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The Housing Stock of the Early United States: Refinement Meets Migration
Carole Shammas
I have been at a fine plantation called Hunthill belonging to Mr Rutherfurd. On this he has a vast number of Negroes employed ... He makes a great deal of tar and turpentine, but his great work is a saw-mill ... There is a show of plenty ... but it is a mere plantation ... they keep a good house, tho' it is little better than one of his Negro huts, and it appeared droll enough to eat out of China and be served in plate in such a parlour ... Every body agrees that it [the plantation] is able to draw from twelve to fifteen hundred a year sterling money.
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| —Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality1 |
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| A common theme running through the accounts of British and European travelers to the colonized portions of North America is the disjuncture they observed between colonists' material wealth and the shoddiness of their built environment. Janet Schaw's 1775 journal entry furnishes a good illustration. The author was a well-off Scottish woman paying a visit to her brother, who had earlier immigrated to North Carolina. Schaw clearly admired the colony's natural beauty, the wealth being extracted from the forest, and even her host's consumer durables. What mystified her, however, was the indifference of these affluent colonists to the erection and preservation of proper housing. Buildings appropriate to a colonist's social and economic standing, according to her account, remained forever in the planning stage, stood half unfinished for years, or, if finally constructed, often burned down because no one made any serious attempt at firefighting. |
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Only in the last few years have historians of early America directed their attention to what eighteenth-century commentators considered good housing and when and why different segments of society began to invest in it. Important work on vernacular architecture had appeared earlier, but it had primarily focused on another issue, regional difference. Researchers, relying on evidence from surviving structures, devoted themselves to matching different types of construction—New England timber frame, mid-Atlantic stone, Georgian brick of the Chesapeake, Appalachian log—to the ethnic traditions of Atlantic immigrants and to tracing the evolution of their building techniques and styles as they confronted the challenges of the American environment. Though of great use to those interested in the transmission of culture and folkways, this literature posed a formidable barrier to the integration of research on the built environment with nonregional themes in early American history and to the incorporation of colonial structures into the history of housing and building in the United States. For these reasons historians of colonial America and the United States have enthusiastically greeted the argument that a new linkage of social status with civility, refinement, and comfort gradually worked its way down the social ladder and resulted in an improved domestic environment from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century, including what contemporaries considered more permanent and well-built dwellings. The titles and subtitles of various works suggest a major architectural change: The Refinement of America; "The Transformation of Living Standards in Early America"; The Invention of Comfort; and Beauty and Convenience: Architecture and Order in the New Republic.2 |
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A long-standing movement for housing improvement across the Atlantic appears to have inspired this American transformation. England's rebuilding process, according to historians of the Tudor and Stuart periods, began in the sixteenth century when people evicted livestock from quarters adjoining houses, replaced earthen floors with wood, substituted fireplaces and chimneys for open hearths and holes in roofs, floored over halls to create full second stories, and glazed windows. In the later seventeenth century, especially after the Great Fire of London, wood and clay construction fell into disrepute while brick and stone became preferred housing materials. Multilevel, compact, and uniform row houses began replacing the jumbled lanes of timber-framed dwellings in English cities and country towns.3 Brick for permanence, second stories for space, fireplaces and glazed windows for warmth and light, and Georgian or, later, neoclassic facades for symmetry were all part of the program. |
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