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Book Review
| Carl R. Lounsbury, The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An Architectural History, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Pp.331. $65.00 (ISBN 0–8139–2301–8).
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| Students of public architecture in North America, scholars and lay readers of Virginia's legal history, and wanderers of the Old Dominion will be delighted with this book. Lounsbury's labor of love reproduces in text, photography, and drawings the architectural evolution of Virginia's early courthouses. The most valuable part of his investigation comes from his documenting not only the courthouse's shifting role, but the ancillary buildings, the ordinaries, jails, and clerk's offices in a gradual gentrification and long twilight. |
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Fascinated by those of us who pointed to the social drama of early court days, Lounsbury also remembers that much of what went on in the courts was just plain boring. His book is not. His seventeenth-century findings probe the archaeological evidence for the location of Jamestown's statehouse (390, n. 32) reminding us of the paucity of information about the early buildings that reflected stingy attitudes. An unsuitable housing for the colony's General Court reflected the poor quality of local courthouses (60–83). |
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Lounsbury's discussion of the 1750s Statehouse in Williamsburg shows how its twentieth-century reconstruction managed to convey wrong impressions about the architecture of the General Court. That interior space as well as the arcades of its 1701–5 appearance were deliberately designed to convey the majesty of the law. (112–24). The expense of innovation prevented local courts from copying the original before the 1730s. Once adopted, the arcade remained a feature of Virginia courthouses into the nineteenth century. |
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The misrepresentation of the 1750s General Court's appearance by architects unfamiliar with eighteenth-century English devices intended to heighten the dignity of the magistrates (396–97, n. 66) confirms that local courts copied that intent to heighten the contrast "between an ornamented bench and a much plainer public space" (397) but were slow to change thereafter. The new Capitol in Williamsburg inspired few copies, just as the existence of a porch on the 1701–5 building failed to find imitators locally for more than fifty years. This conservative response combining thrift and resistance to other centers of power survived the removal to Richmond. Jefferson's "porticoed temple" "repudiated all the lingering domestic qualities that still imbued the public architecture of late eighteenth-century Virginia" but no one rushed to copy it for more than two decades (126–28, at 128). |
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Lounsbury locates the decline of the courthouse's social centrality after the Civil War. Whether persistence of architectural forms adequately reflects shifts in power to superior courts and informal dispute resolution, one might still argue over (165–67). It is worthwhile asking if architectural changes reflected the 1808 decentralization of the state judiciary by superior courts that exploited the already existing county system, provided state courts there, multiplied opportunities for lawyers, but provided no increase in funding. (F. Thornton Miller, Juries and Judges versus the Law: Virginia's Provincial Legal Perspective, 1783–1828 [Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994], 24–33.) |
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Lounsbury's documentation of early courthouse architectural design proves it "was a corporate affair, devised by a committee and executed by a host of individual craftsmen ... " (13). But by the nineteenth century, critics of colonial architecture moved to replace eighteenth-century public buildings with neo-classical structures. Projects in Fredericksburg, Alexandria, Richmond and other towns became the works of individual architects. Still, the transformation of the courthouse complex of buildings "took more than a century in some places. On the eve of the Second World War, some local governments could still fit comfortably within buildings erected in the colonial era ... " (321–35, at 333). |
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Local neglect of records into the nineteenth century also raises questions about the curious tension between concern for an architectural majesty of the law and a lack of concern about careful record keeping. Despite cosmopolitan reformers' hopes that a revision of the penal code would create a correspondingly correct prison architecture, local jails remained in equally desultory conditions into the 1830s. The atmosphere of malaise and carelessness reflected disinterest in penal reform (260–64). |
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Lounsbury's documentation should inspire further reflections upon the function of legal architecture in shaping and reflecting the selective memory of the law and its local manifestations. He is content to hint at the complexity of that process. Specialists should compare his findings with the quite different transformation of courthouses and the success of "centralizers" and "reformers" in Massachusetts. (See Roeber, review of Martha J. McNamara, From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture & Ritual in America Law 1658–1860 in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37 [2006].) Readers will be grateful for Lounsbury's stimulus to ponder his findings. Virginia's courthouses reflected the law's majesty and local resistance to rapid change in the law, its architectural surroundings, or investment in preservation. These monuments to a vanished past have increased in beauty in direct proportion to their irrelevance as settings for social interaction or the law's immediacy and familiarity. |
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| A. G. Roeber
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| Penn State University-University Park |
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