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M I s
JOURNAL of
EARLY SOUTHERN DECORATIVE ARTS
November, 1993
Volume XIX, Number 2
The Museum of Early Southern
Decorative Arts
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JOURNAL of
EARLY SOUTHERN DECORATIVE ARTS
November, 1993
Volume XIX, Number 2
Published twice yearly in
May and November by
The Museum of Early- Southern Decorative Arts
Copyright © 1993 Old Salem, Inc. Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27108
Printed by Hall Printing Company High Point, North Carolina
Contents
Rosewell Revisited 1
Betti' Crowe Leviner
Book Reviews 63
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Figure 1. North facade ofRosewell. Photograph courtesy of the Virginia His- torical Society. This rare view of Rosewell from the northwest shows the house standing in isolation after the destruction of the west outbuilding. Thanks to Joseph Robertson of the Virginia Historical Society for bringing the Society's file of Rosewell photographs to the author's attention.
Rosewell Revisited
BETn' Crowe Leviner
Rosewell (fig. 1) has been an object of fascination for most of its existence — first as the finest domestic academic build- ing of its date in Virginia and then, since 1916, as a ruin (fig. 2). The mansion was the eighteenth-century home of, suc- cessively, Mann Page I, Mann Page II, and Governor John Page — father, son, and grandson. The house was a massive, three-story, brick mansion with two cupolas, a dwelling that proclaimed its occupants to be at the pinnacle of the colony's elite. It remained in the Page family until the 1840s when a new owner either remodeled or vandalized it, depending on one's point of view. The house burned in 1916, and today only the ruins offer witness to its former grandeur.
This study will discuss what is known about the house, including possible room use and furnishings, from the van- tage point of current scholarship dealing with eighteenth-cen- tury material culture. The task is handicapped somewhat by Rosewell's unusual room arrangement. Mansions with more conventional floor plans, i.e., ones that included center pas- sages, experienced changes over the course of the eighteenth century. However, Rosewell's room arrangement did not lend itself to this flexibility, and therefore, room use, with the exception of the hall and possibly some closets, remained fairly constant within the house over the course of the Pages' ownership. For this reason, while the house will be compared with other gentry dwellings, specific dates will not be a focus. Changes in other houses are noted for their cultural context and not their chronology. As for furnishings, objects will be mentioned that would be appropriate for the various rooms
November, 1993 1
Figure 2. Rosewell, circa 1968. Courtesy of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Photograph by Richard Cheek. This view originally ivas published in Arch'neciure in Virginia (Neiv York: Walker and Co., for the Vir- ginia Museum, 1968).
given their functions, but here again, the focus is on type rather than style, since the former would have remained con-
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Figure 3- Sketch of Rosewell from Bishop Meade's 0\d Churches, Ministers, and Families, and Families of Virginia. Couriesy of the Virginia Historical Society. This is the earliest known sketch of Rosewell and the only one illus- trating the house before the reconfiguration of the roof.
stant while the latter in some cases would have been updat- ed.
After more than 250 years since its construction and 75 years after its destruction by fire, Rosewell continues to fasci- nate those who study the eighteenth century. Even before the Civil War, Rosewell captivated. The January 1844 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger included a frustratingly brief description of Rosewell in a series of pieces on Virginia hous- es.' In 1845, Henry Howe described Rosewell as "perhaps the noblest old mansion in the state, and is a most venerable relic of antiquity."^ In his 1856 publication, Old Churches, Minis- ters, and Families of Virginia, Bishop William Meade dis- cussed Rosewell (fig. 3) and the enormous debt incurred by its construction.' In 1876 Lucy Page Saunders published a Christmas story set at Rosewell with herself thinly disguised as the heroine.'' Five years later Thomas Nelson Page, great- grandson of Governor John Page, published an essay in Scribner's magazine that included a description of Rosewell (fig. 4).^
Part of this fascination probably was due to the nostalgia for America's colonial past — nostalgia that gathered momen-
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turn during the nineteenth century and culminated in the movement that has come to be known as the Colonial Revival. One of the movement's leading proponents, Thomas Waterman, included Rosewell not only in his and John Bar- rows's Domestic Architecture of Tidewater Virginia published in 1932 but also more in depth in his Mansions of Virginia published fourteen years later. Researchers since 1946 have been no less intrigued by Rosewell after the Colonial Revival. Between 1957 and 1959 Ivor and Audrey Noel Humes's exca- vation of a trash pit at the site helped compensate for the lack of written evidence about the furnishings of the house. "^ Rosewell and the Pages have been the focus of several other studies over the last twenty-five years. ^
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Figure 4. Sketch of Rosewell from the southeast from Scribner's Monthly Magazine (October 1881). Courtesy of the Virginia Histohcal Society.
No doubt part of Rosewell's mystique is due to there being so little known about its interior decoration or its furnishings. Rosewell's paneling was ripped out and sold in the 1840s, its roof was altered, and no inventories listing the contents of the house have survived. Some interior sketches (fig. 5) and pho-
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Figure 5. RoseweU's newel post from Scribner's Magazine (October 1881). Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society. The main stair was the most illus- trated feature of RoseweU's interior This sketch looks from the landing of the main stainvay toward the back stainvay on the west side of the house.
tographs, primarily of the great hall, do exist: these reveal the elaborate carving of the great stair, the eared architraves on doors opening into the Great Hall and the Gallery above, and the round-headed window opening into the back stairhall. Also surviving, in the collection of the Virginia Historical Soci- ety, is a stool constructed from the newel post of the back
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stair and topped with Ionic pilaster capitals probably from the great hall.^
The builders of Rosewell, the Page family, are almost as mysterious. Little survives in the way of account books, let- ters, or diaries; even the county records seem to subscribe to this conspiracy of silence, for they burned not only in the early nineteenth century but again in Richmond during the Civil War. Family records fell victim to the war as well. Dur- ing the Battle of Williamsburg in May 1862, Union troops looted Robert and Lucy Page Saunders's dwelling on Palace Green. Mrs. Saunders was the youngest daughter of Gover- nor John Page, the last of the male line to make his home at Rosewell, and she had apparently inherited a variety of pos- sessions, including books and family papers, from her fami- ly's Gloucester house. Some of these items were casualties of war, since a contemporary account described books and papers being hauled away by the armful.'^ David Cronin, provost marshall at Williamsburg, recorded the devastation the following year:
The former library [was] in the most deplorable condi- tion of disorder and ravage. In heaps on every side, were spread half destroyed books, vellum-bound vol- umes, some of them with ornate toolings; letters and documents of all sorts, ragged files of precious colonial newspapers; torn folios of rare old engravings. With these were mingled the remains of shattered marbled busts, fragments of ornamented book cases, window glass and plaster mixed with the mud from heavy boots of cavalrymen who seemed to have played football with everything of value in the place. A curious relic, considering the place where it was found, was a copy of the original edition of Jefferson's "Notes on Vir- ginia," which contains the author's oft quoted prophe- cy or foreboding [sic] relating to the ultimate crisis which he feared must come in this country over the question of slavery. ... In tipping over a broken chest in the garret to use as a seat, we picked up and exam- ined some of its contents consisting wholly of old let- ters, bills of lading, rent receipts and jumbled manu- scripts. Examining further we found that we had stum- bled upon a rich mine of historic lore. ... A thick
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packet of letters were from Thomas Jefferson to [John] Page, some dating from their college days, others writ- ten when Jefferson was the American Minister in Paris. Other letters were equally interesting and precious, such as one from Count Pulaski offering his services to the State of Virginia; several from Richard Henry Lee . . . two or three were from Martha Washington to Mrs. Page and numbers were from Madison, Arthur Lee; Peyton Randolph and other of the most prominent characters of the Revolution. '°
To read the extensive quotation above is enough to make any student of the eighteenth century weep. The loss of what might have been learned from the letters, newspapers, engravings, and other ephemera described as so many "foot- balls" is tragic. It is more than likely that other Page artifacts, such as a portrait that will be mentioned later, inherited by Mrs. Saunders were victims as well.
What then is known about the house? At this point it seems appropriate to introduce that information. Mann Page I began the construction of Rosewell sometime between 1721 and 1726.^' It was to be a proper, academic house that would provide an opportunity "for competitive self-display" and demonstrate his family's breeding, upbringing, and proper place in Virginia's colonial society.'- In The Present State of Vir- ginia, Hugh Jones might have been describing Rosewell with these words about the Governor's Palace in 1724: "A magnif- icent structure . . . with . . . fine gardens, offices, walks . . . the ornamental addition of a good cupola or lanthorn."'^ As King William III of England noted, "nothing made a Gentle- man look like a Gentleman but living like one.""
Except for Berkeley, its contemporary in Charles City County that has a date mark of 1726 in its west gable (built by Benjamin Harrison, Page's brother-in-law), Rosewell was the first brick, double-pile, private residence to be built in the colony. Its only predecessor in Virginia at the time was a pub- lic dwelling — the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg, almost directly across the York River from Rosewell and completed by Governor Alexander Spotswood by 1715. Page, in a sense, was a protege of Spotswood; Page was appointed to Spotswood's council when he was only twenty-three.'' Obvi- ously inspired by the palace, Rosewell nonetheless surpassed
November, 1993
Figure 6. Rainham Hall, Essex, front elevation, from Tunstan Small and Christopher Woodbridge, Houses of the Wren and Early Georgian Periods (New York: William Helbur, Inc.. 1928). Photograph by Hans Lorenz. The layout and level of architectural embellishment of this small, by English standards, house built in the 1 720s are similar to Rosewell.
the Governor's residence in the opinion of contemporaries. As one visitor to Virginia stated in 1732: "Col. Page on the North of York River is reputed [to have] the best house in Vir- ginia," and at the end of the century, John Page, Mann I's grandson, could still describe his plantation as "The most beautiful Seat in Virga., with the most elegant House in Amer- ica thereon. "'*"
Rosewell consisted of three stories over a full cellar. It had a "flat" roof of lead, slightly canted to provide drainage into the wide gutters that carried off rainwater. On the roof were not one but two cupolas, normally found only in public buildings in the Chesapeake during the period. Rosewell's other physical features have been described in a number of publications, and there is no need to repeat them here.'^ How- ever, it should be noted that these features all served to make the house appear as English as possible. While the main house must be viewed in a provincial site context, flanked with outbuildings and peopled with blacks as well as whites, the mansion itself seems to be the misplaced house of a less-
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er member of the English gentry — a house somehow trans- planted to the wilds of Virginia.'^
Rosewell's style is one that has come to be associated with Sir Christopher Wren and domestic architecture from the Eng- lish Restoration through the early Georgian period. According to Sir Roger Pratt, a less-known gentleman-architect of the period, there were certain considerations that should be kept in mind as one planned a dwelling house. '^ He advised his readers to "resolve with yourself what house will be answer- able to your purse and estate" and recommended "a double [pile] building to be the most commodious of any other for so the rooms will neither be so hot in summer, nor cold in win- ter, besides when any side of the house is inconvenienced by any ill weather you may retire to the other, and have in your power always to make use of that, which you will find to be most pleasant."-'- Page seems to have followed at least part of Sir Roger's advice.-'
Rosewell does compare with period English examples such as Rainham Hall (fig. 6) that were built by well-to-do merchants and provincial gentry.'^ Eager to emulate the archi- tectural styles present in London. Britain's middle class added to their dwellings such features as parapet roofs, stone cor- nices, and window treatments that they had seen in the cap- ital. These features had in turn been dictated by changes in London's building regulations following the Great Fire in 1666. City officials became aware of the need for greater building regulation in regard to fire prevention, and the resulting regulations in turn influenced style. While these restrictions had little effect on buildings at the country-house level, they played a significant role in urban housing and rural dwellings of the well-to-do middle class and the lesser gentry.'^ Mann Page was no exception. He wanted his man- sion house to exhibit features typical of English dwellings, whether they suited a Virginia context or not. In some cases these features, such as through passages for air drafts during the summer and a marble floor in the main reception room, did fit the needs of a Virginia family. Others, such as the lack of an entrance passage, did not. These drawbacks in terms of a Chesapeake context may be one reason Rosewell's floor plan was not emulated elsewhere in tidewater Virginia.-'
The architectural elements described above were derived from a Georgian vocabulary and were based on aesthetics as
November, 1993 9
well as London building-code requirements. This mix of com- ponents was then put together in a way that can be analyzed geometrically. Lauren Suber, Media Coordinator and Paint- ings Researcher at Colonial Williamsburg, has done extensive analysis of the theory and application of the principles of dynamic symmetry in eighteenth-century portraiture.'' Ms. Suber has extended this analysis to architecture as well and has come up with a system that explains the rationale behind the placement of many of Rosewell's architectural features.
Figure 7. An application of the principles of dynamic symmetry to Thomas Waterman's rendering of Rosewell from Mansions of Virginia. Photograph by Hans Lorenz. Unforiunately, recent archaeology has revealed no traces of the connecting hyphens shown here.
This analysis is based on Thomas Waterman's conjectural drawing of Rosewell as he believed it appeared when origi- nally completed. Measured drawings done in May 1992 con- firm Waterman's dimensions for the parts of the house still extant after the 1916 fire.^'' Rosewell's front (fig. 7) and rear elevations consisted of three bays of double cubes with key architectural elements defined by root rectangles, i.e., the V2 rectangle marks the bottom of the second-floor windows while the top of the parapet completes a double square or a V4 rectangle. The overtly square center bay provided the clue that the overall design may have been based on principles of dynamic symmetry.-' The 1992 dimensions of the first floor (fig. 8) verify Thomas Waterman's measurements, if not pro- portions, for Rosewell's main floor.
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Figure 8. Measured drawing of Rosewell's first floor. Drawing courtesy of Willie Graham and Mark R. Wenger, photograph by Hans Lorenz.
With all its external geometric elements in place, the over- all visual effect (fig. 9) of the house was one of verticality off- set by the horizontal elements of the belt courses, the broad- er windows in the center bay of each facade, as well as the diminishing height of the windows from the first floor to the third. Offsetting the verticality was the lateral effect of the chimney's Portland-stone Cornices, and most important, the flattened roof configuration. While the height and dimensions of the cupola remain conjectural, the system of dynamic sym- metry certainly applies to the top of the stone caps of both the parapet room and the chimney tops since these elements still remain. It should be noted as well that this type of analy- sis not only applies to the facade, but it also affects the dis- position of the floor plan.'*
Thus we have some idea of what the exterior of the house might have looked like when Mann Page I died on 24 Janu- ary 1731''' Rosewell was unfinished at his death, and it is to his widow, Judith Carter Page, and his namesake, Mann Page II, that credit is given for finishing the house. ^° Therefore, Rosewell encompasses two different periods of building that span a period from about 1720 to probably 1741,^'
The application of dynamic symmetry (fig. 10) can also determine interior arrangement. An analysis of the mansion's
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11
Figure 9. Rosetvell's garden facade, c. 1890s, from Ihomas Allen Glenn's Some Colonial Mansions, vol. 1, published in 1899. Photograph by Hans Lorenz.
