THE COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE OF NEW ENGLAND
The Colonial houses of New England are of singular interest because they
fill a gap in our architectural history, a gap regarded for a long time
as embarrassing and awkward to bridge over. They are also peculiarly
interesting because they are so full of surprises that open up with
increasing frequency to repay diligent investigation on the part of the
architectural student, the historian or the antiquary. They are still
further interesting because they supply us with important and ample
material for comparative study.
The gap alluded to is the apparent hiatus in the connexion between
domestic architectural precedents and tradition in old England, on the
one hand, and Colonial manifestations, as popularly conceived until very
recently, on the other. In order to avoid an undue extent of
introductory explanation, it will be assumed that the reader is
reasonably familiar with the general characteristics of outward
appearance displayed by seventeenth-century English houses and knows
something of the structural methods employed in their erection. To
appreciate fully and understand the spirit and peculiarities of the
earliest Colonial architecture of New England, we must seek, in the
course of our examination of the subject, to find a fundamental and
close correspondence between it and the architecture of old England, no
matter how far the visible traces of that intimate relationship may have
been obscured by subsequent alterations and additions to the original
houses whose fabric affords our basis of comparison. If we keep our eyes
and wits alert, we shall not be disappointed in the results of our
search.
While pursuing our quest for evidences of architectural descent or
consanguinity, we should keep constantly in mind three things. Indeed,
we _must_ keep these three facts before us to understand not
only the early phases of architecture but many other aspects of
seventeenth-century New England life as well. First of all, the men who
built the early New England houses and the men who lived in them were
Englishmen, and, as Englishmen, they were naturally disposed by
temperament to be strongly conservative and to cling tenaciously to
precedent and tradition, particularly in a matter of such vital
importance as the fashioning of houses. They were, in short, proving the
truth of Edward Eggleston’s dictum that “men can with difficulty
originate, even in a new hemisphere.” In the second place, all their
training in craftsmanship was English and it was but reasonable that
they should continue to work in a new land with the same tools and to
fashion their materials in precisely the same manner as they had been
wont to do in the land of their birth. It was but natural, too, that
they should perpetuate the technicalities of the trades they had learned
in old England in the training they gave their apprentices. This
identity and continuity of craft traditions may be clearly seen in the
furniture of early New England, which is exactly the same as
contemporary furniture in England in contour, joinery, and the technique
and pattern of the carving. Identity and continuity of craft
characteristics may also be traced in the turning of baluster spindles,
in the chamfering of beams, in the framing of house timbers and in a
dozen other ways. Lastly, those early American Englishmen were possessed
of no mean degree of clear-headed, practical common sense and were
eminently resourceful, as pioneers in a new and untamed land must needs
be if their efforts at colonisation are to be crowned with success. If
local exigency seemed to demand that they modify their methods to fit
current needs, they were prompt to devise a suitable adaptation to meet
the requirement. But these adaptations and
[Illustration: HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES, SALEM, MASS. 1669.
Showing overhang and corner pendant.]
[Illustration:
Courtesy of Henry I. Fairbanks, Dedham, Mass.
FAIRBANKS HOUSE, DEDHAM, MASS. 1636.]
[Illustration: WHIPPLE HOUSE, IPSWICH, MASS.
The latticed casements are restorations.]
[Illustration: WHIPPLE HOUSE, IPSWICH, MASS.]
departures from precedent were not indulged in from mere caprice or with
any deliberate and conscious intent to develop a new and original mode
of architectural expression. The adaptations in each case, before they
became precedents for subsequent repetition elsewhere, were suggested by
obvious necessity and originality was left to take care of itself, with
the usual happy results arising from the observance of the principle
that the safest and truest originality comes by a gradual process of
evolution, elimination and adaptation to local needs.
