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    Early American Houses: With A Glossary of Colonial Architectural Terms
    Early American Houses: With A Glossary of Colonial Architectural Terms
    Early American Houses: With A Glossary of Colonial Architectural Terms
    Ebook239 pages1 hour

    Early American Houses: With A Glossary of Colonial Architectural Terms

    By Norman Morrison Isham

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    An intriguing examination of classic colonial houses, this fact-filled foray explores with remarkable concision the "medieval period" of American architecture. The treatise takes for its examples the first houses built along the Atlantic coast in the seventeenth century. While these early structures were usually based on traditional English and Dutch styles, their design and methods of construction soon acquired a unique character of their own. Geographically remote from the stylistic restrictions of Europe, American architects used new plans and construction elements to create fresh new dwellings with individual beauty and charm. 
    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateFeb 19, 2013
    ISBN9780486146263
    Early American Houses: With A Glossary of Colonial Architectural Terms

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      Book preview

      Early American Houses - Norman Morrison Isham

      Early American Houses

      With A Glossary of Colonial Architectural Terms

      Norman Morrison Isham

      Bibliographical Note

      This Dover edition, first published in 2007, is an unabridged republication of two volumes bound as one, originally published separately by The Walpole Society, Boston, 1928 and 1939, respectively. The only significant alteration consists in making the page numbering continuous for the two separate works.

      9780486146263

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y 11501

      THE WALPOLE SOCIETY

      Francis Hill Bigelow

      Dwight Blaney

      Morgan Bulkeley Brainard

      Thomas Benedict Clarke

      Alexander Smith Cochran

      George Francis Dow

      Henry Wood Erving

      Mantle Fielding

      Harry Harkness Flagler

      Hollis French

      William Brownell Goodwin

      R. T. Haines Halsey

      Norman Morrison Isham

      Henry Watson Kent

      Luke Vincent Lockwood

      John Hill Morgan

      George Smith Palmer

      Marsden Jasiel Perry

      Frederic Bayley Pratt

      Herbert Lee Pratt

      Charles Russell Richards

      George Dudley Seymour

      Philip Leffingwell Spalding

      Charles Hitchcock Tyler

      George Parker Winship

      Samuel William Woodhouse, Jr.

      John Munro Woolsey

      Theodore Salisbury Woolsey

      PREFACE

      THE WALPOLE SOCIETY, which holds all the arts of Early America within its view, has had the custom of publishing, from time to time, authentic texts or utterances upon those arts. The Society, in what it has already printed, has surveyed the fields of Furniture, of Ceramics and of Silver. In this book it traverses that of Architecture and examines the houses of the American Colonies in the seventeenth century.

      The facts here set forth have been gathered in years of study of actual examples. The drawings and photographs presented may be relied on even where the reader may choose to disagree with theoretical statements. Of these there are not many, for the main purpose of the book has been to set out clearly the actual form of the house as it developed in plan and construction as well as in exterior and interior treatment, during the seventeenth century, along the whole Atlantic coast.

      The examples have been purposely chosen, as far as has been possible, from houses not hitherto published or, at least, not well known, and, where noted houses are used, it will be found that the features presented are, in most cases, far from familiar.

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Copyright Page

      THE WALPOLE SOCIETY

      PREFACE

      EARLY AMERICAN HOUSES

      EARLY AMERICAN HOUSES

      INDEX

      A GLOSSARY OF COLONIAL ARCHITECTURAL TERMS

      A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST

      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.

      FIGURE 1. THE ONE-ROOM HOUSE

      I. Rhode Island type (Clemence). II. Connecticut. Transverse summer (Hempstead).. III. Massachusetts. Thwartwise summer (Hathaway). IV. Dutch (oldest part of Elmendorf).V. Maryland (Secretary). VI. Virginia (House ordered by the Company, 1637)

      FIGURE 2. THE TWO-ROOM HOUSE

      I. New England. Lengthwise summer (Fairbanks House). II. New England. Thwartwise summer (Corwin House). III. Dutch (Schenck House). IV. Virginia

      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

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