Architecture as artifact: period rooms at MESDA

Stepping from the well-lit museum gallery space through a low doorway into a small room, everything seems dark, but as one's eyes adjust to the dimmed light, a dark wood floor, a huge brick fireplace, an enclosed corner stair, a spectacular batten door, and regularly spaced ceiling joists slowly come into view (Fig. 3). You have just entered the Pocomoke Room, one of the oldest of MESDA's twenty-four period rooms. Together, these rooms, which span the museum's geographic and chronological scope, offer an extraordinary window into the wide-ranging architectural traditions of the early South. Many were acquired, or collected as he termed it, by Frank L. Horton in the years before the museum opened, and others have been added during subsequent expansions.

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Positioned near the very beginning of the collection, the Pocomoke Room, from the Powell house in Somerset County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (Fig. 4), presents an early eighteenth-century interior. While shockingly "mean" (to use a period term) to modern sensibilities, the Pocomoke Room represents one of the better houses of its era. The building's raised masonry foundation, plastered interior, and large masonry chimney set it apart from the earthen-floored houses with exposed framing and wattle-and-daub chimneys occupied by the vast majority of folks living in the Chesapeake region well into the early eighteenth century. (1) This large common room, called the hall, was the center for the majority of activities, including cooking, eating, entertaining, and sleeping, for the family and the handful of indentured servants and/or slaves that assisted in the agricultural work that supported the household. On those properties that had few or no other structures, the hall was even the site for agricultural activities, such as stripping tobacco leaves and grinding corn. (2)

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By the later decades of the eighteenth century most of the better houses in the Chesapeake region had a more complex floor plan, as demonstrated by the house at Cherry Grove Plantation, erected in Northampton County, Virginia, for the Savage family in the late 1750s (Fig. 5). This plan, with rooms flanking a central hallway, had been used in earlier buildings, such as the 1716 Levingston house (now embedded in the St. George Tucker House) in Williamsburg, Virginia, but it had become much more common by mid-century. (3) Cherry Grove's front door gave access not to a multipurpose hall, but to a wide passage that ran straight through the center of the house to a door at the back (see Fig. 2). As a new space in early southern architecture, the passage met a number of social functions and reflected an adaptation to the region's climate. It served as an intermediary reception space--a place to accommodate those without the status to gain access to the now more refined space of the hall or parlor--and allowed for better air circulation, providing greater comfort for activities that still took place in the hall, such as family dining and even sleeping during Virginia's hot and humid summer months. (4) Thus, the passage in eighteenth-century Virginia, which usually also included the stairway, was not a hallway in our modern sense.

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Immediately off the passage was the large, most formal room in the house, often still referred to as the hall but sometimes called the parlor (Fig. 6). The smaller fireplace opening betrays the fact that by the mid-eighteenth century cooking had moved to an external kitchen, part of the increasingly complex work yard found outside the main house. The yard also included rows of small houses for the enslaved Africans who comprised the vast majority of the workforce by the early eighteenth century. The fully paneled fireplace wall and wainscot, the cornice, and the plastered ceiling sent visible clues about the status and refinement of the family. Their greater wealth freed them from laboring in their own fields and allowed them leisure time to entertain on a grand scale, to master musical instruments, and to read their growing collections of books. (5) As suggested by the ships inscribed by a child in the paint below one of the parlor windows, the Savage family was part of a mature network of planters and factors who were connected by waterways to port towns on the colonial coast and eventually to England's booming commercial centers such as Bristol and London.

Over time the social functions of the eighteenth-century hall had been given their own spaces, resulting not only in at least one parlor but also in separate bed chambers and a dining room. The White Hall Dining Room, part of a house erected in 1818 in the low country of South Carolina, is an excellent example of the increasing trend of dedicating an entire room to the social ritual of dining (see Fig. 1). (6) Often the most formal space in the house, the dining room was large enough to accommodate a central table surrounded by a matching set of chairs and appointed with matching place settings, symbols of the shared, exclusive status enjoyed by those invited to the meal. The small fireplace opening of the White Hall Dining Room is framed by a marble surround and an elegant mantelpiece, features that had appeared only in the best houses in the earlier century. The mantel has vertical elements emulating classical pilasters, a broad frieze punctuated by a central panel, and a shelf above to carry the increasingly abundant decorative objects now found in houses across the economic spectrum. Executed in fancy gouge work, the woodwork for the mantel, cornice, and door frames united the room into a decorative ensemble.