departures from precedent were not indulged in from mere caprice or with any deliberate and conscious intent to develop a new and original mode of architectural expression. The adaptations in each case, before they became precedents for subsequent repetition elsewhere, were suggested by obvious necessity and originality was left to take care of itself, with the usual happy results arising from the observance of the principle that the safest and truest originality comes by a gradual process of evolution, elimination and adaptation to local needs.

In view, then, of the foregoing considerations, one not unreasonably expects to find the early New England house identical or almost identical in appearance and structure with the contemporary English house of a like size, only such differences being evident as local expediency occasioned. If one could only see several such houses now as they unquestionably were at the date of their erection, this chapter would be altogether unnecessary, for the resemblance between them and their prototypes in our old home beyond the Atlantic would be so striking that the veriest dolt would be sensible of it. In nearly every instance the alterations and accretions of centuries have blurred and often hidden the points of likeness, but, by the judicious employment of archæological surgery, we may readily trace all the steps of evolutionary development from the well-known old English type to a type that became peculiarly American and local, that is to say, peculiar to New England. The steps are all logical and we can see how the early colonists began by building houses as they were accustomed to see them built in old England and ended by building a type whose characteristics were generally determined by local conditions and expediency. We can see how, by successive steps, mediæval English peculiarities of structure and design gradually gave way to methods of more recent contrivance or of foreign origin. Indeed, among all the colonists, whether of English, Dutch, Swedish or German blood, directly they had passed the temporary log-cabin stage, there was a virtual identity between the architectural forms of the parent countries and their own earliest permanent architectural attempts, and the process of differentiation did not begin until new environment and new necessities pointed the way to the adoption of new modes and forms. It is exceedingly important to recognise the strong current of continuity and to realise that the architecture of Colonial America, in its sundry manifestations, was not, as some are pleased to contend, an wholly independent growth without old-world antecedents or clearly marked historical background.

The evolution of local architecture, of course, not only mirrors the social and economic development of the colonies but also presents numerous edifying variations within the confines of New England which show how strongly the course of architectural growth in the new land was influenced by conditions locally prevalent in the old home. It can oftentimes be seen how the artisans from one particular place in England perpetuated certain idiosyncrasies of craftsmanship within limited Colonial areas and that those peculiarities are found nowhere else. In both its economic and purely technical aspects, the mode of domestic architectural expression devised in Colonial New England has many admirable features to commend it and is due partly to native Yankee mother wit and shrewd practicality quickened by the spur of necessity, and partly to the spirit of true British conservatism and attachment to long-established custom, a spirit that was strong in the early Puritans and often determined their actions in spite of themselves.

A brief survey of seventeenth-century manners and men, within the bounds of New England, will greatly assist us in forming an intelligent appreciation of the houses erected in this pioneer period. The log-cabin of the first few years of colonisation we need scarcely consider, for the rude huts erected at first were merely temporary shelters, were soon replaced by more substantial structures, and were not really representative in any sense. The houses built as soon as the colonists had an opportunity to become accustomed to their new environment and get their economic bearings, reflected a condition of society in which a modest degree of simple comfort, resulting from rigorous thrift, rewarded the majority while prosperous affluence fell to the lot of comparatively few. Well built dwellings were comfortable but not pretentious. They were apt for all ordinary domestic requirements but, save in exceptional cases, there was no approach to luxury. They usually had rooms enough for all essential purposes but rarely were any special or extra rooms set apart for distinctive uses, with the exception of the parlour or “best room,” which often held the best bed and served variously as state bedroom for most honoured guests, repository for the most treasured household gods and the choicest items of domestic equipment and, finally, as the gathering place for the more worthy visitors at times of weddings, funerals or other important occasions.

