Vernacular Hospitality in the Carolinas: The Tidewater Cottage and the Preacher Room

Vernacular Hospitality in the Carolinas: The Tidewater Cottage and the Preacher Room M. RUTH LITTLE T he little-known Tidewater cottage in the largely British coastal plain of North and South Carolina is the equivalent of the French Creole cottage built by Spanish and French Creoles in the West Indies, the Deep South, and along the upper reaches of the Mississippi River from the earliest years of the eighteenth century. But while the Creole cottage has been extensively documented, the Tidewater cottage, also referred to as a coastal cottage or raised cottage, has not. One of the earliest refined house types in the Carolinas, the Tidewater cottage is usually one-and-one-half stories with a side-gabled roof and an engaged piazza (alternately referred to as a gallery, veranda, or porch) along one or more elevations, and small (half) rooms partitioned into the rear and sometimes the front piazza (jig. I).' The piazza may be recessed or "engaged" under a single-sloped or a double-sloped roof. The house may be of either Fig. I. The Everitt House, Tarboro, North Carolina, ca. I8IO, is a classic example of the Tidewater Cottage. (Catherine Bishir, North Carolina Architecture [Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, I990] , IIS) frame or log construction. Because this is a form type rather than a plan type, the plan varies with the main block either being arranged in one room, hall-and-parlor, or center hall fashion. While the form could be a large plantation house or a small tenant house, most examples were the comfortable houses of small planters, merchants or maritime people. A standard feature of the Tidewater cottage, and the subject of this article, are small shed rooms partitioned into the front and rear, generally opening onto a recessed center piazza. In the French and Spanish Creole cottages, the rear recessed piazza is known as a loggia and the flanking shed rooms are called cabinets.2 In the Tidewater cottage, the front piazza rooms are used as guest chambers, which elderly rural residents in southeastern North Carolina colloquially call "stranger rooms" or "preacher rooms." A historian born in the 18oos defined them as ARRIS M. RUTH LITTLE rooms that were "generally assigned to 'company.' "3 More than just an architectural form, piazza rooms offer a window into rural social relations in the antebellum Carolinas. While the bedrooms' primary purpose may have been to provide extra sleeping space for large families, their prominent position on the front piazza and their lack of access into the house gave them another function, to offer hospitality to the occasional travelers who passed through. The Tidewater cottage and the Creole cottage may have the same origin. As early as 1947, the architect Thomas Tileston Waterman identified the North Carolina version as West Indian architecture .4 What little has been published on the type since then has focused on the piazza instead of the overall form of the house.5 Scholars analyzing the French and Spanish Creole cottage further south in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama have made strong cases for their West Indian origin. The anthropologist and architectural historian Jay Edwards draws upon extensive documentary material to show that the Creole cottage evolved as early as r685 in the West Indies through the amalgamation of the Indian bohio, African coastal architecture, Portuguese and Spanish colonial architecture, and the Bengal bungalow brought by British army engineers.6 The architectural historian Philippe Oszuscik added the "French connection," postulating that the cottage originated in French Haiti by the late r6oos as a combination of the bohio and the French Norman cottage/ Assuming that the Tidewater cottage originated in the West Indies, its early popularity in the Carolinas is readily understood through the area's settlement history. Over one-half of the white immigrants to South Carolina between r67o and r69o came from Barbados, and many of the remaining immigrants came from the other islands of the English West Indies. Barbados, settled in r627 by the English, was the cultural hearth of the English West Indies and of South Carolina as well. Between r64o-r67o a local culture evolved on Barbados that was recreated along the South Carolina coast in the late r6oos and...