Early American Houses: With A Glossary of Colonial Architectural Terms
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Early American Houses: With A Glossary of Colonial Architectural Terms
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Overview
Early American Houses includes over 100 photographs and illustrations that highlight the architecture of young America, with a particular focus on the Tudor and late Gothic styles that ultimately shaped the distinctive house designs of today. Original floor plans and sketches abound — including interior and exterior treatments, elevations, and framing — partnered with detailed descriptions that breathe life into each construction. Accompanying this work is a comprehensive Glossary of Colonial Architectural Terms. Originally published separately, it provides definitions for everything from "arch" to "wainscot," and it is reprinted here to enhance the overall value of the companion volume.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486146263 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 02/19/2013 |
| Series: | Dover Architecture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 34 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Early American Houses
With A Glossary of Colonial Architectural Terms
By Norman Morrison Isham
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2007 Dover Publications, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-14626-3
CHAPTER 1
EARLY AMERICAN HOUSES
THE seventeenth century is the mediaeval period in American architecture. Its work is Tudor or late Gothic in character and, simple and rude as it may seem to be, has yet something of the beauty and charm with which Gothic attracts us.
It was the native tradition, English or Dutch, which our early craftsmen brought hither. They could not do otherwise. Plan, elevation and framing; windows, doors and interior finish; all were what they had used in the old home. They simply transplanted them. But while this traditional art, which had been little touched by the Renaissance, still lived on in Europe after our fathers migrated, it was, here in America, cut off from the old stem and grew in its own way and while it never lost its likeness to the European stock, it produced something, both in methods and results, which belonged to itself.
I
THE growth of the plan is quite easy to follow—early, middle, and late—beginning with the first settlements and ending about the time of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714. In studying it we find that, in this century, we must, perforce, study the construction along with the plan and that we cannot take the framework for granted, as we can in the eighteenth century where it is almost entirely concealed. In Figures 1, 2, and 3 are shown the types of plan and the ways in which they developed. Houses seem, in the beginning, to be of the one-room or of the two-room type. In many cases the two-room type was made by putting together two single-room houses with a common roof over both and a chimney between, or else by putting together two such houses each with its end chimney. It seems, therefore, as if the original unit were a single room with a roof and a chimney. In Figure 1 is the single-room type with the end chimney. In Figure 2 (I and II) is the two-room type with the central chimney which is in general the house of New England, while in III and IV is the two-room type with end chimneys which is in general characteristic of the Middle Colonies and of the South. The type of Figure 1, the one-room house, which existed in all the colonies, was the unit.
These are, to speak generally, the early forms of the plan. The house was only one room deep. As more space was needed, rooms were added at the back and these, in New England, were covered with a leanto which, in most cases, was an addition to the original dwelling, though leantos were built as part of the house, quite early, even if they were narrow and thus of small importance. These added leantos are shown in both the figures. The next step was to put deliberately, from the start, quite important rooms, the kitchen especially, at the back. This was a fashion which was general, as the buildings and the inventories show, from about 1675. In this case the leanto, in New England, was built as a part of the house and was what we may call an original leanto. In the South, the house had, usually, simply a wider roof. The house is now two rooms deep as is shown in Figure 3.
In the next step, which was not general in New England till 1700, but occurs in Boston, in the Sargent house, as early as 1677, the plan is the same, but the back wall of the house is made of the same height as that on the front, and we have what they called, in New England at least, an "upright house."
This description is that of the seventeenth-century plan and its development as the existing houses and the documents present them to us. It must be remembered that our houses descend from the yeoman's dwelling. Any larger houses with more elaborate plans—and while almost none have come down to us there must have been many which have been destroyed—could probably be accounted for by the process of putting together the single-room units. That this was often the case in England as may be seen in the plan of Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire (Figure 4), and in that of Thurston Hall, Suffolk (Figure 5). In the former, one room follows another around a courtyard. The chimneys, save in the kitchen, are on the outside. In the latter, the single-room unit seems to predominate also, but the entry, with its stairs, between two rooms, gives the plan a greater likeness to our own.
We may pass over the temporary abodes of the colonists and come at once to the house with one room and, of course, an end chimney. This underwent all the changes which have been described—added leanto, original leanto, "upright," with full height at the back. Even in its simplest form it attains, in the two-story examples, to no small dignity and in the expanded plan it reaches considerable size and importance. The full two-story type appears in quite elaborate fashion in the Letitia House in Philadelphia.
A one-room plan, that of the Roger Mowry house in Providence, appears in Figure 6, with a cross-section. Figure 7 gives the plan and section of the Hathaway house in Salem in the Massachusetts Bay.
