Six Historic Homesteads (Anniversary Collection)

Our colonial ancestors knew how to build houses as well as constitutions. It may even be that they built the one as enduringly as the other, for many of their mansions still stand, firm in joist and beam, having required in nearly two centuries no more serious repairs than shingles and paint. As the Constitution did not spring, a magic structure, fresh from the minds of its builders, but was a welding together of ideas as old as the Magna Carta, so the style of architecture known as Colonial was not a new creation but an adaptation of the Georgian to new material and new social conditions. While there were no architects among our early ancestors, there were master builders who had served apprenticeship to the creators of the manor houses of Georgian England or of the small chateaux of France. Accustomed to work lavishly in stone and brick, these master builders adapted their methods to wood and unconsciously developed the style we know as Colonial. They kept the type pure whether they applied it to the mansion of the East Indian merchants of New England or to the hospitable home of the owners of the plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas, but in detail they yielded to climate and personality. In this volume, Imogen Oakley meticulously examines the historical climate and the personalities that influenced the construction of six examples of colonial architecture-three in New England and one each in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland: The Moffatt-Ladd House, Portsmouth, New Hampshire The Quincy Mansion, Quincy, Massachusetts The Webb House, Wethersfield, Connecticut The Jumel House, New York, New York Stenton, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Mount Clare, Baltimore, Maryland By relating the character of the homesteads as they stand today to the circumstances under which they were built and the personalities who built and occupied them, the author illuminates these monuments of our American past and demonstrates the relationship of their design to their function. In addi