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

Camille Wells. Material Witnesses: Domestic Architecture and Plantation Landscapes in Early Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018.

ISBN: 9780813940052
Hardcover: 200 pages

When I first enrolled in a graduate course on American architecture in the late 1970s, the semester began with only the briefest mention of the early habitations of seventeenth-century British settlers. In books such as Fiske Kimball's Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (1922), Hugh Morrison's Early American Architecture from the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period (1952), and Leland Roth's A Concise History of American Architecture (1979), buildings erected by Anglophones held pride of place with the earlier Spanish and French colonial traditions barely acknowledged or buried later in the text. Rarely, or barely, were indigenous traditions acknowledged. Volume one of William H. Pierson Jr.'s American Buildings and Their Architects: The Colonial and Neo-Classical Styles (1970) almost completely dispensed with the first colonial habitations and leapt from English manor houses to the Adam Thoroughgood House in Princess Anne County, Virginia, which he claimed was built in 1636. In addition to initial Spanish and French settlements, the very earliest of English habitations were likewise largely neglected.

Within the length of one lecture at the beginning of the semester, students in advanced courses in the 1970s were taught to think of buildings such as the Adam Thoroughgood House or the Parson Capen House in Topsfield, Massachusetts, as the official geneses of architectural traditions in the United States or at least the only ones that mattered.

Fortunately, Camille Wells's anthology of her own scholarly articles demonstrates how far the trajectory of colonial Virginia architectural history and hence early American architectural has evolved. Wells is part of an elite coterie of scholars who, beginning in the 1970s, transformed the study of Virginia colonial architecture and, by extension, the study of American architectural history as a whole. These archaeologists, historians, and architectural historians proved that there were more important questions to be asked than those concerned solely with aesthetics, connoisseurship, or European stylistic architectural influence. These scholars addressed the history of less elite buildings, thereby contributing substantially to a much more complex and richer picture of architecture in the Tidewater region of the British colonies.

Wells's various essays originally appeared in such significant journals as the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography and Winterthur Portfolio. Her work brought to the attention of architectural historians and the wider public that there was clearly more to Virginia's colonial architecture than grand public buildings such as the Williamsburg Capital, elite plantation houses, and the genteel furnishings, which during the 1960s were promoted and commodified by the Kittinger Furniture Company in department stores such as the now defunct Stix, Baer, & Fuller in St. Louis, Missouri.

In this anthology of nine chapters, Wells employs a variety of methodological approaches that have informed her professional career, providing a useful guide to future scholars in the field of early American architecture. She exploits documentary and visual evidence, such as plat maps and measured drawings. She addresses not only the built environment but also the more expansive agricultural landscapes of plantation culture and the role of dowries in funding the construction of mansions. Additionally, she examines the way that aesthetics and subjective taste dominated curatorial decisions concerning restoration practices at Colonial Williamsburg.

Wells's evidence is based on her own careful examination of extant documentary evidence found in archives, but she also generously acknowledges that she is dependent upon the work of previous archaeologists and scholars who have conducted extensive excavations and fieldwork. She demonstrates how a detailed examination of such archival sources and previous fieldwork by other scholars informs our knowledge of the broader architectural environment more so than a close visual analysis of extant elite buildings would.

Wells writes in a concise and elegant manner, avoiding technological jargon while still confronting serious theoretical issues, such as the concept of "patriarchal primacy." Her introduction makes clear that she aims to make students one of her chief reading audiences. I agree with her...