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.