 Chapter 1 of Colonial Folkways. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Colonial Folkways by Charles McLean Andrews. Chapter 1 The Land and the People. The restless and courageous Englishmen who fared across the sea in the 17th century facing danger and death in their search for free homes and the wilderness, little dreamed that out of their adventure and toil there would rise in time a great republic and a new order of human society. There was nothing to indicate that the settlements along the seaboard occupying the narrow strip of land between the ocean and the mountain ranges would eventually grow into a mighty union of states that would be called the melting pot of the world. The elements of that great amalgam of peoples it is true began to be gathered before the close of the colonial era, but the process of fusion made little progress during the years of dependence under the British crown. The settlements of the 17th century were widely scattered, separated by dense forests and broad rivers, and the colonists were busy with their task of overcoming the obstacles that confronted them in a primeval land. Even by the beginning of the 18th century there was little inter-colonial communication to make the colonies acquainted with one another and the thousands of immigrants arriving yearly from the old world and adding new varieties to the raised types already present rendered assimilation more difficult. The entire colonial period was marked by shifting and unsettled conditions. The older colonies, Virginia, New England, Maryland, and New York were undergoing changes in ideas and institutions. The jerseys and the Carolinas were long under the control of absent and inefficient proprietors before they finally passed under the rule of the crown. Pennsylvania the last to be founded except Georgia and the seat of our religious experiment in a city of brotherly love was wrestling with the difficult task of combining high ideals with the ordinary frailties of human nature. In all these colonies the details of political organization and the available means of making a living were developed but slowly. England too the sovereign power across the sea whose influence affected at every important point the course of colonial history was late in defining and putting into practice her policy toward her American possessions. Not until after the turmoil of the war which ended with the Treaty of Utrecht 1713 do we begin to find a state of colonial society sufficiently address to admit about satisfactory review. The half century from 1713 to 1763 is the period during which the life of the colonists attained its highest level of stability and regularity and to this period the training time of those who were to make the revolution we shall chiefly direct our attention. It will be an advantage however to preface a consideration of colonial life with a reference to the topography of the country and a review of the racial elements which made up its composite population. The territory occupied by the colonists stretched along the American coast from Nova Scotia to Georgia. The earliest settlements laid near the ocean but in some cases extended inland for considerable distances along the more important rivers. Behind this settled area toward the foothills of the mountains lay the back country which after 1730 received immigrants in large numbers. Except for settlements and outlying clearings the colonial area even near the sea was densely covered with forests and contained to the end of this period many wild and desolate tracks of dismal swamp drifting sand entangled jungle destined to remain for decades regions of mystery and fear the resort of only fallen beast and the occasional refuge of criminals and outlaws. Gradually as the years passed the wilderness disappeared before the March of Man the wooded and rocky surface was transformed into fertile arable fields and pasture the old settlements widened and new settlements appeared. The number of colonists increased and the pioneers steadily pushed back the frontier setting up towns and laying out farms and plantations rearing families warring with the Indians and trading with them for furs and turning to the best account the advantages that are bountiful though exacting nature furnished ready to their hand. To the west of the colonists lay the boundless wilderness on the east lay the equally vast ocean the great highway of communication with the civilization of the old world to which they still instinctively turned. If the land furnished homes and subsistence from agriculture the sea while also furnishing food afforded opportunities for commerce and travel. Only by water for the most part could the colonists reach the markets to sell their fish furs and agricultural produce and to purchase those necessary articles of food dress and equipment which they could neither raise nor manufacture among themselves. Sometimes they trafficked in short voyages to neighboring colonies and sometimes they sailed on longer voyages to England the continent the wine islands Africa the West Indies and the Spanish main. Though the land in its staples often shaped the destiny of individual colonies the most important single factor in bringing wealth and opportunity to the colonies as a whole was the sea. Those who journeyed upon the Atlantic thought as little of crossing the water as they did of traversing the land and travelers took ship for England and the West Indies with less hesitation than they had in riding on horseback or in chases over dangerous and lonely roads. The colonial domain thus comprised regions which differed conspicuously from one another in climate soil and economic opportunity but the races which came to dwell in these new lands were no less diverse than the country. At the close of the period here under review that is in 1763 the total white population of the region from Maine to Georgia was not far from one million two hundred and fifty thousand. It is estimated that something more than a third of the inhabitants were newcomers not of the stock of the original settlers. These newcomers were chiefly French German and Scotch Irish. There were also in the colonies about two hundred and thirty thousand Negroes free enslaved twenty nine thousand in the middle colonies sixteen thousand in New England and the remainder in the south. The influence of the non English newcomers on colonial life was less than their numbers might suggest. The Scotch Irish belong rather to the back country than to the older settlements and except in Pennsylvania where they were something of a factor in politics were not yet in the public arena. Their turn was to come later in the revolution and in the westward movement. The same maybe said of the Germans not many Germans in the colonies became as well known as John Peter Zenger whose name is indissolubly associated with the liberty of the press in America. The Germans however as farmers contributed greatly to the prosperity of the communities where they cultivated their lands. Huguenots Jews and Highlanders remained in numbers near the coast and took part in the social political and commercial life of the older communities. The Huguenots and the Highlanders became influential planters merchants and holders of political office men of enterprise and standing. The Jews on the other hand had no social or political privileges and made their mark principally in the field of commerce and trade. More than most of the regions over which these many races were scattered late New England extending from the wilds of Maine through a beautiful rolling country of green fields and tree clad slopes to the rocky environs of the white mountains the Berkshires and the Litchfield Hills. Here according to the humor of a later day the sheep's noses were sharpened for cropping the grass between the stones and the corn was shot into the unyielding ground with a gun. Central and Eastern New England was a region of low mountain ranges and fairly wide valleys of many rivers and excellent harbors. A land admirably adapted to a system of intensive farming and husbandry. The variety of its staples was matched by the diversity of the occupations of its people. Fishing, agriculture, household manufacturers and trade kept the New Englander along the coast busy and made him shrewd, persistent and progressive. He was unprogressive and slow in the more isolated towns and villages where the routine of the farm absorbed the greater part of his time and attention. In 1730 the New Englanders numbered roughly 275,000 in 1760 425,000 or about a third of the entire white population of the 13 colonies and at the close of the Revolutionary War 800,000. Somewhat less than half of these were under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. Connecticut stood second in size and Rhode Island and New Hampshire were nearly equal. The New Englanders lived in compact communities along the coast and up the river valleys wherever land and opportunity offered and in self-governing towns and cities of which Boston with about 20,000 inhabitants was by far the largest. The people of New England were mainly of English stock with but a small mixture of foreign elements. The colony of Connecticut was the most homogeneous on the Atlantic seaboard. In parts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, hundreds of Scotch Irish appeared between 1700 and 1750, some of whom eventually drifted down into Connecticut where they formed a trifling and inconspicuous part of the population. These Scotch Irish who were not Irish at all except that they came from the north of Ireland had much less influence in New England than in Pennsylvania or in the back country of the south where their numbers were five times as large as in the north and where their work as frontier pioneers was far more conspicuous. On the other hand, the Huguenots fleeing from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nance in 1685, though never as numerous as the Scotch Irish, nor ever as prominent as frontiersmen or founders of towns, had the gift of easy adaptation to the life of the older communities and remained in the urban centers where they soon vied with the English as leaders in political and mercantile life. The names of Bodewan, Cabot, Fanule, Vernon, Oliver and Revere add Luster to the