The Architecture of Colonial America

by Harold Donaldson Eberlein

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI
THE GEORGIAN MODE IN NEW ENGLAND

IT is nearly always difficult and sometimes an ungracious task to attempt to make sweeping distinctions and establish hard and fast boundary lines. Fortunately for us, we meet with an exception to this well-nigh invariable rule in the case of marking the division between Colonial and Georgian architecture. The one point on which we may seize to emphasise the distinction between these two modes of architectural expression, each exceedingly vital in its own field, is the introduction of the classic element in ornamental detail and the formal or balanced element in plan, an element that implies both external symmetry in the marshalling of mass and internal symmetry in determining arrangement. The Colonial mode of expression as exemplified in the architecture of early New England, New York, the Middle Colonies and the South, whatever local differences it might exhibit, was traditional and, to a certain extent, fortuitous. That is to say, it was informal and represented forms which homely considerations of convenience and the process of gradual cultural growth had dictated from time to time in the course of centuries. It was also mediæval in its affinities and, for the most part, unpretentious because it embodied only the essential features that the great mass of the people, whether in England, Wales, Holland, Sweden, or the German principalities had found requisite and desirable. In short, it was a folk growth and was essentially domestic and simple.

Georgian architecture, on the other hand, echoed the spirit of the Renaissance. Its whole fundamental principle afforded a direct antithesis to the conceptions on which Colonial architecture was based. It breathed the atmosphere of the well-ordered classicism that had spread over the Continent and over England in the train of the New Learning and had its outward concomitant in the stately creations inspired by the masterpieces of Greek and Roman antiquity. However modified by the successive media of its transference from the original springs of inspiration, it still voiced the measured formality and easy restraint inherent in the ancient models. It was essentially the architecture of a well-to-do, polished and, if you will, somewhat artificial state of society that demanded a medium of courtliness and

HOUSE OF HON. JOHN BLAIR, WILLIAMSBURG, VA.