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Figure 10. Dynamic symmetry of Rosewell's floor plan. Photograph by Hans Lorenz.
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floor plan as drawn by Waterman indicated overlapping V2 rectangles; however, the actual measured drawings reveal a slightly different story. The application of the principles of dynamic symmetry to the floor plan is not as "pure" and pos- sibly shows compromises in dimensions that were made on site while the house was under construction.^^
The person responsible for devising the geometric pro- portions of Rosewell is not known, but it is not improbable that Mann Page himself was the mastermind. His friend Gov- ernor Spotswood prided himself on his architectural abilities, and Page definitely had the educational background for tack- ling such a project." It is unlikely that he would have wanted his family to feel that they had wasted money on his educa- tion, as his father- in-law Robert Carter so succinctly described in such a situation with one of his own sons: "Tis no small satisfaction to me to have a pennyworth for my penny. To have spent so much money upon [educating] a dunce or a blockhead had been most intolerable, and yet, after all, to have a finical inside and not a suitable covering for the outside will make but a schymity [?] gentleman.'"'^ In designing and building his mansion house. Page would demonstrate that both his insides and outsides were of suit- able quality.
The room arrangement of the first and second floors is illustrated in figures 11 and 12. The layout of the third floor is somewhat speculative, although an 1852 newspaper describes the third floor as having "four good rooms and large passages."'' Also largely schematic are the functions assigned to most of the rooms. However, some assumptions can be made based on room use in other period mansions contemporary with Rosewell as well as references and descriptions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century docu- ments.
The main entrance to the house was on the north or land side.-''' The house was constructed on a nearly north/south axis with the York River to the south and Carter's Creek to the east. Interestingly, this alignment conforms with Pratt's rec- ommendation that a dwelling's "fronts be placed towards the South and the North."-" Although the main approach to the house was from the water, as with so many colonial dwellings, it was probably not from the primary York but from the Carter's Creek tributary, a further distance from the
November, 1993 13
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Figure 11. Layout of Rosewell's first floor. Photograph by Hans Lorenz ivith thanks to Mark R. Wenger for providing the illustrations.
house than the river. Robert "King" Carter, Mann Page I's sec- ond father-in-law, in a diary entry for 9 November 1727, men- tioned Colonel Page's boatman and coachman. Carter had two daughters living on either side of Carter's Creek: Judith Carter Page at Rosewell on the west and Elizabeth Carter Bur- well at Fairfield on the east. Carter's usual pattern was to spend the night at Fairfield, or Carter's Creek House as it was also known, and go over to Rosewell the next day for dinner. Approaching the dwelling from the creek explains Carter's need to tip both the boatman and the coachman.^ He appar- ently took Page's boat over to the west bank of Carter's Creek and then took his son-in-law's carriage to the main house. ^^ While Carter's diary would apply to the period when his son- in-law was rebuilding, the same route, for approaching the
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Seconc Floor
Figure 12. Layout of RoseweU's second floor. Photograph by Hans Lorenz with thanks to Mark R. Wenger for providing the illustrations.
dwelling seems to have been applied to the new mansion house. ^°
Logistical considerations of travel aside, the treatment of the brick mansion's north door with its pitched pediment sup- ported by consoles and narrow, paneled pilasters was more elaborate and handled with greater confidence than the south door. This adds credence to its having been the main entrance. A segmental arch ornamented the south or "great back door" as Lucy Page Saunders refers to it." While as aca- demic as its northern counterpart, the south entrance flanked by fluted pilasters did not exhibit a similar degree of boldness or sophistication in the combination of its various elements. Upon entering the south door, a visitor would have stepped into a relatively narrow passage rather than the imposing hall on the north. Thus, from a ceremonial standpoint as well, the north door appears to have been the primary entrance to the mansion. Figure 13 illustrates both entrances and their van- tage points.
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15
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Figure 13. Southwest corner of Rosewell, 1900-1915. Courtesy of the Vir- ginia Historical Society.
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Figure 14. Great Hall and stainvay at Rosewell, courtesy of the Valentine Museum. IToanks to Nancy Carter Crump for locating this photograph in the Valentine Museum collections and to Jim Melchorfor arrangingfor the pho- tography.
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Upon entering the main door, a visitor stepped directly into an off-centered stairhall (fig. 14) floored with black and white marble tiles, fully paneled, and graced with one of the most elaborately designed and carved staircases (figs. 15 and 16) in colonial America.^- It boasted extensively carved newel posts, banisters, tread ends, and fascia boards. It was lighted by a large compass-headed window, yet another architectur- al feature usually reserved for public buildings in eighteenth- century Virginia.^'
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Figure 13. Main stair at Rosewell. Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Soci- ety. The rarity of this view compensates for its grainy quality.
Directly opposite on the west side of the house was anoth- er stair also lighted by a round-headed window. This back, or private stair, as Lucy Saunders called it, was not as elaborate as the main stair but still occupied a prominent position in the house's plan, unlike the back stairs in other gentry dwellings. The back stair at the Governor's Palace was totally enclosed while others, such as the ones at Wilton (formerly in Henrico Co., now in Richmond), Nomini Hall, and the Nelson House, presented a very low profile in the overall design of each
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17
Figure 16. Side view of the main stair at Rosewell. Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society. The carved elements of the staircase are more clearly defined in this view.
house. As Philip Vickers Fithian noted, the "narrow dark Stairs" at Nomini were "used only on necessary occasions, as when the great Stair way is washing or on some such account. "'^ At Rosewell, the convenience and accessibility of the private stair would have allowed for its constant use while the great stair could have been reserved for ceremonial occa- sions. When necessary, the back stair could have been par- tially hidden with a multi-paneled screen such as the one illustrated in figure 17. Although the screen in this eighteenth- century print is being used to shield an elderly man from drafts, screens similar to it were used to hide servants' com- ings and goings, and they often show up in Virginia invento- ries. For example, one valued at 30 shillings was listed as on Peyton Randolph's stair landing.
In the use of its staircases Rosewell can be compared to some English houses of the late seventeenth and early eigh- teenth centuries, for example, Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire; Fenton House, Hampstead; Eltham Lodge, Kent; and Coleshill (now destroyed), Berkshire.^' Celia Fiennes described the
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Figure 1 7. Wishing a Happy New Year to Grand Papa by R. Houston, print- ed by John Bowles. London, eighteenth century'. Collection of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF), accession (ace.) 1941-250.
Staircases at Coleshill (built in the mid-seventeenth century): "There runs up a pair of back staires at each end of the house
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19
quite to the top . . . which does make convenient all the Chambers; the great Staires goes out of the hall on each side, spacious and handsom, staires runs up and meetes on the landing place which is a passage, that runs on both sides to each end of the house but is made private by two doores on each side. . . .'"'^ However, only Ditchley's back staircase cor- responds with the unusual prominence of Rosewell's.'^^ Designed by James Gibbs, Ditchley is a contemporary of the Page mansion and illustrates that back stairs even in a grand country house were not necessarily relegated to such an unobtrusive location as those in the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg. Rosewell's back stair, then, is yet another argu- ment for the house's being more English than Virginian in its spatial arrangement.
What is known about the hall comes primarily from Lucy Page Saunders, who described it as being paneled in mahogany and carved in the Corinthian order.''® However, a black walnut stool now in the Virginia Historical Society's col- lection has a Page family tradition of having been salvaged from Rosewell and tells a slightly different story. Its pedestal is believed to be the newel post of the back stair, and the mahogany Ionic capitals were reportedly taken from the Hall. This discrepancy between Mrs. Saunders's description and the surviving woodwork still does not detract from suggest- ing the fineness and costliness of Rosewell's interiors. There is also the possibility that the major stair was constructed of black walnut but the hall itself was paneled in mahogany. We do know that madeira wood, fit for wainscoting and cabinet- making, was ordered for Rosewell in 1733 by John Carter. ^^ An 1844 description of the house states that Rosewell's inte- riors were paneled as well as wainscoted and that hooks were still present in the hall from which tapestries had been hung. Supposedly the "tapestry was still preserved there a few years ago."'° William Fitzhugh ordered "a Suit of Tapes- try hangings for a Room twenty foot long sixteen foot wide, & nine foot high" in 1683.'' Although this order predates Page's mansion by nearly forty years, tapestries appear in British decorating schemes through the period of Robert Adam and thus still would have been considered fashionable in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.
It is interesting to consider Rosewell's "tapestry" in anoth- er context. A black velvet pall played a minor role in Lucy
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Saunders's Christmas ghost story. While it is possible that a tapestry may have been Mrs. Saunders's inspiration, the pres- ence of an object made of "grand black velvet . . . with . . . white satin lining and heavy fringe . . . which had been put over every corpse from times unknown" closely resembles a pall that appears in an eighteenth-century French print (fig. 18) of an English funeral." It is hard to believe that Mrs. Saun- ders could have imagined such an object in such detail. In addition to tapestries, it is possible that the Pages did own a rich and sumptuous pall so that even in death there was still another reminder of the family's wealth and status.'-^
The hall itself served the same purpose — that of impress- ing and reinforcing upon callers the social, economic, and political position of the Pages. The room was the main recep- tion area for company and could have served as an enter- taining space (fig. 19) as well as a screening area for callers before they were allowed to go further into the house. Here, too, the Pages would have received guests, house servants
Figure 19- Pamela Asking the Blessing of Sr. Jacob Swinford from the
Pamela Series, engraved by L. Tnichy, printed by Joseph Highmere, London? 1 745. CWFacc. 1968-280. Illustrated here is a stone-paved hall furnished with a dining table set up with a coffeepot on a tray, ceramics, and a cloth.
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would have inquired as to the business of unexpected callers, and slaves might even have talked to their master about plan- tation matters.'' The latter was the case at Nomini Hall where Philip Vickers Fithian witnessed "an Old Negro Man" who had come to see Robert Carter with a complaint against an overseer. "We were sitting in the passage, he sat himself down on the Floor clasp'd his Hands together, with his face directly to Mr. Carter, & then began his narration."" The mas- ters of Rosewell assembled family and sen/ants in the hall for specific events as well. John Page did that when a portrait painted by Charles Willson Peale was delivered to Rosewell.''' The hall was also the location for teaching slave children their prayers and catechism every Sunday.-' It was probably this room that was described as having "mahogany seats in the recesses of the old fashioned windows."'®
These formal social activities in Rosewell's hall reflected the local vernacular pattern of having people enter directly into the body of the house. While there was nothing else ver- nacular about this spectacular and academic entrance, the house did lack a passage, a social-filtering device to sort out people. As Dell Upton has noted, "the partitioning of space reveals a need to categorize and control the direction of human activity. '"* Such a need for partitioning began to appear in gentry dwellings at about the time that Rosewell is men- tioned in Robert Carter's will. Consequently, there may have been a point in Rosewell's life when this lack of spatial parti- tioning was considered old- fashioned; it may have been one of the reasons that Mann Page II decided to build a new seat in Spotsylvania County. By the mid- 1760s, Mann Page II had left his oldest son John and new daughter-in-law Frances Bur- well in residence at the older mansion after moving to the recently constructed Mannsfield, a more up- to-date house that resembled his brother-in-law's dwelling, Mt. Airy.''° Thus, Rosewell would have gone through a period of slipping in and out of fashion, giving the changing social needs required of architectural space.
Rosewell's hall eventually came into its own again with an important architectural and social trend that began to emerge during the second half of the eighteenth century — the pres- ence of a summer hall in newly-built houses of Virginia's elite. ''^ As Isaac Weld noted in the 1790s, a Virginia hall "is always a favourite apartment, during the hot weather . . . and
November, 1993 23
|
^ |
||
|
DR 1 |
||
|
I BR ' 1 n 1 M^-i |
Ps |
|
|
1 " |
||
|
^ ^ ^^^H |
Figure 20. First-floor plan of the Nelson House, Yorktown, 1 740- 89. Draw- ing by Mark R. Wenger, photograph by Hans Lorenz . Circa 1740 conjectur- al rooms are on the left; BR represents back room. Room designations based on the 1 789 inventory of nomas Nelson's estate are on the right, with BP representing back parlor.
is usually furnished similar to a parlour, with sofas, &C."" Already paved with marble, a contemporary method of beat- ing the summer heat, Rosewell's hall would have served the same function as the entrance space at Mt. Airy, where Philip Vickers Fithian mentions sitting to chat or to listen to tunes played on the harpsichord.''^
Is it possible that the great hall functioned as a dining room? Mark R. Wenger has charted the decline of the hall and the rise in status of the dining room over the course of the eighteenth century, citing the Nelson House (fig. 20) in York- town, which had a hall and dining room listed in a 1749 inventory. Forty years later, the same house had a dining room and parlor instead, and apparently the 1789 dining room was the 1749 hall.^^ In the case of Rosewell, the hall continued to serve as the more public dining space over the course of the eighteenth century while still retaining its older name.*^' It also could have served as a room for entertaining or specifically for dancing. Roger North, another late seven- teenth-century gentleman- architect, described the latter as an alternate function for "a great dining room."*^
No matter what its function, the hall, when completed, must have awed any visitor, regardless of social, political, or economic standing, who came calling. With its floor-to-ceil- ing paneling and marble flooring, with tapestries and/or paintings on the walls, and with valuable furnishings, Rosewell would present a first impression of wealth, status,
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and learning. This was obviously Mann Page I's intention, and Mann Page II carried out his father's design.
Although there are no clues to the room's furnishings, some educated guesses can be made. The eighteenth-centu- ry visitor probably would have found himself in a room that was furnished as comfortably but as formally as possible.*^' Its contents probably included a pair of dining tables, a set of matching chairs, a card table or two, possibly a tea table, and a tall-case clock. ^^ There may have been tapestries as men- tioned above. The room may also have been hung with paintings, although the nineteenth- century references are conflicting. Lucy Page Saunders mentioned portraits in the Gallery above, not the hall. However, Bishop Meade recount- ed an anecdote in which a Page relative refers to the pictures that "decorated the old hall.""'' These family portraits were probably the work of artists such as Bridges and Wollaston, several of which are now in the College of William and Mary.''° In the fireplace there was possibly the fireback (fig. 21) now
^ '^ .4^ ^ I J
n^p.
Figure 21. Fireback, cast iron, attributed to the Tubal Furnace, Spotsylva- nia County, Virginia, 1 725. HOA 24 1/4", WOA 36 1/4"; DOA 7/8". MESDA ace. 3956. The circumstantial evidence for Mann Page's ownership of this fireback is strong, although it has not been proven.
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25
in the collection of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. Dated 1725 and bearing the initials MP, the fireback was probably made in Alexander Spotswood's Tubal Furnace near Germanna.^'
Besides its possible movables, the room contained two closets: one to the left of the fireplace that was a "dark clos- et," i. e., it had no window to provide light, and one described as "the little room under the stairs.""^ Although exterior photographs show an outside door for the dark clos- et, there is no present evidence that it was ever a functioning entrance. There is racking still visible in this area of the east exterior wall as well as the opposing west wall, and it is assumed that connecting hyphens were planned for either side of the house to flanking advance builders. However, at this point no archaeological evidence of their construction has been found, and there is no reason to believe that the east door was actually used. The closet would not have been totally dark since light would have been available from the transom window over the doorway.
