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
English forts of this kind, with stockades and ditches, were common to
Virginia, as for example, at Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke Fort of 1585
in North Carolina, formerly Virginia; at Old Point Comfort in 1609; in
City of Henrico in 1611; at Claiborne's Kent Island trading post of
1621--now in Maryland; and at the "Town" on the Eastern Shore in 1623.
One of the longest palisades in all Virginia in the seventeenth century
was Dale's "Dutch Gap" on the James. Its two-mile-long moat was lined by
palisaded walls accented by towers.
After the Massacre of 1622, the Colony of Virginia ordered (1624-25) all
dwellings and plantations to be palisaded in, that is, to be enclosed by
"Park-pales," as the English called them. Ordinarily walls about seven
and a half feet high were tall enough for protection from sudden attack.
Even churches were palisaded in, as for example, the first church on the
Eastern shore. In the 1630s one Stephen Charleton threatened to kick the
Reverend Cotton over the paled fence--the "Pallyzados"--around that
sacred edifice.
The second medieval method is _puncheoning_. It seems that the English
made puncheons or "quarters" pretty much like the Indians, that is, they
fashioned upright timbers or posts, set apart in the ground so that the
space between them was the same as the thickness of the timber or post.
Then they filled the interstices with "wattle-and-daub," a basketwork of
branches, twigs, and roots, coated on both sides with loam and lime,
mixed with straw. Back home in England, this filling of the spaces was
named "post and pan." On James River there is record of the Berkeley
settlement of 1619 having most of the dwellings built of "punches" set
in the earth and with boards for the roofs. Other huts were flimsy
shelters merely "covered with boards," so that one spark could easily
set them off. But when the English employed thin turf or sod for their
roofs, the structures were safer from fire.
[Illustration: A Puncheoned Cot with wattle filling and clapboard
roof]
In connection with this wattling and daubing of Virginia buildings, the
two early churches on Eastern Shore are believed to have been puncheoned
edifices. The second church (c. 1638), near Fishing Creek was described
as "of insignificant dimensions" and constructed of two materials:
"roughly riled logs"--that is, vertical timbers, since log cabins as we
know them were virtually unknown in the English colonies before 1660;
and "wattles." A reference to "daubing" the first church (c. 1623), on
King's Creek, leads us to believe that it also was built on "punches"
and was woven with wattles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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