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The Brandywine. W. Barksdale Maynard
Читать онлайн.Название The Brandywine
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812290738
Автор произведения W. Barksdale Maynard
Издательство Ingram
Glazed Headers, Pent Eaves
All these early Chester County houses are nationally important for their deep history and their craftsmanlike excellence. Architect Milner lives in the Abiah Taylor House he restored and has described the power these old dwellings have exerted in creating a modern tradition of neocolonial design—the past directly shaping the present in this Brandywine region of such heightened historical susceptibility:
The early vernacular architecture of southeastern Pennsylvania has had a profound influence on my own work for the past three decades. The treasures of this region afford almost limitless inspiration for the restoration of historic buildings as well as for the design of new buildings in the context of an exceptional landscape. The more I work on these remarkable structures, the more I feel a connection with the craftsmen who created them, and the more I am inspired to carry on the tradition.13
Milner greatly admires the architect Brognard Okie, a staunch anti-modernist of the early twentieth century who restored the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia and re-created William Penn’s mansion on the Delaware River, in addition to developing a charming style of country house based on early colonial examples. “He responded to the spirit of colonial woodwork,” Milner notes, “but applied his own personal style.” Okie remodeled the Dower House outside West Chester for novelist Joseph Hergesheimer, an exercise that says much about the dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist culture of the valley. For Hergesheimer, the Dower House (1712) had “the air of the past, of an early Quaker pastoral, had remained like the tranquil scents of a simple garden.” In Okie he found a man of “fanatical honesty” who, even more than the novelist, “lived almost wholly in an immaterial world, not of words but regretted old Pennsylvania houses” long since demolished.
On the patio. In the 1920s, novelist Joseph Hergesheimer “re-created” the Dower House, turning the 1712 farmhouse into an enclave of timeless values where he could flee the frantic twentieth century.
Together Hergesheimer and Okie tackled the restoration. Okie insisted on using solid oak beams for the door frames, joined with oak pins: “That was the old way to do it. That, then, would be our way.” (Thus they “repudiated the use of screws in the Dower House” as excessively modern.) They began a search for venerable lanterns, cupboards, latches, box locks, and “the smallest brass knobs imaginable,” along with hinges of H, L, and clover shape. Old wood came from barns, stone was cut from abandoned quarries, huge boxwoods were trucked in from homesteads in the region. Local antique expert Francis Brinton helped; Hergesheimer said the meeting between Brinton and Okie “was very affecting—two men lost in their singleness of allegiance to the past in Pennsylvania.”
Not that the Dower House restoration was wholly authentic; windows were enlarged and a sleeping porch added. But the final results deeply impressed the nostalgic Hergesheimer, who brooded on the ancientness of the place: when in 1712 “the pins were thrust home above the latches, the doors, the house, was fastened upon a forest hardly broken by the settlement” of Penn. “Slipping into the night it was absorbed in a silence that, emphasized by the wind in the trees, the nocturnal animals, reached across the continent from ocean to ocean…. It’s impossible now to conceive of such a silence, such a deep resonant hush. How soon it vanished!”14
Surely the Dower House—still standing proud today at 100 Goshen Road, West Chester—and its various peers make Chester County, all in all, just about the best-preserved colonial landscape in the nation. There are so many of these houses—because the settlers built in brick and stone, more likely to endure. Driving the twisting back roads, usually with some frantically impatient suburbanite on your tail, you glimpse these dwellings out of the corner of your eye, their lumpy walls of robust stone, raised by hand so long ago. The most exciting are often the ones not yet restored, with moldering window sash and crumbling slate-tile roofs and improvisational Victorian additions, such as bay windows surrounded by fish-scale shingles, or scroll-saw porches, and with tattered curtains of parti-colored fabric behind half-broken window panes, and the bricks at the top of the chimney knocked loose and about to fall. Where the whitewash has flaked away, perhaps a row of glazed header brick peeps forth, the ruddy clay and Coke-bottle-green glaze as snappy as in the very best work in old Philadelphia. Or maybe you can find joist holes filled with rotten wood where a pent eave once jutted, that distinctively Pennsylvania feature. It seems priceless to discover these unrestored houses, because possibly the next time you drive by, they will be undergoing yuppified restoration—or even reduced to a pile of rubble by a snorting yellow backhoe.
Such houses, now so aged, were once ultramodern symbols of the dynamic transformation of the American countryside as forests gave way to fields and crops. The Brandywine was emerging as, one might say, the model farming district for the nation. From his Como Farm beyond Marshallton on the West Branch, John Beale Bordley, a founder of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, experimented with crop rotation, giving advice to farmers everywhere in his popular books published after the Revolution. Already Colonial newspapers had been full of advertisements boasting of the riches of the Brandywine bottomlands.
For example, one John Gillylen sold a farm near Downingtown in 1765
containing 468 acres, with … 113 acres cultivated; the whole plantation is plentifully stored with springs and streams of water, one of the forks of Brandywine runs near a mile through the land; an orchard of 9 acres with near 500 of the best fruit trees…. The land is all new, the crop that is now in the ground is but the third…. Likewise to sell, a negroe boy, aged 13, and a negroe girl, aged 15, both have had the small pox, and sold for no fault. I design to pay all my debts, and forewarn any person or persons from cutting hoop poles, or any timber … off my land.15
When President Barack Obama created First State National Monument, part of the intention was to preserve what remains of these kinds of early Brandywine agricultural landscapes. The official proclamation notes that the 1,100-acre Woodlawn section of the monument contains at least eight structures from the eighteenth century. “Because Wood-lawn has been relatively undisturbed, it still exhibits colonial and Quaker settlement patterns that have vanished elsewhere.”16
At Old Swedes Church
Much as Roman Londinium reverted entirely back to forest before eventually being resettled as medieval London, so the old Swedish town beside the lower Brandywine at Fort Christina vanished during the years of rapid English inroads, finally being resurrected after sixty-seven years as the city of Wilmington. During the intervening period, little remained as a reminder of New Sweden except for the surnames of local farmers and a single place of worship, Old Swedes Church, built for remnant Swedes in English days. Historical interest in Fort Christina remained, however; when traveler Peter Kalm came through in the 1740s, he was given a relic, a Swedish silver coin of 1633, dug up when a new fort was built on the site of the old to protect the British against French and Spanish privateers.17
Fort Christina’s occupants had buried their dead not in the wide, waterlogged marshes but on a slight rise northward, where Old Swedes Church now stands (in Virginia, Jamestown settlers did much the same). Three Lutheran missionaries arrived from Sweden in 1697 to serve the remaining Swedish colonists; they included the energetic Reverend Eric Björk, who pressed for a new place of worship. By now the Quakers were pouring ceaselessly into the Delaware Valley, and in fact there is little or nothing “Swedish” about the architecture of Old Swedes: an English mason named Yard brought his crew down from Philadelphia, joined by English carpenters John Smart and John Britt. The cornerstone was laid in May 1698, and bluestone walls were up by fall. Lime