The dark closet may have served as a "bowfat," a built-in cupboard for the storage of dining and drinking wares. Punch bowls may have been kept there, including the one that St. George Tucker recalled in 1776 when he reminisced to John Page about "pleasant evenings at Rosewell where he and John discussed science 'over a Bowl of good Toddy till the early hours. '"'^ As for the quality of Rosewell's wares, we know from the Noel Humes' excavations that the glassware and ceramics were comparable to those found at the Gover- nor's Palace. Using pewter spoons and bone-handled knives, the Pages ate their meals on Chinese and English porcelain as well as English wares of saltglaze and delft from Bristol, Lon- don, and Liverpool. Along with wine, such as "Champaigne & Burgundy . . . Extraordinary good," poured from bottle bearing the initials "MP," the family drank Piermont water from lead glasses with a variety of stem types. ^' All these items are the sorts of wares that would have been found in a "bow- fat" or storage place.-'
The "little room under the stairs," as Lucy Page Saunders termed the other closet, would appear fairly large by today's standards. ^"^ It would have measured approximately fifteen feet north to south and a minimum of seven feet east to west and with a window besides. It could have been used for storage
26 MESDA
of a variety of items, such as pistols, holsters, swords, a house bell, scales, stilyards, yardage of linens, door hinges and latches, or old boots. Objects such as these were listed in Colonel Henry Ashton's hall closet in his 1731 estate invento- ry/^ Mann Page I had similar belongings, for he was left "a Sil- ver hiked sword a Torter shell and Silver hiked hanger and Belt, one Torter shell and Silver handed Horse whip, Crimson Velvett Howsen and Holster caps trimm'd with Silver Lace . . . which were his fathers" in his stepfather's will of 1709.'®
An analysis of gentry-level inventories for the period indi- cates changes in closet use over the span of the eighteenth century. In Ralph Wormeley II's inventory of 1701, the two closets mentioned by name — Madame Wormeley's and Esquire Wormeley's — were used as libraries since only books are listed as their contents."" In 1719, James Burwell had in his closet "An Escrutore . . . £3, A parcell of Books . . . £6, 3 Gunns & a Musket . . . £3," while Mrs. Burwell's closet con- tained "A parcell of China & Earthen Ware . . . .£7.8.6, A Case of Sweet meat knives & forks with Ivory handles & Silver Spoons. . .£4.10-, A Case of Glass handled knives & forks... An old press & an old Chest . . . £-12.6, 4 1/2 doz drinking Glasses with sundry other Glasses . . . £1.10.-, 10 Candle Mould & 6 Case Knives . . . £-.15.-."^° In Robert "King" Carter's inventory taken after his death in 1732, his enumerated rooms included a dining room closet filled with not only items relat- ed to eating and drinking but also "1 Secrutoire" and "1 Large Eloor oyle" (probably a floor cloth). Also listed were chamber closets in which books primarily were stored.*'
This sort of early eighteenth-century usage could have given away over time to the "little room under the stairs" being used as a pantry where the butler or some other responsible domestic servant could oversee the smooth workings of the household from a central vantage point with- in the mansion. This was certainly the case at the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg during Lord Botetourt's tenure. Although a room was set aside at the Palace for this purpose, Rosewell's "little room under the stairs," would have been large enough to suffice.
The use of other rooms on the first floor is more difficult to determine than that of the hall. There is a family tradition that they were used as a dining room and parlor, and some writers have wondered about the presence of a library as
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well. However, these traditions are questionable and proba- bly are based on nineteenth-century usage and twentieth- century assumptions.^^ The research and analysis of eigh- teenth-century Chesapeake society over the last two decades have included intensive architectural study and have given us a clearer and less sentimental view of life 250 years ago. A more likely scenario for these three spaces is that of a pador and two chambers on the first floor. Upon consideration of the nineteenth-century literature relating to Rosewell, one interesting point that confirms this premise emerges: the only first-floor rooms mentioned are the hall and parior. This is true of Lucy Page Saunders's faidy extensive description of the house as well as another lesser-known work, Sketches of Old Virginia Family Servants.^^
During formal dining events, the parlor could have been the "withdrawing room" for the ladies after dinner or as the scene of a late supper during other entertainments. The par- lor could also have served as the more private of the two public rooms in which the family could have had meals away from the larger and less intimate hall. Unlike the majority of other period Virginia mansion builders, who lived in houses equipped with halls and dining rooms or chambers as their two first-floor rooms, Mann Page I would have been familiar with the idea of a pador. ^^ In 1709 his step-father John Page mentioned a parlor in his dwelling house in Gloucester Coun- ty.^' When Robert "King" Carter, Page's second father-in-law, built his mansion at Corotoman, his first floor consisted of a parlor, passage, and bedchamber.^''
The question now arises as to which of the other three rooms could have been the parlor. In looking at the other spaces, there are several issues to be considered. First of all, the northwest room opened directly into the hall, and it also had an outside door in a dark closet to the right of its fire- place and comparable to the outside door in the hall's dark closet.^' Its light closet had a small fireplace. A third door opened into the passageway containing the back or private stair. Directly across and south from this door was an entrance into the southwest room, equipped like the north- west room with a dark closet and a light closet, the latter also having a small fireplace. This southwest room did not have an exterior door nor did the southeast room across the other passage, which led to the back door. The southeast room also
28 MESDA
had the same combination of a dark and light closet, although in this room, the light closet did not have a fireplace. All three of these rooms were of the same dimensions, the closets were roughly the same, and only one room (the northwest) opened directly into the hall.
It is the author's belief that the southeast room was the parlor, and the two rooms on the western half were bed- chambers. Although there is no paneling to be analyzed that would give a sense of architectural hierarchy for the three rooms, there is one feature that can still be examined: the size of the major fireplace openings on the first floor. In studying the openings, it can be determined that the two fireplaces on the eastern half of the first floor are five feet, four inches at the front of each firebox. The two fireplaces on the western side measure four feet, eight inches.^ The smaller fireplaces suggest more private spaces such as bedchambers. Admitted- ly, these are slender threads on which to base such a sweep- ing judgment, but it should be taken in conjunction with sev- eral other pieces of evidence.
While visiting Rosewell, Robert Carter noted in his diary on 19 December 1723 that "Coll Page fast kept above stairs these 3 dales we saw not one another."^'' Both men were apparently sick at the time that Carter made this statement; the implication is that Carter stayed downstairs, presumably in a bedchamber, during the time that Page was upstairs. Page may have normally stayed in the first-floor chamber himself but gave it up to his father-in-law when he came to visit. This was the case at one house that Carter visited: "Mr. Wormeley lay out of his bed for me.'"^ The problem with this December reference is its early date. Since Page in his 1731 will men- tioned his "dwelling house with all out houses thereunto belonging" as well as his "mansion house now building," this seems to rule out the possibility that Carter was referring to the brick house we know as Rosewell. ^^ However, it does indicate that Page had at least one first-floor chamber in his previous dwelling.
Nineteenth-century sources shed more revealing light on first-floor room use. Mrs. Saunders wrote of one other first- floor room besides the hall. She called it "a room which opened into the hall," which, in her story, was used for two young men that were "most comfortably fixed" for the night, suggesting that the room was furnished as a bedchamber.''-
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Although Mrs. Saunders's story was published in 1876, she set it early in the nineteenth century, probably about 1820 to 1825, and she described some of the furniture as "old" and "ancient." It is quite possible that the room arrangements and their furnishings retained their eighteenth-century appear- ances, since the Pages did not live there year-round after John Page's death in 1808. It is unlikely that they would have put money into modern furnishings for a house that was not their primary residence. Therefore, it can be argued that the "room which opened into the hall," had probably been a bedcham- ber since the eighteenth century.
Yet another consideration is room usage within other Vir- ginia houses of the period. At Sabine Hall, Westover, and Menokin, two of four first-floor rooms were used as bed- chambers. At Gunston Hall (fig. 22), Carter's Grove, and Wilton, in addition to Sabine Hall and Westover, the other half of the first floors are devoted to what Mark R. Wenger has called the triumvirate of public spaces that characterized Vir- ginia's Georgian dwellings: passage, dining room, and parlor. ^^ Rosewell did not fit these standard forms in that it lacked "the triumvirate," as is the case with another notable exception:
Figure 22. Floor plan of Gunston Hall. Drawing provided by Mark R. Wenger photograph by Hans Lorenz. In thisjloorplan, the public rooms are concentrated on the south or right side of the house. Compare this with the plan of the Nelson House in fig. 20 where the public rooms are located on the entrance facade.
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Menokin in Richmond County. ^^ However, Rosewell does conform somewhat if one-half of its first-floor is considered as public space and the other half as private space reserved for use by immediate family or close friends and associates. This was the case at both Gunston Hall and Carter's Grove.
It is possible that Judith Page might have occupied the southwest chamber since it had no exterior door. Her son Mann may have taken the northwest chamber for his own, and here may have been stored the Pages' library, which Governor John Page described as located in a closet.''" The light closet with its fireplace would have kept the books dry and the master warm in winter. The location of these rooms on either side of the back stair is another argument for their having been used by the family. From the southeast chamber, Judith, as mistress of the house after her husband's death and still living there after her eldest son's marriage, would have had the convenience of access to the cellar as well as the upper stories of the house as she saw to the day-to-day household operations. Mann II would have had the same access and the added convenience of an outside door in his chamber. Unfortunately, all of this is only conjecture. How- ever, based on the Pages' status within colonial Virginia soci- ety and comparisons of the family to their peers, these guess- es still have validity in theory, if not in fact.
The decoration of Rosewell's first-floor parlor and bed- chambers probably included painted panelling rather than the hard-wood panelling of the great hall. John Carter wrote his brother Charles in August 1738 that "in my opinion Col. Richd. Randolph's Rooms are as well painted, as any I have seen at Mrs. pages & much better than some of them, where ones Fingers Stick to the paint, which perhaps will be never dry & hard Enough."* As for furnishings in these rooms, other gentry houses provide the best comparisons. For example, a John Collett painting (fig. 23) shows a fashionable English parlor during the third quarter of the eighteenth century that boasts a settee, carpet, tea table and accessories, and paint- ings in gilt frames. The Rosewell parlor probably was fur- nished with a set of 12 or 18 walnut chairs, possibly mahogany later in the century, one or two card tables, a tea or china table, maybe a small dining table, a carpet, and pos- sibly a pair of fire screens.''" According to one nineteenth-cen-
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Figure 23- Modern Love: the Honeymoon by John Collett, England, c. 1 775. CWFacc. 1969-48, 3- Photograph by Dehnore Wenzel.
tury source, there was at least one portrait in the room. This was of Judith Carter Page.''^
In the bedchambers were most likely high-post bedsteads with curtains, valances, pillows, bolsters, quilts, and counter- panes. There may have been dressing tables and glasses, bot- tles and basins, perhaps an easy chair, and a number of side chairs. Clothes presses or chests of drawers may have pro- vided additional clothing and linen storage. There probably were no window curtains, at least early in Rosewell's history, since the house had interior wooden shutters for privacy.
The contents of the closets in these rooms would have been determined by the rooms' uses. More ceramics, glass- ware, and silver could have been stored in the parlor closets, and in the light closet, packs of cards could have been kept in a writing desk along with candles, an inkstand, and a wax taper and stand. ^ Chairs for seating might also have been found. If Judith Page occupied the southwest chamber, she might have stored such things as a spice cabinet, coffee and chocolate pots, tea canisters, medicines, candlesticks and snuffers, sugar, textiles, cutlery, and personal items in the
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dark closet in that chamber.'"^ She may have used the heated closet as her dressing room (fig. 24) and study, where she kept her private papers and accounts. Its furniture could have included a dressing table with toilette cover, a writing table, and chairs. If the closet in the northwest chamber was indeed a library, as suggested earlier, its other furnishings may have consisted of a desk and bookcase, chairs, a table, and fire tools.
Figure 24. Pamela . . . Writing in her Late Lady's Dressing Room. . . .from the Pamela Series (see fig. 19). CWFacc. 1968-280, 1, photograph by Hans Lorenz. While the furnishings of this dressing room are too lavish by Vir- ginia standards, e.g, the painting over the fireplace, the print nonetheless gives an idea of how Judith Carter Page's closet room may have looked.
As ownership of Rosewell descended from Mann Page II to his son John, the forms of its first-floor movables, includ- ing that of the great hall, probably stayed the same, although their styles would have changed. Chairs with cabriole legs might have been replaced by examples with straight, Marl- borough legs. It is possible that by the mid 1780s, there were Windsor chairs in the great hall. Frances Page wrote John in 1784 asking that he purchase eighteen green chairs, prefer-
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ably in Baltimore, where they might be less expensive.'"' The same sort of modernizing and replacement of broken pieces would have been true of other furnishings — from tables to fireplace equipment to dining and drinking wares to textiles.
One complicating factor was Mann Page IPs move from Rosewell to Mannsfield in the 1760s. How many of his old furnishings did he leave in Gloucester and how many did he take with him to Mannsfield? How much did John Page have to refurnish Rosewell after his father's departure? In 1769, John Page was complaining about his state of indebtedness: "the necessary Expenses of an encreasing Family joined to the Commencement of Housekeeping in a large House, have forced me to submit to [debt] for a while. "'°^ Part of these expenses could have been caused by replacing objects taken by his father to Mannsfield. Unfortunately, the only assistance in backing up these speculations was provided by a few orders that Mann Page II placed with John Norton and the 1803 inventory taken at Mannsfield after the death of Mann Page III. While the latter says little about Mannsfield's fur- nishings at the time it was built, the Norton orders gave some glimpses of Mann Page IPs needs for his new dwelling in 1770. Page requested "1 large Scotch carpet," "1 dozn. Wind- sor Chairs for a Passage," ivory- handled knives and forks, queen's china as well as blue and white, and cut-glass con- tainers for pickles, and ten ounces of wire for his harpsi- chord.'°-^ These items suggest forms that might have been in use in the public rooms at Rosewell that Mann II did not take with him. However, these items can also be viewed as sup- plementing Rosewell furnishings removed to Mannsfield.
Room use on the second floor of Rosewell is still specu- lative but on somewhat firmer ground by virtue of Leonora and the Ghost as well as the use of second-floor rooms in other contemporary gentry dwellings. The great stairs led to an open space called the gallery. According to Mrs. Saunders, this was the area in which family portraits were hung. The other three rooms on the floor were all bedchambers and by at least the early nineteenth century, were known as the old chamber, the red room, and the blue room. The names of these rooms probably referred either to the color of the woodwork and/or the color of textiles within them."^ Based on Mrs. Saunders's sometimes confusing narrative, it seems that the old chamber may have been in the southwest corner,
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the red room in the southeast, and the blue room in the northwest. Each chamber had a dark and Hght closet, although unlike the first floor examples, none of the light closets were equipped with fireplaces.