The number of bedchambers provided in most cases would nowadays be deemed totally inadequate for the people to be accommodated and, to cite only one instance thoroughly typical of innumerable others, the members of the Revere household, if we may believe the statistics of tradition, must have been packed away at nights in sardine-like and most unsanatory proximity, or else some of them slept in the cellar or on the roof. This was well on towards the latter part of the eighteenth century, too, when habits in this particular had certainly not fallen below the standards of the seventeenth century. Besides the members of the Revere family, there were various apprentices and domestics, all of whom found shelter beneath the roof of this typical seventeenth-century house. It was no uncommon thing for two or three children or young persons to sleep in one bed and there was often more than one bedstead in a room. Truckle or trundle beds for children were frequently put in the bedchambers of their elders, while indentured servants and apprentices oftentimes slept in the kitchen, or else master and mistress slept in the tempered atmosphere of the kitchen fire and underlings took to the frigid regions above. Wherever the kitchen was put into commission as a sleeping apartment, there was the folding or “let down” bed or slawbank, which Mrs. Earle describes as “an oblong frame with a network of rope. This frame was fastened at one end to the wall, with heavy hinges, and at night it was lowered to a horizontal position, and the unhinged end was supported on heavy wooden turned legs which fitted into sockets in the frame. When not in use the bed was hooked up against the wall, and doors like closet doors, were closed over it, or curtains were drawn over it to conceal it.” What though the sleeping arrangements of the seventeenth century, and indeed of much of the eighteenth century, for that matter, would often have called forth the sharp condemnation of a modern tenement house inspector, the colonists, nevertheless, made shift to get along in tolerable comfort and raise large families of children, with a due regard for the amenities of life, who became the most exemplary of citizens.

If the kitchen was sometimes used as a sleeping room, it was almost universally used as a living room. It was the vital point of the household whence radiated all domestic energies. It was spacious and was made as bright and cheerful as it could possibly be. Around the great open fireplace, where the cooking was done, centred all in-door activities from carding, spinning and weaving to corn husking. Here the family circle, eldest in places of greatest comfort, children and servants about the outer edge, gathered in the firelight of the long winter evenings; here the neighbour or chance traveller was entertained, and here lads and lasses, in the full glare of family publicity, did much of their courting, sometimes whispering their sweet nothings, from opposite sides of

the fireplace, through a “courting-stick,” a wooden tube six or eight feet long with mouth and ear pieces at each end.

In houses sufficiently spacious to admit of a living room or a “keeping-room” separate from the kitchen—such a room was analogous to the old English “hall”—the kitchen was still a cheerful room of great importance and the scene of many domestic fireside industries. It was a common thing to make lean-to additions to the original structure and the kitchen was often put in such an addition or in an ell extension. It was only the houses of the affluent, like that of Governour Theophilus Eaton at New Haven, built about 1640, that could boast what we should nowadays consider a very moderate number of rooms on the ground floor. Besides the great hall or living room in Governour Eaton’s house, there seem to have been a large kitchen and a pantry or buttery on one side, and on the other a parlour and a counting-house or library. Of the appointments of these rooms we may gain some idea from the inventory of Governour Eaton’s effects at the time of his death in 1657. In the hall or living room there were “a drawing Table and a round table; a cubberd & 2 long formes; a cubberd cloth & cushions; 4 setwork cushions, 6 greene cushions; a greate chaire with needleworke; 2 high chaires set work; 4 high stooles set worke; 4 low chaires set worke; 2 low stooles set work; 2 Turkey Carpette; 6 high joyne stooles; a pewter cistern & candlestick; a pr of small andirons; a pr of doggs; a pr of tongues fire pan & bellowes.” The other rooms were furnished in a comparable manner. Living rooms in less pretentious houses had similar equipment though, it is scarcely necessary to add, they were not usually so complete nor so elegant.

The very plan, or rather plans for there were several, of early New England houses proclaimed an English origin. The house of Governour Eaton, just mentioned, is said to have been built in the form of a capital E. The “E” plan was a very common form in the manor houses and even in the larger cottages of the England of Eaton’s time. It was also a very old form, “dating from the thirteenth century, if not from the twelfth, or even earlier, and it had, in its long career, come to be the expression of a regular and well-recognised arrangement.” “Other houses of this plan were built in different parts of New England for men of consequence and substance.”