The Mowry house has a post in each corner of its rather small room, at one end of which is a wide stone chimney with an enormous fireplace. This chimney does not stand on the axis of the room but leaves, on the right, as one faces it, a space in which was placed the stair or ladder to the chamber. On the left, the chimney extends to the wall of the room where, in the corner, a post is set against it. This post is part of the outside wall which thus covers the side of the chimney. On the outside of the end of the house the stack is visible for its whole width and height. In fact, it forms the greater part of the end wall, as in the Nathaniel Jenks house (Plate I).
Across the room, in front of the chimney, runs a beam called the chimney girt. In the opposite end wall of the house is one called the end girt. Between these runs a beam known among the older people as the "summer-tree," generally contracted to summer. It will be noted that in this house it runs parallel to the front wall and perpendicular to the chimney. Between the corner posts run also the front girt and the back girt, and from these to the summer, across the house, run the smaller sticks called the floor joists.
The Mowry house has only a half-story in the chamber, as the second story was always called, with the plate or beam, which carries the rafters, about 31/2 feet from the floor. The Southern houses which have come down to us are also a story-and-a-half in height, like the Thoroughgood house (Plate 3). In the Hathaway house the "Old Bakery," we have two full stories with a garret above (Figure 7 and Plate 2). If we examine the plan in Figure 7 we at once see some further differences. First, the chimney—the present stack is not original—did not appear on the outside. There is a girt behind the chimney and the end wall is of the usual wood construction. Then, the most important point, the summers, there are two in the room, run parallel not with the front wall but with the end wall. It is thus perpendicular not to the chimney but to the front of the house. The Narbonne house, also in Salem, has the same scheme, with but one summer, and so has the Paul Revere in Boston, and this house again has two summers. It will be seen also that each of these summers rests upon a post, as is the case in the Hempstead house in New London (II of Figure I), and this is the usual construction. This thwartwise summer is most common in Salem and its neighborhood, but it is not universal even there, and occurs here and there in the rest of New England according to no settled rule. In the Dutch colonies and in the South, however, it seems to have been the prevailing system. Bacon's Castle has two summers which cross each other, as in some New England houses, but the thwartwise stick carries the weight.
The chimney not only showed in the outer wall of most Southern houses but projected from it as in the Thoroughgood house (Plate 3), Bacon's Castle, and others. That this was just as well known in the North is shown by the Whitfield house (Plate 4), the Pierce-Little house (Plate 5), and the Sargent, better known as the Old Province House, in Boston.
The greater number of the earlier New England houses, which have come down to us, have two rooms with a central chimney. This is the type, whether the house was built all at one time or was made up of two houses put together. The houses in Virginia are generally of the two-room type with end chimneys and sometimes, perhaps commonly, with a central entry, a hallway going across the house. It is hard to speak definitely of the New Netherlands, but documents and survivals point toward the Virginia type with the central entry.
In Figure 8 is given the plan and in Plate 6 the exterior of the Fairbanks house in Dedham, the oldest wooden house we have, built in 1637 or 1638. This house—the plan shows the original building—has but two rooms on each floor. Between them stands the chimney with the entry and stair in front of it. The eastern room, the parlor, gives no idea of its original condition. The plaster is modern. The summer is new and has been made longer than the original beam to provide for a lengthening of the room which can be seen below the gable on the outside. The hall, the western room, is far older in appearance. The horizontal sheathing on the walls, put on like clapboards, with beaded edges, may possibly be original. The old fireplace has been bricked up and the way in which the chimney girt rests on the mantel-tree—the beam directly above the fireplace opening—is very unusual. The joists are chamfered. The sill originally projected into the room. A portion of it has been cut away for a door on the west and nearly all of it has been removed for the two doors in the entry, that now in use and the original which was a little west of this. The stairs are not old.
In the second story the parlor chamber is plastered with lime and looks quite modern. It has been lengthened, as the end girt, still in place, will show. The hall chamber is now lined with plain boards, horizontal except on the chimney wall, where they are vertical, and there still remain two moulded boards which are old. In the end wall, on the west, under the later boards, there still remains, between the heavy studs, the old clay filling on vertical sticks, one of the most important architectural fragments in America.
That there was once a stair to the garret seems probable from the care lavished upon the framing and from the large windows, remnants of which still exist in the gables. The roof, which is very steep, has no ridge and but one line of purlins on each side. There is a truss over each of the chimney girts and one over each of the summers which, in the chambers, run across the house, a common device for giving a tie beam to the rafters. The common rafters which are set flatwise, rest on the purlins (Figures 18 and 19), which are wind-braced to the principal rafters. It will be noted that the framing in this house is of the usual type with the lengthwise summer in the first story. The summer across the house in the second story is common, as has been said, in all houses as a tie for the truss above it.