The gallery could have been used as an upstairs sitting room for visitors using the elaborate main stair leading to a space filled with pictorial reminders of the Pages' importance. It also may have been used at times as a private sitting room for family members. This was the case at Sara Nourse's dwelling in Berkeley County, Virginia, during the summer of 1781. Bothered by the heat and humidity, "she remained ^upstairs' in the passage, dressed only in a shift or undergar- ment, sometimes taking her meals there. "'°- At Mannsfield, an inventory taken of the dwelling's contents in 1803 suggests that there was an upstairs sitting room, possibly the passage, since chairs were grouped with a harpsichord, four presses, two sideboards, and two screens."^ It is possible that the arrangement of having an upstairs receiving room at Rosewell was repeated at Mannsfield.
Mrs. Saunders described the old chamber as Leonora's "grandsire's favourite apartment, where all his children were born.""^' If we accept Leonora as Lucy Page Saunders, this was a reference to Mann Page II; however, it does not nec- essarily mean that Page slept in the old chamber. As Mark Wenger has noted, gentry husbands and wives did not always share a bedchamber in the early colonial period, although this practice changed over time.'°** It is possible that, unlike William and Lucy Byrd or Robert and Frances Tasker Carter, Mann Page II preferred an old- fashioned arrangement whereby his two successive wives, Alice Grymes and Ann Corbin Tayloe, may have occupied the old chamber, while he used the first-floor northwest chamber. ^"^
The other bedchambers could have been used by daugh- ters of the family as well as a housekeeper, while the boys were housed in an outside school house. "° According to Fith- ian, the Carter girls, the housekeeper Sarah Stanhope, and the slave Sukey all slept in one chamber on Nomini Hall's second floor.^^' If Rosewell's equivalents all shared one room, then the third chamber could have been used for guests, as was the case at Nomini Hall and Westover.''^ The guest bedcham- ber at Rosewell may have been the southeast room, based on the size of the fireplace opening."^ It is also possible that Ann
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Waller, a schoolmistress at Rosewell in the 1730s, used one of the chambers on the second floor."" She may have taught the children of Judith and Mann Page I before the sons were sent on to more formal education, or she may have been a "tutoress" for the girls."'
As with the furnishings of the first floor, the contents of the second floor can only be guessed at. The gallery could have been furnished with a set of chairs, possibly a dining table or two, along with the family portraits that Mrs. Saunders said were on the walls of the room. In this practice, the space would have corresponded to an early nineteenth-century description of the upstairs passage at Mt. Airy, which a visitor referred to as "a long gallery, with family portraits: the Corbins, Platers, &c.""^ Some of these portraits could have dated back to the seventeenth century. Among his bequests to Mann Page I in his 1709 will, John Page left "five Picture in double lacker'd frames now hanging in the parlor of my said dwelling house in Gloucester County ... of his father Col. Matthew Page, of his Mother Mrs. Mary Page, of himself and of his two sisters Alice and Martha.""'
As for the bedchambers, their architectural elaboration was likely less intricate, and they would have been furnished with tall and low-post bedsteads with more than one bed- stead and bed to some of the rooms (fig. 25). There would have been side chairs but probably few case pieces since closets would have provided storage space. There may have been dressing tables and glasses and possibly a bedside car- pet or two. In the guest chamber, the furnishings may have resembled the room in Westover where an overnight visitor found himself:
Imagine then a room of 20 feet square, and 12 feet high, wainscoated to the cieling, hung with a number of elegant gilt framed pictures of English noblemen and two of the most beautiful women I have ever seen (one of whom opposite to the bed where I lay). ... I must tell you too . . . that on the floor is seen a rich scotch carpet, and that the Curtains and Chair covers are of the finest crimson silk damask, my bottle and bason of thick & beautiful china, and my toilet which stands under a gilt framed looking glass, is covered with a finely worked muslin."^
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Figure 25- Pamela with her Children and Miss Goodwin. . . .from the Pamela Series (see fig. 19). C\VF 1968-280, 12. Photograph by Hans Lorenz. V}is print illustrates a bedchamber in a wealthy English household, com- plete with a bedstead fully outfitted with valances, curtains, pillows, and a counterpane as well as such furnishings as upholstered backstools, looking glasses, and window curtains.
This description gives some idea of the appearance of a gentry plantation guest chamber at the end of the Revolu- tionary period. Inventory references to comparable spaces during that time suggest that the Westover guest room may have been especially opulent in contrast to the bedchambers at Nicholas Flood's 1776 dwelling, Landon Carter's 1779 dwelling, and Raleigh Downman's 1781 dwelling."^ Howev- er, Philip Ludwell Lee's chambers were closer in their level of decoration to those at Westover.''° Financially, the Pages would have been able to furnish elaborately if they chose or to follow the more austere example of their uncle Landon Carter, who eschewed such frivolities as window curtains.'-' Considering the uses and furnishings of the rooms on Rosewell's third floor also leaves us adrift on a sea of assump- tions, for it is described in even less detail than the other floors. Mrs. Saunders, for example, did not mention it at all. In 1844, the Southern Literary Messenger's article described
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the upper floor as "a good deal decayed, the floor in some of the rooms having ^settled. "'^" This was due in part to the Pages' declining fortunes that prohibited spending money on necessary upkeep. '^^ As Roger North pointed out in the late seventeenth century, "I cannot reccomend [a cupola] in pri- vate houses, being a leaky shaking business, and in no sort worth the charge of making and keeping."'" By the early twentieth century, visitors were not encouraged to linger on the increasingly ruinous third floor as they ascended to the single cupola that had been constructed on the roof with the 1840s alterations.
Shirley, Rosewell's one surviving contemporary that might have provided a useful comparison, is of no assistance in determining the architectural elaboration of Rosewell's third- floor, for the panelled fireplace walls on its upper floor date to the 1770s.'" This is unfortunate since John Carter, the prob- able builder of the Shirley mansion house, was involved with Rosewell's construction during the 1730s, when his sister Judith was guardian of her son's inheritance. It is probable that both houses received similar architectural treatments based on the relationship between John and Judith. Robert Carter's executive papers reveal several instances where the Carter brothers interested themselves in construction details at their sister's dwelling.
As for the uses to which the third floor of the Page man- sion may have been put, it may be that children were housed here as well as on the second floor. Mann and his two wives and John and his two wives were the parents of large fami- lies, and some of their children, as well as hired staff such as Mr. Richason, head overseer at Rosewell, may have occupied rooms on the third floor'^^ This type of arrangement was true of the Governor's Palace during Lord Dunmore's tenure, and Westover's garrets were described as "commodious and clever. "'^^ Housing servants in the main dwelling conforms with one period writer's comments, namely, that servants deserve a hierarchy as well as their masters in terms of rooms, "where a part was devided out, for the better servants, for qual- ity (forsooth) must be distinguish'd."'^ The furnishings on the third floor, while roughly of the same form, would have been of lesser value and ornamentation that those on the floor below. This also would have been true of the architectural fit- tings for this story. However, a distinction would have been
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made between blacks and whites where "quality" was con- cerned. African-Americans sleeping in the mansion would have made do with a pallet or possibly just a blanket on the floor.
Moving to the roof, a little more is known about Rosewell's eighteenth-century cupolas. It is possible they resembled that illustrated in figure 26. The west cupola afforded access to the roof from the back stair, as well as light for the stairway. It also may have ventilated the house during the summer as rising hot air escaped through its windows, creating a draft. The east cupola, which provided visual bal- ance, was known as the "summer-house."'-^ In the early eigh- teenth century, English writer John Worlidge laid out precepts of garden design and recommended that a summer house (fig. 27) be built "at some remote Angle of your Garden: for the more remote it is, the more private you will be from the frequent disturbances of your Family and Acquaintances."'^" For Page, a summer house on the roof may have answered the same purpose. Accessible only from the roof, it was prob- ably in this structure that "Mr. Jefferson and Gov. Page, in the summer evenings, sometimes enjoyed conversation and the moonlight scene there. From the top of Rosewell house, the view [fig. 28] stretches nearly ten miles up and down the river York. . . . Before the house spreads a fair lawn — around the house are a few trees: this enhances its simpler grandeur, standing, as it were, in the dignified solitude of some antique castle."'-'
Possibly a catch basin for water was located on the "leads" as well since there is a tradition that "Governor P[age] and his friend Jefferson caught fish up there. "'^^ The basin then could have fed into a cistern, a feature of house of this period in England, especially in London, where the fear of fire was ever-present.'" There is a tradition of another roof-top fish pond on the Middle Peninsula in eighteenth-century Virginia: this one at Shooters Hill in Middlesex County.'^' It was the home of Augustine Smith, another intimate of Governor Spotswood, and most likely an acquaintance of Mann Page, given the social and geographic proximity of the two men. They may have had similar ideas about keeping an adequate supply of water on hand, or the two may have appreciated the exotic — for a provincial outpost — appeal of such a fea- ture.'^'
November, 1993 39
Figure 26. Cupola of Eagle House, Mitchamber, Surrey, from Colin Amery, Three Centuries of Architectural Craftsmanship (London: The Architectural Press, 1978), plate 28.
Before concluding this study, a few other furnishings for the house should be mentioned. These included a telescope used on Rosewell's roof where Governor John Page and Thomas Jefferson supposedly observed the heavens at night/^
40
MESDA
Jl ,.,y,„;„/M„,j ,„M/:,m./„,„
Figure 27. Mr. B. Expostulating with Pamela in the Summer House. . . .from the Pamela Series (see fig. 19). CWF 1968-280, 2. Photograph by Hans Lorenz. While this summer house is larger than the space afforded by a cupola, it gives an idea of what summer houses looked like and the types of seating furniture found in them.
It is possible that Page owned other items of scientific equip- ment, such as an orreiy, a pair of globes, and a microscope, since he was a founding member of the Virginia Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge."'
In the parlor there may have been an upholstered English settee dating to the 1740s, a piece that survives in private hands today. The settee has a tradition of having been in the Page family, and if that is true, it demonstrates that Mann Page II acquired quality English furnishings for his mansion.'-^ Two side chairs, obviously products of eastern Virginia arti- sans, have descended in the family with a tradition of having belonged to Governor John Page. Also belonging to Gover- nor Page was a silver cruet stand made in London during the mid-1760s and ornamented with the Page family arms.^^''
In the late 1770s, Frances Burwell Page purchased green- handled knives and forks in a case that contained "one dozen of Large, & one of Small with a Carving Knife of the same kind." At the same time she also acquired "a Set of Blue, Red,
November, 1993
41
A-
\^
;- -;.
^4
^^
^^ It
^ -^ •H •«
P .2
-Si
o
1/1 '
42
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Figure 29- Weeping cherub from Maun Page Is tomb in Abingdon church- yard, Gloucester County. Photograph by the author
November, 1993
43
& white Breakfast China with Tea Board. "^''° In addition to the items previously noted, Leonora and the Ghost mentions tables, benches, high-backed chairs as well as a few modern, i.e. nineteenth- century, chairs, an oak chest, beds (including a feather bed), and a blue damask quilt. All of these pieces of information suggest a well-furnished gentry house typical of the late colonial period.
This, then, is what can be summarized about Rosewell in 1993- This narrative is filled with a number of unsatisfactory qualifiers, such as "maybe," "probably," and "possibly." They are part and parcel of the frustration of trying to describe the mansion house and what is known about it. However, there can be no doubt that Rosewell was an architectural work of art. It has been praised from the time of its construction down to the present day, when hints of its former greatness can be glimpsed only through its ruins.
More knowledge about the house may be forthcoming. The scholarship of the last decade is proceeding with a body of analytic work being conducted by social as well as archi- tectural historians, curators, archaeologists, and other stu- dents of material culture. Wallace Gusler and Luke Beckerdite are working on a survey of carvers and trying to pin down the artisan responsible for the decorative carving found in a group of Virginia gentry houses — a group that includes Rosewell. The Rosewell Foundation is focussing its attentions on compiling the historical, archaeological, and architectural facts and contexts relating to the mansion and its landscape. ^^^
Based on continuing studies of other period houses, assumptions can be made about the ceremonial and ritualis- tic workings of Rosewell — from its great hall to its private stair to the summer house. Although specific knowledge about Rosewell's interior may be scant, scholars can draw conclu- sions about the family and their perceptions of themselves through the overall design of the house, comparing it and them to contemporaries. The guesses may still be guesses, but they are educated ones, based on an ever-increasing store of research and analysis. Rosewell will continue to mystify and captivate and sadden (fig. 29) its admirers, but it is not quite the enigma it once was.
Betty Leuiner is the Curator of Buildings for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In addition to those whom I have acknowledged individu- ally in footnotes, there are others who helped make this paper possible. First of all, my thanks to colleagues at Colonial Williamsburg: John Davis, Liza Gusler, Ron Hurst, Hans Lorenz, Craig McDougal, Margaret Pritchard, Laurie Suber, and Susan Shames in the Collections and Museums Divi- sion; Willie Graham and Carl Lounsbuty in the Department of Architectural Research; and Susan Berg, John Ingram, and Gregg Williams in the Department of the Library at Colonial Williamsburg. Each was always ready to assist with spur-of the moment appeals for help and suggestions for tracking down obscure references. Voe same kindness was tnte of the staff at the Virginia Historical Society, as well as the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia.
Forsyth Alexander, Barbara Carson, Ed Chappell Nancy Ca?-ter Cntmp, Jan Gilliam, Graham Hood, Marilyn Melchor, and Mark R. Wenger were invaluable with suggestions and comments that helped me organize and present this material in a more cogent and accurate fashion. In addition, Graham Hood provided me with the support and encourage?7ient that helped turn this idea of several years' standing into a reality. And as only she knows, Jan Gilliam 's assistance through the months of research, whting, and rewhting was indispensable. Lastly, my loving thanks to my husband John Hyman who, in his oivn words, was "smart enough to know when to leave you alone and to not read you the sports page. "
November, 1993 45
FOOTNOTES
1. Southern Literary Messenger \Q, no. 2 (Jan. 1844), 41-42. The pieces are identified as being written in Petersburg, October 41 [sic], 1843 by C. C. This probably was Charles Campbell as identified by Bishop William Mead, Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of Virginia, 1857 (reprint. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1966), vol. 1, 336.
2. Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Virginia . . . Charleston, S. C, 1845 (reprint. Baltimore: Regional Publishing Company, 1969), 281.