“The common houses,” according to Edward E. Lambert, the antiquary, “at first were small, of one storey with sharp roofs, and heavy stone chimneys and small diamond windows.” Many of the early dwellings also had two floors. One type of these small houses commonly found in Massachusetts and Connecticut consisted of two rooms with a chimney between them. The house door opened into a small entry containing the staircase, opposite the door and carried up beside the chimney. The chimney was the core around which the house was built and projected above the middle of the ridgepole. Each room had a fireplace. To this type of house was frequently added a lean-to across the whole rear and this addition usually accommodated the kitchen. Sometimes the lean-to was incorporated in the plan when the house was built. In either case, the long, narrow lean-to room contained a fireplace which generally had a flue in the central chimney. When dwellings of this description had two rooms on the ground floor, one would be the kitchen and general living room and the other the parlour containing the “best bed,” an arrangement alluded to in a previous paragraph; where there was the additional lean-to room for the kitchen, the two other rooms would be living room and parlour.

In northern Rhode Island there was another common type that contained one room, at the end of which “was a vast stone chimney which appeared on the outside of the house.” Beside the fireplace and in the offset made by the chimney jamb, was a winding staircase—in the earliest houses it was sometimes a ladder—leading to the upper room or loft, as the case might be. An amplification of this “stone-end” type of house was occasionally found with two rooms placed side by side and a fireplace in each room in relatively the same position. That these types of floor plan were part of the common English architectural heritage we shall presently see by comparison with subsequent chapters. The position of the chimney served to all intents as an exterior indication of the internal plan of the house. Of course, many departures from these two original plans are to be met with in the early Colonial houses of New England but it will usually be found that such departures are due to later additions to a structure based, in the first instance, on one or the other of them.

We are so accustomed to thinking of the old New England houses as structures covered with clapboards that we are in danger of forgetting what is underneath this outer coat. In fact, it is safe to say that the majority of people do not know what is underneath, and many would be greatly surprised if they did. After all, the clapboard casing is a disguise, and the people of New England are so thrifty and, as a rule, have been so careful to keep their buildings in good condition that the clapboards hide the traces of age that would otherwise be visible and put the oldest buildings on a par with those of later date. The clapboard casing masques different things beneath its surface. If we rip it off many of the oldest buildings, we shall find behind it nothing more nor less than an old English half-timber house, built precisely as were the half-timber or “black and white” houses in the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts. The exigencies of climate soon made it evident that such a mode of structure was not altogether suited to the rigorous winters of New England and then, too, something must be attributed to the desire on the part of subsequent owners to follow prevalent fashion which prescribed the clapboard jackets. In houses of more recent date, of course, the clapboard shell may be regarded as an integral part of the structure but, in the earlier buildings, it is nothing but a masque, put on at a later date, to protect the walls and give added warmth when the first-adopted method of wall building was found insufficient, or in some cases, perhaps, to comply with the dictates of a passing fancy.

Whenever this clapboarding is torn off for repairs, original conditions become obvious and may readily be studied. The writer has seen such old houses, when partly denuded of their clapboard casing, reveal typical half-timber constructional methods, similar in every particular to the methods pursued by the half-timber builders in England. The cills, the studs, the diagonal timbers and all the other parts of the frame are set and joined, tenoned and pinned, just as they were in England and the spaces between the studs are “pugged” with rough brick or stones and coarse clay stiffened with chopped straw, also in the time-honoured English manner. It is quite possible that in some instances the spaces between the studs may have been “pugged” with “wattle and dab”—thick clay daubed on a loose mesh of interwoven wattles or withes—for the tradition of this process certainly crossed the Atlantic and appeared in some of the early clay chimneys of Connecticut.

So many people have expressed surprise when told of the unbroken persistence of the half-timber tradition that it will be in order to mention specific instances which, however, may be regarded as typical of many other buildings of contemporary date. For much painstaking and scholarly investigation in this field, and for much accurate restoration, the public is indebted to Joseph Everett Chandler, of Boston, whose restorations of numerous historic buildings have won him well deserved esteem and confidence.[A]

It was the writer’s privilege to see the old Bake House in Salem just after it had been rescued by private generosity from impending demolition and moved to its present site hard by the House of the Seven Gables. In the course of making necessary repairs and restorations, the clapboard casing had been entirely removed and it was possible to see fully the whole structural scheme. The timbers and pugging were as just noted. Although the windows were, at that time, of the sash type, with small panes, the traces were clearly visible of alterations that had been made at an earlier date, probably somewhere about 1720, when the sash window rose into high favour and was generally substituted for the leaded casement with small diamond-shaped panes. The timbers gave unmistakable evidence that the window apertures in the sides of the house had originally been wide enough to accommodate a range of casements and that they had been neither so high nor so low as the sash or double hung windows that took their places. In other words, the timbers showed that the apertures had been narrowed to a considerable extent and, at the same time, extended both upwards and downwards.

