THE FIRST GEORGIANS IN THE NEW WORLD
Stephen Bull’s seventeenth century plantation house had stood on the banks of the Ashley River for nearly three decades by the time he decided to improve it in 1704. The house, a tabby structure with a simple, two-room floor plan, served as a home for Bull, his wife (whose name has somehow never been recorded), and their four children. It had also been Bull’s base as he established himself as the deputy of not one, but two of the colony’s Proprietors; he was one of the few major political players in the colony’s early history who managed to negotiate the various factions and conflicts without becoming embroiled in any of them.
By the first decade of the eighteenth century, Bull’s modest tabby house was no longer sufficient, particularly for a man who had begun to see the potential of the next generation of his family. His eldest son, William, born in Carolina in 1683, may have been the driving force behind the house’s construction, since Stephen Bull died just two years later and William occupied the house until his own death in 1755. The new building was a substantial improvement on the original.1 Built of brick, it was two stories over a
partially raised basement – the presence of exterior windows and access beneath the porch suggest that the basement was habitable – and three bays wide with a stair tower.2
1 Califf and Bull, “Ashley Hall Plantation.”
2 Later writers described the house as having an “extreme verticality,” likely due to the
While the symmetrical brick exterior spoke to a new kind of building, its interior plan was that of the seventeenth century: on the first floor, a hall-and-chamber plan divided the space in two, with one room much larger than the other.3
The hall-and-chamber plan was used in the majority of the houses of the period in both Virginia and South Carolina, even after the beginning of the eighteenth century. The hall served as the hub of the medieval and pre-modern house, bringing together the various members of the household regardless of race, class, or gender. What was significant, however, was that these comparatively open-plan houses were given a Georgian skin at the beginning of the eighteenth century, visually affiliating their owners with the English gentry to which they aspired, while maintaining the interior organization of the medieval household. Earlier in the seventeenth century, planters in Virginia and Barbados accomplished this by building in the Jacobean style common to the houses of the English gentry, but the hall-and-chamber plan had been a traditional feature of that type of building, suggesting a unity of function and design. Houses in South Carolina similarly employed the hall-and-chamber plan with a “Georgian” exterior after the turn of the eighteenth century, but they revealed a variety of Atlantic influences as well as
Carolina’s transition from a provisioning colony for its neighbors to one of the wealthiest in North America. In Barbados during the same period, economic stagnation, political unrest, and competition with other sugar colonies resulted in diminished interest and
addition as dating to the nineteenth century, apparently based on a series of watercolors by Henrietta Augusta Drayton from 1820 (presently located at the South Caroliniana Library). However, a depiction of the house by Charles Fraser (owned by the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC), from 1803, indicates that the third floor was probably added prior to the end of the eighteenth century.
capital for construction just as Virginians and South Carolinians embarked on a new phase of building.
With fewer spatial barriers came fewer social barriers as individuals shared communal spaces, fostering a sense of household that incorporated those who worked in the house into the family structure. The household would become increasingly stratified in Virginia and South Carolina during the course of the eighteenth century. This openness was particularly appealing in Virginia and Barbados where the early reliance on
indentured servants encouraged planters to model their households on the patriarchal structures they observed in England and elsewhere throughout Europe, where the lord (or gentry) had vassals to whom he (and they) considered himself to be obligated.
Englishmen transplanted to the New World brought with them a social structure that, while stratified, contained layers of mutual obligation.
The “Georgian skins” on early eighteenth century buildings came in a variety of forms, from the most elaborate to ones that simply incorporated one or two classically- influenced elements, like dentil moldings or a superficial symmetry. Virginia houses were typically far more stylistically “Georgian” during the first decades of the eighteenth century than houses in either South Carolina or Barbados, but it was still a colony whose social hierarchy was in flux, whose early adoption of the central passage spoke to its transition from indentured labor to slavery. While the central passage began to appear in Virginia houses at the end of the seventeenth century, the hall-and chamber plan, with its blurred public and private space, still prevailed, even in the most “Georgian” of houses.
Architectural historian Mark Wenger made a two-fold argument about the
at once a response to Virginia’s unpleasant summers and a means of establishing a social barrier within the household.4 While these two functions seem clear, Wenger suggested
that the central passage appeared in Virginia houses during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. He argued that the introduction of the central passage and the dining room during this period had the effect of making “the old hall and chamber far less accessible than they previously had been. This change is thought to have represented a growing desire on the part of planters to distance themselves, in a ceremonial way, from persons outside their closely knit circle of family and social peers.”5 While Wenger’s
assessment of the effect of these spaces was sound, the central passage appeared during the late seventeenth century in Virginia, partly as a consequence of other adaptations to the subtropical climate, and does not appear to have become normative in Virginia buildings until the middle of the eighteenth century. Instead, for a significant period of time, it coexisted with the hall-and-chamber plan as planters navigated the process of becoming slaveholders.