3. Meade, Old Churches, 1: 331-33.
4. Lucy Page Saunders, Leonora and the Ghost (Baltimore, Charles Har- vey & Co., 1876) has been used extensively in this article to reconstruct room assignments at Rosewell before its alteration in the 1840s. While Mrs. Saunders only spent her first year at Rosewell, she and her moth- er, Margaret Lowther Page, continued to visit the house "once or twice a year" (p. 6) after Governor John Page's death. Thus, Mrs. Saunders would have become familiar with the house and the furnishings. As
she states in her story: "The week, or two, that Mrs. spent
in arranging her affairs with the good manager, who lived upon the estate, was a pleasant time to Leonora, who thus passed a part of every year till her marriage, when she went to Rosewell only as a visitor to some friends there" (p. 7). The house remained in the family's pos- session until Mrs. Page's death in 1838, although many efforts had been made to sell the property. For example, see John Page, Williams- burg, to Thomas Smith, Gloucester Count)', letter, 14 February 1827, Where he writes "We had hoped that my mother had at last got rid of . . . Rosewell." My thanks to Nancy Carter Crump for providing me with this information taken from the William Patterson Smith Papers, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N. C.
5. See Scribners Monthly Magazine 22, no. 6 (Oct. 1881), 801-16.
6. Ivor Noel Hume, Excavations at Rosewell in Gloucester County, Vir- ginia, 1957-59, Bulletin225: Contributions from the Museum of Histo- ry and Technology, Paper 18, 1962.
7. The most detailed and intensive of these studies is Bennie Brown, Jr., "Rosewell: An Architectural Study of an Eighteenth Century Virginia Plantation" (M. A. thesis. University of Georgia, 1973). Mr. Brown's the- sis, as well as conversations with him have been invaluable to me in my work on Rosewell, and I have relied upon his work extensively. See also Claude O. Lanciano, Jr., Rosewell, Garland of Virginia (Char- lotte, N. C: The Delmar Co, for Gloucester County and the Gloucester Historical and Bicentennial Committee, 1978) as well as Betty Crowe Leviner, "Rosewell and the Page Family in the Eighteenth Century" (B. A. honors thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1979) whichlater became the basis for an article, "The Pages and Rosewell," in the May 1987 issue of the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts. For stud- ies of the Page family, see Carol Minor Tanner, "John Page of Rosewell,
November, 1993 47
M. A. thesis, University of Virginia, 1944); T. B. McCord, Jr., "John Page of Rosewell. A Man of the Virginia Enlightenment" (M. A. thesis, George Mason University, 1975); Betty Crowe Leviner, "The Page Fam- ily of Rosewell and Mannsfield: A Study in Economic Decline" (M.A. thesis, College of William and Mary, 1987). McCord went on to study Page further in an exhaustive, three-volume dissertation; see T. B. McCord, Jr., "John Page of Rosewell: Reason, Religion, and Republican Government from the Perspective of a Virginia Planter, 1743-1808" (Ph. D. dissertation, the American University, 1990).
8. See Virginia Historical Society, Occasional Bulletin, 27 (Oct. 1973, IS- IS. Also, Edward A. Chappell, Director of Architectural Research at Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, is analyzing the architectural and structural details of Rosewell in a forthcoming research report for the Rosewell Foundation.
9. See "Williamsburg During the Occupancy of the Federal Troops," undated manuscript, 15, T. C. Washington Papers, Box 17, Manuscripts and Rare Books Department, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va. Cynthia Beverley Tucker Wash- ington Coleman wrote: "I have asked Edmund Parsons (Mr. Saunders's butler) to help me to save his Master's books, but he declined, was afraid to meddle'-all bosh, a good for nothing, ungrateful wretch . . . I could not get the books moved out do-day [5 May 1862] a Yankee woman has carried away an ambulance well loaded with them. Day by day I see them carried away by the armful. Once Mr. Saunders was asked by some Northern man to whom he politely showed his library, to sell him some of the volumes. He replied 'I would as soon think of selling my wife and children.' I expect that man is at the bottom of their present removal." My thanks to Nancy Carter Crump and Mark R. Wenger for calling the citations in this and the following footnote to my attention.
10. David Edward Cronin, "The Vest Mansion, Its Historical and Romantic Associations . . . 1863-1865," typescript, 219-23, special Collections, Department of the Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. See also Ro[bert] Saunders to Thos. E. Wynne, letter, Williamsburg, 3 Dec. 1867, Brock Collection, Hunting ton Library, San Marino, California: "Such was the devastation of public records and pillage of private libraries in this region during the war, that I fear that much cannot be found. My own library is entirely gone & it was the largest & best private one in all lower Virginia." Mr. Saunders had at least one portrait from Rose- well in his Library as well: "The picture of Selim [a native of Algiers] may still be seen in the library of Mr. Robert Saunders, of Williamsburg. Mr. Saunders married a daughter of Governor Page, and thus inherit- ed it." Meade, Old Churches, vol. 1, 336.
11. On 12 March 1721, William Byrd II recorded in his diary that "Mrs. Har- rison . . . told me Colonel Page's house was burned to the ground, which I was much concerned to hear." William Byrd II, The London Diary< (171-1721) and Other Writing, ed. by Louis B. Wright and Mar- ion tinling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 506. Robert Carter wrote Messrs. Micajah Perry, Sr., and Jr., on 25 March 1721 that "poor Colonel [Plage hath had a most dismal loss the 8th of this month:
48 MESDA
his dwelling house and store burnt down to the ground. Letters of Robert Carter, 1 720-1 727: The Commercial Interests of a Virginia Gen- tleman, ed. by Louis B. Wright (San Marino, Ca.: The Huntington Library, 1940), 90. The date by which reconstruction was begun — 1726 — can be determined from Robert Carter's will of that year in which he leaves his daughter, Judith Page, £300 for the furnishing of his son-in-law's house when finished: "It is my further will that if the large brick house now building by Col. Page in the room of the house that was unfortunately consumed by fire, shall be finish't and com- pleated during the life of my said daughter Page so that she shall come to enjoy it & to have her Tithe of Dower in it, then it is my will and I do lay it as a charge upon my three eldest Sons, John, Robert, and Charies, my ex'tors, out of the profit of the estates I have hereby given to them in the sume of one hundred pounds, the some of £100 apiece to be paid to my Son in Law Mann Page, Esq., if he be then alive or else to my Daughter his now wife towards furnishing the said house. Virginia Magazine of Histor}' and Biography 5, no. 4 (Apr. 1898): 427- 28. In terms of buying power, £300 would have helped provide a good part of Rosewell's furnishings. An examination of John Tayloe's inven- tory taken in 1747 shows that the evaluation of the furnishings in the hall, passage, green room, dining room, back passage, Mrs. Tayloe's chamber, the inner room, the room above Mrs. Tayloe's, the great chamber, Mr. Fauntleroys Chamber, and the room over the green room amounted to almost £265. Richmond County Will Book 5, 1725-53, 547-53.
12. For a discussion of these motivations, see Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), l68; Carole Shammas, "English-Born and Creole Elites in Turn-of-the-Century Virginia," in Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., ne Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century. Essays on Anglo-American Society and Politics (New York: W. W. Norton,' 1979), 274-96.
13. Graham Hood, The Governor's Palace in Williamsburg: A Cultural Study (Williamsburg, Va.: the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1991), 42. It is possible that Hugh Jones and Page may even have known each other in England since both were at Oxford, albeit dif- ferent colleges, from 1708 to 1711. While Page attended St. John's, Hugh Jones matriculated at Jesus College in 1708, where he received a B. A. in 1712, followed by an M. A. in 1717. My thanks to Emma L. Powers, Research Department, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, for providing me with this information on Jones.
14. Charles Saumarez Smith, Voe Building of Castle Howard (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 23.
15. Charles E. Kemper, ed., "Virginia Council Journals, 1726-1753, "V/'^- ginia Magazine of History and Biography H, no. 1 i]^n. 1924), 38.
16. Gregory A. Stiverson and Patrick H. Butler III, eds., "The Travel Jour- nal of William Hugh Grove," Virginia Magazine of History and Biogra- phy 85, no. 1 Oan. 1977): 26; McCord, "John Page," 663. Page's 1792 description perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt since he was considering mortgaging Rosewell at the time. Three years later he was facing the possibility of selling the plantation.
November, 1993 49
17. For example, see Leviner, "The Pages and Rosewell."
18. Dell Upton in "Early Vernacular Architecture in Southeastern Virginia- (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1979) argues that Westover, for example, makes sense "only in its Virginia context, not in an English one" (p. 356) . Despite being flanked by story-and-a-half brick build- ings built in the Virginia manner as well as other outbuildings that would not appear at an English site, Westover nonetheless reflects William Byrd's attempt to be perceived as an Englishman living in an Englishman's dwelling. I think the same premise applies to Mann Page and Rosewell. To cite just one obvious Virginia feature, the house was located in the middle of a complex of outbuildings, but the mansion itself featured a cellar with three rooms with working fireplaces. These rooms could have housed various offices of the mansion as recom- mended by Sir Roger Pratt, as well as other architects of the period. R. T. Gunther, ed.. The Architecture of Sir Roger Pratt {OySoxd: Universi- ty Press, 1928), 27, 62-63. Rosewell exhibited this very English feature at a time when other eighteenth-century mansion builders were mov- ing service areas to outlying buildings.
19. Pratt's journals and other writings were not published until 1928. While they obviously would not have been available to Pratt's con- temporaries, they nonetheless give us insight into the mentality of architectural design and layout during the period.
20. Gunther, Architecture, 60, 61.
21. See Leviner, "Rosewell and the Page Family," for an analysis of the Pages' financial difficulties.
22. Daniel Reiff came to the same conclusions in Small Georgian Houses in England and Virginia (London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1986), 288-301.
23. This was despite the fact that some English gentlemen-architects dis- approved of the practice. Roger North comments: "A knight of the shire having ... set his heart upon [building a house] in the best man- ner . . . traveled with his bricklayer, whome he used also as surveyor, to most eminent houses in England, to take patternes, and observe the modes of great houses. The house they built was a new fabrick intire . . . Now the marks of this man's humour were, first the model was as for a suburbian house, neer a square with a lanthorne, and small court- yard, which is a citty-houmor, and litle; and pleaseth on account of thrift, because the square figure hath most room for least walls, except- ing onely the sphericall, together, as want of light in the midle. . . . Here the back staires open to the great staires, and those have no light, but from above the cornish, which looks like a steeple." Howard Colvin and John Newman, eds., Of Building, Roger North's Writings on Architecture (Oxford: University Press, 1928), 9. At least Mann Page had more than a "steeple" providing light for his back stair.
24. Edward A. Chappell noted that "certain configurations of function and space became familiar because they fulfilled the practical and social needs of their occupants: some houses worked, others didn't." Chap- pell, "Rosewell's Architecture," l6. My thanks to Chappell for allowing me to read this study while it was still in draft form.
50 MESDA
25. For a concise discussion of dynamic symmetry, see Claude Bragdon, The Frozen Fountain (Freeport, N. Y.: Books for Libraries, 1924) . See also Lauren Suber, "Rituals, Roots, and Rectangles: The Classical Tra- dition in Eady American Portraiture" (M. A. thesis. College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va., 1992) . For a modern discussion of geo- metric proportion applied to eighteenth-century buildings, see Cruik- shank and Burton, "Proportion," in Life in the Georgian City, 13 4 - 49.
26. Members of the Department of Architectural Research at Colonial Williamsburg surveyed and measured the Rosewell ruins in May 1992. My thanks to them for sharing their findings with me and especially to Willie Graham and Mark R. Wenger for providing me with a copy of their measured drawings.
27. In working on the dynamics of Rosewell, Ms. Suber and I were sur- prised to find that Waterman's conjectural rendering of Rosewell worked out to a triple square. This leads us to believe that Waterman also was aware of the application of dynamic symmetry since the roof line and height of Rosewell's cupolas can only be theorized. Of course, this brings into doubt the accuracy of Waterman's overall rendering since he wanted the mansion to fit his symmetrical preconceptions.
28. While some architectural historians remain skeptical about the appli- cation of dynamic symmetry to eighteenth-century buildings, the evi- dence of such an application in a number of other period mansions is persuasive. For example, Lauren Suber has determined that Westover's facade is based on a V3 rectangle while its floor plan is a combination of a V3 and a V2 rectangle. The facade of the Ludwell-Paradise House in Williamsburg is defined by a three-bay system with V3 rectangles determining the ridge line of each bay. The facade of the Archibald Blair House is also based on a V3 rectangle. Other scholars have done similar work. Marcus Whiffen has analyzed the Wythe House in this manner. (Marcus Whiffen, We Eighteenth-Century Houses 0/ Williams- burg (New York: Hold, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970), 87. One argu- ment for this system of geometry being all in the minds of the twenti- eth-century student is the lack of period house plans or drafts with holes in them that would have been caused by the points of a com- pass. However, Sir Roger Pratt may be a source for explaining their absence. In his "Things necessary for Designing," he recommends that "compasses are to be provided for the drawing circles, as the rule is for the right lines. The chief things observable in them are that the point of them be firm, so that they will not easily be opened nor twist, and that the points of them be not so sharp as to ordinarily peck the paper." Pratt goes on to say that "A Square will also be convenient for the greater haste, but one who understands but little of Geometry will do well enough without it." Gunther, Architecture, 20. Contemporary portraits of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architects show them holding such devices. For example, a mezzotint of James Gibbs in Colonial Williamsburg's collections, accession no. (ace.) 1967-343, shows the architect equipped with both a compass and a square.
29. See Robert W. Robins, comp.. The Register of Abingdon Parish, Gloucester County, Virginia, 1677-1780 (Arlington, Va.: Honford House, 1981), 135, for the dates of Page's death and burial.
November, 1993 51
30. Judith Page was probably more involved with the house during the years after her husband's death. In 1738, at the age of 20, Mann II was still being referred to as "Master Page," and had apparently not yet taken over the running of the estate: "Master Page will in a few Years time be able to take the care of his Estate upon himself." See John Carter to Micajah Perry, Shiriey, 1 Aug. 1738 in Robert Carter Letter- book (#4996) ,Tracy W. McGregor Library, Manuscripts Division, Spe- cial Collections Department, University of Virginia. My thanks to Hen- rietta S. Goodwin who allowed me access to her transcription of the letterbooks done for Christ Church, Lancaster County. Some Rosewell students have given 1737 as the date of completion for the house. This date is based on a document, "Accounts of a Settlement and Division Estimated and Made of the Bank Stock, & some Debts due to the Estate of Robert Esq., Sr., Esq., Deed, by John Carter and Charles Carter, Esqs., Executors and Residuary Legatees at Corotoman, June 28th 1737." Wright, ed.. Letters, 135-47. However, my reading of the account book interprets the document as saying only that John Carter assumed the obligation "to pay all these legacies [including one to Judith Page for Rosewell] the respective legatees." It says nothing about his actu- ally paying them on this date, and the Carters were not always prompt in paying their bills and obligations. My thanks to John Harden Histo- rian, at Tryon Palace, who has done extensive research on the Carter family for his insight into this matter during a telephone conversation on 15 July 1992.
31. The specific year of 1741 is argued by some to be the year of Rose- well's completion because on 31 December of that year Mann Page II married Alice Grymes of Brandon in Middlesex County. It is possible that Page wanted the house finished before his marriage.
32. Thanks to Suber for this discovery which also reinforces the author's belief that Waterman was working, either consciously or unconscious- ly, to maintain particular geometric preconceptions.
