Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts

Folk Housing in Middle Virginia

A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF HISTORIC ARTIFACTS

Folk Housing in Middle Virginia

By HENRY GLASSIE

Photographs and Drawings by the Author

THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS

Copyright © 1975 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville.

All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Cloth:    first printing, 1975; second printing, 1979; third printing, 1983; fourth printing, 1987; fifth printing, 1991.

Paper:    first printing, 1979; second printing, 1983; third printing, 1987; fourth printing, 1991; fifth printing, 1996; sixth printing, 2006; seventh printing, 2024.

Publication of this book was assisted by the American Council of Learned Societies under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Glassie, Henry H.

Folk housing in middle Virginia

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Architecture, Domestic—Virginia.

2. Folk art—Virginia. I. Title

NA7235.V5G55            975.5                   75-11653

ISBN 978-0-87049-173-3 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-87049-268-6 (pbk)

for Fred Kniffen

Preface

The lonely cold in ancient cathedrals chilled John Ruskin. He was fatigued by endless trips across Europe, distracted by illnesses of body and mind. The cathedral drafts set him shivering, but he kept sketching. His fingers must have stiffened in pain and then numbed; his back must have ached, but his notebooks thickened with measurements and lines, with traceries, crockets, finials, and startling Gothic fantasies. When he wrote or spoke, John Ruskin began with the architectural details that he had drawn with precision. But his discourse sailed from stones to speculation on the culture of the craftsman; his mind soared from chisel marks to the morality of the mason’s society.

A century has gone by. The intellectual rage of Ruskin and his contemporaries lies unread, entombed in old volumes that bring cheap prices in second-hand bookshops. Unaware of their efforts, we must work to reinvent their goals. It took me a long time sketching before I could battle past wood and stone to begin considering the human beings who left material things as their only legacy. This book, a record of my effort, is not exactly a study of old buildings, or even old builders. It is a study of the architecture of past thought—an attempt to reconstruct the logic of people long dead by looking seriously at their houses.

Architecture studied for itself can fulfill a personal curiosity and provide a test of personal capacity. Architecture studied as an expression of personality and culture may provide us with the best means available for comprehending an authentic history. If a person’s interest is in the timeless principles governing human behavior, the study of architecture is an unnecessarily complicated way for him to locate those principles. It would be better to watch human beings in action than to spend time trying to catch reflections of behavior in mute artifacts. If the scholar’s interest turns to people he cannot observe, however, and if his interest is in the ways that people’s minds have operated over long stretches of time, then artifacts can provide him with the best means to confront his interest. Many of today’s cleverest and most creative thinkers have abandoned the field of history in a quest for human principles. It follows that when they lost interest in the past, they lost interest as well in the analysis of artifacts. By forgetting the past, these thinkers have been able to develop thrilling synchronic theories, and they have made it easier for unscrupulous men to co-opt the vast power of history, harnessing it to their own ends.

Like archaeology, art history, and cultural geography, the discipline of folklore is a natural center for the historical study of artifacts. Folklore has not totally lost its interest in the past, though that interest, lamentably, has been more in the history of things than in the history of people. Folklorists in America now generally count material culture as part of their subject matter, and folklorists in greater numbers—younger folklorists especially—are concentrating on the study of artifacts. As yet, however, their goals have been weakly defined. Understandably, folklore’s progressives are little interested in artifacts; the past does not worry them. It is likely that their nonhistorical program will continue to mark folklore’s high road into the future, but the way of the social sciences will not and should not become folklore’s only path. Folklore’s tradition of humanistic literary scholarship is probably due for a revival. Philosophy—phenomenology and existentialism, in particular—may become a future source for folkloristic ideas, just as anthropology and linguistics have been in the past. And more folklorists will probably take a look at historical possibilities. I wrote this book partially to help my discipline consider these historical possibilities.