history of New England while others of less known attained local success as artisans and tradesmen. The Jews, though their peers in business, were nowhere their serious rivals except in Newport. In this town about the middle of the 18th century, Jews congregated. They came either directly from Spain or from Portugal by way of Brazil and the West Indies and gave to that growing Rhode Island seaport a distinctly commercial character. The only other foreigners in New England were a number of Dutch who were not really foreigners as they came of the original settlers of New Netherland having moved eastward from the towns and manors along the Hudson. Many Negroes and Milatoes served as farm hens and domestic servants chiefly in or near the seaports dealing with the south or with the West Indies and a few thousand Indians more often on reservations than in the households or on the farms of the white men survived in ever dwindling remnants of their former tribes. New York and Pennsylvania, though they were closely akin to New England in climate and staple products bore little resemblance to that Puritan world in the racial factors of their population or the topographical features of their land. New England had a single dominant stock in a land of many small communities and independent seaports. New York and Pennsylvania on the other hand with their satellite neighbors the jerseys and Delaware contained a kaleidoscopic collection of people of different bloods and religions. Their life was also less diversified and scattered for it was closely associated with the marks of New York and Philadelphia. Each of these cities was situated on a superb body of water. The Hudson and the Delaware like the Nile in Egypt shaped to know in considerable extent the prosperity of the regions through which they flowed. But between these two cities there were noteworthy differences. New York was backward in colonial times while Philadelphia though less favorably situated because the Delaware was a difficult stream for sailing vessels to navigate leaped into commercial prominence within a decade of its foundation. The differences between the provinces in which these cities lay is no less striking though possessing magnificent water facilities. The province of New York had as yet a very restricted territorial area much of which was mountainous its broad interior drained by the Hudson and Mohawk rivers was a boundless promise for the future but of little immediate usefulness except as a source of furs and peltry. While the whole lay bottled up as it were and inaccessible to harbor and ocean except through a narrow neck of land of which the island of Manhattan was the terminus. The people of the province English Dutch and French with a sprinkling of other nationalities were much given to factional quarreling and their political development was slow for until 1691 they had no permanent popular assembly. Furthermore the situation of the territory along the chief waterway from Canada of necessity exposed the province to constant French attack from the north and added to the distractions of politics, the heavy burden of defense and the responsibility for peace with the six nations whose alliance was so essential to English success. The population of the province nevertheless increased in 1730 it was only 50,000 30 years later it was more than 100,000 and at the outbreak of the revolution 190,000. But in colonial times it always lacked cohesion and unity owing to racial divisions and social distinctions and to its strangely shaped territory. Philadelphia was the center of the far more compact colony of Pennsylvania and the seat of a more united powerful and dominant political party. The Quakers on principle avoided war and cultivated as far as possible the arts and advantages of peace. Though there was quarreling enough in the legislature and a great deal of jockeying and routiness at elections, the stability and prosperity of the province were but little impaired. The city lay along the bank of a great river in the midst of a wide fertile agricultural country which included West Jersey and Delaware and which was inhabited by people of many races and many creeds all tilling the soil and contributing to the prosperity of the merchant class. These merchants with their dingy counting houses and stores near the waterfront had their correspondence all over the world their ships in every available market. One of them Robert Morris boasted that he owned more ships than any other man in America. Many of these merchants were possessed of large wealth and were the owners of fine country houses as beautiful as any in the north adorned with the best that the world could offer. The colonial mares of Philadelphia like those of London were taken as a rule from the mercantile class. The population of Pennsylvania increased from 50,000 in 1730 to more than 200,000 in 1763 due in largest part to the thousands of Scotch Irish and Germans who from 1718 to 1750 poured into the colony. The bulk of the Scotch Irish urged westward by their proprietary government which wanted to get rid of them pushed rapidly into the region of the Susquehanna. The Germans usually settled in or near the old counties where they could devote themselves to the cultivation of the soil and to the maintenance of their many peculiarities of life and faith content to take little part in politics though inclined to uphold the Quakers in their quarrels with the proprietors. Both the Scotch Irish and the Germans moved onward as opportunity offered journeying southwest through the uplands of Maryland and Virginia west into the Juniata region and northwest along the west branch of the Susquehanna taking up lands and laying out farms. In this forward movement the Scotch Irish were usually in advance since their less developed instinct for thrift and permanence often led them to sell their holdings to the oncoming Germans and to trek to the edge and over the edge of the western frontier. The life of these Germans, Moravians, Mennonites, Swank, Felders, Dunk, Guards and others was marked by simplicity, docility, mystical faith and rigid economy. That of the Scotch Irish by adventure, conflict and suffering. Before the land seekers of the southern Tidewater had reached the back country, the Scotch Irish and the Germans had entered the mountain valleys of Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas and had developed a separate agricultural and industrial life of their own independent of the Tidewater but in close communication with the regions in the north once they had come. Beyond the southern boundary of Pennsylvania, famous later as Mason and Dixon's line, lay two groups of colonies in a semi-tropical zone occupying the Tidewater lowlands about the Chesapeake and the Great Rivers and sounds of the southern coast. These lowlands extended as far back as the fall line, the head of river navigation which curve from the present city of Washington through Fredericksburg Richmond and Fayetteville to Augusta. Within this area lay five colonies, Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas and Georgia. In 1760 the white population of the southern colonies was as follows, Maryland 107,000, Virginia 200,000, North Carolina 135,000, South Carolina 40,000 and Georgia 6000. At the end of these colonies the last two had a proportion of blacks to whites, vastly greater than the others. Although the southern colonies received at one time or another an accession of population from nearly every country of Central and Western Europe, they were in the main free from any large admixture of foreign stocks. Until after 1730 Maryland had few foreigners. At that time a few Germans crept down from Pennsylvania and others came in by way of the Virginia capes, some of whom found lodgment in Baltimore and in 1758 erected a German church there. Virginia had at the beginning a few foreign artisans, later a number of Dutch and Germans probably from New Amsterdam occupied lands on the eastern shore and at odd times Portuguese Jews from Brazil found refuge under its protection. But the only groups of foreigners in the colony were the Palatine Germans at German, the French Huguenots at Mannequin town and a small body of poor but industrious Swiss at Madaponi. The dominant stock was English. On Albemarle Sound in North Carolina there were no foreigners so far as can be ascertained, but after 1700 many Swiss and Palatine Germans toiled weirdly over land from Virginia and founded New Bern. Huguenots settled on the Pamlico German Moravian since Scotch Irish poured into the back country and Celtic Highlanders came up the Cape Fear and settled at Cross Creek Bay at Bill and eventually became influential citizens of the colony. South Carolina had a population which was a composite of English Huguenots and Germans, the French element in the coast counties, however numbers scarcely more than 2% of the whole and the Germans like the Swiss in the same colony were isolated and politically unimportant. Throughout the period the center of the social and political life of South Carolina was at Charleston. Georgia had very few foreigners though she stood unique among her sister colonies in possessing a small settlement of Greeks and another of Salzburgers or Austrian Germans. Here and there among the colonies as a whole were a few Italians employed as gardeners, botanists or miniature painters, a few hundred Irishmen perhaps though most of the Irish Celts began their careers in America as indentured servants and once in a while a Czech or Bohemian though the identification is often doubtful. There were Irish and Welsh Quakers in Pennsylvania and a few Danes are said to have come into New Hampshire with imported Danish cattle. Following the Acadian expulsion 1755 the French neutrals or Acadians were distributed among the cities from Portsmouth to Savannah. These exiles presented a pathetic picture of desolation and despair. They were undesired and were frequently charged with crimes and misdemeanors by those who wish to get rid of them. In time the colonists of the southern groups with Virginians in the lead pushed their settled area across the fall line and cut slowly and with great labor into the dense forest. Here they established farms and plantations and began the growing of wheat, a staple destined to