33. A generation later this was probably the case with John Tayloe II and the building of Mt. Airy in Richmond County. See William M. S. Ras- mussen, "Palladio in Tidewater Virginia," in Building by the Book, ed. by Mario di Valmarana (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), 75-109. Rasmussen stated that a "letter of 1754 from Edmund Jennings of Maryland suggests that John Tayloe II was more than like- ly the designer of the house" (p. 77).
34. Wright, Letters, 4. The American Heritage Dictionary, 1978 edition, defines "finical" as "Fastidious; finicky. [Probably originally university slang, irregularly from FINE (delicate). "Schymity" is not listed at all.
35. Richmond Enquirer, 12 Dec. 1852.
36. Brown also suggested that the north door was the main entrance to the mansion. Brown, "Rosewell," 71, 86.
37. Gunther, Architecture, 27.
38. Robert "King" Carter Letterbooks (#3807), entry for 9 Nov. 1727, Man- uscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Vir- ginia.
39. William Byrd II also mentioned Colonel Page's boat during his trip to
52 MESDA
Gloucester with Robert "King" Carter in October 1720. Byrd, London Diary, 465, 466.
40. The earlier dwelling was probably located very close to its successor. While archaeology has not been conducted extensively at the site, a dig conducted in fall 1991 revealed the foundations of a small house that cut diagonally across the northeast corner of the present ruins. This structure may have been either the "dwelling house" or "store" that Robert Carter mentioned on 25 March 1721. Wright, Letters, 90. Conversation with Nicholas Lucketti at Rosewell, 11 Oct. 1991.
41. Mrs. Saunders referred to "the great back door" in a context that sug- gests the garden side of the house since the next paragraph refers to servants assembling in the parlor rather than the hall. Saunders, Leono- ra, 13.
42. Brown raised some question about the hall being fully paneled given the possibility of tapestries in the room; however, there seems no rea- son to think othen^'ise given the architectural evidence of other eigh- teenth-century contemporaries such as Sabine Hall, Williamsburg's Peyton Randolph House, and Tuckahoe. Unfortunately, other than the William Fitzhugh order mentioned later, we have no reference to tapestries in Virginia. However, the combination of fully-panelled walls hung with tapestries is not unusual in English houses of the peri- od.
43. An exception to this is the Peyton Randolph House, Williamsburg, which has a round-headed window on the landing of its main stair. Some architectural historians maintain that these features are merely part of the Georgian vocabulary; however, the fact that they show up on so few Virginia houses suggests that those builders that did utilize the compass-headed window were trying to make a status statement identifying themselves and their dwellings with their roles in colonial public life. This would certainly be true of Peyton Randolph in his position as Speaker of the House of Burgesses. Carter Hudgins made a similar comparison in writing of Robert "King" Carter: "Just as Carter's multiple roles in government overlapped with his role as a planter, so the function and hence the appearance of his house mixed the conventions of public buildings with those of a private residence." Carter L. Hudgins, "Patrician Culture, Public Ritual and Political Authority in Virginia, 1680-1740, " (Ph.D. dissertation. College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va.), 253.
44. Philip Vickers Fithian, Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, \lli-\llA (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, n.d.), 184.
45. John Conforth, "Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire - I," Country Life {\1 Nov. 1988): 100-105.
46. Christopher Morris, ed., Ihe Journeys of Celia Fiennes {London-. Cres- set Press, 1949), 24.
47. Country Life, 17 Nov. 1988.
48. Saunders, Leonora, 4.
49. Letter from John and Charles Carter, Rappahannock River, Va., 10 Nov. 1733, to Messrs. Hayward and Chambers, Merchants in Madeira: "We want five hundred feet of fine Madeira Wood fit for Tables or Wain-
November, 1993 53
scotting, to be worked up in Colonel Page's House." See the "Execu- tive Papers of Robert Carter," Manuscripts Dept., Alderman Library, Charlottesville. My thanks to Henrietta S. Goodwin who allowed me access to her transcription of the letterbooks done for Christ Church, Lancaster County.
50. Messenger, 10 :4l-42.
51. Richard Beale Davis, ed., William Fitzhugh and His Chesapeake World, 1676-1701 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 142. Linda Baumgarten, Curator of Textiles at Colonial Williamsburg, knows of no other Chesapeake references to domestic tapestries.
53. Linda Baumgarten states that Mrs. Saunders's description of the pall closely matches what we know about eighteenth-century examples. The one exception is the fringe. However, Linda points out that this could easily have been added at a later date. Conversation with Linda Baumgarten, 31 Aug. 1992.
54. One eighteenth-century visitor resented receiving such treatment: "I did not approve of waiting for her [Mrs. Campbell] in the passage." Jane Carson, comp., We Were There (Charlottesville: University Press of Virg:
55. Fithian, Journal, 129.
56. Meade, Old Churches, 348. This was not a portrait of a family member but of an Algerian named Selim who, through a series of misadven- tures, wound up in Virginia in the eighteenth century. Supposedly, while in Philadelphia, John Page had Peale paint Selim's portrait, which was shipped to Virginia and hung at Rosewell. Unfortunately, since the looting of the Robert Saunders home in Williamsburg during the Civil War, noted earlier, the portrait has not been traced, and noth- ing more is known of it. My thanks to Lillian B. Miller, co-editor of New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale (Pittsburgh: University of Pitts- burgh Press, 1991), for providing me with this information.
57. In the 1847 Sketches of Old Virginia Family Servants (p. 29), Old Milly recalled that "it was madam Judith that taught me my prayers and cat- echism. She had all the black children every Sunday in the great hall, to teach them, and she saw them all christened." Madam Judith was Judith Carter Page.
58. Sketches, 24.
59 Dell Upton, "Early Vernacular Architecture in Southeastern Virginia" (Ph.D. diss.. Brown University, 1979), 1:151.
60. This would allow Mann Page II to leave his namesake Mann Page III an important residence as well. Many have speculated that this was the elder Page's motivation. My thanks to Cathleene Hellier of Colonial Williamsburg's Research Department for sending me confirmation of this theory with the following reference: "At length I am inform'd that some of the Miss Burwells in York will soon change their Situation . . . that Miss Fanny Burwell proposes to grace Rosewell which Mr. Mann Page intends to resign to his Son for that reason and to remove his own to the neighborhood of Cleve." Mrs. Maria Beverley to Maria
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Carter, 20 Apr. 1764, in "Family Letters of the Eighteenth Century, "Vir- ginia Historical Magazine 15, no. 4 (Apr. 1908), 434.
61. Mark R. Wenger has presented a thoughtful analysis of the emergence of the passage and its consequent use as a summer hall in Virginia~s domestic buildings. As Wenger notes, Philip Vickers Fithian refers to the summer hall at Mt. Airy, the seat of John Tayloe II and brother of Ann Tayloe Page, Mann Page II's second wife. Mark R. Wenger, "The Central Passage in Virginia: Evolution of an Eighteenth-Century Living Space," in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, ed. by Camille Wells (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 137-49.
62. Rasmussen, "Palladio," 81.
63- There is a family tradition that the marble floor survived into the 1840s and that the floor was hard to keep clean in the summer because it "sweated." Supposedly the marble pavers were laid in a bed of cinders above the vaulted brick cellar. While I have not been able to document this tradition, my thanks to Wright Houghland of Williamsburg for informing me of it. It is always possible that confirmation may be forth- coming. In Journeys of Celia Fiennes, Celia describes Yorkshire's Newby Hall as having " 2 dineing roomes and drawing roomes, one for the summer with a marble floore." Morris, e6., Journeys. 85; Fithi- an, Journal, 152, 156. At one point I had theorized that John Page had replaced the marble floor with wood in his renovations to Rosewell in the early 1770s . Upon rereading the Noel Humes's archaeological report and given family tradition, I think Page probably changed the windows but left the hall's marble pavers alone.
64. Mark R. Wenger, "The Dining Room in Early Virginia," Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture III iColumbiz, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 149-59.
65. "Hall" persisted as a room name through a good part of the eighteenth century. A survey of room-by-room inventories by the author indicates that out of 46 Tidewater inventories spanning the years 1750-95, 35 households still had a room known as the hall. While Rosewell's near contemporary, Stratford Hall, still had a "hall" in 1776, Sabine Hall and the Nelson House, also roughly contemporary, did not. These latter two houses, with their more conventional layouts that included pas- sages, could more easily adapt to changes in room names.
66. In 1737, the Truro Parish Registry requested the new glebe house to be equipped with a "hall or entertaining room." Upton, Early Vernac- ular," 265. North, Of Building, 78.
67. Upton, "Early Vernacular," 296.
68. These sorts of furnishings are enumerated in Mann Page Ill's 1803 inventory for Mannsfield, Spotsylvania County. Unfortunately, the list- ing seems to be incomplete given the presence of only one looking glass, one card table, and one dressing table. No tea table is listed, nor are prints or portraits, although the omission of graphics, especially paintings, is not that unusual. It is possible that the family removed objects of sentimental value from the house shortly after Page's death in March 1803; the inventory was not taken until December of that year. Leviner, "Page Family," 53-55.
November, 1993 55
69. Meade, Old Churches, 348.
70. For example, Matjti Page II, Alice Grymes Page and Her Son John, and John Page (as a young man) are among the Page portraits owned by the College of William and Mary and are illustrated in Leviner, "The Pages," 8, 9, 12.
71. "New in the Collection," Luminary, 9, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 5.
72. Saunders, Leonora, 12. The word closet was in a state of transition in the eighteenth century. Previously it had meant a small private room used by an individual to store valuable objects, ranging from books to objets d'art to a simple table and chairs. Samuel Pepys in his diary for 1663 gave a description of the continuing work and outfitting of his wife's closet. By the mid-eighteenth century, closets were approach- ing the modern definition of the word. Confusing the issue further is the term bowfat, which was used to designate a built-in cupboard as well as a free-standing piece of furniture, as opposed to closet, for storing drinking and dining wares.
73- McCord, "John Page," 442.
74. Robert Carter to Jno. Starke, letter, 4 Sept. 1723, Carter Diary and Let- terbooks. University of Virginia; Hume, Excavations, 192, fig. 16.
75. Closets coud be used for everything from storage of books to silver to ceramics to miscellaneous objects. Closets were outfitted with locks that secured those items stored in them; see William Byrd II's diary entry for 15 April 1709, where he mentioned "I mended the locks of my closet and secretary." Byrd, Diary, 21. The one thing that closets generally were not used for was the storage of clothing, but even this had begun to change by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In Williamsburg, Peyton Randolph's inventory of 1776 lists no case piece in what was Betty and Peyton's bedchamber. However, the room is equipped with two closets flanking the fireplace. Architectural exami- nation reveals one closet was outfitted with shelves while the other probably had pegs. York County Orders and Wills, 22 (1771-83), 344- 46. Contrary to what is heard in many house museum interpretations, closets definitely existed in the eighteenth century.
76. Saunders, Leonora, 12.
77 Westmoreland County Records, Inventories 1 (1723-46), 110-1 11a.
78. Channing Moore Page, Genealogy of the Page Family in Virginia, 2nd. ed. (Harrisonburg, Va: C.J. Carrier Co., 1983), 48.
79. Middlesex County Will Book A, 1698-1713, 113-32.
80. York County Orders and Wills, 15 (1716-20), 145-52.
81. "Carter Papers," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 6, no. 2 (Oct. 1898): 145-52.
82. Brown, "Rosewell," 93, 101; Leviner, "Rosewell."
83. Sketches, 29.
84. Dell Upton, "Vernacular Domestic Architecture in Eighteenth Century Virginia," Winterthiir Portfolio 17, nos. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1982): 95-119.
85. This John Page was the second husband of Mary Mann Page, the wid-
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ow of Matthew and mother of Mann Page I. For a copy of this John Page's will, see Page, Genealogy, 47-51.
86. Hudgins, "Patrician," 248-58.
87. This exterior door on the west at one point did have steps leading up to it. However, another photograph of approximately the same view shows no exterior steps in this location. See Waterman and Barrows, Domestic, 86, 89.
88. My thanks to Willie Graham for his assistance in making these mea- surements.
89. Carter Diary, 23 Dec. 1723, Alderman Library.
90. Carter Diary, 20 Dec. 1723, Alderman Library.
91. Kemper, "Council Journals," 39.
92. Saunders, Leonora, 18.
93. Wenger, "Central Passage," 137-49.
94. Menokin's floor plan survives in the collection of the Virginia Histori- cal Society. Its first floor contained an entry with a stairway, a study, a dining room, and two chambers. Other gentry-level houses that can be cited as not exhibiting the conventional triumvirate of public rooms include Shirley, Charles City County; Kenmore, Fredericksburg; and Mt. Airy, Richmond County, before its 1844 fire.
95. Ijohn Page], A Deed of Gift To My Dear Son, Captain Matt. Page (Philadelphia: Henry B. Ashmead, 1856), iv.
96. [John Carter] to Charles Carter, 26 Aug. 1738, "Executive Papers of Robert Carter," Alderman Library, University of Virginia, transcribed by Henrietta G. Goodwin.
97. During John Page's tenure at Rosewell, we know that he and his wife Fanny whiled away the winter hours of 1774 playing whist. McCord, "John Page," 456. After Governor Robert Dinwiddie left the colony in 1758, various pieces of his personal effects were purchased by Vir- ginians, including a "silver table" by a member of the Page family. See Hood, Governor's Palace, 65.
98. [Page], Sketches, 29.
99. In Lord Botetourt's inventory there were similar entries for "In the Closet" off the parlor and "Closet off the Passage up stairs." Invento- ries of Four Eighteenth-Century Houses in the Historic Area of Williamsburg (Wi lliamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1974), 5, 8.
100. A spice chest in the collection of the Virginia Historical Society, ace. FU973.33, is a product of Williamsburg, made about 1760. It is made of mahogany and yellow pine, primary and secondary woods, respec- tively. The chest has a family tradition of having first been at Rosewell and then being moved to Mannsfield. As for patterns in other house- holds, the 1742 inventory of Newman Brockenbrough lists such items as tea canisters, coffee pots, candlesticks, and knives and forks "in the closet at the end of the Chamber." Richmond County Will Book 5 (1725-53), 403-409. Mrs. George Mason's closet contained -'precious stores for the Table," and the 1776 inventory of Peyton Randolph's estate mentioned items in a closet context. John Mason, "The Recol-
November, 1993 57
lections of John Mason" (typescript transcribed and abridged by Terry Dunn, George Mason University, from an original in the Gunston Hall archives, Lorton, Va.): 8; Inventories, 25. The 1776 inventory of Peyton Randolph's estate mentions similar Items in a closet context.
101. McCord, "John Page," 1990. Jonathan Prown, Assistant Curator of Fur- niture at Colonial Williamsburg, concurs that "green chairs" would refer to Windsors during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
102. Frances N. Mason, ed., John Norton and Sons, Merchants of London and Virginia, Being the Papers from their Counting House for the Years 1 750 to 1 795 (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1937), 94.
