Bala, built in 1633, or Harriton, built a little later, but it has suffered less change in the lapse of years than its near neighbours in Lower Merion township or other sections in which the Welsh influence was felt, and it is better fitted to represent the type. The house is built of native grey fieldstone of varied sizes—some of the stones were probably turned up in the course of clearing the fields round about—lined with white mortar and presents an interesting feature in the bold moulding of the cornices. A continuation of the cornice from the eaves, following the same horizontal line, traverses the face of the wall at each gable end, making, with the gable cornice, a complete triangle. This arrangement of the cornice as a string course across the gable ends gives the roof a downright, positive appearance. The cornice in this arrangement is not dissimilar from the penthouse so often used on structures of this date between the first and second floors. Wynnestay was built at two different periods. The first part, built in 1689, has a penthouse along the front with a triangular hood; the later addition, built in 1700, has the penthouse between the first and second floors, but without the triangular hood above the door. Still another feature showing the close connexion of Waynesborough with the early Colonial type, as exemplified by Wynnestay, is the hood over the house door. Although the penthouses have disappeared the hood has remained, and indicates very plainly a certain line of descent.

Wynnestay and other old houses just like it were the forerunners of a type of structure that has come to be known as the Pennsylvania Colonial farmhouse type; very worthy the type is, truly comfortable, homelike and sensible, and deserving the popularity accorded it, so long as it sticks closely to its severe simplicity and avoids all attempt at pretence. The very moment, however, we depart from time-honoured tradition and attempt to begaud this sort of building with Georgian embellishments and furbelows—a thing far too often done—it looks unseemly and ludicrous. Before leaving the subject one should add that the Pennsylvania Colonial farmhouse is found in roughcast as well as stone, and that the buildings erected by the English settlers, though similar, were apt to be somewhat higher than the old, squat dwellings of the Welsh, whose natural predilection for “stumpiness” is well exemplified by the towers of their churches.

Our next Colonial example is Wyck in Germantown, at the corner of Walnut Lane and Germantown Road. Like Wynnestay, Wyck has undergone scarcely any change since its staunch walls were reared. Furthermore, Wyck has never been sold, but has passed from owner to owner by inheritance, and as its possessors have always been careful to maintain everything in its original condition, it can readily be seen that a more trustworthy example of Pennsylvania Colonial architecture could not be chosen. Wyck represents the German influence in Colonial architecture. The structure is really two houses joined together. The first was built about 1690 or earlier; the second, though built somewhat later, nevertheless dates also from an early period. Through the first part of the connecting portion, that links the two houses into one, ran a passage or waggon way. This passage was afterward closed in and now forms a great hallway from which open outwards big double doors almost as wide as barn doors, with a long transom of little lights above them.

The whole long south front of the house is whitewashed. Trellises cover the face of the wall, and the vines, with their masses of thick foliage, stand out in sharp contrast to the gleaming brightness of their background. At Wyck the windows are higher and not so wide in proportion as at Wynnestay, and the same may be said of the dimensions of the doors. The proportions are excellent and the measurements of sash-bars, muntins, and panes have been duplicated by architects again and again, with most satisfactory results. The dormerheads have the same sharp angularity as those at Wynnestay. At Wyck, however, the cornice runs only beneath the eaves, and does not extend across the wall at the gable end. This extension of the cornice as a string course was more apt to occur in houses of Welsh or English build, while the Germans, one of whom built Wyck, usually left their gable ends unadorned. In fact, there is no cornice at all at the gable ends of Wyck, and the junction of wall and roof is marked only by plain barge-boards, beyond which the roof edge scarcely projects. At Wyck the pitch of the roof is not so steep as at Wynnestay, and it may be remarked that the flatter pitch was generally found on Colonial houses built by the Germans, and also in the later English Colonial houses.

Both Wynnestay and Wyck, different as they may be in national tradition, are alike in their thoroughgoing staunchness, their straightforward simplicity of expression and detail and their utter lack of all conscious attempt at adornment. It is true, both houses have distinct elements of charm and embellishment, arising from such details as the trellises and long transoms with little lights at Wyck, or the hoods above the doors and the extension of the cornice across the gable-end walls at Wynnestay, but the effect is wholly fortuitous and not the result of design. Both houses are thoroughly typical of most of the contemporary dwellings, and because of their escape from damaging alterations no part of their charm has been impaired. Both, too, well exemplify architectural modes that have continued uninterruptedly in use to our own day. In the portions of the country where the English element predominates, the little peculiarities of English tradition are still plainly observable in modern work, while in the parts of the country where the Pennsylvania German element is most numerous, it is easy to trace, even in small matters, the enduring influence of German architectural tradition, introduced by the early German settlers. Indeed, we may very properly compare the persistence of architectural minutiæ to the persistence of family traits and features in the human race. So much, then, for worthy specimens of Pennsylvania styles that are truly Colonial. The instances given are by no means isolated, but stand as representatives of a numerous class of buildings to be found not only in Pennsylvania, but in Delaware and New Jersey.

Before leaving the subject it should be noted that the brick farmhouses of New Jersey, while often following closely the type noted in Pennsylvania, occasionally assumed, as the period wore on, much more bulky proportions than the dwellings of the early settlers, the roof rising to a considerable height, and the body of the structure assuming great depth as well as breadth. Some of these great brick structures date from a comparatively early period, and may be attributed to the rapidly increasing prosperity of the West Jersey planters, who had the advantage of the Pennsylvania settlers

MERION MEETING HOUSE, PENNSYLVANIA.

Built by Welsh settlers, 1695.

MORAVIAN SISTERS’ HOUSE, BETHLEHEM, PA. 1748.

THE SAAL, EPHRATA, PA.

Strong German influence.

through their considerably earlier settlement. The oldest houses were usually built on points of land stretching out into the numerous creeks by which a part of the country is intersected, so that their communication by water was always assured when the roads were bad, as they frequently were. In this respect they resembled many of the old houses of Virginia and Maryland. The walls of some of these early Jersey houses are made of thick planks, tightly grooved together with a sliding tongue, and stand today as staunch and true as when they were first built. Stone was not a popular building material in Jersey, but brick was generally used instead, and for brick was sometimes substituted a kind of adobe or large block of sun-baked marl.

It is interesting to note that the long narrow transom of small lights which we so often find over house doors in the Colonial period and the first phase of the Georgian, seems to be a remnant of Queen Anne tradition that got into English architecture from Dutch sources, probably in the reign of William and Mary when such a large importation of Dutch ideas and Dutch practices came into England.

While noting foreign influences in Colonial architecture we must not forget to include the tendency to steep pitch and also gambrel forms in roofs shown by the Swedish colonists. Nor should we forget to chronicle two exceedingly interesting specimens of wholly foreign appearance that were erected in Pennsylvania at an early date. One is the Moravian Sisters’ House, at Bethlehem, erected about 1748 and the other is the Saal or great hall of the monastery at Ephrata, built by the Seventh Day Baptists about the same time. The tiny dormers are exact replicas of the dormers to be seen on the towering and seemingly boundless roofs of any old German town while the small, irregularly placed windows and steeply pitched, high roof of the Ephrata Saal make the building look as though it might have been transplanted bodily from Nürnberg or Rothenburg.

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