Folklore is in a strange state, assessing its new-found maturity in text books, anthologies, summaries, recodifications of old thought, and tentative pronouncements for the future. Much is being said, but little is being studied. Prescriptive essays do less good in the furthering of a discipline than do actual studies, and "theoretical? essays, trimmed with assorted examples, are too easy to write. For those reasons, though my purpose is to show how artifacts can be analyzed to get at history, I have attempted a tight little study rather than the outline of a method. I respond, emotionally and aesthetically, to folk architecture, and I was fascinated by the historical results of my analysis. Still, this study is a test and an explication of a method. I have meant to be rigorous, and to state openly the assumptions upon which it is founded, for it depends upon influences from several disciplines, as will be apparent from the footnotes (I have not been stingy with them) and the classified bibliography.

The reader will probably find some parts of the study more useful or familiar than others, depending upon his own disciplinary traditions. The historian, for instance, might wish to glance from chapter II to chapter VIII before working through the whole book. The person interested in structuralism, which is the book’s theoretical mainstay, might wish initially to skip the chapters the historian reads and read those he skips. The person who has no interest in architectural history might want to pass by chapters IV and V and then refer to points within them when it becomes necessary for his understanding of the subsequent chapters. The architectural historian and the cultural geographer might relate most comfortably to chapters V and VI. However, this work is not exactly interdisciplinary; rather, it is the kind of openly synthetic attempt that is possible within the modem discipline of folklore. I wish to learn as much as possible from the objects I select to analyze.

The study is occasionally complicated, but the problem it addresses is complicated. A much simplified statement would require the omission of crucial aspects of the method and would be an insult both to the reader and to the human beings I am attempting to explain.

John Ruskin’s architectural studies became the basis for an effective radical romanticism. Ruskin’s friend William Morris, blue suit crumpled and hair aflame, could stand before a gathering of genteel socialists, manual laborers, or artists, and proclaim a future based on the analysis of the folk craftsman’s art. Unlike the Victorian romantics, I have no social program, but, like them, I know that humble old artifacts have important messages for us if we can figure out how to read them. I am saddened that many of the best minds of our time feel no responsibility toward history, and that even the historian feels no responsibility toward most artifacts. Everyone knows that the bulldozer begets ugliness on the land, but fewer seem to be aware that it destroys history. When the land is blasted and paved over it will be easy for anyone to remake the old American in his own image.

I thought about doing this book for six years, and I thought intensely about it for the four years following the completion of Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. That book and this one treat similar material, and the older book contains some information that is useful within the arguments I have framed here. The theoretical bases of the two books, however, are entirely different. I finally wrote this book in the spring of 1972. When I had finished the first draft, I owed a number of debts.

I would like to thank those people in Middle Virginia who were especially helpful to me when I was at work in the field: Otis Banks, Lee Bradshaw, Mr. and Mrs. E. E. Brooking, B. B. Harris, Athylone Julia Lloyd, N. O. Rigsby, Ida Smith, and Mr. and Mrs. James Watson.

Many of my intellectual debts will become apparent in the footnotes, but I have learned more in conversations than I have from reading. My greatest debt will always be to Professor Fred Kniffen, to whom this work is dedicated. I also take pleasure in mentioning the names of these men who have helped me define my concern for the artifact: Ronald Brunskill, Jim Deetz, Estyn Evans, James Marston Fitch, Bunny Fontana, Alan Gailey, and Warren Roberts. Chips of this book were tried out at academic meetings of folklore, archaeology, and historical societies. Nice comments were made to me in those contexts by people who have probably forgotten that they were encouraging: Dick Dorson, Roger Abrahams, Elliott Oring, Joe Illick, John Walzer, and Anthony N. B. Garvan. It is possible that all of the men named in this paragraph will want to deny any connection with this book, but comments made by all of them were helpful to me while I was at work.

