TWO UNUSUAL JAMESTOWN STRAP-HINGES
The right-hand hinge, broken, probably came from a wagon-box or chest. (See page [68])
A BRASS SWORD HANDLE FROM THE JAMESTOWN MUD
Found in three pieces with the blade missing, this cavalier's sword is ornamented with putti and other decorations. Photos, author. Courtesy, Antiques Magazine.
The most significant aspect of the medieval rural abode in Virginia was its regular course of development from the simple, one-room-and-garret cottage—what an English bishop in 1610 called a "silly cote," a hut of "one bay's breath"—to the stately and elegant Georgian mansion of the eighteenth century. Even so, it may not be unequivocally declared that all the simple dwellings were constructed first and all the complex ones later. At the same time, we find that often the homes with more than two downstairs rooms and a central passageway were constructed in late seventeenth-century times. Further, the country lodging for the most part was only one-storey-and-loft high. The full two-storey domicile was the exception.
The elementary hut of one bay, such as we have noted as having been prevalent in the Cottage Period of the first thirteen years, was the earliest type of substantial house-form in the Old Dominion; it had a "hall," which was the "Great Room"—not a passage,—a dining room, and a kitchen, all rolled into one. The garret with sloping ceilings, perhaps reached by a stepladder or narrow, winding, "break-your-neck" staircase, was usually a cold, unheated, cramped space for sleeping.
One of these small, fractional-bay dwellings stood (1660) in Northampton County, and was ten feet from end to end. It served as the first meeting-place of the Quakers or Friends on the Eastern Shore, and was later used as a "wheat house."
A better known one-bay domicile was Richard May's, built about 1661 in Jamestown, and pictured in a crude sort of way in the Ambler Manuscripts: a flush chimney at one gable and a front with central door flanked on each side by a window. Excavations by the National Park Service at the site of May's revealed that the house had a chimney at the opposite end—a feature which must of necessity have marked an addition.