The development of the central passage depended on another effect of the climate on the house, the creation of end chimneys instead of central ones. While houses built further north continued to make use of the central chimney into the eighteenth century and beyond, for Virginians and South Carolinians, by the end of the seventeenth century, end chimneys, which provided a distribution of heat toward the center of the house in colder months while creating space for the flow of air between them during the hot and humid summers, had replaced the central chimney. The end chimney also simplified the
4 Mark R. Wenger, “The Central Passage in Virginia: Evolution of an Eighteenth-Century
Living Space,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 2 (1986): 137–49.
heating of multiple rooms, ensuring that heat was used only in occupied spaces. A lack of a hearth in many garret spaces further suggests this prioritization, as the servants and enslaved persons who occupied these spaces would have had to make due with residual heat from the rooms below. The clearest effect of the relocation of the chimneys to the gable ends was the creation of a more open interior space that elongated the house, which could be divided into increasingly stratified spaces and made room for a central passage.
Barbadians, able to eliminate the chimney within the plantation house altogether when a hearth was built in a separate kitchen house, had the opportunity to organize their single and double houses with a plan that flowed more explicitly from the most public to most private, following the schema of the series reception rooms that was common in English gentry houses of the period, though with some variation.6 At the same time, for
those enslaved people working in the house, this meant that the house was much more open: in a house where each room connected to the next without a passage, any obstacle to the enslaved became an obstacle to their master as well. The central passage of the Virginia house, in contrast, allowed spaces to be accessed or closed off without necessarily restricting work, or the current of air, in other spaces.
Wenger’s argument that the central passage appeared during the first quarter of the eighteenth century would be less problematic if it did not obscure the fact that while the central passage became increasingly popular, it was hardly common during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, even in buildings built during the period. Houses built by elite Virginians often modified the seventeenth century hall-and-chamber plan or used a much wider version of what eventually became known as the central passage, finding a
6 For a discussion of the form of the Barbadian single and double house, see the previous
middle ground between a central hall and a central passage, the first being far more about occupation and the second more about controlling movement.7
This slow adoption of the central passage indicated Virginians’ ambivalence about the purpose of this space and its function within the household. Just as John Coombs has illustrated that the conversion from servants to slaves was a much more gradual process than has previously been suggested by scholars attributing it to the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, white Virginians’ accommodation of slavery within the built environment happened very gradually.8 For the most part, however, even as stylistic
features of English Georgian architecture became common in Virginia plantation houses, their interiors continued to be arranged in a way that facilitated movement for the
enslaved, rather than limiting it with an aim to control, as one space flowed into one another. The earlier adoption of the central passage in Virginia, demonstrated at Fairfield (ca. 1694; a central passage was likely added in the 1720s during Nathaniel Burwell’s renovations) and its coexistence with the hall-and-chamber plan through the 1730s reveals planters’ efforts to manage their slaves spatially as they negotiated the
distinctions between black and white, slave and free. Barbadian planters, whose 1661 slave code informed that eventually produced in Virginia in 1705, had fully embraced the principle of racial slavery four decades before Virginians at the same time as they
negotiated their identity as Englishmen in the New World. Thus race-based slavery – and the work done by the enslaved within the household – was embedded and accommodated
7 An example of one such wide central hall can be found at Mount Vernon in the portion
of the house dating to Augustine Washington’s construction of the house in the 1730s.
within the Barbadian plantation house before architectural change provided a clearer means of segregating the household.
Beginning in the 1720s and continuing until the end of the 1730s, Virginia
planters adopted Georgian style without wholly adopting Georgian plans. One of the best examples of this was Rosewell Plantation, begun by Mann Page I in 1725 and completed (with the assistance of a bequest from his father-in-law) after his death, by his son Mann Page II in 1737. Rosewell, which burned at the beginning of the twentieth century but persists as a ruin, was likely designed with the grand townhouses of London in mind, possibly by Mann Page I himself. Its exterior features some of the best brickwork in Virginia and the requisite embellishments for a fashionable townhouse, but its interior maintained a more open hall-and-chamber plan while situating its public spaces on the first floor, rather than the second floor like the English townhouses it emulated.
At Rosewell, a massive staircase that ascended to the second floor encircled the hall while a much narrower and far more modest stair occupied a separate stair hall directly opposite, linking all three floors and the house’s basement. The narrow, arched entrance to this smaller staircase would have obscured it from the view of visitors in the main hall or those who entered from the river-side entrance. At Shirley plantation on the James River, begun by John Carter when he married Elizabeth Hill in 1723 but not completed until 1738, the hall-and-chamber plan was once again sheathed in an elaborate Georgian shell. All the rooms on the first floor flowed into each other via connecting doors. Unlike Rosewell, Shirley had only a single staircase connecting all three stories.