As an example of the house of the two-room type, with the thwartwise summers, let us look at the plan in Figure 9 of the Corwin house—the so-called "Witch House"—on Essex Street, in Salem. It was probably built before 1661, as there was a "cottage right," described as "Mr. Williams'," attached to the land.
As the house now stands it has a room on the east, the old hall, with two summers crossing it and framing into posts in the front and back walls; and, on the west of the wide entry or porch, the old parlor with one summer crossing it in the same manner. On the north of these two rooms are others which seem to be later, and the whole dwelling is now covered by a wide gambrel roof said to date from 1746. The lower slope of this, on the front, gives the pitch of the original roof.
In an old painting of the house (Plate 7) there is shown a porch, traces of which also appear in a photograph of the outside taken about 1856 (Plate 9), and are still to be seen in the house. According to the old painting this porch had a gable roof and a gable is shown on each side of it on the front of the house.
Jonathan Corwin, who bought the house in 1675, proceeded to make some changes, and the plan in Figure 9 shows the house, presumably, as he left it. His contract with Daniel Andrews for the mason work is still extant and reads: "The said parcel of worke is to be bestowed in filling plastering and finishing a certain dwelling house bought by the said Owner," so that it is not possible to claim that the house to be finished was entirely new.
An interpretation of the old painting is given in Figure 10, and in Plate 8 is an old drawing by William Twopenny, of a house in Kent, which shows very plainly the tradition which our old carpenters were following.
Somewhere about 1675—the date would vary in different places—the leanto was widened and built as a part of the house and no longer as a later addition. This, of course, does not mean that leantos were not still constantly added to old one- room or two-room houses, but that when a new house was built it was generally built with the plan two rooms deep and that the leanto was incorporated in the frame. This is shown, for the one-room house, in the Arnold and the Norton houses (I and II, respectively, in Figure 3). The old hall still exists on the front and there is a kitchen on the back in the leanto with a "leanto chamber" over it. In the two-room, central-chimney houses, as in the Whipple-Matthews at Hamilton, Mass. (Figure 11), the old hall and parlor are still in the same place, while there are now three rooms, kitchen, bedroom, and buttery or kitchen and two bedrooms, at the back. The outside appearance of this type is given by Plates 11, 12 and 13.
It must not be supposed that the old house, either one-room or two-room, without the back rooms had died out. It survived, but it is no longer characteristic. The persistence of both this and the leanto may perhaps be illustrated by the two houses, each made up of two single-room units, which appear in Figures 12 and 13, and which seem in date to belong in this period. These are the Lee house in East Lyme, and the Whipple house in Ipswich. Each house is made up of an old one-room building to which is added another single-room structure—not as an addition spliced to the frame of the older part, but as a separate frame apparently set against the former house. At the back of this combination, in each of these houses, was built a leanto addition also. This doubling of the one-room house occurs in so many instances that it must have been a common practice, with or without the leanto, and justifies the theory that our ancestors regarded the single-room house as a sort of unit of construction and plan.
The next step was the upright house. The plan of this was the same as that of the leanto house which, indeed, persisted into this late period and in some parts of the country lingered even till 1750. The rear wall, however, was now carried up to the same height as the front so that all the second-story rooms were of full height. With this there occurs, in New England at least, a slight but significant change in construction shown by the Meggatt house (Figure 14) and the Sheldon house (Figure 15). This was the leaving out of the line of posts formerly set on the back wall of the front rooms, so that the long girts spanned the whole depth of the house.
This enlargement of the house by adding rooms at the back was common in the Dutch settlements and in Maryland and Virginia as well, and we should look for the leanto there, but as almost if not quite all the seventeenth-century houses of those colonies were of one story or a story-and-a-half the lean-to may not have been common. The house was widened and the roof was carried, with a slope of equal length on both sides, over the whole. Some two-story houses, however, there must have been in the South and the leanto is far too convenient a roof not to have been in some use there. There is a leanto, probably added, in the Billop house on Staten Island and Barber in his Historical Collections of Virginia gives us a curious picture (Figure 16) of Lord Fairfax's house with an end chimney or end wall of stone and a long leanto roof—quite a Rhode Island "stone-ender," in fact. Of course this is not of the seventeenth century, neither is the house at Edenton, North Carolina (Plate 14), probably, but both show that the leanto was known and used in the southern colonies.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
THE WALPOLE SOCIETY,
PREFACE,
EARLY AMERICAN HOUSES,
EARLY AMERICAN HOUSES,
INDEX,
A GLOSSARY OF COLONIAL ARCHITECTURAL TERMS,