103. Mason, /o^?7 Norton, 125-26.
104. According to the research file on Rosewell in Colonial Williamsburg's Department of the Library, an interior panel from Rosewell was used as a model for the shade of red paint applied to the gates at the recon- structed Capitol ("Capitol gates painted red color to match an old panel from 'Rosewell' in possession of E. K. Perry of Boston"). Could this possibly be a panel from Leonora's red room? As for the blue room, Mrs. Saunders mentioned a blue quilt on the bed in this cham- ber.
105. Wenger, "Central Passage," 139.
106. Although the contents of Mannsfield's second floor are all lumped to- gether, the listing goes on to enumerate items that suggest several chambers. Spotsylvania County Will Book E, 303306.
107. Saunders, Leonora, 6.
108. Mark R. Wenger, "The Domestic Pageant: Society and the Great House in America" (forthcoming article). My thanks to Wenger for permitting me to read a draft of this article.
109. Secondary sources seem to prefer to spell "Ann" with an e. However, in his will Mann Page II refers to his wife as "Ann Corbin Page"; see Will Book E, Spotsylvania County Court Records. The Genealogy of the Page Family in Virginia (Harrisonburg, Va.: C. J. Carrier Company, 1983) spells "Ann" without an e when citing a tombstone inscription on page 69, but its secondary references adds an e to her first name. Editor's note: Family tradition maintains that there was an e. There has been an "Anne" in every generation of the family, including the editor of this Journal, and all have been told that they were tiamedfor Mann Page II 's "Anne."
110. Mann Page II was one of several sons; as a boy, he and his brothers may have stayed in one of the outbuildings with a tutor since the two primary outbuildings are described as a kitchen and a dwelling in early nineteenth-century insurance policies. Brown, "Rosewell," 59. During Governor John Page's youth, he was educated first by his grandmoth- er, Judith Carter Page, whom he described as "one of the most sensi- ble and best informed women I ever knew." Virginia Historical Regis- ter 5: 144. Later he entered a grammar school run by the Reverend William Yates at the glebe house of Abingdon Parish for twelve months, but returned home 'due to Mr. Yates's "passionate disposition" and was taught by a tutor, Mr. William Price, over the next three years. Price may have been housed in an outside school house along with
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the boys of the family in the 1750s. In addition to this being the case with Philip Vickers Fithian, John Harrower, a tutor at Belvidere in Spot- sylvania County in the 1770S, experienced the same kind of arrange- ment. There was also an outside school room complete with beds at both Sabine Hall and Stratford.
111. Fithian, your«a/, 184-85.
112. Fithian, Journals, 80; Thomas Lee Shippen, Westover, to Dr. William Shippen, Jr., Philadelphia, letter, 30 Dec. 1783, Shippen Family Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. A photostat copy is in the Department of the Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
113. The openings on the east side of Rosewell's second floor are larger than those on the west; this corresponds with the first floor.
114. John Carter to Micajah Perry, letter, 12 Aug. 1735, in the Executive Papers of Robert Carter, Alderman Library. It is interesting to note that John Carter took under his wing Benjamin Waller, born in 1716, the youngest child of Colonel John Waller of King William county. It is possible that Ann Waller was a relation of the family. Lynda Rees Heaton, ed., "Littleton Waller Tazewell's Sketch of His Own Family . . . 1823" (M. A. thesis. College of William and Mary, 1967), 129, 244.
115. At Gunston Hall, there was a "tutoress" as well as a tutor. Mason, Rec- ollections, 20.
116. Rasmussen, "Palladio," 84.
117. Page, Genealogy: 48.
118. Shippen to Shippen, 30 Dec. 1783.
119. Richmond County Will Book 7, 239-70; Sabine Hall Papers (#1939), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia; Lancaster County Wills and Deeds 20, 1770-83, 200-204.
120. Westmoreland County Inventories and Accounts, Book 6, 173121.
121. One of the problems with comparing and contrasting estate invento- ries is the age and outlook of individuals. Nicholas Flood and Landon Carter, for example, were neighbors and contemporaries in Richmond County and died within three years of each other. Yet Flood's inven- tory goes on for 30 pages of typescript, while Carter~s takes up only 5 pages. Flood was obviously in the vanguard of eighteenth-century consumerism, while Carter was more restrained in his purchases. Another distinguishing characteristic of different inventories is the age of the person involved. A man dying at the age of 30 in 1775 would have different items in his dwelling as compared to a man dying in the same year but at the age of 75. Aside from inherited goods, the younger would have had less time to accumulate possessions, and these would be of a more recent date and production. The older man would likely have belongings that would date back to the beginning of his adult life. This is one of the reasons that students of material cul- ture are careful to put subjects into a context that seems closest to their social, chronological, and economic position, and to point out instances in which this is not possible. In the case of the Pages, where so little written material survives, I have tried to compare them with other gentry households through a continuum of roughly 75 years.
November, 1993 59
122. Southern Literary Messenger \0A\.
123. Leviner, "The Page Family."
124. North, Of Buildings, 60.
125. My thanks to Ed Chappell, Willie Graham, and Mark Wenger for this information relating to Shirley's woodwork.
126. "About Christmas last one Mr. Richason head Overseer at Rosewell desired to be discharged." John Carter, Corotoman, to Mr. Alderman Perry, 1 Aug. 1735, Executive Papers of Robert Carter, Alderman Library. At Sabine Hall in 1779 Landon Carter's probate inventory iden- tified one room as the "Overseers Room" in what appears to be the main body of the house. See "Inventory of the Estate of Landon Carter, February 1779, " Carter Papers, Alderman Library.
127. Shippen to Shippen, 30 Dec. 1787.
128. North, Of Buildings, 86.
129. Saunders, Leonora, 3. Unlike the Governor's Palace, where the single cupola could be situated centrally over the centrallylocated stair, Rosewell's stair placement did not allow for this arrangement. The back stairway continued its ascent on the west side of the building from the cellar up through the third floor onto the roof. Thus, the access to the roof — through the cupola — had to be on the west side. Without the addition of a similar structure on the eastern side of the roof, the house would have been off-balance. The evidence for the back stair beginning in the cellar comes from Leonora and the Ghost (p. 3) and Mark R. Wenger's observations of building evidence at the ruins of Rosewell.
130. Martin Wainwright, "Sandwiches in the Temple," Country Life (9 July 1987): 97.
131. Howe, Historical Collections, 281. In Of Building. Roger North gives another view of cupolas: "If there be a prospect, few care to mount so high for the sake of it; and no oven is more insupportable hott than such a place in the summer" (p. 60). It is possible that North was refer- ring to cupolas with windows that could not be opened to provide ventilation.
132. Saunders, Leonora, 4.
133. Discussion with Treve Rosoman, Curator, Architectural Study Collec- tion, English Heritage, 10 June 1992. A 1769 Williamsburg advertise- ment described for sale "all sorts of sheet lead, pipes for conveying water from the tops of houses, cisterns" as offered by the partnership of Kidd and Kendall. Williamsburg Virginia Gazette {?uxd\e and Dix- on), 28 Sept. 1769. We Builder's Dictionaty described the process of collecting water: "The Manner of bringing together Rain- Water, is of Channels made of different Materials, fLxed to the Edge of the Roofs of Houses, which convey the Water into a small Bason made of Lead or Tin, in the Midst of which, there is a Hole through which the water passes into a Pipe that is there; and which, before it enters into the Cistern, helps it to fall into a Stone Trough made on purpose near the Cistern." A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, The Builder's Dictionary: or. Gentleman and Architect's Companion, 1734 (reprint. Washington, D.
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C: Association for Preservation Technology, 1981). My thanks to Jan K. Gilliam for calling not only the cistern reference to my attention but reminding me once again of the importance of this work. John Carter of Shirley, for example, was familiar with wages cited in the Builder's Dictionary (see preface of reprint). Also, see Dan Cruickshank and Neil Burton, Life in the Georgian City (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990): 8788. I appreciate Kevin Rogers of the Victoria and Albert's internship program for passing along this reference.
134. Sally Robins wrote of Shooters Hill: "Its roof was lead covered, and there was a teeming fish pond." Louise E. Gray, Evelyn Q. Ryland, and Bettie J. Simmons, Historic Buildings in Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1875 ( Chariotte, N. C: Delmar Printers, 1978), 140.
135. In 1738 one English writer described an East Anglian house as "a neat pile of brick, on the summit whereof is a lofty lantern or turret, and on the top of this house he (being a very great humorist) erected a fish- pond, with a bason of lead to contain the water." Colvin, Of Building. 7, fn. 6. Even in the seventeenth century, at one of King James's hous- es, Theobalds, an observer noted: "The upper part of [the summer house] is set round with cisterns of lead into which water is conveyed through pipes, so that fish may be kept in them, and in summer time they are very convenient for bathing." 'Wainwright, "Sandwiches," 97.
136. Saunders, Leonora, 4.
137. On 1 May 1800, Josiah Husey, Professor of Greenville College, adver- tised in a Salisbury newspaper that scientific apparatus purchased for Greenville College consisted of "a Telescope, a set of Globes, Micro- scope, Thermometer, Barometer, five Maps of the World on Canvas, Orrery, and Planet-arium, a Cast of Mathematical Instruments, Astro- nomical Quadrant, an Electrical Machine." Salisbury North Carolina Mercury, 1 May 1800. My thanks to Marilyn Melchor for calling this announcement to my attention.
138. See Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's Collection Division's file on "Sofas and Settees" under "Southern Furniture" for reference to this piece.
139. See Minutes of Curators' Meeting, 13 Feb. 1990, Collections Division, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, for reference to this object. Unfor- tunately, the stand's canisters or cruets have not survived.
140. Benjamin Harrison, Rosewell, to John Baylor, New Market, letter, 6 May 1779, Baylor Papers (#2257), Manuscripts Division, Special Col- lections, University of Virginia. My special thanks to Marilyn Melchor for her help in searching out Page family references at the Alderman Library. She made it possible to cover an amazing amount of material in a limited amount of time.
141. Thomas W. Sweeney, "Renaissance at Rosewell," Historic Preservation News (July /Aug. 199 2), 14-15.
November, 1993 6I
Book Reviews
Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation
Slavery. By John Michael Vlach.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Pp. XX, 258.
To white observers visiting an antebellum southern plan- tation, the enslaved African-Americans whose labor under- wrote the place might have seemed like obscure figures on the landscape: moving across fields, around quarters and farm buildings, shunted to the margins of the plantation hier- archy, living in the shadow of the big house, they were seem- ingly pawns to the master's ownership of the land and of their own bodies. But as John Michael Vlach demonstrates in this beautifully written and illustrated study of slavery and plan- tation architecture, slaves had a far more complex relation- ship to the land and buildings where they worked and lived. In keeping with recent scholarship stressing the initiative and creative adaptiveness of bonded African Americans, Vlach argues that slaves "appropriated" plantation spaces for them- selves, imbuing fields, cabins, gardens, and work stations with a proprietary sense of ownership. By creating what Vlach calls a "black landscape," slaves defined the physical and cultural spaces where they forged the strong sense of community that helped them withstand slavery's traumas.
Vlach points out that studies of plantation architecture, in their enthusiasm for the splendor of the antebellum mansion, traditionally have ignored the spaces occupied by black workers who comprised the great majority of plantation inhabitants. He maintains that an understanding of the plan- tation can scarcely be complete without considering all its human and physical components. For this study the author, whose previous work has ranged over many aspects of African-American material culture from textiles to metalwork
November, 1993 63
to grave decoration, has tapped a cache of little-used pho- tographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey. The 23,000 images the Survey has collected national- ly since the 1930s include some 500 photos and 100 plans of slave dwellings and work sites throughout the South, many of which have collapsed or been destroyed since being recorded on film or paper. Approximately 200 of these pic- tures analyzed by Vlach make up a stunning composite por- trait representative of the physical environment of many of the South's black captives, who numbered four million on the eve of the Civil War. Vlach complements the illustrations with effective use of slave narratives, planters' diaries, and a grow- ing body of secondary literature to explore the ways slaves shaped — insofar as they were able — and interpreted this environment.
Ranging across the spectrum of southern staple agricul- ture, Vlach devotes separate chapters to individual buildings and spaces typically found on tobacco, cotton, sugar, and rice plantations: the big house, kitchens, yards, outbuildings, barns, overseers' houses, quarters for house slaves and field hands, and so on. Vlach interweaves careful descriptions of these spaces and their uses with consideration of the mean- ings invested in them by slaves and planters. Two final chap- ters analyze how these discrete parts fit together as organic "plantation ensembles." He concludes that slaves claimed many of these spaces as their own, thereby establishing "defensible social boundaries for their communities" and gaining a "sense of place" (pp. 236-37).
Not that such achievements were easily won. In fact, attempts by slaves and planters to define plantation spaces in their own ways often involved an intense, if unequal and sometimes brutal, power struggle. Vlach is at his best in prob- ing these conflicts. Smokehouses, for example, symbolized planters' power because often manipulated food distribution as a means of social control and also used smokehouses as a means of social control as well as punishment cells or torture chambers. Vlach cites the case of William Wells Brown, an escaped slave who was recaptured, hung by his wrists in the smokehouse, whipped, and then literally smoked like a side of pork with a fire of tobacco stems. But smokehouses also were clandestine sources of food for slaves who helped themselves to its supplies when they could.
64 MESDA
Similarly, chapels, gardens, and slave dwellings were sites of contests where planters sought to enforce their notions of tidiness, order, and discipline while slaves countered by stub- bornly asserting their own spiritual and aesthetic ideals. When an African-born slave named Okra in Georgia built a house in an African design, his master quickly forced him to tear it down. But in many cases, Vlach argues, slaves simply ignored or violated planters' efforts to control their use of space so often that they compelled masters to recognize vir- tually autonomous spheres of slave activity and culture.
For all the emotional impact of the illustrations and text, Vlach's approach is not without its limitations. The great majority of photos and drawings he analyzes depict nine- teenth- century buildings, since few slave dwellings and other structures associated with African-American activity during the colonial era have survived. While he does not complete- ly ignore the development of the plantation landscape during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Vlach's focus on the antebellum period tends to minimize the evolution of enslaved Africans' responses to their new environment in the formative years of the plantation system. At what point in their transition from a heavily African population to an African-American one did blacks begin to identify with and claim physical settings as their own? At times the theme of contest over space gets lost amid technical descriptions of the working of buildings such as barns, stables, outbuildings, and kitchens. Often it is unclear whether slaves actually built the many structures in and around which they spent so much of their lives. Could their craftsmanship in consruction have helped foster the sense of ownership that so infused slaves' view of their surroundings?
Vlach has nonetheless made a compelling case for the close connection between physical space and a more abstract notion of cultural space in the lives of antebellum slaves. By showing that blacks had an engaged though often ambiguous relationship to the land and buildings around them, he offers a new way to study African-American culture while proving the centrality of material culture in southern history.
Jon Sensbach
Institute of Early American History and Culture,
Williamsburg, Virgina.
November, 1993 65
Flowerdeiv Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia
Plantation, 1619-1864. By James Deetz. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1993.