Inside the house, the heavy oak studs, when the laths and plaster were torn off, showed chamfered corners, usually stopped at the ends with a stop that was thoroughly mediæval in character and might be found duplicated in the beams of trussed roofs in any old building in England dating from the sixteenth century or earlier. The tops of the studs, in some cases, showed a peculiar splay outward at the sides and rough notching by way of ornament. Surely here were touches of mediæval English workmanship that had been perpetuated in the new land by a workman who had served his apprenticeship in an English village where all the old joinery traditions were preserved intact.

The overhang on the second floor projecting some distance beyond the walls of the first is another striking instance of the survival of half-timber building traditions in not a few of the old houses. We see it in the House of the Seven Gables, in the Bake House, in the Paul Revere house in Boston, in more than one old house in Marblehead, and in plenty of other ancient dwellings, some of them recently restored, throughout the land, where restorations have been intelligently undertaken and carried out. It has almost invariably proved the case either that the pendants were intact beneath the clapboards, or that the stumps of them were there, clearly showing the existence of the feature. In not a few cases the overhang has disappeared because the clapboard casing has been carried down flush with the outside of the upper storey. This was the case with the House of the Seven Gables, and it was only when the clapboard casing, in which it had been jacketed for many years, was removed that the overhang once more came to light and the stumps of the original pendants were forthwith restored. The finding of such pendants and such overhangs coupled with the frequent occurrence of such features as just noted in the case of the Bake House afford us irrefutable evidence of the perpetuation of the English half-timber building traditions. It has been fondly supposed by some that the overhang was meant for purposes of defence. It may have been turned to that use when occasion required, but defence was certainly not the original idea, for in that case the projection would doubtless have been carried all the way around the wall, as it was in the case of the block houses, where, of course, this feature was meant primarily to facilitate defence and cover the occupants as they dropped boiling oil, hot lead, or other missiles on the heads of their assailants whenever they approached near enough.

From the early New England houses, that embodied so many old English architectural traditions, was gradually evolved, under stress of local expediency, a type that met the needs of the colonists. That type was not only intensely practical in its characteristics but its simplicity and straightforwardness gave it a vital artistic interest that still commends it to our favourable consideration.

CHAPTER IV

PRE-GEORGIAN ARCHITECTURE IN THE MIDDLE COLONIES

English, Welsh, Swedish and German Influences

FROM the very outset, Pennsylvania was the most polyglot and conglomerate of all the English colonies or provinces in America. West Jersey and Delaware, which latter State was originally a part of Pennsylvania and known as “the three lower counties on Delaware,” in some degree shared this miscellaneous character, and together the three formed a practically distinct unit in the Middle Colonies, peculiar in composition and without parallel elsewhere. The diversity in nationality and speech among the early settlers was directly reflected in architectural manifestations and the variant types were never wholly welded together into one distinct style and, even long after the advent and almost universal prevalence of the Georgian mode, they continued in use concurrently. Just as similar phenomena were to be detected in the several parts of New England, they displayed local peculiarities of artisanship attributable to the different traditions obtaining in the respective parts of the Old World from which the individual artisans had come. The two most noticeable features in the early population of Pennsylvania were the diversity of elements and the clannishness and consequent isolation of the people who composed the several distinct parts of the colony. These elements remained distinct from each other both from preference and interest, and natural conditions favoured this division.