By February of 1973, when I was revising the manuscript, my debts had increased. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provided me with a very generous grant from June through December of 1972. Though the project I completed as a Guggenheim fellow was not the one reported here, the grant did allow me to do fieldwork in Britain, and this book was improved at many points by my first-hand experiences on the other side of the Atlantic.

Drafts of this work were buoyed by my friends, the faculty, staff, and students of Indiana’s Folklore Institute. They provided me with as pleasant an atmosphere as can be found in these disagreeable times. Phil and Pat Peek brought me my own ivri from Isoko country, and from it I borrowed the energy to keep at it on some particularly tiring nights.

My family has always patiently indulged my fanaticisms. My grandmother, my mother, my father (the nation’s most insightful, unsung critic of nineteenth-century American painting), my sister and her friend Jim—all helped me in diverse ways. My wife’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Irving J. Friedman, helped us with housing while the folk housing of Middle Virginia was being studied. Then there are Polly, Harry, and Lydia, without whose interruptions my scholarship would seem like work instead of the fun it is. Betty-Jo and the kids lived with me in the field. Betty-Jo nursed me back from an incredible case of poison ivy that I contracted because one especially important old house was covered with that God-forsaken weed and my choice was to not measure the house or to become totally covered with obnoxiously itchy sores. I chose the latter. Betty-Jo and John Vlach drank a lot of coffee while proofreading. She typed and retyped the manuscript and thought I was a little hard on the old Virginia heritage that we share. Actually I was surprised by the results of my analysis: the old Virginians were hard on themselves.

Contents

Preface

     I A Silent Land

    II A More Human History

   III A Prologue to Analysis

   IV The Architectural Competence

    V Counting Houses

  VI The Mechanics of Structural Innovation

 VII Reason in Architecture

VIII A Little History

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Figures

  1. Signs on the land.

  2. Middle Virginia.

  3. Population of Louisa and Goochland.

  4. The survey area within its region.

  5. The survey area and locations of architectural examples.

  6. Conjectural diagram of ground plan design.

  7. Scale of shapes.

  8. Summary of typological differences.

  9. Relation of subtypes.

10. Type 1, House A.

11. Diagram of the transformation of the X and Z base structures into types 1, 2, 3.

12. Distribution of types 1, 2, 3.

13. Diagram of the transformation of the XY 2 base structure into type 4.

14. Distribution of types 4, 5, 6.

15. Diagram of the transformation of the XY 1 base structure into types 5, 6.

16. Type 10, House B.

17. Diagram of the transformation of the XX base structure into types 7, 8, 9, 10.

18. Distribution of types 7, 8, 9, 10.

19. Type 13, House C.

20. Two-thirds type 14, House D.

21. Diagram of the transformation of the XY 3 X base structure into types 11,12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.

