Housing
Housing
European Designs. The structure and size of European houses varied widely throughout North America and changed dramatically as the period wore on. The first settlers brought the construction methods they had known in the Old World and adapted them to the materials and requirements of their New World environment. English builders of the first generations patterned dwellings on the English “hall and parlor” plan, in which each house had two equal-sized main rooms separated by a single fireplace. Dutch and French farmhouses shared this same basic floor plan, though their external appearance differed according to styles preferred by their countrymen. Both rooms had multiple uses. The parlor usually served as a bedroom as well as for various work and family functions. The other room in Dutch dwellings was called a groot kamer, or “best room,” and served for social occasions as well as sleeping. In the hall general-purpose activities occurred such as cooking, eating, and work. For English and French settlers it was often the core room of the house and was used for entertaining as well as work and eating. Many residents built lofts for additional sleeping or storage, and as a family grew, it might add rooms to house a separate kitchen, bedchamber, or storeroom. These floor plans encouraged communal living. Whole families commonly slept in the same room, the parents in a large bed and the children in a smaller one or on pallets by the hearth. Overnight guests often shared the family bed with their hosts. Even when family members slept in separate rooms they had to pass through one to reach another, and they carried out most of their daily activities in close proximity to each other. Dwellings in the Spanish borderlands varied considerably from region to region according to the climate and building materials available. In Saint Augustine a distinctive long, rectangular house emerged; inhabitants of New Mexico constructed long adobe houses only a single room deep.
SHARING ROOMS AND BEDS
People staying overnight in colonial inns or private houses often found themselves sharing their rooms and even their beds with total strangers. The traveling doctor Alexander Hamilton woke up one morning in a New York country inn to find
“two beds in the room, besides that in which I lay, in one of which lay two great hulking fellows, with long black beards, having their own hair, and not so much as half a nightcap betwixt both of them. I took them for weavers, not only from their greasy appearance, but because I observed a weaver’s loom at each side of the room. In the other bed was a raw-boned boy, who, with the two lubbers, huddled on his clothes, and went reeling downstairs, making as much noise as three horses.”
Source: Alexander Hamilton, Itinerarium, edited by Robert M. Goldwyn (New York: Arno, 1971).
Adaptations. As the seventeenth century wore on, house structures changed somewhat. New England builders came to locate the fireplace consistently at the center of the house, where the warmth of the chimney would heat the interior more efficiently, a practice also common in New France. Builders further south tended to place fireplaces at the ends, where the heat would be carried away during the hot summers, or even to build separate “summer kitchens” so that daily cooking would not make the main house intolerably warm. Timber, which had been scarce in England, was plentiful in America. Builders took advantage of this abundance by siding homes entirely in wood and roofing the houses with wooden shingles instead of thatch or slate. Almost no first-generation English settler had ever seen a log cabin, but by 1700 settlers in frontier
New Hampshire were building log houses sided with clapboards, and settlers in the Middle Colonies were imitating the log-cabin design introduced to America by Swedish settlers. Dwellings in the Spanish borderlands of the Southwest were built of adobe or stone where available and were commonly adapted for purposes of defense in this thinly populated region. Inhabitants of towns commonly built their houses close together around a central plaza so that their outer walls could double as a fort. Haciendas were structured the same way for similar reasons, with dwellings and outbuildings arranged in squares around central patios.
Genteel Architecture. By 1700 wealthier English colonists were importing new European fashions in house design as they built larger, more formal structures planned by professional architects. The gentry wanted to display their wealth, importance, and civilized tastes in large structures graced with elegant, symmetrical lines and brick construction. They desired ornamental exterior woodwork and beautifully finished interiors. They forsook the simple hall and parlor floor plan for multiple rooms with specialized uses, separated by corridors to allow for greater privacy. Children and parents began to sleep in different rooms, and bedchambers were often located on the second floor, away from the parlors and halls where guests were entertained. Ordinary colonists gradually began imitating the symmetrical Georgian exteriors of gentry homes and began fulfilling a newfound desire for privacy with specialized rooms separated by corridors and partitions. Some mid-eighteenth-century gentry also built great houses that incorporated various features of the Palladian style, with large porticos and modular, symmetrical plans.
African Americans. The dwellings of a growing population of Africans, the great majority of whom were slaves, contrasted sharply with the houses of great planters, though less so with those of many free white family farmers. In the eighteenth century many slaves built their own dwellings from materials provided by their masters. Whether they used English or African construction methods, slaves often organized their dwellings in patterns that supported communal ways of life they had known in Africa. Single-room structures were often built around a common central area where slaves could interact, share household work, and play together when time permitted. Free African Americans tended to adopt European designs in their housing.
Sources
James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archeology of Early American Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1977);
James Early, The Colonial Architecture of Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994);
Robert Lionel Séguin, La Maison en Nouvelle-France (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1968);
Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987);
Dell Upton, Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).