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Pennsbury Manor: Reconstruction and Reality
| EVEN BEFORE THE RECONSTRUCTION of William Penn's Pennsbury Manor began in 1938, the form of its house and landscape sparked contention. The project earned a controversial and indeed pivotal status in preservation history. Charles Hosmer has pointed out that after Pennsbury the National Park Service dissociated itself from reconstructions of historical sites, common enough projects earlier, exemplified especially by the vast and vastly popular reconstruction program at Williamsburg, Virginia. Today, as William Woys Weaver and Nancy Kolb cogently argue, the Pennsbury reconstruction is usually and perhaps best appreciated as a marvelous example of the colonial revival and the tastes and attitudes of the architects and officials that brought it into being.1 |
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Amid this discussion of the twentieth-century Pennsbury, Penn's original has largely been lost, resulting in a serious and unfortunate gap in the historical record of the colonial period. Fiske Kimball, writing in the 1920s, ignored Pennsbury almost entirely. Hugh Morrison's Early American Architecture (1952) has no mention of it at all; neither does William Pierson's 1970 American Buildings and Their Architects. The most recent survey of colonial architecture, by James D. Kornwolf, acknowledges Pennsbury's importance but concentrates more on the process of reconstruction than on the original house itself; its text and illustrations largely assume that the reconstruction is correct.2 |
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The original Pennsbury is important in the history of American colonial architecture and landscape because it was the seat of Pennsylvania's founder, was one of the most substantial houses and planned landscapes of the early colonial period, and was the progenitor of a long and distinguished line of Philadelphia country houses. The absence of the original is an unfortunate but not fatal blow to this significance. While the original form of the house and landscape cannot be known with certainty, sufficient documents and visual evidence survive to allow us to make educated suppositions and to understand the character of the place. The surviving evidence provides us an opportunity to witness the creation in the North American colonies of a house and landscape by a seventeenth-century English gentleman. Few other seventeenth-century colonial houses have such documentation. Pennsbury's record makes it possible to reconstruct a more accurate past; Penn's own words have much to say about the language of architecture, building, and landscape at the time. |
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The events surrounding Pennsbury's original creation have never been fully published, nor have the documents about it been adequately interpreted with regard to the accuracy of the modern reconstruction. Some documents have come to light since the period of reconstruction. Others can be newly interpreted given recent research into American and English architecture and landscape of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the largest issue in any attempt to "reconstruct" Pennsbury is the question of whether Penn was "living in state" there. Those who reconstructed Pennsbury in the 1930s believed he was and were determined to make the house and landscape as grand as possible given the evidence at hand. This view remains Kornwolf's underlying assumption. The most recent author to write on Pennsbury, Kornwolf wants the place to reflect "the dramatic impact of the Italianate and Roman Catholic court of James II ... [and] to honor the house of Stuart by [Penn] beginning his colony with a more classical architecture, [and] a planned garden."3 This vision is very much at odds with the surviving evidence, which suggests that Penn's intentions were more modest and the realities of early Pennsylvania vexing and stringent. |
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