22. Distribution of types 11, 12, 13.

23. Distribution of types 14, 15.

24. Distribution of types 16, 17.

25. Distribution of nontraditional houses.

26. Typological tabulation.

27. Type 2 house with XY 3 X fenestration, House E.

28. Two-thirds type 14 house with ungrammatical fenestration, House F.

29. Unique house, House G.

30. English hall-and-parlor house.

31. Type 5, House H.

32. Type 6, House J.

33. Type 4, House K.

34. Type 2, House L.

35. Type 3, House M.

36. Type 17, House N.

37. Type 17, House P.

38. Two-thirds type 16, House Q.

39. The central-hall I house, west of the Blue Ridge.

40. English Houses.

41. Type 14, House R.

42. Type 14, House S.

43. Two-thirds type 14, House T.

44. Two-thirds type 14, House U.

45. Type 3, House V.

46. Type 3 houses.

47. The Georgian house.

48. Type 15, House W.

49. The last of old Viriginia architecture, House X.

50. Evolution of the architectural competence.

51. An English frame.

52. The Tidewater frame.

53. Sections through vertical framing members.

54. The Tidewater frame.

55. Log comer-timbering.

56. Board interior.

57. Wooden latches.

58. Preliminary diagram of a segment of the Middle Virginia architectural logic.

59. Distribution of institutional architecture.

60. British longhouse.

61. Suggestions of early farm planning, House Y.

62. Nineteenth century farm planning, House Z.

63. Aligned outbuildings.

64. Boxed stairway.

65. Tidewater chimney.

66. English framing.

67. Framing details.

68. Plate framing.

69. The loft.

70. Framing the plate of a log house.

71. Hinges.

72. Beaded siding.

73. Molded opening.

74. Interior woodwork.

75. Type 14, House AA.

76. The architecture of design.

77. Type 15 house with end addition, House BB.

78. The nonsymmetrical house of England and Ireland.

79. Saddlebag house, House CC.

80. Type 11, House DD.

81. The West European tripartite barn.

82. Church, FF.

83. English cottages.

84. Diagram of the Middle Virginia housing revolution.

85. West Country I house.

86. Plan of a northwestern English house.

Folk Housing in Middle Virginia

I

A Silent Land

Slow wheels on the roads in Virginia summertime spin pink dust into the sky. It remains until long after quiet returns. The fields in winter, rough with fodder stubble and brittle under a sheet of snow, glide away into the black pines. Shattered only by the tree tops, the horizon is bleached soundless. It is that sort of country.

The skies come constantly into view. The land bears no features that hold the attention; it rises and falls flatly along the lines struck by small rivers, rows of tobacco or corn, fence posts or timber. The red clay on which most livelihoods and all moods depend is waxy and thick with too much rain, and it dries to dust with too little. At the end of a row, a farmer will stoop to take up a pinch of mud or dust, cocking his head back to take in the sky. Cloud streaks sailing back from the sunset bespeak fair weather, and a low metallic blackness indicates rain. The farmer will stand and stiffen, his hand curled over the top of his hoe, his chin resting on his knuckles. The face in the shade of his hat will not move as his eyes lower from the sky to the dirt and then level to follow a car passing through the dust. No nods are exchanged. When he was a young man, half a century ago, he plowed behind oxen for forty cents a day and carved tracks through the forests that had grown over the plantations of his grandfather’s manhood. He had known and joked with everyone and gathered with his friends for dances. He still follows the moon’s wisdom and attends to nature’s signs, but things do not look good. Tractors pack the clay too tightly to let the young shoots struggle into the sun, and mules have become so expensive that he has to harness one to a two-horse rake to scratch the lumps out of his garden. And these younger generations. They stare sullenly out of automobiles, waiting to leave. They have lost the logic of the farmer’s world.

Centered for some on the stores at Orchid, Inez, or Gum Spring, for others on white wooden churches in the woods, this land lies across the line separating Goochland County, formed from Henrico in 1727 and named for a colonial governor, and Louisa, formed from Hanover in 1742 and named for King George III’s daughter. Located just west of the fall-line, lolling between the Blue Ridge and the Tidewater, this land is called Middle Virginia. Roads reach out to prevent its isolation. The main road from Mineral to Goochland Court House cuts through, crossed by the highway that runs from Charlottesville to Richmond. Gum Spring is near the halfway mark. There travelers stopped to water their horses,¹ and drovers of cattle and turkeys broke the two-day trip from the Blue Ridge to the eastern markets. Lest travelers should lose it in the net of farm lanes cast over the red clay and piney woods, the highway was blazed by three strokes of an ax, whence its name: Three Chopt Road. The chops remain in the oak tree standing amid the boxwoods in front of the ruined Rackett house, where people on the road used to stop to pass the night. From beneath that oak the low-clustered shapes at Gum Spring are visible: the new highway and the old one part here, one carved straight through the landscape and the other wandering into the woods. Richmond lay only a half a day from here, if your horse were a traveler; and produce could be sent from Goochland by water down the James River. This land was not, and is not, isolated. It is a home for those whose living grows from the ground, but for the outsider the land is located too near the center of things to be more than a place to pass through.