204 pages. Appendix, notes, index.
James Deetz has been a prominent figure in the field of historical archaeology for several decades. Trained in anthro- pology, he was one of those who participated in establishing historical archaeology as a legitimate area of scholarship, at a time when many contended that there was no place or need for the discipline. Those opposing the creation of a branch of archaeology addressing the historical record contended that there was no need for archaeological examination of the remains of historic societies, as historical documentation had already provided all necessary information. Deetz and others, such as Harrington, South, Noel-Hume, led the way in devel- oping techniques and areas of inquiry in the study of historic archaeological remains. These scholars, followed by others, demonstrated new information available to history, anthro- pology, and the humanities through the examination of mate- rial remains.
The subject of this book is the historical archaeology of Flowerdew Hundred, an early Virginia plantation founded in 1619 by George Yeardly, Virginia's first governor. As an important archaeological complex in the greatly significant Chesapeake and James River heartland of colonial America, the investigation of Flowerdew Hundred had great appeal to the professionals and the interested nonprofessional as well. Because of that and because of Deetz's position as one of the leaders in the development of this field, this book is particu- larly disappointing. It has a number of substantive problems and overly impressionistic flavor when what is called for is clarity of organization, depth in the presentation of the archaeological record, and an attention to detail.
Excavations at Flowerdew Hundred, on the James River, were initiated in 1971 and continued under the direction of Norman Barka until 1978. In 1980 Deetz initiated a research program on the site that has continued to the present. In the course of the work, seventeen field archaeologists of "various affiliations" partially or completely excavated eleven sites. It is the diffuse nature of the scholarship on Flowerdew Hun-
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dred that may have contributed to some of the problems in the book. Deetz indicates in his acknowledgments that little of the information in the text is the result of excavations in which he was involved "except in the most general of ways, as overall project director."
Deetz states that his research design is concerned with the closeness of fit between archaeological evidence found at Flowerdew Hundred and the history of the colony and the wodd of which it was a part. He proposes a research design that is necessarily global in perspective, as the systems influ- encing historic groups were global. Deetz states that the research design is a model that will allow one to fit all the parts into a coherent whole, with little or nothing left over to be explained in other terms. Unfortunately this treatment leaves many questions without providing any explanations.
Deetz proposes that historical archaeology has two values. He regards as its prime value its ability to take into account large numbers of past people who are invisible in the docu- mentation of history. Secondly, it creates historic contexts by providing a view of everyday, commonplace objects. Deetz cautions the reader that "events taking place far beyond their immediate horizon" affected the families represented by the eighteen known sites at Flowerdew Hundred. Beyond that there is no statement of research goals to address what was taking place within the bounds of that horizon, which may or may not fit into a globally oriented research design. Presup- posing that all behavior fits into such a broad research state- ment, "with little or nothing left over to be explained in other terms," does not do justice to the archaeology of place.
Deetz draws from a number of sites at Flowerdew Hun- dred for his discussions, presenting three sets of colonial peri- od sites ranging from the early seventeenth century through the eighteenth century. Added to this is a discussion of a fourth set of sites that relate to nineteenth-century plantation activities. It is on the level of the specific discussions that problems begin to arise in the text.
The first problem, which is encountered almost immedi- ately and remains present throughout, is that the maps, site drawings, and photographs are completely inadequate. A map is presented which is an outline of a peninsula protrud- ing into the James River with sixteen site numbers and the name "Grants Crossing" adjacent to the river. This figure is
November, 1993 67
provided as the base map of the Flowerdew Hundred sites without showing the reader the boundaries of the plantation, nor any topographic information, although topography emerges in the discussion as an important point. Four differ- ent sets of sites are at the crux of the discussion, but no means is provided on the base map for differentiating the sites of each set. There is no scale on this base map, and one site discussed in the text is inexplicably absent. The book provides other maps, one with two sites juxtaposed in a con- fusing manner, reflecting the logistics of the figure rather than reality on the ground. The apparent reversal of the north arrow furthers the confusion. Another omission is the absence of a significant archaeological feature from the site drawing. At numerous points in the text, additional mapping, site drawings, and site photographs would do much to clari- fy the subject. Beyond this, there are figures of significant arti- facts presented without site numbers, joining a laxness in the use of site numbers within the text.
Associations that should provide a basic element context, found through archaeological examination and explication, anchor Flowerdew Hundred's archaeological record to the ground. Deetz, by moving his considerations to the level of "global" analysis, is relieved of the necessity of consistently addressing the intra-plantation systems and variables, which should be a part of the discussion of Flowerdew Hundred. The failure to provide basic information about the internal composition and organization of Flowerdew Hundred through time and in space is the basic failure of this book. There is no comprehensive statement of what Flowerdew Hundred was and is in its own terms, archaeologically and historically.
Basic contextual information about what was and is pre- sent on (and in) the ground, together with a clear and con- cise statement of the containing historical (documentary) context is required. This is absent from this presentation. This information is necessary to consider what Deetz proposes, and without it his tenuous linkages of selected sites with the broad processes of world systems cannot be properly evalu- ated. In its absence the discussion lacks the coherence derived from a thorough, efficient statement of the Flow- erdew Hundred plantation context. Explication of the archae- ological record particularly requires clear, complete, and
68 MESDA
well-conceived mapping, photographs, and statement of con- text where sets of data in relationship to each other, to boundaries, and to topography, are the subject of discussion. Any reader, whatever his level of expertise, would benefit from more thoughtful provision of these basic tools and will suffer while wrestling with those provided in this book.
The presentation in the text is organized around several sets of archaeological sites found at Flowerdew Hundred. The identification of the first three sets was accomplished using Harrington's pipe stem histogram technique. Harring- ton's technique is designed, by measuring pipe stem hose diameters, to demonstrate the time of initial occupation, peak of occupation, and end of occupation. This is possible because the sizes of pipe stem holes changed in a known reg- ularity through time. Based on this technique. Deist and his colleagues identified seven sites in group one, with a sharp peak of occupation between circa 1620 through 1650; a sec- ond group of six sites, showing an overlap with groups one and three, peaking "in the later seventeenth century"; and group three with a sharp peak of occupation in the first half of the eighteenth century. The peak at the beginning of the seventeenth relates to an economic boom based on the intro- duction of a valuable tobacco type into Virginia, and the peak in the eighteenth century relates to a dramatic increase in the labor force through the importation of slaves, according to Deetz's meshing of the historic record and the archaeological data.
The first set of sites treated by Deetz primarily consists of an enclosed compound with two earthfast (post in ground) buildings, one possibly a dwelling, the other a warehouse (44 PG 65; and a dwelling house with a stone foundation within a yard with three graves outlined by massive posts, related to an enigmatic rectangular pit and a second enclosure (44 PG 64). The initial discussion of these features omits the site numbers, forcing the reader to thumb back ten or twelve pages to one unclear figure and the base map, presented on adjoining pages, in an attempt to follow the discourse. These eventually emerge as two of the seven sites in the first set. The remaining five sites of the set are touched on in very brief paragraph descriptions, with little interpretation. Those listed are three surface collections of early seventeenth-century sites, plus one excavated earthfast building thought to be the
November, 1993 69
remains "of either a barn or a warehouse," and another exca- vated earthfast dwelling house with a possible bake oven.
Deetz handily sorts out the temporal relationship between the structures of the enclosed compound (44 PG 65) and the dwelling house with the stone footing (44 PG 65). He has determined that the ruin with the stone footings and the grave relates to Andrew Piersey's 1624 purchase of Flow- erdew Hundred, and that this is a house Piersey built, although exactly where was not known. Further, Deetz satis- factorily makes the case that one of the three graves is Piersey's. Although Deetz uses the other two graves in an introductory piece of fiction that suggests subservient roles, the identity of these two internments, a man and a child, was not alluded to in his archaeological interpretations.
Beyond this, Deetz himself asks what archaeology has told us that we would not know otherwise and answers, "In truth, not all that much, but this is really not an issue." At issue, according to Deetz, is that archaeology has confronted us with a body of material evidence which has led to asking dif- ferent kinds of questions of the written sources.
Deetz has presented us a slight examination of the first set and a very faint analytical treatment of the artifactual return on these early and important sites, and this is, in truth, the real flaw in this book. There is in his presentation a sense of a reluctance to engage the whole body of artifacts from an immensely important group of sites. There is a tone of casu- alness, and boredom with the foundation work of archaeolo- gy, comprehensive artifactual analysis. Deetz in fact explicit- ly cites boredom on a chilly 1984 April day as the stimulus for applying Harrington's histogram techniques to the pipe stem data. This quantification of his data led to the insight on which this book rests, the sorting out of the array of sites into the significant sets and yet there is no evidence of any simi- lar handling of the remaining artifacts collections from Flow- erdew Hundred. There is only the vaguest indication that there are other artifacts present on Flowerdew Hundred sites, excepting the breaking out of certain interesting types for fig- ures (armor) or for analysis, such as Chesapeake incised pipe bowls. This is not a plea for meaningless lists of artifacts, but for the evidence of analytical treatment based on "the com- monplace" objects of material culture.
The second set of sites is partially examined from excava-
70 MESDA
tions on two of the eight sites of the set. Proposed in that set is a tentative interpretation of industrial activities. One site was seen as the location of an iron bloomery for the manu- facture of "small quantities of low-grade iron" and another for the local manufacture of incised English style pipes. Further, there is a discussion of a change in house types within this set. Deetz proposes an attitudinal and cultural change within the population to account for an observation of an unusual cellar hole.
In the third set Deetz enters into an interesting treatment of the presence of Colono ware on these five late colonial sites from the eighteen sites of the three sets. Noting that Colono ware was found on these late sites and not on the ear- lier sets, Deetz analyzes the meaning of this presence. Fol- lowing the work of Richard Polhemous, Stanley south, and, most recently and most prominently, Leland Ferguson, Deetz argues that the ware seen at Flowerdew Hundred was made by slaves. This, he says, correlates with the rapid increase in the number of slaves in the early eighteenth century as well as a change in the relationship between master and slave from that of the first two sets. Following Dell Upton, he argues that before the eighteenth century^ slaves were more likely to be more flexible, with residence in the master's house and no need to produce a separate pottery. Following the change of the early eighteenth century, when slaves would have been settled away from the main house, a sepa- rate slave-manufactured pottery would have resulted. Further, this is compared with South Carolina, where Ferguson reports African forms, rather than the European forms seen in Vir- ginia Colono ware. This accounted for by the early separation of slaves and whites in South Carolina in contrast to the Vir- ginia pattern of shared accommodations. This, says Deetz, allowed slaves to learn European food consumption patterns and vessel forms.
This treatment extends to a discussion of Virginia excised pipes, with a sound argument made for African application of incised motifs on European-style pipes. Deetz cites Susan Henry's 1979 work, which showed a correlation between an increase in the locally produced pipes when low tobacco prices produced a need for cheaper local goods. Evidence from Matthew Emerson's 1988 dissertation that demonstrates African origins for the motifs, suggesting slave manufacture,
November, 1993 71
follows Henry's. The discussion of the set concludes with an identification of an important ferry site.
Following the discussion of the three sets of the eighteen colonial sites at Flowerdew Hundred, Deetz concludes his archaeological review of Flowerdew Hundred with a treat- ment of nineteenth century sites. These, said Deetz, had moved from the bottomlands to the ridgecrest of the planta- tion. Here there is a discussion of mass dumping procedures, which Deetz compares to sites in New England and in South Africa. These mass dumps are single event deposits that con- tain complete arrays of household goods. Deetz concludes that this behavior occurs fifty years after a culture ceases to be a frontier society and represents the time when the first native born generation reaches maturity. Upon reaching this mark, says Deetz, the dumping behavior represents a mass rejection of colonial identity and the assumption of an indi- vidual cultural identity.
Also contained in this section is interpretive speculation about the meaning of food remains in a slave cabin, and the location of a refuse dump at a plantation house kitchen. Of particular interest in this section is a demonstration of the use of Eugene Prince's use of photographic correlation to locate and work with archaeological sites.
Deetz's concluding chapter proposes five issues relating to the future course and development of historical archaeology. They are useful in identifying Deetz's orientation and are pre- sented below without his discussion:
1. The age of any site, in and of itself, is not a determinant of its significance.
2. One should always use the archaeological record as a point of departure in conducting historical research.
3. Historical archaeology is international in scope and must adopt an international comparative method to be of maximum value.
4. Unlike prehistoric archaeology, historical archaeology has close connections with the humanities, particularly histo- ry and folklore.
5. The tangibles of historical archaeology should appeal both to the emotions and the intellect.
Deetz ascribes significance to a site based on how much information will be lost if excavations are not conducted.
72 MESDA
which he strongly binds to the richness of documentary infor- mation. In the consideration of his second point he avers that "compared to the richness of the written record of at least some people, the archaeological record is lean and impover- ished." He proposes that explanations must be move dto the international level of comparison "to be of maximum value," coupled with an interdisciplinary approach involving others, such as folklorists and humanists. He concludes by recogniz- ing that the things of the past have a powerful subjective and emotional message in company with what may be observed with the intellect.
This book is a challenge to move archaeological consid- erations to broad levels of generality and to engage world- wide systems of influence. It is a challenge to see significance in terms other than age, to broaden the spectrum of discipli- nary approaches to the material record and to recognize a poetic appeal in the things of the past. These cautions and points are well taken. Yet in the book there is a sense of untapped richness of an archaeological record which could elaborate on the lean and impoverished written record. There is a sense of a place that existed and exists with a life and poetry of its own that is never adequately addressed. In the end remains the awareness that the book was in fact to be about Flowerdew Hundred, which remains a vague and enig- matic backdrop.
Michael Hartley Archaeologist, Bethania, North Carolina.
November, 1993 73
MESDA seeks manuscripts on any facet of southern decorative art for publication in the fOURNAL. The MESDA staff would also like to exam- ine any privately-held primary research material (documents and man- uscripts) from the South.
Some back issues of the JOURNAL are available.
The preparation of the JOURNAL ivas made possible (in part) by a grant from the Research Tools and Reference Works Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and an independent Federal Agency.
Photographs in this issue are by the staff of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts except ivhere noted.
November, 1993 74
MUSEUM OF EARLY SOUTHERN DECORATIVE ARTS
HOBART G. CAWOOD, President. Old Salem Inc. SALLY GANT, Director, Education and Special Events
RUTH BROOKS. Associate in Education PAULA Y HOOPER, Coordinator of Membership Services FRANK L. HORTON, Director Emeritus PAULA LOCKLAIR, Director, Department of Collections
JOHANNA METZGAR, Assistant Curator and Registrar
JENNIFER ABER, Collections Assistant
BRADFORD L. RAUSCHENBERG, Director, Department of Research
FORS\T"H ALEXANDER, Editor of Publications
WHALEY BATSON, Paintings Consultant
NANCY BEAN, Office Manager
RICHARD MURDOCH, Librarian
MARTHA ROWE, Research Associate
WESLEY STUART, Photographer
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