The Dutch Colonial House
"Curiously enough the types of architecture employed by all three of these settlements bore little resemblance to that of the countries from which they came, and while the settlers both…
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“The Genesis of the Style,” from The Dutch Colonial House by Aymar Embury, 1913.
America was settled by very diverse elements, which came to the new country in three principal streams; to New England on the north, Virginia on the south, and New Holland in the center of eastern America.
Curiously enough the types of architecture employed by all three of these settlements bore little resemblance to that of the countries from which they came, and while the settlers both in New England and Virginia were of common blood (although in sentiment and in religious denomination widely separated), the types which they established for their country homes in their new land resembled each other no more than either of them resembled the architecture of the Dutch settlers in the neighborhood of New York. The houses were unconscious expressions of the new conditions, and were in most cases so simple and unostentatious that it may be that, in speaking of most of them, ''architecture" is too dignified a term to employ, since the term implies a conscious attempt towards artistic expression in these buildings.
To anyone interested in the early life of our Colonial ancestors the thing which will most immediately appeal as interesting and extraordinary is, as said before, the unlikeness of most of the Colonial buildings to those of the parent countries. We have, fortunately, preserved to us a considerable number of the old houses and a few of the public buildings, in most cases not of the years immediately following the first settlement.
However, when one considers that settlement in America was not a process which took place once and for all and then ceased, leaving the Colonists with only tradition to recall to them the styles of their parent countries; but was a continuing process during which there was a constant addition of Colonists born and brought up in England and in Europe, thoroughly familiar with the styles of houses there customary, it is amazing indeed to find how easily they fell into the vernacular architecture of the time, so that its growth was apparently, as far as country houses went, little influenced by foreign ideas, and, even when so influenced, these ideas were transmuted into forms quite unlike those of the home countries.
Thus we find Mount Vernon, the best known of all our American country houses, because of the unique position its builder enjoys in American history, absolutely unlike not only the English country houses constructed at the same period, but those of any date. This very radical change in architectural ideas has been attributed to various causes; for example, to the climatic conditions, to the changed list of convenient materials, to the fact that skilled mechanics were scarce and many of the houses were built by amateur craftsmen, and to numerous other causes. The probability is that all of these carried weight, but I think that the principal reason for the change in style was the absolute break in the traditional life of the people.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were years when architecture as a profession could scarcely be said to exist, and architects as such were employed only for buildings of considerable importance. The lovely little English cottages, of which we see so many, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, were not designed at all, but were built without plans by local carpenters and masons, who learned their trades from their parents and handed their skill and traditions to their children until they constituted almost a caste of their own. Men of these classes were scarce among the early immigrants, who came in the main from the cities, and in New England were of the shopkeeping and manufacturing classes, rather than mechanics, or, when mechanics, were those familiar with city and not country work.
Virginia, of course, as we learned from our school histories, was founded by so-called gentlemen adventurers, people without trades and without any productive excuse for being. The mechanics there were mostly transported and indentured men, who, criminals in their own country, became under favorable circumstances at least useful and excellent citizens in the new. In New Amsterdam and the Dutch colonies around it, the first comers were merchants, traders of furs and the like, to whom were soon added many of the Dutch peasants, the ancestors of the sturdy farmers of New York and Long Island. Thus, among the earliest settlers, in no one of these three parts of the country was there any great proportion of the mechanics, who in their native villages preserved the traditional styles; and requiring houses, the settlers must needs build them as best they might.
Just why conditions not at all dissimilar in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts should have produced types so radically unlike, is hard to tell, but what we do know is that in each of these three centers was developed a certain style of house, not very flexible in design, and each of which has furnished a mine of material for the country house architects of this later day.
To me the most curious of the resulting anachronisms was the rather extraordinary exchange of materials between the various settlements. Everybody knows that Holland was preeminently the land of brick construction, but I do not recall a single Dutch farmhouse built entirely of brick, although I do know of two or three in which some brick was used elsewhere than in the chimneys.
On the other hand the English country cottages were built largely of stone, or of stucco over stone, with a considerable amount of half-timber construction; that is, a heavy wooden framework filled in between the uprights with brick and plaster. I do not recall in all the South, or in fact anywhere else in this country, a building of half-timber construction in the English sense. The typical Southern house was of brick, and, in most of the earlier cases, of brick imported from England.