In view, then, of the foregoing considerations, one not unreasonably
expects to find the early New England house identical or almost
identical in appearance and structure with the contemporary English
house of a like size, only such differences being evident as local
expediency occasioned. If one could only see several such houses now as
they unquestionably were at the date of their erection, this chapter
would be altogether unnecessary, for the resemblance between them and
their prototypes in our old home beyond the Atlantic would be so
striking that the veriest dolt would be sensible of it. In nearly every
instance the alterations and accretions of centuries have blurred and
often hidden the points of likeness, but, by the judicious employment of
archæological surgery, we may readily trace all the steps of
evolutionary development from the well-known old English type to a type
that became peculiarly American and local, that is to say, peculiar to
New England. The steps are all logical and we can see how the early
colonists began by building houses as they were accustomed to see them
built in old England and ended by building a type whose characteristics
were generally determined by local conditions and expediency. We can see
how, by successive steps, mediæval English peculiarities of structure
and design gradually gave way to methods of more recent contrivance or
of foreign origin. Indeed, among all the colonists, whether of English,
Dutch, Swedish or German blood, directly they had passed the temporary
log-cabin stage, there was a virtual identity between the architectural
forms of the parent countries and their own earliest permanent
architectural attempts, and the process of differentiation did not begin
until new environment and new necessities pointed the way to the
adoption of new modes and forms. It is exceedingly important to
recognise the strong current of continuity and to realise that the
architecture of Colonial America, in its sundry manifestations, was not,
as some are pleased to contend, an wholly independent growth without
old-world antecedents or clearly marked historical background.
The evolution of local architecture, of course, not only mirrors the
social and economic development of the colonies but also presents
numerous edifying variations within the confines of New England which
show how strongly the course of architectural growth in the new land was
influenced by conditions locally prevalent in the old home. It can
oftentimes be seen how the artisans from one particular place in England
perpetuated certain idiosyncrasies of craftsmanship within limited
Colonial areas and that those peculiarities are found nowhere else. In
both its economic and purely technical aspects, the mode of domestic
architectural expression devised in Colonial New England has many
admirable features to commend it and is due partly to native Yankee
mother wit and shrewd practicality quickened by the spur of necessity,
and partly to the spirit of true British conservatism and attachment to
long-established custom, a spirit that was strong in the early Puritans
and often determined their actions in spite of themselves.
A brief survey of seventeenth-century manners and men, within the bounds
of New England, will greatly assist us in forming an intelligent
appreciation of the houses erected in this pioneer period. The log-cabin
of the first few years of colonisation we need scarcely consider, for
the rude huts erected at first were merely temporary shelters, were soon
replaced by more substantial structures, and were not really
representative in any sense. The houses built as soon as the colonists
had an opportunity to become accustomed to their new environment and get
their economic bearings, reflected a condition of society in which a
modest degree of simple comfort, resulting from rigorous thrift,
rewarded the majority while prosperous affluence fell to the lot of
comparatively few. Well built dwellings were comfortable but not
pretentious. They were apt for all ordinary domestic requirements but,
save in exceptional cases, there was no approach to luxury. They usually
had rooms enough for all essential purposes but rarely were any special
or extra rooms set apart for distinctive uses, with the exception of the
parlour or “best room,” which often held the best bed and served
variously as state bedroom for most honoured guests, repository for the
most treasured household gods and the choicest items of domestic
equipment and, finally, as the gathering place for the more worthy
visitors at times of weddings, funerals or other important occasions.