become a dangerous competitor of the tobacco produced on lower levels. The upcountry was much healthier than the lowland and combined forest pasture and a wonderfully fertile arable soil with good water facilities and an equitable climate. What had been in the 17th century but a camping ground for warriors, traders and herders became in the 18th century the seat of busy settlement and agriculture. As the frontier was gradually pushed back by the movement of settlers from the coast, the newly won regions came under the control of the coast dwellers and reproduced much of the life of the older settlements. But such was not the case in Maryland nor in the far mountain valleys of Virginia and North Carolina. These regions did not receive their pioneers from the tide water settlements. Central Maryland remained a wilderness until the Germans from Pennsylvania carrying their goods and wagons and driving their cattle before them entered the territory, took up tenancies under the land speculators of Annapolis and began an era of small farms and diversified staples essentially different from the plantation life of the Chesapeake. As these pioneers passed on, they found homes along the Blue Ridge and in the Shenandoah and Yadkin valleys. And as this dream of home seekers advanced southward following the line of the mountains farther and farther away from the coast and the older civilization, there arose a new community of American settlers living on small farms and tenancies and imbued with all the individualistic notions characteristic of the dweller on the frontier. While the Virginians were clearing away the forests of their own back country and the Germans in Scotch Irish with the help of occasional pioneers from the coast were filling the slopes and valleys of the lower Appalachian ranges with the humming bustle of a frontier civilization, the old settlers of the Carolinas in Georgia remained little influenced by the call of the West. The old Albemarle settlement of North Carolina founded by wanderers from Virginia in 1653 remained a comparatively poor and struggling community. It received but few additions by sea because of the sand choked inlets and the fearful reputation of Cape Hatteras as a rendezvous with death for those brave enough to dare its storms and treacherous currents. On the other hand these settlers ventured but short distances inland because of the no less terrible menace of the fighting Tuscarora Indians who ranged over the region from seaboard to upland and carried terror to the hearts of even the boldest pioneers. Not until after the horrible massacre of 1711 from the effects of which the Albemarle settlement never fully recovered in colonial times was an effort made to end the Tuscarora danger and to open up the lower and central part of the colony to occupation and settlement. The assistance which South Carolina gave to her sister Colony in Revenging itself on the Tuscaroras brought to the knowledge of the leading men of Charleston the wonderful beauty and fertility of the land around the Cape Fear River and led to the founding of the second or southern settlement in North Carolina. First at Brunswick about 1725 and later at Wilmington a town which eventually became the capital seat of the colony. But even the Cape Fear settlers though laying out plantations along the river and its branches never passed farther inland than the fall line across Creek Fayetteville the head of navigation on the river. Throughout the period they remain more closely in touch with their southern neighbors of South Carolina than with those of the older region to the northward and not only received from them many accessions of numbers but also entered into frequent intercourse of a social and commercial nature. Though the Cape Fear planters raised neither rice nor indigo as did those of South Carolina and Georgia they were similar to them in manners customs and habits of life. Just as the men of the Cape Fear region confined their activities to the lower reaches of the river and its tributaries so the settlers to the southward at Georgetown Charleston and Savannah move but short distances back from the coast during the colonial period. At first there were only a few plantations of South Carolina, which lay as much as 70 miles inland. And though after 1760 certain merchants of Charleston took up extensive grants of land on the upper waters of the Savannah River the only people in these colonies who gave real evidence of the pioneer instinct were the Germans. They entered South Carolina about 1735 pushed up the rivers into the region of Orangeburg and Amelia counties and fill that frontier section with an industrious people who cultivated wheat, rye and barley entered into friendly relations with the Cherokee Indians and lived in great harmony among themselves. As they increased in numbers and widened their area of occupation, some of them by coming into touch with the Scotch Irish who had pushed in from the north eventually linked the back country civilization to that of the coast. Such in broad perspective was the land of our colonial forefathers and such were the people who dwelt in it. The picture when looked at more closely has interesting features and a wealth of local color, perhaps the most immediately striking because one of the earliest and most fundamental is the contrast between town and country. End of chapter one. The tilling of the soil absorbed the energies of not less than nine tenths of the colonial population. Even those who by occupation were sailors, fishermen, fur traders or merchants often gave a part of their time to the cultivation of farms or plantations. Land hunger was the master passion which brought the men of the 17th and 18th centuries across the sea and lured them on to the frontier. Where hundreds sought for freedom of worship and release from political oppression, thousands sought in the great unoccupied lands of the new world a chance to make a living and to escape from their landlords at home. To obtain a freehold in America was, as Thomas Hutchinson once wrote of New England, the ruling purpose which sent colonial sons with their cattle and belongings to some distant frontier township where they would thrust back the wilderness and create a new community. Throughout the whole of the colonial period, this migration westward in quest of land, whether overseas or through the wilderness, whether from New England or old England or the continent, continued at an accelerating pace. The revolutionary troubles of course brought it temporarily to a standstill. In New England, outside of New Hampshire, where the Allen family had a claim to the soil that made the people of that colony a great deal of trouble, every individual was his own proprietor, the supreme and independent lord of the acres he tilled. But else where the ultimate title to the soil lay in the hands of the king were of such great proprietors as the Baltimore's and the pens to whom grants had been made by the crown. The colonists to obtain land from king or proprietor was expected to pay a small quit rent as a token of the higher ownership. The quit rent was not a real rent, proportionate to the actual value of the acres held, it was never large in amount nor burdensome to the settler, and it was rarely increased whether the price of land rose or fell. The colonists never liked the quit rent however and in many instances resolutely refused to pay it so that it became in time a cause of friction and a source of discontent which played some part in arousing in America the desire for independence. Once when the people of North Carolina complained of the way their lands were doled out the governor replied that if they did not like the conditions they could give up their lands, which after all were the kings and not theirs. It was a small thing this quit rent but it touched men's daily lives a thousand times more often than did some of the larger grievances to which the revolution has been ascribed. The towns of New England were compact little communities favorably situated by sea or river and their inhabitants were given over in the main to the pursuit of agriculture. Even many of the seaports and fishing villages were occupied by a folk as familiar with the plow as with the warehouse the wharf or the fishing smack and accustomed to supply their sloops and schooners with the produce of their own and their neighbors acres. Life in the towns was one of incessant activity the New Englanders house with its barns outbuildings kitchen garden and back lot front of the village street while near at hand were the meeting house and school house. Pillary stocks and signpost all objects of constant interest and frequent concern beyond this cluster group of houses stretch the outlying arable land Meadows Pastures and Woodland the scene of the villagers industry and the source of his livelihood. Thence came wheat and corn for his grist mill hay and oats for his horses and cattle timber for his sawmill and wood for the huge fireplace which warmed his home. The lots of an individual owner would be scattered in several divisions some near at hand to be reached easily on foot others two or more miles distant involving a ride on horseback or by wagon. While most of the New Englanders preferred to live in neighborly fashion near together some built their houses on a convenient hillside or fertile upland away from the center. Here they set up quarters or corners which were often destined to become in time little villages by themselves each the seat of a cow pound a chapel and the school. Sometimes these little centers developed into separate ecclesiastical societies and even into independent towns but frequently they remained legally a part of the original church and township and the residents often journeyed many miles to take part in town meeting or to join in the social and religious life of the older community. The New Englander who viewed for the first time the list of his allotments as entered in the town book of land records had the novel sensation of knowing that to all intents and purposes they were his own property subject of course to the law of the colony which he himself helped to make through his representatives in the assembly subject to more remotely to the authority of the king across the sea. But the king did