Virginia Architecture in the Seventeenth CenturyForman, Henry Chandlee
History
Virginia Architecture in the Seventeenth Century
Forman, Henry Chandlee
Architecture -- Virginia -- History -- 17th century; Architecture, Colonial -- Virginia
For many years after the founding of James Fort in Virginia, the Indian
continued to build in his traditional manner along side the
newly-blossoming English architecture. In what year the last, authentic,
wooden structure of Indian style was constructed in Virginia by a native
Indian is not known, but it probably was in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century. However that may be, in eighteenth-century Virginia
Indian construction was a dying art, of which the skills, it seems, have
been completely lost. Even if you gave the present-day Indians in the
Old Dominion the tools to build them with, those natives would not know
how to erect the great wigwams and temples of their ancestors. Such a
statement is no minimization, because this writer once resided as a
guest in the Pamunkey Indian Reservation near West Point, Virginia, and
he found the natives there, who are descendants of the oldest and most
powerful clan in Virginia, who possess the oldest Indian reservation in
the United States, living in clapboard houses of the kind we call
"shacks." With all their inherited courtly bearing and good manners,
they had even forgotten how to make their own pottery, with its
indigenous designs based on the scroll, the swastika, and the like.
Instead, they sold to tourists and visitors to the reservation imported
Southwestern or Pueblo pottery, of step-designs. To that favor they had
come at last, three centuries after Jamestown.
The fact that a large percent of the people who settled Jamestown, and
other English settlements of Virginia in the seventeenth century were
lowly fishermen, farmers and laborers who were not adjusted to new
national economic conditions, unsuccessful tradesmen, unemployed
craftsmen, and such folk, has a direct bearing on the style of
architecture introduced from Britain into Virginia. Because there were
few bluebloods, and because most were of the humbler classes, the
average Virginian came from the overwrought farms on remote and secluded
roads, the little small-town shops, in narrow streets, the peasant
dwellings of sod or wattle, far out on the fens and moors of Britain.
The real point is, architecturally speaking, it was in these very rural
districts of England the Medieval Style was the most entrenched.
[Illustration: The First English Architecture in Va. was at James Fort
(1607) now washed away, off this point below Orchard Run]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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