First of all in date of settlement on the shores of the Delaware were the Swedes, whose successful efforts at colonisation began in 1638. The Dutch, it is true, had previously made some slight attempts at settlement. In 1616, in pursuit of the exploration essayed but abandoned by Hudson in 1609, Captain Hendrickson, in the “Onrust” (“Restless”), had sailed up the Delaware to the mouth of the Schuylkill and, in 1623, under Captain Cornelius Mey, Fort Nassau was built at what is now Gloucester Point, nearly opposite Philadelphia. In the main, however, the Dutch preferred to stay down the bay and, in 1650, Fort Nassau was abandoned. They were traders rather than settlers, so far as their connexion with the Delaware was concerned, and the first real settlements, therefore, are to be credited to the Swedes who were home-loving, industrious farmers, proud of their homesteads and capable in the management of their dairies but possessed of little inclination towards commercial activity. The Swedish foundation was permanent and, though the Swedish population was eventually absorbed by the more numerous elements brought hither a few years later by Penn’s “holy experiment,” it left an indelible and significant mark upon the corporate composition of the colony and the traces of Swedish influence are still distinct and unmistakable, not only in much of the local architecture, in the names of places and persons, and in the strong strain of Swedish blood in many Pennsylvania families but in humbler and less obvious matters as well. As an instance of the latter may be mentioned the common strain of red cattle to be seen everywhere on the hills and in the valleys of eastern Pennsylvania. These same red cattle are the descendants of the Swedish kine, brought hither nearly three hundred years ago by the hardy colonists who planted their farmsteads along the waters of the Delaware and its lower tributaries.

Attracted by the prospect of religious liberty, by the liberal inducements offered them, and by the fatness of the land, a great variety of settlers, following in the wake of Penn’s pioneers, flocked to the colony on the Delaware and found there a safe and happy refuge after the troublous existence many of them had led before their departure from their old homes. Besides the English, who were almost altogether Quakers, there were, in this second wave of immigration, both Welsh and Germans. Later still, a small Dutch element was added and then came the Scotch-Irish. Each of these elements naturally perpetuated its own peculiar architectural traditions, and why those traditions continued so long a time distinct in their expression we shall presently see.

While the English Quakers were numerically preponderant, counting the neighbourhood of Philadelphia and West Jersey as a unit of population, and were politically in supreme control until late in the eighteenth century, the Welsh and Germans dwelt close beside them and were accorded so large a measure of practical independence in the management of their own affairs that their communities were virtually imperia in imperio. For twenty or thirty years after the founding of Pennsylvania, “the Welsh were the most numerous class of immigrants” and in place names, in blood, in local history, and in architecture their enduring influence is plainly discernible. Before they migrated from the land of their birth, they had entered into an agreement with Penn by which he promised them “a tract of forty thousand acres, where

they could have a little government of their own and live by themselves.” Accordingly, upon their arrival, this tract was surveyed for them in the high, rolling lands embraced chiefly within the present bounds of Montgomery and Delaware Counties, a section that more nearly resembled in character their beloved Wales than did any other part of this new country of their adoption. The tract was called the Welsh Barony for the sturdy, “red-haired, freckle-faced descendants of the ancient Britons insisted that this territory, specially set apart for them, was a barony or county palatine and, in very truth, it was a manor with the right of court baron.” These Owens and Joneses, Evanses and Wynnes, Powells and Pughs and all their kith and kin, managed their affairs according to their own notions and, at first, dispensed with the usual system of township and county organisation. Civil authority was vested in the Quaker meetings until, in 1690, the three townships of Merion, Haverford and Radnor were formed and the civil jurisdiction of the meetings superseded. Welsh was the official language of the courts and records and Welsh was the daily tongue of all the people in the barony and very few of them understood English, so that when William Penn preached at Haverford, in 1701, his hearers could not have been much edified, so far as his words were concerned. Closely bound together by the tie of language and separated by the same means from the other colonists who spoke English, Swedish or German, these Welsh gentry and yeomen held aloof from outside affairs, content with a mode of life that was “unusual on a provincial frontier” for its “amount of enjoyment and expenditure for dress and entertainment.” Local independence and self-sufficiency were only broken down when the barony was thrown open to outside settlers because the Welsh occupants refused to pay quit-rents on more land than they actually used or held. Their strong feeling of nationality, however, remained and nothing could have been more natural than that the architecture for which they were responsible should have had, as it did, a characteristic local flavour.