not often bother him he could do with his land much as he pleased so that if need be leave it to his children by will or add to it by purchase. The New Englander loved a land sale as he loved a horse trade and any dicker in prices but he had a stubborn sense of justice and a regard for the letter of the law which often drove him to the courts in defense of his land claims. Probably a majority of the cases which came before the New England courts and colonial times had to do with land. Yet there was little accumulation of large properties or landed as states for such were contrary to the Puritans ideas of equality. Jonathan Belcher later a governor of Massachusetts had in eastern Connecticut a manor called Mort Lake on which were a few un-enterprising tenants holding their land for a money rental. There are other instances of lands let out in a similar manner on limited leases but the number was not large for as Hutchinson said the Puritans ruling passion was for a freehold and not a tenancy and where there is one farm in the hands of a tenant he added there are 50 occupied by him who has the fee of it. Outside New England there was greater variety of land holding and cultivation. The Puritan traveler journeying southward through the middle colonies must have seen many new and unfamiliar sites as he looked over the country through which he passed. He would have found himself entirely at home among the towns of Long Island, Westchester County and Northern New Jersey and would have discovered much in the Dutch villages about New York and up the Hudson that reminded him of the closely grouped houses and small allotments of his native heath. But had he stopped to investigate such large estates as the Scarsdale, Pelham, Fordham and Morassania manors on his way to New York or turned aside to inspect the great Philips and Cortlandt manors along the lower Hudson or the still greater Livingston, Claverac and Rensselaer manors far the north he would have seen wide acres under cultivation with tenants and rent rolls and other aspects of a proprietary and aristocratic order. Had he made further inquiries or extended his observations to the west and north of the Hudson he would have come upon grants of thousands of acres lavishly allotted by governors to favored individuals. He would then have realized that the division of land in New York instead of being fairly equal as in New England was grossly unequal. On the one hand were the petty acres of small farms surrounding the towns and villages. The other were such great estates as Morassania and Rensselaer Wick where the farmers were not free holders but tenants and where the proprietures could ride for miles through arable land, meadow and woodland without crossing the boundaries of their own territory. If the traveler had been interested as the average New England farmer was not in the deeper problems of politics he would have seen in this combination of small holdings with large one explanation at least of the differences in political and social life that existed between New England and New York. What the traveler might have noticed in New York he would have found repeated in a lesser degree in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. There too he would have seen large properties such as the great tracks set apart for the proprietors and still awaiting sale and distribution and such extensive estates as that of Louis Morse known as Tintin Manor near Shrewsbury in East Jersey and the proprietary manners of the pens that pens vary on the Delaware and at Muncie on the Susquehanna. But there were also thousands of small fields belonging to the Puritan and Dutch settlers at Newark, Elizabeth, Middletown, Bergen and other towns in northern New Jersey and a constantly increasing number of somewhat larger farms in the hands of the Germans and Scotch Irish in the back counties of Pennsylvania. The traveler would have noticed also as he rode from Perth and Boyd to Borden town or Burlington or from New Brunswick to Trenton that central New Jersey was a flat unoccupied country with scarcely a mountain or even a hill in 40 miles that the sort of towns he was familiar with had entirely disappeared and that along the highway to the Delaware and even from Trenton to Philadelphia the country had only an occasional isolated farm stead. He would have met with no plantations in the southern sense of the word with almost no tendencies like those at Rensselaer, Wick and with only a few compact settlements such as the large towns of Trenton, Borden town, Burlington, Philadelphia, Germantown and Lancaster and the loosely grouped villages of the Germans where the lands were held in blocks and the houses of the settlers were more scattered than among the Puritans. He would have learned also that in Pennsylvania particularly the needs of the proprietors, the demands of the colonists and the character of the crops were leading to frequent sales and to the division of larger states into small and manageable farms. What probably would have interested the New Englanders as much as anything else was the interdependence of city and country which was frequently manifested along the way. Unlike the Puritans to whom country seats and summer resorts were unknown and trips to mountain and sea shore were strictly matters of necessity or business, the town folk of the middle colonies residing in New York, Burlington and Philadelphia had country residences, not mere cottages for makeshift housekeeping but substantial structures often of brick well furnished within and surrounded by grounds neatly kept and carefully cultivated. There were many stately gentlemen seats belonging to the gentry of New York between King's Bridge and the city and on Long Island for what is now greater New York was then for the most part open country, hilly rocky and heavily wooded interspersed here and there with houses, farms, fields, groves and orchards of fruit trees and threaded by roads some good and some bad. Billet Van Cortlandt had his country placed six miles as he then reckoned it from the city. Here at Bloomingdale, a village in a sparsely settled neighborhood, now the uptown shopping district of New York, somewhat north of the present public library, he was want to send Mrs. Van Cortlandt and his little family to spend the summer season. The Burlington merchants had their country houses near the Delaware on the high ground stretching along the river and back toward the interior. On the other hand Philadelphia merchants, mayors and provincial governors whose city life was confined to half a dozen streets running parallel to the Delaware had their country residences often 12 or 15 miles away sometimes in West Jersey. The more often in Pennsylvania itself adjacent to the familiar and well trodden highways. These roads which radiated northwest and south from the river formed arteries of supply for the markets and ships along the docks and during certain times and seasons afforded means of social intercourse between the business of the counting house in town and the pleasure of the dining hall and the assembly room in the country. To the Southerner on the other hand who passed observantly northward and viewed with discernment the country from Maryland to that way down east land of Maine which was as yet little more than a narrow fringe of rocky coast between the Piscataqua and the Cannebec. All these conditions of housing and cultivation must have seemed to a large extent strangely novel and unfamiliar. The Southerner was not used to small holdings and closely settled towns. His eye was accustomed to range over wide stretches of land filled with large estates and plantations. The clearings to which he was accustomed though often little more than a third of the whole area consisted of great fields of tobacco, grain, rice and indigo and presented in appearance essentially unlike that of the small and scattered lots and farms of the New England towns. He was unacquainted with the self centered activity of those busy northern communities or the narrow range of petty duties and interests that fill the day of the Puritan farmer and tradesmen. Were he a landed aristocrat of Anne Arundel or Talbot County in Maryland he would himself have possessed an enormous amount of property consisting of scattered tracks in all parts of the province, sometimes 15 or 30,000 acres in all. Many of these estates he was accustomed to speak of as manners though the peculiar rights which distinguished a manner from any other tract of land early disappeared and the manner in Maryland and Virginia as elsewhere meant merely a landed estate. But the name undoubtedly gave a certain distinction to the owner and probably served to hold the lands together in spite of the prevailing tendency in Maryland to break up the estates into small convenient farms. Though Oregon manner of the carols with its 10,000 acres for instance remains undivided to this day by the wealthy Virginia the term manner was used much less frequently than it was in Maryland. Well in the Carolinas in Georgia it was not used at all in Virginia even though the great plantation with its dependent farms and quarters in different counties could be reached off and only after long and troublesome rides over bad roads through the woods. The estate was generally kept intact. Though land was frequently leased and overseers were usually employed to manage outlined properties the habit of splitting up the states into small farms was much less common than it was in Maryland. Councilman Carter owned we are told some 60,000 acres situated in nearly every county in Virginia 600 niggers lands in the neighborhood of Williamsburg an elegant and spacious house in the same city stock and that Baltimore ironworks and several farms in Maryland. It was not at all uncommon for men in one town or colony to own land in another for even in New England the owners of town lands were not always residents of the town in which the lands were situated. It would be a mistake however to think of Maryland and Virginia as covered only by great plantations with swarms of slaves and lordly mansions in both these southern colonies. There were hundreds of small farmers possessing single grants of land upon which they had erected modest houses. Many of these farmers rented lands of the planter