The number of bedchambers provided in most cases would nowadays be
deemed totally inadequate for the people to be accommodated and, to cite
only one instance thoroughly typical of innumerable others, the members
of the Revere household, if we may believe the statistics of tradition,
must have been packed away at nights in sardine-like and most unsanatory
proximity, or else some of them slept in the cellar or on the roof. This
was well on towards the latter part of the eighteenth century, too, when
habits in this particular had certainly not fallen below the standards
of the seventeenth century. Besides the members of the Revere family,
there were various apprentices and domestics, all of whom found shelter
beneath the roof of this typical seventeenth-century house. It was no
uncommon thing for two or three children or young persons to sleep in
one bed and there was often more than one bedstead in a room. Truckle or
trundle beds for children were frequently put in the bedchambers of
their elders, while indentured servants and apprentices oftentimes slept
in the kitchen, or else master and mistress slept in the tempered
atmosphere of the kitchen fire and underlings took to the frigid regions
above. Wherever the kitchen was put into commission as a sleeping
apartment, there was the folding or “let down” bed or _slawbank_, which
Mrs. Earle describes as “an oblong frame with a network of rope. This
frame was fastened at one end to the wall, with heavy hinges, and at
night it was lowered to a horizontal position, and the unhinged end was
supported on heavy wooden turned legs which fitted into sockets in the
frame. When not in use the bed was hooked up against the wall, and doors
like closet doors, were closed over it, or curtains were drawn over it
to conceal it.” What though the sleeping arrangements of the seventeenth
century, and indeed of much of the eighteenth century, for that matter,
would often have called forth the sharp condemnation of a modern
tenement house inspector, the colonists, nevertheless, made shift to get
along in tolerable comfort and raise large families of children, with a
due regard for the amenities of life, who became the most exemplary of
citizens.
If the kitchen was sometimes used as a sleeping room, it was almost
universally used as a living room. It was the vital point of the
household whence radiated all domestic energies. It was spacious and was
made as bright and cheerful as it could possibly be. Around the great
open fireplace, where the cooking was done, centred all in-door
activities from carding, spinning and weaving to corn husking. Here the
family circle, eldest in places of greatest comfort, children and
servants about the outer edge, gathered in the firelight of the long
winter evenings; here the neighbour or chance traveller was entertained,
and here lads and lasses, in the full glare of family publicity, did
much of their courting, sometimes whispering their sweet nothings, from
opposite sides of
[Illustration:
Copyright, Detroit Publishing Co.
PAUL REVERE HOUSE, STREET FRONT, AFTER RESTORATION.
Built 1676.]
[Illustration:
Copyright, Detroit Publishing Co.
PAUL REVERE HOUSE. GREAT ROOM, GROUND FLOOR.
The old wall paper is not coeval with the house.]
the fireplace, through a “courting-stick,” a wooden tube six or eight
feet long with mouth and ear pieces at each end.
In houses sufficiently spacious to admit of a living room or a
“keeping-room” separate from the kitchen--such a room was analogous to
the old English “hall”--the kitchen was still a cheerful room of great
importance and the scene of many domestic fireside industries. It was a
common thing to make lean-to additions to the original structure and the
kitchen was often put in such an addition or in an ell extension. It was
only the houses of the affluent, like that of Governour Theophilus Eaton
at New Haven, built about 1640, that could boast what we should nowadays
consider a very moderate number of rooms on the ground floor. Besides
the great hall or living room in Governour Eaton’s house, there seem to
have been a large kitchen and a pantry or buttery on one side, and on
the other a parlour and a counting-house or library. Of the appointments
of these rooms we may gain some idea from the inventory of Governour
Eaton’s effects at the time of his death in 1657. In the hall or living
room there were “a drawing Table and a round table; a cubberd & 2 long
formes; a cubberd cloth & cushions; 4 setwork cushions, 6 greene
cushions; a greate chaire with needleworke; 2 high chaires set work; 4
high stooles set worke; 4 low chaires set worke; 2 low stooles set
work; 2 Turkey Carpette; 6 high joyne stooles; a pewter cistern &
candlestick; a pr of small andirons; a pr of doggs; a pr of tongues fire
pan & bellowes.” The other rooms were furnished in a comparable manner.
Living rooms in less pretentious houses had similar equipment though, it
is scarcely necessary to add, they were not usually so complete nor so
elegant.
The very plan, or rather plans for there were several, of early New
England houses proclaimed an English origin. The house of Governour
Eaton, just mentioned, is said to have been built in the form of a
capital E. The “E” plan was a very common form in the manor houses and
even in the larger cottages of the England of Eaton’s time. It was also
a very old form, “dating from the thirteenth century, if not from the
twelfth, or even earlier, and it had, in its long career, come to be the
expression of a regular and well-recognised arrangement.” “Other houses
of this plan were built in different parts of New England for men of
consequence and substance.”