Shirley’s staircase, like Rosewell’s, occupied the main hall and showcased intricate woodwork crafted by enslaved workers under the supervision of English
craftsmen. It was an engineering marvel, floating away from the wall and appearing to climb three stories without any support because of an ingenious internal system of iron straps. Its undercut soffit created the impression of movement, even when frozen. Unlike fixed staircases, whose only movement came from the creak of floorboards, Shirley’s stairs undulated so slightly it could be possible to have imagined it, but so regularly that one could not possible deny that it was happening. Every distinguished visitor, every family member, and every enslaved member of the household walked up and down these stairs multiple times each day. The lack of a back stair meant that every chamber pot from the upper floors traveled in the hands of enslaved chamber maid down that staircase and through the side door at the base of the stairs.
There are very few documentary records about Shirley relating to the period of its construction and initial use and those that do exist offer little beyond the cost and amount of materials, both of which are worthwhile avenues of inquiry, but that provide no insight into the household itself. For that, historians must turn to the buildings and their patterns. Frederic Edwin Church’s 1851 drawing of Shirley depicted what the original extended landscape around Shirley looked like and archaeology has confirmed his rendering. Instead of the two large, but somewhat distant buildings comprising the extant forecourt, the main house was flanked on either side by two massive buildings rising three stories, possibly taller than the main house itself. Archaeological excavation revealed that rather than being the seventeenth century house rumored to have been built on the property by Elizabeth Hill’s father, there were in fact two parallel flankers, each sixty feet long and twenty four feet wide with hall-passage-parlor plan. Building materials and stylistic elements from the excavation of the North and South Dependencies (as they have been
most commonly called) indicated that they were part of the same phase of construction as the main house (ca. 1738), while Charles Carter (son of John Carter and Elizabeth Hill Carter, 1732-1806, who occupied Shirley from 1771-1806) oversaw the construction of the four extant forecourt buildings as well as the renovation of the main house.9
Archaeology revealed that both buildings had vaulted cellars (after the North Dependency collapsed its vaulted cellar appears to have been repurposed as a root cellar). The use of a hall-passage-parlor plan in the flankers indicates that John Carter’s choice not to include a central passage in the main house was a deliberate one. While these substantial buildings could have been used to house guests, the social purpose of the central passage (to control access to the planter and the more private spaces of the household) would have been voided and instead the central passage likely facilitated the movement of air through the space while providing a central space for circulation of people throughout the building.
The transition toward a cohesive “Georgian” architecture took a number of different forms throughout Virginia, but until the end of the 1740s, there was no consistent use of a central passage. At Tuckahoe plantation, the Randolph family used one of the possible alternative arrangements. Thomas Randolph began building in 1714 and his eldest son, William (who married Mann Page’s daughter, Maria Judith Page), inherited the house and expanded it into a four room mansion (two rooms on each story) with a hall-passage-parlor plan in 1733. By 1740 he added a center hall and a South wing that replicated the plan of the original house, creating an H-shape, though in orientation it
9 Theodore R. Reinhart and Judith A. Habicht, “Shirley Plantation in the Eighteenth
Century: A Historical, Architectural, and Archaeological Study,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 92, no. 1 (1984): 29–49.
differed significantly from the best example of an H-shaped house in Virginia at Stratford Hall.
Stratford Hall, home to the Lee family, replaced an older mansion, The Cliffs, whose simple plan facilitated the creation of a community amongst the servants, slaves, and family within the household, an interpretation supported by the archaeology. The earlier house, dating to 1670, underwent significant change in the 1690s before being replaced by the new mansion in the 1730s. Whereas the earlier house had originally had an open plan and a communal hall, the 1690s changes included the creation of a central passage and the addition of a porch to the front of the house, both of which emphasized the division between public and private space, even within the household itself. When Thomas Lee abandoned that building in the 1730s to construct his new home, he created a central space that was explicitly public and for entertaining and situated the rest of the house around it. The central hall at Stratford encompasses nearly a third of the first floor, while passages that open off of it lead to bedchambers and discreet staircases to the ground floor where enslaved servants did the work of the household.
Stratford, Shirley, Tuckahoe, and Rosewell, while certainly not universally representative of other early eighteenth century elite structures in the Chesapeake, nonetheless reflected the manner in which the desire for English design that
communicated the planters’ active participation in the Atlantic world accommodated the strategies planters used to control their world. The distinction between public and private space meant that movement for visitors to the house became increasingly restricted,