Material Witnesses: Domestic Architecture and Plantation Landscapes in Early Virginia by Camille Wells (review)

The last three or four decades have witnessed a major florescence of scholarship on the built environment of the colonial Chesapeake. Historians, art and architectural historians, archaeologists, and folklorists, including Cary Carson, Dell Upton, Henry Glassie, and Ivor Noël Hume, have reshaped our understanding of early Chesapeake landscapes and society in both subtle and dramatic ways. One of the most prominent of these scholars has been Camille Wells, an architectural historian who has studied early Virginia architecture and landscape extensively since the 1970s. The author is well known to students of the early Chesapeake built environment; she is also one of the founders of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to the appreciation and study of ordinary buildings and landscapes. Material Witnesses is a fine collection of nine of her previously-published essays plus an introduction. First published in a range of sources including the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Winterthur Portfolio, and Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, the essays date from the late 1980s through 2006.

A brief introduction recounts how so many like-minded individuals from different academic disciplines became scholars of the early Chesapeake landscape around 1970, during a period when money, time, and seemingly boundless energy helped fuel these architectural studies. Wells recounts how she and her colleagues developed new methodologies by “dismissing the style guides that did so little to inspire confidence” and “collapsed any meaningful distinction between the terms ‘building’ and ‘architecture’” (2). Borrowing from the methodology of historical archaeology, Wells and others began carefully recording the features they encountered, soon realizing, through fragmentary evidence, that surviving early Chesapeake buildings were built by only the most prosperous colonial Virginians. In underscoring the reciprocal relationship between teaching and research, the author also readily acknowledges that she wrote all of the essays included in this volume during the years she was teaching, so they are all based on the idea that buildings and landscapes are evidence that provides access to the past.

The opening essay, originally published in 2006 and one of the most important in the book, introduces themes central to Wells’s research, including the extent to which colonial Virginians used their buildings and landscapes to convey power and authority. “While much of the work a colonial Virginia mansion was meant to do occurred within its walls,” the author notes, “its most important role was to cut a distinguished figure in the countryside” (34). Multiple function-specific outbuildings constituted important parts of the total assemblage as well. Even as meat-houses, dairies, kitchens, and slave quarters certainly accommodated the work and the workers of the plantation, they also “contributed to the presentation of the owner’s house as set in the midst of every manner of work” (34). The main dwelling ultimately “reinforced recognition among gentlemen of wealth, education, and experience that the mansion belonged among similarly fashionable houses built by similarly powerful men in near as well as distant places” that extended into the entire Anglo-American World (36).

Subsequent essays build upon these important ideas. In “The Eighteenth-Century Landscape of Virginia’s Northern Neck,” Wells again reminds readers that buildings surviving from the eighteenth-century colonial Chesapeake are in no way representative of the many that are gone. In this sparsely settled region, country seats of the wealthier planters constituted the exception rather than the rule. This was a countryside that was “partitioned and inhabited in a much more humble fashion,” where improvements “ranged in quality from unpretentious comfort to ramshackle misery” and where “disposable architecture was often the everyday reality for substantial as well as impoverished colonists” (49, 63).

“The Planter’s Prospect,” first published in 1993 in Winterthur Portfolio, uses real estate advertisements from the Virginia Gazette to explore the organization of the early Virginia countryside on the ground as well as in the minds of Virginia’s landowning planters. Inclusions as well as silences in the advertisements...