Fig. 1 SIGNS ON THE LAND.

Fig. 2 MIDDLE VIRGINIA.

People from across the Atlantic began breaking the land as the eighteenth century opened. In the 1790 census both Goochland and Louisa counties had a population of nearly nine thousand, and in each of the counties the majority of the people were black slaves (Fig. 3).² Before the Civil War exploded, the black majority had increased.³ Its decline began toward the end of the nineteenth century.⁴ By the 1960 census 39.9 percent of the 12,959 people in Louisa were not white; of the 9,206 Goochland residents, 48.2 percent were not white.⁵ In over a century and a half, Louisa County’s population had increased by about a quarter and Goochland’s by only 153 people.

Fig. 3 POPULATION OF LOUISA AND GOOCHLAND. The sources of these figures can be found in notes 2–4, p. 194.

The people’s work was always agricultural. The enumeration of 1810 reported that Louisa had produced a couple of thousand dollars worth of clocks and watches, and had twenty stills in operation. A few carriages were made in both counties, but the main produce grew out of the land.⁶ A decade later the census records that in the two counties 6,906 people were engaged in agriculture and only 465 in manufactures.⁷ Thirty years later the number of people employed in manufacturing had decreased by more than one hundred. At the same time the two counties had produced 341,490 bushels of wheat, 653,676 bushels of corn, and 2,508,493 pounds of tobacco.⁸ The 1880 census shows a further decline in the numbers working in manufacturing and a dip in agricultural output: 146,582 bushels of wheat, 513,719 bushels of corn, 2,578,114 pounds of tobacco.⁹ After the Civil War the plantations contracted, and though there still are farms among the pines the young men are leaving cultivation to work in the whining sawmills that are cutting paths through the second-growth timber, spitting out low-grade boards and pallets. And they are leaving the sawmills for Richmond and Philadelphia. In the melancholy rhetoric of the fading Confederate, the author of one of the thin local histories writes, The material wealth of Goochland was bountifully supplied by nature ... but it is hoped and believed that it will never be said of Goochland, as it has never been said in the past, ‘Ill fares the land; to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay.’ ¹⁰ The fact is, the area rests at the rock bottom of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s economy.¹¹

The correspondence between Cornwallis and Tarleton refers to the Three-notched Road, and Tarleton galloped through Louisa.¹² We are informed by historians that a lady who was loved by both John Paul Jones and Patrick Henry was born not far to the east.¹³ And the Civil War flamed all around this area. Despite these brushes with importance no great event chanced to happen just here. The land never struck anyone as culturally exotic. People passed through.

There are documents, government reports, and small books from which a little can be learned, but there is not enough to allow a historian to write about this area—or about the many other areas that are like it primarily in being unknown. If this land and the people who made it have no place in the historical record, then the worth of the study of history must be called sharply into question. The written primary sources are too scanty, but there are fences in the forests and silent old houses set back from the roads. They are decaying and difficult to decipher, they demand tiring work in the field and complicated analysis, but they can be made to reveal the information upon which a strengthened historiography could be based. With brave exceptions, though, historians pass by such sources without a look. History moves on, leaving this land, like almost everywhere else, and these people, like almost everyone else, out of account.

II

A More Human History

History is a difficult pursuit.¹ It is, in fact, passing difficult, possibly impossible, and for that reason the vanguard of social science has been in full retreat from history for most of our century. Left in the path of that movement is a critique of history compounded of three interrelated charges.

The first charge is that of unexplained process. It is intellectually unsound to develop a narrative of change through time without first accounting for the system that is undergoing and enabling change. Thinkers at odds on other matters—Claude Lévi-Strauss² and Jean-Paul Sartre,³ for example—concur that any method of inquiry must include a synchronic statement as a prelude to diachronic interpretation. Time must be stopped and states of affairs examined before time can be reintroduced, else the scholar