Notwithstanding his inherited preference for stone and brick as building materials, the early Virginia colonist had perforce to make a virtue of necessity and build his house of wood. Although, in the majority of cases, the Virginia colonist took to brick and stone when circumstances permitted--they were almost universally used so soon as the Georgian influence began to be felt and the accumulation of wealth conduced thereto--the necessary dependence upon wood at the outset created a precedent and launched a Southern tradition that has subsisted to our own day. In many parts of the Old Dominion there was practically no stone to be had and it was a difficult matter to secure even enough for chimneys. Often all dependence for this purpose had to be placed upon brick and brick was none too easy to come by at first. Good brick clay, to be sure, was abundant and the manufacture of bricks received encouragement from the first but there were serious difficulties in the way of transportation after the bricks were made and by the time these difficulties were surmounted many of the older houses had been built and it was hardly to be expected that the planters, after constructing substantial and comfortable abodes of timber would demolish them and replace them by others of brick, after brick was more plentiful, merely to comply with the arbitrary directions issued by the authorities in England when, in 1637, they instructed Governour Wyatt “to require every landowner whose plantation was an hundred acres in extent to erect a dwelling house of brick, to be twenty-four feet in length and sixteen feet in breadth, with a cellar attached. In the cases where the area of the grant exceeded five hundred acres, the size of the dwelling house was to enlarge in proportion.” The earliest Southern houses in Virginia and elsewhere, after the brief log-cabin stage had been passed, we may feel assured were of wooden construction with brick or sometimes stone chimneys. All about was the greatest abundance of the finest pine, cypress, cedar, oak, chestnut, hickory, elm and ash timber which fully answered for all structural needs and the feather-edged plank or clapboard, nailed to the framing of posts, studs, girts and cills was in common use for building purposes. It was probably owing to the absence of stone and the comparative scarcity of bricks at an early date that we do not find evidences of attempted half-timber construction with clay and brick or clay and stone pugging as we do in New England at the same period.