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
