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.