“The common houses,” according to Edward E. Lambert, the antiquary, “at
first were small, of one storey with sharp roofs, and heavy stone
chimneys and small diamond windows.” Many of the early dwellings also
had two floors. One type of these small houses commonly found in
Massachusetts and Connecticut consisted of two rooms with a chimney
between them. The house door opened into a small entry containing the
staircase, opposite the door and carried up beside the chimney. The
chimney was the core around which the house was built and projected
above the middle of the ridgepole. Each room had a fireplace. To this
type of house was frequently added a lean-to across the whole rear and
this addition usually accommodated the kitchen. Sometimes the lean-to
was incorporated in the plan when the house was built. In either case,
the long, narrow lean-to room contained a fireplace which generally had
a flue in the central chimney. When dwellings of this description had
two rooms on the ground floor, one would be the kitchen and general
living room and the other the parlour containing the “best bed,” an
arrangement alluded to in a previous paragraph; where there was the
additional lean-to room for the kitchen, the two other rooms would be
living room and parlour.
In northern Rhode Island there was another common type that contained
one room, at the end of which “was a vast stone chimney which appeared
on the outside of the house.” Beside the fireplace and in the offset
made by the chimney jamb, was a winding staircase--in the earliest
houses it was sometimes a ladder--leading to the upper room or loft, as
the case might be. An amplification of this “stone-end” type of house
was occasionally found with _two_ rooms placed side by side and a
fireplace in each room in relatively the same position. That these types
of floor plan were part of the common English architectural heritage we
shall presently see by comparison with subsequent chapters. The position
of the chimney served to all intents as an exterior indication of the
internal plan of the house. Of course, many departures from these two
original plans are to be met with in the early Colonial houses of New
England but it will usually be found that such departures are due to
later additions to a structure based, in the first instance, on one or
the other of them.
We are so accustomed to thinking of the old New England houses as
structures covered with clapboards that we are in danger of forgetting
what is underneath this outer coat. In fact, it is safe to say that the
majority of people do not know what is underneath, and many would be
greatly surprised if they did. After all, the clapboard casing is a
disguise, and the people of New England are so thrifty and, as a rule,
have been so careful to keep their buildings in good condition that the
clapboards hide the traces of age that would otherwise be visible and
put the oldest buildings on a par with those of later date. The
clapboard casing masques different things beneath its surface. If we rip
it off many of the oldest buildings, we shall find behind it nothing
more nor less than an old English half-timber house, built precisely as
were the half-timber or “black and white” houses in the reigns of the
Tudors and Stuarts. The exigencies of climate soon made it evident that
such a mode of structure was not altogether suited to the rigorous
winters of New England and then, too, something must be attributed to
the desire on the part of subsequent owners to follow prevalent fashion
which prescribed the clapboard jackets. In houses of more recent date,
of course, the clapboard shell may be regarded as an integral part of
the structure but, in the earlier buildings, it is nothing but a masque,
put on at a later date, to protect the walls and give added warmth when
the first-adopted method of wall building was found insufficient, or in
some cases, perhaps, to comply with the dictates of a passing fancy.
Whenever this clapboarding is torn off for repairs, original conditions
become obvious and may readily be studied. The writer has seen such old
houses, when partly denuded of their clapboard casing, reveal typical
half-timber constructional methods, similar in every particular to the
methods pursued by the half-timber builders in England. The cills, the
studs, the diagonal timbers and all the other parts of the frame are
set and joined, tenoned and pinned, just as they were in England and the
spaces between the studs are “pugged” with rough brick or stones and
coarse clay stiffened with chopped straw, also in the time-honoured
English manner. It is quite possible that in some instances the spaces
between the studs may have been “pugged” with “wattle and dab”--thick
clay daubed on a loose mesh of interwoven wattles or withes--for the
tradition of this process certainly crossed the Atlantic and appeared in
some of the early clay chimneys of Connecticut.