The earliest German community was Germantown and, though it is now a part of Philadelphia, in 1683 and for more than a hundred years afterward, Penn’s “greene country towne” and the village of the Germans were separated by a long stretch of open country and the highroad between the two was oftentimes so bad that it was an obstacle rather than an aid to communication. The German settlers spoke their own language, printed their own books, pursued their own industries, worshipped in their own way, built their own schools and managed their own affairs of internal organisation without either interference or assistance from the powers in Philadelphia. As did the earliest settlers in Germantown, so also did their countrymen, who continued to come to America in ever-increasing numbers and travelled farther and farther into the interior of the land where the richness of the soil and the opportunity to follow their own inclinations without let or hindrance from interfering or antagonistic neighbours invited them.

Besides keeping aloof, during most of the early period, from the settlers of other nationality, the Germans were also subdivided among themselves. There were the Pietists or Rosicrucians, who had their settlement or community on the banks of the Wissahickon. Although they maintained some intercourse with the other German settlers, they nevertheless led a distinct existence. The people in Germantown, likewise, formed a complete community in themselves and the industries in which they engaged at an early date, namely, the operation of paper and knitting mills, are still flourishing in the neighbourhood, in some instances on the original sites. Again, the settlers in the Skippack region were far removed from those in Germantown and developed peculiarities of their own. The Moravians, in their turn, pushed still farther into the northern part of the province and founded settlements quite distinct from all other colonisation enterprises. Their ancient buildings are deeply interesting and have preserved permanently the traditions of the country whence the Moravians originally came. An examination will clearly show a similarity in many points to the Suabian modes of architectural expression, as one might expect from the close ties of kinship.

The isolation of the several elements of population in the colony was still further favoured by the fact that, at first, the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware colonists who followed Penn resembled their Swedish predecessors and were not commercial in their instincts like the Dutch, who were aggressively mercantile with their fur trade. What they needed for home consumption the early Pennsylvanians made for themselves, so far as they could, and in every way were essentially agricultural and diametrically opposed to the Dutch. For some years after the founding of the colony, Swedes, English, Welsh, and Germans alike turned their eyes inland. We might say that their policy of colonisation was introspective rather than expansive.

This introspective policy of colonisation did not tend toward the expansion or the prosperity of the colony and, while the colonists led lives of comfort in their own preferred seclusion, it was not until they turned their eyes to the sea and engaged in commerce that the prosperity of Philadelphia, and of the colony generally, increased by leaps and bounds. The roads, for the most part, were extremely bad and, in the winter and spring, were hopelessly miry. Where the settlers did not follow the course of the streams for the spread of their area of colonisation, they followed the Indian trails, and most of the old roads leading out from Philadelphia, the old arteries of traffic along which the colonists made their homesteads, and from which they pushed farther and farther into the interior, were originally the pathways worn by the red men through the forest.

While the Swedes chose the streams to determine their course of colonisation, the Germans usually stuck to the Indian trails which, in time, became the highroads to their various communities. In the earliest times, the German lads and lasses forded the streams and came on horseback along these roads, carrying their goods for market in the city in panniers. It was not long, however, before sufficient improvement was made in the condition of the highways to allow the great four, six, and eight horse wains to be driven to the city periodically from the more remote settlements. In these wains were contained the products of the six months’ or year’s labour on the farms and, with the money from what they sold, the farmers bought materials which they took home to be manufactured into the various articles of necessity or comfort required by the different members of their households.

Not until they learned, in the course of time, to appreciate the fundamental liberalism that characterised the principles of the colony as established by the Founder, and not until the gradual development of commercial industries tended to bring them more together had the different groups of colonists any common ground upon which they might meet without bringing their diversity of principles and prejudices into conflict. In the meanwhile, the architectural course of the province had fallen into several well-defined separate channels that are still easily recognisable. That these divers phases of Colonial architecture should retain their individuality side by side is not to be wondered at when we consider the early diversity and isolation of the various racial elements of the province, explained at length in the foregoing pages, and when we consider, also, the tenacity with which the people clung to their distinguishing racial peculiarities of every sort long after the barriers of antagonism or isolation had been broken down.