In New England, wooden construction was universal in the country districts, although old England itself has not had, since the time of the Romans, forests enough to furnish even interior woodwork for the English houses, and certainly the clap-board and shingle house is almost never seen there.
In Virginia there were probably no fewer trees than in New England, and as to why the Virginians did not use wood as freely as the New Englander we have no information, although a guess that the Virginian, vain of his assumed superior station in life, sought to imitate the English houses of those of similar station, may not be far wrong. This surmise is perhaps strengthened by the fact that in so far as the Virginia architecture resembled that of England at all, it was that of the town and not of the country, and it was certainly the towns with which the Virginians were most familiar.
It is nevertheless curious to find that in the early Colonial work stucco was practically unused in Virginia and New England, but was occasionally found in Philadelphia, and was at least not uncommon around New York, in spite of the fact that the Dutch were primarily a race of brick-builders. In such curious facts as these lies one of the most interesting phases of architectural history. In searching for the genesis of the Dutch style we look for it first in the consideration of materials at hand.
Northeastern New Jersey was at some remote age the termination of the glacial drift, and the fertile fields which offered such an alluring bait to the Dutch settler were covered with red sandstone, not native to the country, but brought there long ago by the glaciers. These stones had to be removed from the fields before these could conveniently be worked, and since they had to be moved, in the natural sequence of things it was as convenient to pile them on top of each other to form walls for the fields and walls for the house, as to dispose of them in any other way. The earliest Dutch farmhouses in New Jersey are, then, of stone.
In Long Island, on the other hand, building stone was about as common as diamonds, and the houses were built of wood and covered either with shingles or with clapboards, although in a few cases a frame wall was filled in with brick and plastered over the whole surface—the wood as well as the masonry. The New Jersey type of construction very probably led to the development of the most familiar characteristic of Dutch work, the long overhanging roof. In building their walls the early settlers did not have proper materials with which to build; lime had to be imported, and cement had not yet been invented; time and labor they did have, and in consequence instead of being built of roughs irregularly shaped stones, with the interstices filled with mortar, their walls were built of square stones with level beds, competent to stand without any cementing together, and secured against intrusion of the wind and rain by the filling of the chinks with clay, just as had been the case in the log cabins which had been their first homes.
Clay in a dry climate is nearly as good a material for wall building as cement, but exposed to the weather under the action of rain and frost, it soon disintegrates and washes out. To protect it from moisture the settlers therefore extended the roofs, a condition which, in the two-story houses of Philadelphia, led to the development of the familiar "Germantown hood," since a single projection at the top of the house was not sufficient to protect the full height of the wall, and a secondary roof had to be introduced at the second-story level. As the Dutch houses were nearly all of a single story height below the roof, a single long overhang was sufficient, and at first this was a straight continuation of the main roof; they were later swung out in a wide sweeping curve whose purpose is not at once apparent, but which was probably intended to raise the eaves sufficiently above the windows to permit the rooms to be fully lighted.
The earliest houses had roofs of a single pitch; the later ones were covered with the familiar gambrel shape, so commonly associated with the Dutch farmhouses as to be called a "Dutch" roof, although it was by no means uncommon in New England, and not entirely absent from Pennsylvania and the South. This gambrel roof is America's principal contribution to the science of building; it was almost, if not absolutely, unknown in Europe, including England, and if any cases did occur there they were not a part of the real development of architecture, but were sporadic and without real influence in the evolution of any style.
As a contribution to country house design, especially for small houses, it is invaluable, for the reason which probably caused its invention, since it permits a greatly increased space in the second story without making a roof of tremendous height. The Dutch always applied this method of construction rather timidly, the lower set of rafters being pitched not much more than the upper set, and the gain of space was correspondingly inconsiderable, but its employment in the Dutch fashion, with the ends of the rafters still swinging out into a wide curve to protect the walls, produced a roof shape of peculiar beauty, which can seldom now-a-days be imitated, because of the labor involved in curving the rafter ends, and because the pitch is too flat to give good space for rooms below it.
As the style developed, these roofs were not uncommonly extended, on one side at least, far enough to give space for a narrow porch or piazza, and were supported on columns.
