Colonial estates as carefully restored and preserved as Mount Vernon are extremely scarce, especially throughout the South. I number among my acquaintances some enthusiasts who spent several weeks in Gloucester County, Virginia, a year or so ago, and who did me the honor of writing glowing accounts of some ancestral halls they had discovered there. They were not architects, and could hardly have judged of the architectonic merit of their find; but as the names of the plantations were euphonious—names like “Elmington,” “Whitemarsh,” “Todsbury,” and “Rosewell,” I was anxious to see the pictures they brought home, one of which, with their permission, appears on [Plate XXXVII]. Visions of more estates like Jefferson’s Monticello, Madison’s Montpelier, Sabine Hall, Westover and Shirley easily flitted across my brain; but alas! I was doomed to disappointment! The photographs revealed many typical Virginia plantations entailed and beautiful, but not at all remarkable architecturally. In my anxiety to know the truth about Virginia I repeated the question, “Were there no houses as nice as Shirley?—nothing as nice as Shirley?” ([see Plate V]), when, after considerable explanation and some excuses, there was left but frankly to own that the great plantations I had enumerated were the homes of the wealthier planters and proprietors under the royal patents, and as a matter of fact, there was nothing in Gloucester as representative of the grand epoch as was Shirley-on-the-James.
Throughout New England and the middle States isolated examples of exceptionally good Colonial architecture are still numerous, and some of them in good repair. There will be just one, perhaps, to a town
JOHN COTTON SMITH HOUSE, SHARON, CONN.
THE DEMMING HOUSE, LITCHFIELD, CONN.
(The front has not been altered.)
