The medievalism of the seventeenth century was simply the survival of ancient practices and attitudes that had not significantly changed for centuries past. There is no better way to illustrate this point than to consider together the little brick church of St. Luke’s at Smithfield, Virginia, and Sunnyside, the home of Washington Irving near Tarrytown, New York. The former, built in 1632, just twenty-five years after the founding of Jamestown, with its buttresses, pointed-arch windows, and steeply piched roof, is a tiny, distant, but direct descendant of the great Gothic cathedrals of an earlier England.
Not all the houses that were constructed during the first few generations of colonization were of wood. As will be told, stone and brick were also used, in New England as in other regions. In any case, men skilled in the use of all these materials - masons, carpenters, sawyers, and others - and equipped with tools for working them were early on the scene in the New World, and with them most of the popular building techniques of the Old World were quickly transplanted to the wilderness. For obvious reasons wood was from the beginning, and still is, America’s principal building material. By the early seventeenth century timber was becoming scarce in England, and what remained was needed for shipbuilding. But the first settlers in this country, and later generations that moved the frontier inexorably westward, were confronted with an almost overwhelming abundance of timber, dense forests on a scale that Europe had not known for centuries past. Wood was not only plentiful, but it was easily worked by competent craftsmen.
Not only did the colonists have to do their own building, but they had to learn from experience how best to cope with the peculiar conditions of their new environment. Winters in the New World were generally both longer and more severe, and the summers hotter, than settlers from the cool, temperate climate of England and western Europe were accustomed to. In New England, for instance, because of the greater severity of the climate, and because of the availability of better materials, the colonists soon abandoned thatch, so commonly used in England, in favor of wooden shingles for roofing. The fact that thatch posed a serious fire hazard was something else again. Early records of the Plymouth Plantations and the Massachusetts Bay Colony abound in reference to houses that went up in flames because of sparks lighting on thatch roofs.
Those first New Englanders also very soon learned the necessity of covering the exterior walls of their frame buildings with clapboards as protection against the weather and for greater warmth. Half-timbered houses, with plaster walls exposed to the elements within the structured framework, a traditional English style of building, were simply not practical in the New World. Clapboards were in fact among the earliest exports from the colonies. They were already being shipped out of Plymouth to England, where they were in demand, in 1622 or 1623. From the beginning the shortage of manpower in a land so rich in resources led Americans to develop laborsaving devices, and thus it was that water-powered sawmills quickly started to replace traditional hand-worked pitsaws; this before such contrivances were common in England, where they continued to be discouraged for fear of technological unemployment.
All but the rudest seventeenth century New England house included a parlor, or “best” room, which, as the name implies, contained the finer furnishings and was reserved for such special occasions as entertaining important guests. Often it also served as the parents’ bedroom. Seating facilities in this room were something lined up in a row against the wall, as a 1691 inventory implies, were apt to exceed the number of occupants: the parlor of John Bowles of Roxbury, Massachusetts, contained “13 Leather chairs,” “6 Turkey work chairs,” and “4 Stools with needle work covers”. At an early date in some houses the cooking operations were removed from the hall to a separate kitchen, often placed in a lean-to at the back of the house. In this annex the kitchen itself commonly opened onto a buttery at the cool end, a small bedroom at the opposite end. The latter made a convenient room for tending the ill. Until late in the century, even in the better houses, no effort was made to conceal or disguise the posts and beams of the buildings framework.
Window glass was a luxury of sorts until the seventeenth century and continued to be in the colonies before adequate glass factories were established. Windows had indeed been long regarded as cherished personal property, apart from the rest of the home, and were often designed so that they could be removed and stored for safety or convenience. Blown glass, almost entirely imported in the seventeenth century, was typically cut into diamond-shaped panes from round disks that were spun, in a semi-molten state, at the end of the glass maker’s tool until they flattened out sufficiently and congealed.