It is always well to be explicit, and it is easier to make the basis of contention clear when a

definite instance is cited. We shall, therefore, use certain specified houses for the sake of example. The first of these to claim our attention is Wynnestay, shown in one of the accompanying illustrations, the ancient home of the Wynne family, on the borders of the Welsh Barony. When built in 1689, it was in deep country; now it is surrounded by a suburban growth. Practically the only alteration that Wynnestay has ever undergone was raising the ridgepole of the roof, on the oldest part, to the line of the 1700 addition at a time when it was found necessary to make some repairs. Save this, and what has been built at the back to meet increased domestic needs, Wynnestay remains to-day in its pristine state and is, therefore, valuable as a well-preserved example of Welsh Colonial work. Doors and windows are low, but of generous breadth, and capped by heavy stone lintels made of thick, oblong slabs that must have cost no ordinary exertion and energy to set them in place. The two dormers have the same sharply-pointed peaks that we shall see in another Colonial example. As might be expected, the walls are thick and everything about the building is of the most solid construction.

When Wynnestay was built, the colonists had had no time to evolve new architectural forms, so we may be sure that in erecting their dwellings they followed as closely as they were able all traditions and precedents with which they had been familiar in the old country. That Wynnestay and its contemporaries faithfully represent the farmhouses and small manor houses of Wales and England we may feel the more certain because capable artisans, both house carpenters and stone masons, accompanied the earlier settlers and by this time had arrived in considerable numbers in the colony, and of course were working by the principles instilled into them in their apprentice days.

The masonry of the Pennsylvania Colonial type has been highly admired time and time again by architects in all sections of the country. The same sort of masonry work is being done by local stone masons today, and so individual and characteristic is it that they are sometimes sent for to erect walls at a great distance from their own locality, because no other masons can be found to put quite the same touch into the face of the wall or lay the stones in quite the same way. But the charm for which their handiwork is justly famed is due to the fact that they are merely following the tradition handed down to them by the old Welsh and English masons who came over with the first settlers. The tradition has been faithfully perpetuated ever since. We find it in strong evidence in all the old houses of that type, in fact in all the old buildings. It will be adverted to, in the chapter on old Colonial churches, in connexion with St. David’s, Radnor. Again we see it in such a building as Waynesborough, which, by the way, is particularly interesting as marking the transition from the early Colonial type to the early Georgian.

Although Waynesborough was not built until a few years after Graeme Park or Hope Lodge, those striking examples of the first phase of the Middle Colonies’ Georgian, it has, nevertheless, retained in certain features a strong resemblance to the early Colonial Welsh type. The masonry is precisely the same, but more noticeable even than this are the lintels of the doors and windows, constructed of a number of stones vertically set in a flattened or elliptical arch. This form is to be seen in much of the early Welsh work concurrently with the great slabs noted at Wynnestay.

In general character Wynnestay is similar to the other Welsh houses near by, such as Pencoyd, at Bala, built in 1633, or Harriton, built a little later, but it has suffered less change in the lapse of years than its near neighbours in Lower Merion township or other sections in which the Welsh influence was felt, and it is better fitted to represent the type. The house is built of native grey fieldstone of varied sizes—some of the stones were probably turned up in the course of clearing the fields round about—lined with white mortar and presents an interesting feature in the bold moulding of the cornices. A continuation of the cornice from the eaves, following the same horizontal line, traverses the face of the wall at each gable end, making, with the gable cornice, a complete triangle. This arrangement of the cornice as a string course across the gable ends gives the roof a downright, positive appearance. The cornice in this arrangement is not dissimilar from the penthouse so often used on structures of this date between the first and second floors. Wynnestay was built at two different periods. The first part, built in 1689, has a penthouse along the front with a triangular hood; the later addition, built in 1700, has the penthouse between the first and second floors, but without the triangular hood above the door. Still another feature showing the close connexion of Waynesborough with the early Colonial type, as exemplified by Wynnestay, is the hood over the house door. Although the penthouses have disappeared the hood has remained, and indicates very plainly a certain line of descent.

