Whether wood was used or brick, the Southern houses of the seventeenth century and the fore part of the eighteenth conformed pretty closely to the same architectural type and even in the more ambitious dwellings, erected by the very wealthy towards the end of this period, there was generally no radical departure from the accustomed style. For the most part, the homes of even the most affluent planters were simple in plan and plain in appearance. The typical dwelling was an oblong structure with the house door on one of the long fronts, a steeply-pitched roof, a chimney at each end, and often had but one full floor with an attic above it, although a more commodious second floor was by no means uncommon. In 1679, Major Thomas Chamberlayne, a prominent citizen of Henrico, contracted with one Gates, a carpenter of the same county, to build him a frame house, forty feet long by twenty feet wide. The outside walls were to be boarded and there was to be no cellar, but the framework was to be supported on cills resting on the ground. Upper and lower floors were each to be divided by wooden partitions into two rooms. At each end there was to be a brick chimney. So many descriptions of similar houses and specifications for their erection occur in seventeenth-century documents that we are quite justified in regarding them as typical of the period. The Adam Thoroughgood house, built of brick in Princess Anne County, Virginia, between 1640 and 1650, presented the same general contour. The roofs were customarily of cypress shingles although tiles were subsequently employed to some extent. The pitch of the roof closely resembled the pitch of some of the earliest New England roofs but in both the South and North there is observable, as the years go by, a general tendency to depart from English precedent and flatten the pitch so far as conditions would permit. In this connexion it must also be remembered that thatch was a common roofing material in England and required a steep pitch in order to shed the rain quickly while the use of shingles [Illustration: Copyright, J. B. Lippincott Co. ADAM THOROUGHGOOD HOUSE, PRINCESS ANNE COUNTY, VA. BUILT _C._ 1640.] [Illustration: GOVERNOUR EDEN HOUSE, EDENTON, N. C. Unusual example of overhang in Southern architecture.] [Illustration: HOUSE AT YORKTOWN, VA. With typical outside chimneys at ends.] [Illustration: “HOSPITAL” HOUSE, YORKTOWN, VA. Of Southern Colonial type.] permitted a less abrupt angle without impairing the water-shedding qualities of the roof.