under limited leases and paid their rents and money or probably more often in produce labor and money as did the tenants of William Beverly of Beverly manner on the Rappahannock. As many of the largest states in Maryland could not be worked by the owner the practice arose of renting some and of breaking up others for sale. In this way there came into existence numbers of middle class land holders who formed a distinctly democratic element both in Maryland and Virginia. They cultivated small plantations ranging from 150 to 500 acres not more than a third of which was improved even by 1760. Daniel Dulaney the famous lawyer of Annapolis who had made his money in Tidewater Enterprises bought land in Central Maryland which he rented out to Germans from Pennsylvania and thus became a land promoter and town builder on an extensive scale. Though no such mania for land speculation seized upon the Virginia planters they were equally zealous in acquiring properties for themselves beyond the fall line to the west and some of them endeavored to add to their wealth by promoting the building of towns. It was in 1745 that Dulaney laid out the town of Frederick as a shrewd business enterprise. Eight years earlier the second William Byrd one of the far-seeing men of his time had advertised for a sale in town lots his property near the inspection houses at Chaco's. This was the beginning of Richmond the capital of Virginia. Less successful was Richard Randolph when in 1739 he tried to attract purchasers to his town of Warwick in Henrico County modeled after Philadelphia with a hundred lots of ten pistols each. A common and all conveniences were trade thrown into the bargain but the only really important towns in these colonies during the colonial period were Annapolis and Williamsburg. In these towns many of the planters had houses which they occupied during the greater part of the year or at a neat rate when the assembly was in session and life was gay infested. Such other centers of population as Baltimore, Frederick, Hagerstown, Norfolk, Falmouth, Fredericksburg and Winchester played little part in the life of the colonies except as business communities. As the Albemarle region of North Carolina was settled from Virginia the plantation and the tobacco field were introduced together and along the sound and its river landed conditions arose similar in some respects to those in Virginia. The word farm was not used but the term plantation was employed to include anything from the greatest states of such men as Seth Sothel. One of the true and absolute proprietors and Philip led well governor to the small holdings of less important men who received grants from the proprietors and later from the crown in amounts not exceeding a square mile in extent. There was a rule that holdings in Albemarle were smaller than elsewhere in the south and the conditions of life were simpler and less elaborate. The farmers were still free holders not tenants. The whole of this section remained less developed in education, religious organization and wealth than other plantation colonies in such towns as it had Edenton, Bath, New Bern and Halifax were smaller and less conspicuous as social and business centers than were Annapolis, Williamsburg and Charleston. Governor Johnston who was largely responsible for the transfer of government from New Bern to the Cape Fear River said in 1748 we still continue vastly behind the rest of the British settlements both in our civil constitution and in making a proper use of good soil and an excellent climate. It was an important event in the history of North Carolina when Maurice and Roger Moore of South Carolina in 1725 selected a site on the south bank of the Cape Fear River 10 miles from its mouth and laid out the town of Brunswick. With the transfer of the colony to the crown in 1729, the settlement increased and prospered. Lands were taken up on both sides of the river from its mouth to the upper branches and plantations were established which equaled in size and productiveness all but the very largest in Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina. At first many of the planters purchased lots in Brunswick but afterwards transferred their allegiance to Wilmington on the removal to that town of the center of social and political life. No people in the southern colonies were more devoted than they to their plantation life or to greater pride in the beauty and wholesomeness of their country. They raised corn and provisions, bred stock, notably the famous black cattle of North Carolina and made pitch tar and turpentine from their light wood trees and these together with lumber, frames of houses and shingles they shipped to England and to the West Indies. The Highlanders who settled at Cross Creek at the head of navigation above Wilmington brought added energy and enterprise to the colony and developed its trade by shipping the products of the back country down the river and by taking in return the manufacturers of England and the products of the West Indies. Some of them built at Cross Creek dwellings and warehouses, mills and stores and set up plantations in the neighborhood, others among whom were a few lowland Scots, spread farther afield and bought lands even in the Albemarle region. To this section after it had stagnated for 30 years they brought new interests and prosperity by opening communication with Norfolk in Virginia as a port of entry and a market for their staples. They thus prepared the way for a promising agricultural and commercial development which unfortunately was checked and for the moment ruined by the unhappy excesses and hostilities of the revolutionary period. South of Cape Fear laid Georgetown, Charleston and Savannah centers of plantation districts chiefly on the lower reaches of the rivers of South Carolina and Georgia. These plantations were characterized by a close union between town and country. South Carolina differed from the other colonies in that a considerable portion of our territory had been laid out in Baranese under that clause of the fundamental constitutions which deputed a number of acres to be set apart for colonists. Bearing titles of nobility. Thus it was provided that 48,000 acres should be the portion for a land grave, 24,000 for a casique and 12,000 for a baron. Many colonists who bore these titles took up lands at various times and in varying amounts but their properties which probably never exceeded 12,000 acres in a single grant differed in their way but name from any other large plantations. The most famous of the land graves were Thomas Smith who was governor in 1695 and his son, the second land grave whose mansion of Yeomans Hall on the Cooper River with all its hospitality, gaiety, romance and tragedy has been graphically though somewhat fancifully pictured by Mrs. Elizabeth A. In the olden time of Carolina, most of the plantations of South Carolina and Georgia were smaller than those in Maryland and Virginia. A single track rarely exceeded 2,000 acres and an entire property did not often include more than 5,000 acres. These estates seem to have been on the whole more compact and less scattered than elsewhere. They lay contiguous to each other in many instances and formed large continuous areas of rice, land, pine land, meadow, pasture and swamp. Upon such plantations the colonists built substantial houses of brick and cypress generally less elaborate than those in Virginia particularly when they were described as of the rustic order. There were also tanyards, distilleries and soap houses as well as all facilities for raising rice corn and later indigo. At first the chief staple on these plantations was rice but the introduction of indigo in 1745 with its requirement of vats, pumps and reservoirs and its plagued refuse and flies though of great significance in restoring the prosperity of the province gave rise to new and in some respects less agreeable conditions. The plantations were also supplied with a plentiful stock of cattle and the necessary household goods and furnishings. The following detailed description of William Dry's plantation on the Cooper River two miles above Goose Creek is worth quoting. The estate which fronted the high road is described as having on it a good brick dwelling house, two brick store houses, a brick kitchen and wash house, a brick necessary house, a barn with a large brick chimney with several rice mills, mortars, et cetera, a winnowing house and an oven, a large stable and coach house, a Cooper's shop, a house built for a Smith's shop, a garden on each side of the house with posts, rails and poles of the best stuff, all plain and painted and brick underneath, a fish pond well stored with perch, roach, pike, eels and catfish, a handsome cedar horse block or double pair of stairs, frames, planks, et cetera, ready to be fixed in and about a spring within three stones throughout the house intended for a coal bath and house over it. Three large dam ponds whose tanks with some small repairs will ground upwards of 100 acres of land, which being very plentifully stored with game all the winter season affords great diversion in orchard of very good apple and peach trees, a corn house and poultry house that may with repairing served some years longer, a small tenement with a brick chimney on the other side of the high road, fronting the dwelling house and at least 400 acres of the land cleared, all except what is good pasture and no part of the track bed, the hole having a clay foundation and not deep, the great part of it fenced in and upwards of a mile of it with a ditch seven feet wide and three and a half deep. Most of the South Carolina planters had their townhouses and divided their time between city and country. They lived in Charleston, Georgetown, Beaufort town and Dorchester, but of these Charleston was the Mecca toward which all eyes turned and in which all lived who had any social or political ambitions. Attempts were made in the 18th century in this colony as elsewhere to boom land sites for the erecting of towns on an artificial plan. In 1738, the second land grave, Thomas Smith tried to start a town on his Wyn Yaw track near Georgetown. He laid out a portion of the land along the bluff above the Wyn Yaw River in lots, offered to sell some men to give away others and plan to provide a church, a meeting house and a school. But this venture failed and even the more successful attempt to build up will town about the same time, although lots were sold and houses built and occupied, eventually came to nothing. The story of some of these dead towns of the South, whether promoted by natives or settled by foreigners, has been told only in part and forms an interesting chapter in colonial history. In all the colonies, indeed the 18th century saw a vast deal of land speculation. The merchants and shopkeepers in most of the large towns acted as agents and bought and sold on commission. Just as George Tilly merchant and contractor of Boston advertised good lots for sale in 1744, Sir John Lawrence, Robert Hume and Benjamin Whitaker in Charleston a little later were dealing in houses, tenements and plantations as a sideline to their regular business as settlers and merchants. In the 70s the sale of land had become an end in itself and one Jacob Volk advertised himself as a real and personal estate dealer. The meaning of the change is clear, desirable lands in the older settlements were no longer available except by purchase and then we're already looking beyond the fall line and the back country to the ungrounded lands of the new frontier in the farther west. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of Colonial Folkways by Charles McLean Andrews This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Colonial houses. It is well worthwhile for us at this point to look more in detail at the colonial towns to see the houses in which our ancestors dwelt and to note the architecture of their public edifices for these men had a distinctive style of building as characteristic of their age as skyscrapers and department houses are of the present century. The household furnishings have also a charm of their own and in many cases by their combination of utility and good taste have provided models for the craftsmen of a later day. A brief survey of colonial houses inside and out will serve to give us a much clearer idea of the environment in which the people lived during the colonial era. The materials used by the colonists for building were wood, brick and more rarely stone. At first practically all houses were of wood as was natural in a country where this material lay ready to every man's hand and where the means for making brick or cutting stone were not readily accessible. Clay, though early used for chimneys was not substantial enough for house building and lime for mortar and plaster was not easy to obtain. Though limestone was discovered in New England in 1697, it was not known at all in the Tidewater section of the south where lime continued to the end of the era to be made from calcined oyster shells. The 17th century was the period of wooden houses, wooden churches and wooden public buildings. It was the 18th century which saw the erection of brick buildings in America. Up to the time of the revolution bricks were brought from England and Holland and are found entered in cargo lists as late as 1770, though they probably served often only as ballast. But most of the bricks used in colonial buildings were molded and burnt in America. There were brick kilns everywhere in the colonies from Portsmouth to Savannah. Indeed bricks were made north and south in large enough quantities to be exported yearly to the West Indies. As building stones scarcely existed in the south, all important buildings there were of brick or in case greater strength were needed as for Fort Johnston at the mouth of the Cape Fear River or the fortifications of Charleston of Tappy work, a mixture of concrete and shells. Brick walls were often built very thick. Those of St. Philip's Church, Brunswick, still show three feet in depth. Jimneys were heavy often in stacks and windows as a rule were small. The bonding was English, Flemish or running according to the taste of the builder and many of the houses had stone trimming which had to be brought from England if it were a free stone as was suggested for King's Chapel Boston or a marble as in Governor Tryon's palace in New Bern. Buildings of stone were not common and were confined chiefly to the north where this material could be easily and cheaply obtained. As early as 1639, Henry Whitfield erected a house of stone at Guilford, Connecticut to serve in part as a place of defense and in other places here and there were to be found stone buildings used for various purposes. It has been said that King's Chapel Boston built in 1749 to 54 was the first building in America to be constructed of hewn stone. But this is not the case. Some of the early houses in New York, as well as the two Anglican churches were of hewn stone. The Malbone country house near Newport built before 1750 was also a hewn stone and all the corners and sides of the windows painted to represent marble. There were many houses in the colonies painted to resemble stone and some in which only the first story or the basement was of this material while in many instances there were broad stone steps leading up to a house otherwise constructed of wood or brick. Stone for building purposes was therefore well known and frequently used. Travelers who visited the leading towns in the period from 1750 to 1763 have left descriptions which help us to visualize the external features of these places. Portsmouth, the most northerly town of importance, had houses of both wood and brick, large and exceeding neat, we are told, generally three story high and well sashed and glazed with the best glass, the rooms well plastered and many veins scotted or hung with painted paper from England. The outside clapboarded very neatly. Salem was a large town, well built, many genteel, large houses, which though of wood are all plain dand painted on the outside in imitation of hewn stone. By 1750 Boston had about 3,000 houses and 20,000 inhabitants, two thirds of the houses were of wood, two or three stories high, mostly sashed, the remainder of brick substantially built and in excellent architectural taste. The streets were well paved with stone, a thing rare in New England but those in the north end were crooked, narrow and disagreeable. Worcester was one of the best built and prettiest inland little towns that Lord Adam Gordon had seen in America. The houses in Newport with one or two exceptions were of wood making a good appearance and also as well furnished as in most places you will meet with many of the rooms being hung with printed canvas and paper, which looks very neat. Others are well wainscotted and painted. New London with its one street a mile long by the river side and its houses built of wood seemed in 1750 to be new and neat. New Haven which covered a great deal of ground was laid out in nine squares around a green or marketplace and contained many houses in wood, a few in brick or stone, a brick state house, a brick meeting house, and Yale College which was being rebuilt in brick. Middletown though one of the most important commercial centers between New York and Boston and the third town in Connecticut had only wooden houses. Hartford, a large scattering town on a small river, the little river not the Connecticut is meant, was built chiefly of wood with here and there a brick dwelling house. New York with two or three thousand buildings and from 16 to 17,000 people in 1760 was very irregular in plan with streets which were crooked and exceedingly narrow but generally pretty well paved, thus adding much to the decency and cleanness of the place and the advantage of carriage. Many of the houses were built in the old Dutch fashion with their gables to the street but others were more modern, many of them spacious genteel houses summing four or five stories high, others not above two a few stone brick and white Holland tiles neat but not grand. Around cupola capping a square wooden church tower rising above a few clustering houses was all that marked the town of Brooklyn, while a fairy tavern and a few houses were all that foreshadowed the future greatness of Jersey City. Albany was as yet a town of dirty and crooked streets with its houses badly built chiefly of wood and unattractive in appearance. South foot across the river from New York were Elizabeth, New Brunswick and Perth Amboy, the last with a few houses for the quality folk but a mean village albeit one of the capitals of the province of New Jersey. Burlington the other capitol consisted of one spacious large street that runs down to the river with several cross streets on which were a few tolerable good buildings with a courthouse which made but a poor figure considering its advantage just location. Trenton or Trent town was described in 1749 as a fine town and near to Delaware River with fine stone buildings and a fine river and intervals meadows etc. Philadelphia had 2100 houses in 1750 and 3600 in 1765 built almost entirely of brick generally three stories high and well sagged so that the city must make take it upon the whole a very good figure. The Virginia ladies who visited the city were want to complain of the small rooms and monotonous architecture every house like every other the streets were paid with flat foot walks on each side of the street and well illumined with lamps which Boston does not appear to have had until 1773. Wimmington on the Delaware was a very young town in 1750 all the houses being new and built of brick new castle the capital was a poor town of little importance there were but few towns in Maryland andapolis the capital was charmingly situated on a peninsula following different ways to the water built in an irregular form the streets generally running diagonally and ending in the townhouse. Others on a house that was built for the governor but never was finished. This governor's house afterwards became the main building of St. John's College. A majority of the residences were brick substantially built within brick walls and closing gardens and true English fashion across the Potomac was Williamsburg the capital of Virginia and the seat of William and Mary college built partly of brick and partly of wood and resembling. It seemed to Lord Adam Gordon a good country town in England. Norfolk which was built chiefly of brick was a mercantile center with warehouses rope walks wharves and shipyards while Fredericksburg at the head of navigation on the rapper honey was constructed of wood and brick its houses roofed with shingles painted to resemble sleep. Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley was described in 1755 as a town built of limestone and covered with slate with which the hills abound. It was the center of a settled farming country and its inhabitants enjoyed most of the necessities but few of the luxuries of life and at almost no books. It is described as being inhabited by a spurious race of mortals known by the appellation of scotch Irish in all of these towns were one or more churches. The market house prison and pillory and in the chief city at the usual place of execution was the gallows of the colony. The older towns of North Carolina Edenton bath Halifax and New Bern were all small and in 1760 were either stationary or declining. Their houses were built of wood and except for Trians Palace at New Bern an extravagant structure considering the resources of the colony, the public buildings were of no significance. Brunswick to was declining and was bought a poor town with a few scattered houses on the edge of a wood inhabited by merchants. Wilmington was now rapidly advancing to the leading place in the province because of its secure harbor easy communication with the back country accessibility to the other parts of the colony, fresh water and improved postal facilities. In 1760, it had about 800 people, its houses though not spacious were in general very commodities and well furnished. Peter Dubois wrote of Wilmington in 1757. It has greatly the preference of my esteem to New Bern. The regularity of its streets is equal to that of Philadelphia, and the buildings are in general very good. Many of brick two or three stories high with double piazzas, which make a good appearance. Charleston or Charlestown as the name was always written in colonial times and is thus described by Pelletie Webster who visited it in 1765. It contains about 1000 houses with inhabitants 5000 whites and 20,000 blocks has eight houses for religious worship. The streets run north and south and east and west intersecting each other at right angles. They're not paved except the footways within the posts about six feet wide which are paid with brick in the principal streets. According to a South Carolina law, all buildings had to be of brick but the law was not observed and many houses were of cypress and yellow pine. Lawrence said in 1756 that none but the better class glaze their houses. The sanitary condition of all colonial towns was bad enough, but the grand jury presentments for Charleston and Savannah which constantly found fault with the condition of the streets the sewers and necessary houses and the insufficient scavenging leave the impression on the mind of the reader that these towns especially were afflicted with many offensive smells and odors. The total absence of any proper health precautions explains in part the terrible epidemics chiefly of smallpox which scourged the colonists in the 18th century. Taking the colonial area through its entire length and breadth we find individual houses of almost every description. From the superb mansions of the Carters in Virginia and of the vassals in Massachusetts to the small wooden frame buildings, 40 by 20 feet are thereabouts with a shade on the backside and a porch on the front. And the simple houses of the country districts were the rest in front too, hundreds of which were small of one story unpainted covered with ruffian or sawn flat boards, whether stained with few windows and no panes of glass and without adornment or architectural taste. One traveler speaks of the small plantation houses in Maryland as very bad, Neil contrived, their furniture mean their cooks and house wifey, worse if possible. And another says that an apartment to sleep in and another for domestic purposes with a contiguous storehouse and conveniences for their livestock gratified the utmost ambition of the settlers in Frederick County. Many economists north of the Potomac lived in nothing better than the crib or block house which was made of squared logs and roofed with clabberts. In contrast to the typical square built houses of New England, the Dutch along the Hudson and even to the eastward and Litchfield County Connecticut built quaint low structures which they frequently placed on a hillside in order to utilize the basement as living rooms for the family. The better colonial houses were rain-scotted and paneled or plastered and whitewashed and the woodwork trim cornices, stair ratings and new posts was often elaborately carved. Floors were sometimes of double thickness and were laid so that the seam or joint of the upper course shall fall upon the middle of the lower plank which prevents the air from coming through the floor in winter or the water falling down in summer when they washed their houses. Roof were covered with tiles, late shingles and lead, though much of the last was removed for bullets at the time of the revolution. Flat tiles made in Philadelphia and elsewhere were used for paving chimney hearts and fire backs imported from England were widely introduced. Among the Pennsylvania Germans wood stoves were generally used but soft coal brought as ballast from Newcastle. Liverpool and other ports in England and Scotland was also for sale. Stone, coal or anthracite was familiar to Pennsylvania settlers as early as 1763 but until just before the revolution was not burned as fuel except locally and on a small scale. Wood was consumed in enormous quantities and we are told that at no many haul there were kept burning 28 fires which required four loads of wood a day. There were a few professional architects for colonial planters and carpenters did their own planning and building. What is sometimes called a carpenters colonial style was often designed on the spot or taken from baddie Langley's sure guide the builder's jewel or the British Palladier. Smybert the painter and paint shop man of Boston designed the new hall and succeeded in creating a very unsuccessful building architecturally. The first professional architect in America was Peter Harrison, who drew the plans for King's Chapel, the Redwood Library, the Jewish synagogue and brick market at Newport. It even he combined designing with other applications. In truth, there was no great need of architects and colonial days styles did not very much certainly not in New England and the middle colonies and a good carpenter and builder could do all that was needed. There were scores of houses in New England similar to Samuel C. Berry's rectory at Hampstead, a story and a half high in front with a roof of a single pitch sloping down to one story in the rear. Low ceilings everywhere, four rooms with a hall on the first floor, a kitchen behind and three or four rooms on the second story. The brick houses were more elaborate and were sometimes built with massive and chimneys between which was a steep pitch roof with dormers and a walk from chimney to chimney. Many feet wide. Other houses made of wood as well as brick had hipped roofs with and chimneys or roofs converging to a square center and a rail lookout. All the nearly 150 colonial houses still standing in Connecticut conformed to a common type, though they differ greatly in the details of their paneling mantles, cupboards, staircases, closer open beam ceilings, fireplaces and the like. Some had slave quarters in the basement others under the rafters and what was called in one instance the black hole. Many of even the better houses were unpainted inside and out. Many had paper hung or tacked afterwards pasted on the walls and in a few noteworthy cases in New England the chimney breasts were adorned with paintings. The floors were usually bare or covered with matting rugs were used briefly at the bedside but carpets were rare. Philadelphia which was famous for the uniformity of its architecture must have contained in 1760 many houses of the style of that built for Provost Smith of the College of Philadelphia. In addition to a Garrett this dwelling had three stories respectively 1110 and nine feet high. The brick outside walls were 14 inches thick and that partitioned walls of the same material nine inches. There were windows and window glass, heavy shutters for playing corners, cedar gutters and pipes. The woodwork inside and out was painted white and all the rooms were plastered. No mention is made of white marble steps but there may have been such for no Philadelphia house was complete without them. The southern houses both on the plantations and in the towns buried so widely in their style of architecture that no single description will serve to characterize all. Such buildings as the Governor's Palace at Williamsburg, Triune's Palace at Newburn and the government house at Annapolis were handsome buildings provided with conveniences for entertainment and that at Newburn contained rooms for the gathering of assembly and council. The most representative southern plantation house was a brick with wings, the kitchens on one side and the carriage house on the other, sometimes attached directly to the central mansion and sometimes entirely separate or connected only by a quarter. In the Carolinas in Georgia, however, there were many rectangular houses without wings built of wood of brick with rooms available for summer use in the basement. The roof was often capped with a cupola and commanded a wide prospect. The dwelling houses of Charleston were among the most distinctive and quaint of all colonial structures. Some of them were divided into tenements quite unlike the tenements and flats of the present day for in addition to its independent portion of the house, each family had its own yard and garden. Overseas houses were, as a rule, small, about 20 feet by 12 with brick chimneys and plastered rooms. A typical Savannah house had two stories with a handsome balcony in front and a piazza, the whole length of the building in the rear, with the bedroom at one end and a storehouse at the other. The dining room was on the second floor and everywhere for convenience and comfort were to be found closets and fireplaces among the gentry in a country where storms were frequent. Electrical rods were in use and in 1763, one Alexander Bell of Virginia advertised the machine