Wynnestay and other old houses just like it were the forerunners of a type of structure that has come to be known as the Pennsylvania Colonial farmhouse type; very worthy the type is, truly comfortable, homelike and sensible, and deserving the popularity accorded it, so long as it sticks closely to its severe simplicity and avoids all attempt at pretence. The very moment, however, we depart from time-honoured tradition and attempt to begaud this sort of building with Georgian embellishments and furbelows—a thing far too often done—it looks unseemly and ludicrous. Before leaving the subject one should add that the Pennsylvania Colonial farmhouse is found in roughcast as well as stone, and that the buildings erected by the English settlers, though similar, were apt to be somewhat higher than the old, squat dwellings of the Welsh, whose natural predilection for “stumpiness” is well exemplified by the towers of their churches.

Our next Colonial example is Wyck in Germantown, at the corner of Walnut Lane and Germantown Road. Like Wynnestay, Wyck has undergone scarcely any change since its staunch walls were reared. Furthermore, Wyck has never been sold, but has passed from owner to owner by inheritance, and as its possessors have always been careful to maintain everything in its original condition, it can readily be seen that a more trustworthy example of Pennsylvania Colonial architecture could not be chosen. Wyck represents the German influence in Colonial architecture. The structure is really two houses joined together. The first was built about 1690 or earlier; the second, though built somewhat later, nevertheless dates also from an early period. Through the first part of the connecting portion, that links the two houses into one, ran a passage or waggon way. This passage was afterward closed in and now forms a great hallway from which open outwards big double doors almost as wide as barn doors, with a long transom of little lights above them.

The whole long south front of the house is whitewashed. Trellises cover the face of the wall, and the vines, with their masses of thick foliage, stand out in sharp contrast to the gleaming brightness of their background. At Wyck the windows are higher and not so wide in proportion as at Wynnestay, and the same may be said of the dimensions of the doors. The proportions are excellent and the measurements of sash-bars, muntins, and panes have been duplicated by architects again and again, with most satisfactory results. The dormerheads have the same sharp angularity as those at Wynnestay. At Wyck, however, the cornice runs only beneath the eaves, and does not extend across the wall at the gable end. This extension of the cornice as a string course was more apt to occur in houses of Welsh or English build, while the Germans, one of whom built Wyck, usually left their gable ends unadorned. In fact, there is no cornice at all at the gable ends of Wyck, and the junction of wall and roof is marked only by plain barge-boards, beyond which the roof edge scarcely projects. At Wyck the pitch of the roof is not so steep as at Wynnestay, and it may be remarked that the flatter pitch was generally found on Colonial houses built by the Germans, and also in the later English Colonial houses.

Both Wynnestay and Wyck, different as they may be in national tradition, are alike in their thoroughgoing staunchness, their straightforward simplicity of expression and detail and their utter lack of all conscious attempt at adornment. It is true, both houses have distinct elements of charm and embellishment, arising from such details as the trellises and long transoms with little lights at Wyck, or the hoods above the doors and the extension of the cornice across the gable-end walls at Wynnestay, but the effect is wholly fortuitous and not the result of design. Both houses are thoroughly typical of most of the contemporary dwellings, and because of their escape from damaging alterations no part of their charm has been impaired. Both, too, well exemplify architectural modes that have continued uninterruptedly in use to our own day. In the portions of the country where the English element predominates, the little peculiarities of English tradition are still plainly observable in modern work, while in the parts of the country where the Pennsylvania German element is most numerous, it is easy to trace, even in small matters, the enduring influence of German architectural tradition, introduced by the early German settlers. Indeed, we may very properly compare the persistence of architectural minutiæ to the persistence of family traits and features in the human race. So much, then, for worthy specimens of Pennsylvania styles that are truly Colonial. The instances given are by no means isolated, but stand as representatives of a numerous class of buildings to be found not only in Pennsylvania, but in Delaware and New Jersey.

Before leaving the subject it should be noted that the brick farmhouses of New Jersey, while often following closely the type noted in Pennsylvania, occasionally assumed, as the period wore on, much more bulky proportions than the dwellings of the early settlers, the roof rising to a considerable height, and the body of the structure assuming great depth as well as breadth. Some of these great brick structures date from a comparatively early period, and may be attributed to the rapidly increasing prosperity of the West Jersey planters, who had the advantage of the Pennsylvania settlers