Sometimes there was only a single pair flanking the entrance door (of which type there is one example illustrated), designed apparently to emphasize the entrance; but more commonly, as in the Demarest and Vreeland houses, the roof was upheld by a row of square columns which added immensely to the picturesque appearance of the front.
The latest development of the Dutch farmhouse, before it fell with the rest of the world's architecture into the wretched tastelessness of the Victorian era, was characterized by the reduction of the cornice projection and the introduction of a row of second-story windows along the front, usually of the low kind sometimes called "lie-on-your-stomach" windows; the projecting hood of the piazza was then placed between the windows of the second story and those of the first.
Another curious development of this period was that at this piazza roof line the material often changed; below the roof it was still of stone, while above it it was of wood. This last change in the Dutch farmhouse may be attributed to two causes: first, the introduction of good lime mortar, which did away with the necessity of protecting the wall surfaces, although many shingle and wooden houses which needed no protection, had, because of the strength of the tradition previously established, been built with them; and second, because the Dutch no longer constituted an isolated community, but in the early years of the nineteenth century gradually became familiar with current Colonial work of all parts of the United States, and especially of New England, so that its provincial characteristics disappeared, and about 1820 or 1830 the work around New York had little to distinguish it from the Neo-classic which then constituted the national style.
In detail indeed, the Dutch work was very widely different from that of the rest of the Colonists, and although no Colonial architecture, either in mass or in detail, was very subservient to tradition, the Dutch was perhaps the freest of all. Taking, for example, such an important piece of the design as the column shapes, we find that in the South they followed the classic proportion quite closely; in New England, while the classic forms were in a rough way retained, the proportions were tremendously attenuated; and in both sections the columns were generally round and often fluted.
This was not characteristic of Dutch work; many of the old columns were octagonal and hexagonal, with the capitals totally unlike the classic, and strongly reminiscent of Gothic work. Side by side with these curious examples, which are not found elsewhere than in Dutch houses, we find the square carpenter-built type of columns, sometimes with paneled sides, and sometimes plain, common to all late Colonial styles. The doorways of the earlier houses were only rarely ornamented, but with the growth of wealth and knowledge, the Dutch made quite as much of their doors—although in somewhat different fashion—as did their New England confreres.
The style never was, and never can be, perfectly adjusted to houses of great size or formal character; it was essentially informal and picturesque. The genius of the Dutch race did not lend itself to formality in building any more than it did to the pomp of public life; we do not find in Holland itself any buildings, either private or public, of such a character; the Dutch simply do not know how to be stately. But if a country house is wanted which shall be homelike, quaint and lovely, the style is admirably adjusted to its use, especially since in a small house the lower the roof comes, the more intimately the building will fit its landscape, and houses of the Dutch type are essentially low in appearance. Up to a certain size the style certainly has possibilities beyond the ordinary and even for a house as big as the Board house it can hardly be surpassed.
Before concluding this chapter on the genesis of the style, I want to say a little about this, which is perhaps the finest of all the Dutch places still existing. Like most of the Dutch houses it is placed with its gable end close to the road, and consists of a low central mass with a gambrel roof, flanked by two still lower wings with simple roofs of single pitch. The lower story in the main part of the building is of stone, stuccoed under the piazza on the side which is shown in the illustration, on the other side pointed up with mortar joints. The wings are of frame, probably built long after the rest of the house.
The entrance drive passes by the long piazza, and across the drive from the main piazza is what I believe to be the finest old formal garden in America, symmetrical in plan, the paths edged with box trees, and the intersections of the paths strengthened by trellised arches, while a summer-house marks the center. The garden is raised above the public street by a stone terrace wall surmounted by a wooden fence. On the other long side of the house a small porch faces a plain lawn studded with tremendous and magnificent trees. It is a place quite as important architecturally as any of the famous Virginia houses, but possibly because of its nearness to New York, and possibly because it is not associated with any historic incident, it has passed almost unnoticed, although in its setting and surroundings it is very superior to many of the famous Southern houses. In itself it is exquisitely designed, and not less beautifully detailed. It is the sort of house which one should seek to have in the country, unostentatious, elegant and comfortable; the home of a gentleman.
Embury, Aymar. The Dutch Colonial House. McBride, Nast, & Co., 1913.
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