for protecting houses from being struck by lightning, though what his contrivance was we do not know. The town halls and courthouses generally followed English models with public offices and assembly rooms on the upper floor and a market and shops below. The southern courthouses were at first built of wood and later of brick with shingled roofs, heavy plank floors and occasionally a cupola or belfry. Those of the 18th century either included the prison and pillory or were connected with them. The inadequacy of jailed accommodation was a cause of constant complaint. Not only did grand juries and newspapers point out the need of quarters. So arranged that debtors balance and Negro should not be thrown together, but the occupants themselves protested against the nauseating smells and odors. And some of the prisons that is true a separate cage was provided for the Negroes. And in North Carolina prison bounds covering some six acres about the building were laid out for the use of the prisoners and arrangement which was not abolished till the 19th century. In all the cities of the north and south stores and shops were to be found occupying the first floor while the family lived in the rooms above. As a rule a shop meant a workshop where articles were made, a store, a storehouse where goods were kept. But in practice usage varied as shop was in common use in New England for any place where things were sold and store was the usual term in Philadelphia and the south. An apprentice riding home to England in 1755 and trying to explain the use of the term said stores here in Virginia are much like shops in London. Only with this difference the shop sell but one kind or species of wares and stores all kinds. Some of these stores particularly in Maryland and Virginia were located away from the urban centers in the interior near the courthouses at the crossroads along the rivers at the tobacco inspection houses or wherever else men congregated for business or public duty. They were often controlled by English or Scottish firms and managed by agents sent to America. They received their supplies from Great Britain and they sold for credit cash or tobacco almost everything that the neighborhood needed. Varied as were the architectural features of colonial houses, they were paralleled by an equal diversity in the household effects with which these dwellings were equipped. It is impossible even to summarize the information given in the thousands of extent wills inventories and invoices which reveal the contents and furnishings of these houses. Chairs, bureaus, tables, bedsteads, buffets, cupboards were in general used. They were made of hickory pine, maple, cypress oak and even mahogany which began to be used as early as 1730. From the meager dining room outfit of only one chair, a bench and a table, all rough and homemade we passed through the furnishings of the richer merchants in the northern cities and of the wealthier planters in Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas. But we cannot take the establishments of Wentworth, Hancock, Vassal, Fanu, Kyler, Morris, Carter, Beverly, Manigault or Lawrence as typical of conditions which prevailed in the majority of colonial homes. Some people had silver plate, mahogany, fine china and copper utensils, others owned china, deftware and furniture of plain wood with perhaps a few silver spoons, a poringer and an occasional mahogany chair and table. Still others and these by far the largest number used only pewter, earthenware and wooden dishes with a simpler essential spinning wheel, flat irons, pots and kettles, lamps and candlesticks but no luxuries. There was in addition of course the class of the hopelessly poor but it was not large and need not be reckoned with here. The average New England country household was a sort of self-sustaining unit which depended little on the world beyond its own gates. Its equipment included not only the usual chairs, beds, tables and kitchen utensils and tableware but also shoe makers tools and shoe leather frequently tanned in the neighborhood and badly done as a rule. Surgeons, tools and apothecary stuff, sands and ointments, branding irons, pestle and mortar, lamps, guns and perhaps a sword, harness and fittings. Occasionally a still or a cider press and outfits for carpentering and blacksmithing. The necessary utensils for use in the household or on the farm were more important than a poultry, carwood, woodwork, fine linen or a silver plate. Everywhere there were hundreds of families which concerned themselves little about ornament or design. They had no money to spend on unessentials. Still less on luxuries and from necessity they used what they already possessed until it was broken or worn out then if it were not entirely useless they repaired and patched it and went on as before. Economy and convenience made them use materials that were close at hand and in many New England towns a familiar figure was the wood turner who made plates and other utensils out of dish timber as it was called a white wood which was probably popular or linen but not basswood. The economic class these people were, even the unpretentious households possessed an abundance of mugs and tankers which suggests their one indulgence and their enjoyment of strong drink. As conditions of life improved and wealth increased the number of those who were able to indulge in luxuries also increased. The period after 1730 was one of great prosperity in the colonies owing to the enlarged opportunities for making money which strayed commerce and markets furnished. Though it was also a time of higher prices rapid advance in the cost of living and general complaint of the inadequacy of existing fees and salaries. Those who were engaged in trade and had access to markets were able to indulge in luxuries which were unknown to the earlier settlers and which remained unknown to those living in the rural districts and on the frontier. In the northern cities and on southern plantations costing beautiful household furnishings appeared furniture was carved and upholstered in leather and rich fabrics. Tables were adorned with silver china and glassware and walls were hung with expensive papers and decorated with paintings and engravings all brought from abroad. A house thus equipped was not unlikely to contain a mahogany dining table capable of seating from 14 to 20 persons and an equal number of best Russia leather chairs. Two of which would be arm or elbow chairs double nailed with broad seats and leather backs. Washington for example in 1757 bought two neat mahogany tables four and a half feet square when spread and to join occasionally and one dozen neat and strong mahogany chairs. Some with gothic archbacks and one and easy chair on casters about the rooms were pieces of mahogany furniture of various styles. T tables, card tables, candle stands, set teas and sofas on the walls which were frequently papered painted in color or stenciled in patterns. Hung family portraits painted by artists whose names are in many cases unknown to us and frame pictures of hunting scenes still life ships and humorous objects among which the engravings of Hogarth were always prime favorites. On the chimney breast above the mantle there was sometimes a scene or landscape either painted directly on the wall itself or executed to order on canvas in England and brought to America. There were eight day clocks and mantle clocks and sconces carved in yoke upstairs and down in the cupboard and on the sideboard would be silver plate in great variety and sets of best English China ivory handled knives and forks glass and considerable profusion. The glassware as a rule was not much used diaper tablecloths and napkins brass chafing dishes and steel plate warmers. There was always a centerpiece or opinion of silver glass with China. In the bedrooms where peer glasses and bedsteads and many forms and colors of mahogany and other woods. Frequently there were four posters with carved and fluted pillars and carved cornices or cornices, as they were generally spelled. The bedsteads were provided with hair mattresses and feather beds, woolen blankets and linen sheets, and were adorned with silk damask or chins curtains and balances. Russian Gausser lawn was used for mosquito nets for mosquitoes were a great pest to the colonists. On the large plantations there was to be found a great variety of utensils for kitchen, artisan and farm use, most of which were brought from England, but some particularly iron pots, axes and size from New England. For the kitchen there were iron metal plates, copper kettles and pans, pewter dishes in large numbers, chiefly for servants use, yellow metal spoons, stone bottles, crocs, jugs, mugs, butter pots and heavy utensils and iron for cooking purposes. For the farm there were grindstones, saws, files, knives, axes, ads, planes, augers, irons, hay rakes, carts, forks, reaping hooks, weed saves, spades, shovels, watering pots, plows, plowshares and mow boards, harness and traces, harrows, ox chains and sives. The farm was thus provided with all the implements necessary for mowing, clearing underbrush and cradling wheat and all the other essential activities of an agricultural life. A wheel plow is mentioned as early as 1732 and in 1748 James Crockett and influential Charles Stoning in England sent over a plow designed to read, trench, sew and cover indigo, but of its construction we unfortunately know nothing. The colonists usually imported such articles as millstones as large as 48 inches in diameter and 14 inches thick, frog spindles and other parts for a tub mill or grist mill hand presses with lignum vitae, rollers for cider, copper steels with sweat worms and a capacity as high as 60 gallons, vats for indigo and pans for evaporating salt. For fishing there were plenty of rods, lines, hooks, sands, with leads and corks and eel pots. In addition to this very equipment, nearly all the plantations had outfits for coopering, tanning, shoemaking and other necessary occupations of a somewhat isolated community. Separate buildings were erected in which this artisan work was done, not only for the planter himself but also for his neighbors. Indeed, their returns from this community labor constituted an important item in the annual statement of many a planter's income.