| Styles of Homes: The Colonial Period 1600–1820. Post Medieval English 1607–1700. |
| Overview |
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| Style |
Material |
Orientations of structure |
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| Rustic |
Wood |
Vertical |
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| Key features |
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| Steep roof; massive chimney; diamond-shaped windowpanes separated by lead, in tight clusters. |
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| Architectural Features |
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| Entrance Door |
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- Board & batten
- Exposed supporting boards
- No lite
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| Shutters |
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- Single board or board and batten
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| Garage Door |
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- Board & batten
- Exposed supporting boards
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| Style Summary |
This was the only style in the English colonies from their
founding to 1700, when their population had grown to
220,000 and occupied the coastal area from Virginia to Maine.
Only a few hundred houses remain of the many thousands built
in this period. Most are in Massachusetts and Connecticut,
where about a hundred are preserved as museum homes and
at least that many more are in private hands. Fewer examples
survive in Maryland, Virginia and the middle colonies. After
1700, early Georgian houses with less steep roof slopes,
smaller chimneys, large double-hung windows having one fixed
and one movable sash, and classical door surrounds rapidly
replaced this style throughout the English colonies. Post-medieval houses survived longest in the South, where scattered examples with Post-medieval details were built throughout the 18th century.
These earliest English Colonial houses are New World
adaptations of modest English domestic buildings, which, in
the decades immediately preceding colonization, had begun to
undergo a transition from Medieval to Renaissance structural
details. The steeply pitched roofs were a surviving Medieval
development for thatch covering, which must be steep to
shed water. In America the earliest roofs were also of thatch,
but the ice, snow, thunderstorms, and high winds of the
more severe New World climate soon made wooden shingles
the preferred roofing material. The high pitch, now without
function for relatively impervious shingle roofs, persisted
for nearly a century. The roof pitch has been lowered in later
alterations of most examples, including many restorations. The
chimneystack, replacing the open fire of Medieval vernacular
houses, was the crucial Post-medieval improvement. Attic
space, formerly unenclosed so that smoke could escape
through roof openings, could be floored over to provide
sleeping rooms. In the New World, large chimneys were
used on all but the most modest 17th century houses. In the
northern colonies, central chimney placement was preferred,
probably to conserve heat during the severe winters. In the
southern colonies, the end chimneys may have helped to
dissipate the heat of cooking fires during the oppressively hot
summers.
Excerpted from A Field Guide to American Houses, Virginia and
Lee McAlester, Alfred Knopf, New York, © 2000. |
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