So many people have expressed surprise when told of the unbroken
persistence of the half-timber tradition that it will be in order to
mention specific instances which, however, may be regarded as typical of
many other buildings of contemporary date. For much painstaking and
scholarly investigation in this field, and for much accurate
restoration, the public is indebted to Joseph Everett Chandler, of
Boston, whose restorations of numerous historic buildings have won him
well deserved esteem and confidence.[A]
[Illustration: DOTEN HOUSE, PLYMOUTH, MASS. BUILT 1640.
Very early type with low eaves and central chimney.]
[Illustration: NARBONNE HOUSE, SALEM, MASS.
The long slope of roof on one side shows persistence of old English
tradition.]
[Illustration:
Copyright, J. B. Lippincott Co.
WYNNESTAY, PHILADELPHIA. 1689.
An intact example of Pennsylvania Colonial, of Welsh workmanship.]
[Illustration:
Copyright, J. B. Lippincott Co.
SOUTH FRONT OF WYCK, GERMANTOWN, PHILADELPHIA. 1690.
Pennsylvania Colonial type with German influence apparent.]
It was the writer’s privilege to see the old Bake House in Salem just
after it had been rescued by private generosity from impending
demolition and moved to its present site hard by the House of the Seven
Gables. In the course of making necessary repairs and restorations, the
clapboard casing had been entirely removed and it was possible to see
fully the whole structural scheme. The timbers and pugging were as just
noted. Although the windows were, at that time, of the sash type, with
small panes, the traces were clearly visible of alterations that had
been made at an earlier date, probably somewhere about 1720, when the
sash window rose into high favour and was generally substituted for the
leaded casement with small diamond-shaped panes. The timbers gave
unmistakable evidence that the window apertures in the sides of the
house had originally been wide enough to accommodate a range of
casements and that they had been neither so high nor so low as the sash
or double hung windows that took their places. In other words, the
timbers showed that the apertures had been narrowed to a considerable
extent and, at the same time, extended both upwards and downwards.
Inside the house, the heavy oak studs, when the laths and plaster were
torn off, showed chamfered corners, usually stopped at the ends with a
stop that was thoroughly mediæval in character and might be found
duplicated in the beams of trussed roofs in any old building in England
dating from the sixteenth century or earlier. The tops of the studs, in
some cases, showed a peculiar splay outward at the sides and rough
notching by way of ornament. Surely here were touches of mediæval
English workmanship that had been perpetuated in the new land by a
workman who had served his apprenticeship in an English village where
all the old joinery traditions were preserved intact.
The overhang on the second floor projecting some distance beyond the
walls of the first is another striking instance of the survival of
half-timber building traditions in not a few of the old houses. We see
it in the House of the Seven Gables, in the Bake House, in the Paul
Revere house in Boston, in more than one old house in Marblehead, and in
plenty of other ancient dwellings, some of them recently restored,
throughout the land, where restorations have been intelligently
undertaken and carried out. It has almost invariably proved the case
either that the pendants were intact beneath the clapboards, or that the
stumps of them were there, clearly showing the existence of the feature.
In not a few cases the overhang has disappeared because the clapboard
casing has been carried down flush with the outside of the upper storey.
This was the case with the House of the Seven Gables, and it was only
when the clapboard casing, in which it had been jacketed for many years,
was removed that the overhang once more came to light and the stumps of
the original pendants were forthwith restored. The finding of such
pendants and such overhangs coupled with the frequent occurrence of such
features as just noted in the case of the Bake House afford us
irrefutable evidence of the perpetuation of the English half-timber
building traditions. It has been fondly supposed by some that the
overhang was meant for purposes of defence. It may have been turned to
that use when occasion required, but defence was certainly not the
original idea, for in that case the projection would doubtless have been
carried all the way around the wall, as it was in the case of the block
houses, where, of course, this feature was meant primarily to facilitate
defence and cover the occupants as they dropped boiling oil, hot lead,
or other missiles on the heads of their assailants whenever they
approached near enough.
From the early New England houses, that embodied so many old English
architectural traditions, was gradually evolved, under stress of local
expediency, a type that met the needs of the colonists. That type was
not only intensely practical in its characteristics but its simplicity
and straightforwardness gave it a vital artistic interest that still
commends it to our favourable consideration.