VI Epilogue: What Happened to the Seventeenth-Century Styles?
When over the fens and marshy slashes of Jamestown Island the eighteenth century dawned in that year of 1700, there were two significant aspects of Virginia architectural history which stand out clearly. Today the first of these aspects is well known, but the second is known only to a handful of persons. They are:
1. The most important style of architecture of the eighteenth century—the pseudo-classical Georgian—was about to make its entrée upon the Virginia scene, with the building of the “Governor’s Palace,” Williamsburg, begun in 1706.
2. All the styles of architecture, both American Indian and English, which flourished in the seventeenth century carried over—hung over—into the eighteenth century, and even into the nineteenth century.
The Georgian Style, of course, was actually English Georgian—Georgian of England—and in Virginia it prevailed from the 1710s to the 1780s—a span of some seventy years. It ushered into the Old Dominion a rage for ballrooms, such as that in the “Governor’s Palace,” theatres, tea tables, and china. It marked the golden age of the great houses, like “Marmion,” “Stratford Hall,” “Westover,” and “Mt. Vernon.”
At the same time in Virginia there existed side by side with the Georgian Style the following five styles of architecture, of which the last four have been identified and named by this writer for convenience:
1. The American Indian Style, which faded away probably in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
2. The “Hangover” Medieval Style.
3. The “Hangover” Jacobean Style.
4. The Transitional Style, which, as we have seen, prevailed from about 1680 to about 1730.
5. The “Hangover” Transitional Style (after about 1730).
In this way, like a mighty river the four main streams of Virginia architecture in the seventeenth century—American Indian, Medieval, Jacobean, and Transitional—flowed into the eighteenth, to be then joined by the Georgian tributary.
Furthermore, in the nineteenth century the men of tidewater Virginia who put up the buildings in the false medieval style, the copybook, birthday-cake Gothic known as the “Gothic Revival,” were not aware of, and took no cognizance of, the true medieval examples existing on their very doorsteps—a “Thoroughgood House” here, a “St. Luke’s Church” there. That situation was one of the strange paradoxes of our architectural history.
A few of us in very recent years are just beginning to label those English structures along tidewater which make up the bulk of Virginia architecture in the seventeenth century by the correct name, Medieval.