Images de page
PDF
ePub

plantations was rice; but the introduction of indigo in 1745, with its requirement of vats, pumps, and reservoirs, and its plague of refuse and flies, though of great significance in restoring the prosperity of the province, gave rise to new and in some respects less agreeable conditions. The plantations were also supplied with a plentiful stock of cattle and the necessary household goods and furnishings. The following detailed description of William Dry's plantation on the Cooper River, two miles above Goose Creek, is worth quoting. The estate, which fronted the high road, is described as

having on it a good brick dwelling house, two brick store houses, a brick kitchen and washhouse, a brick necessary house, a barn with a large brick chimney, with several rice mills, mortars, etc., a winnowing house, an oven, a large stable and coach-house, a cooper's shop, a house built for a smith's shop; a garden on each side of the house, with posts, rails, and poles of the best stuff, all planed and painted and bricked underneath; a fish pond, well stored with perch, roach, pike, eels, and catfish; a handsome cedar horse-block or double pair of stairs; frames, planks, etc., ready to be fixed in and about a spring within three stones' throw of the house, intended for a cold bath and house over it; three large dam ponds, whose tanks with some small repairs will drown upwards of 100 acres of land, which being very plentifully stored with game all the winter season

affords great diversion; an orchard of very good apple and peach trees, a corn house and poultry house that may with repairing serve some years longer, a small tenement with a brick chimney on the other side of the high road, fronting the dwelling house, and at least 400 acres of the land cleared, all except what is good pasture, and no part of the tract bad, the whole having a clay foundation and not deep, the great part of it fenced in, and upwards of a mile of it with a ditch seven feet wide and three and a half deep.

Most of the South Carolina planters had their town houses and divided their time between city and country. They lived in Charleston, Georgetown, Beaufort Town, and Dorchester, but of these Charleston was the Mecca toward which all eyes turned and in which all lived who had any social or political ambitions. Attempts were made in the eighteenth century, in this colony as elsewhere, to boom land sites for the erecting of towns on an artificial plan. In 1738, the second landgrave, Thomas Smith, tried to start a town on his Winyaw tract near Georgetown. He laid out a portion of the land along the bluff above the Winyaw River in lots, offered to sell some and to give away others, and planned to provide a church, a meetinghouse, and a school. But this venture failed; and even the more successful attempt to build up Willtown

about the same time, although lots were sold and houses built and occupied, eventually came to nothing. The story of some of these dead towns of the South, whether promoted by natives or settled by foreigners, has been told only in part and forms an interesting chapter in colonial history.

In all the colonies, indeed, the eighteenth century saw a vast deal of land speculation. The merchants and shopkeepers in most of the large towns acted as agents and bought and sold on commission. Just as George Tilly, merchant and contractor of Boston, advertised good lots for sale in 1744, so John Laurens, Robert Hume, and Benjamin Whitaker in Charleston a little later were dealing in houses, tenements, and plantations as a side line to their regular business as saddlers and merchants. In the seventies the sale of land had become an end in itself, and one Jacob Valk advertised himself as a "Real and Personal Estate Dealer." The meaning of the change is clear. Desirable lands in the older settlements were no longer available except by purchase, and men were already looking beyond the "fall line" and the back country to the ungranted lands of the new frontier in the farther West.

CHAPTER III

NUTS To you

Toms of grapes

COLONIAL HOUSES

It is well worth while for us at this point to look more in detail at the colonial towns to see the houses in which our ancestors dwelt and to note the architecture of their public edifices, for these men had a distinctive style of building as characteristic of their age as skyscrapers and apartment houses are of the present century. The household furnishings have also a charm of their own and in many cases, by their combination of utility and good taste, have provided models for the craftsmen of a later day. A brief survey of colonial houses, inside and out, will serve to give us a much clearer idea of the environment in which the people lived during the colonial era.

The materials used by the colonists for building vere wood, brick, and more rarely stone. At first ractically all houses were of wood, as was natural 1 a country where this material lay ready to every

man's hand and where the means for making brick or cutting stone were not readily accessible. Clay, though early used for chimneys, was not substantial enough for housebuilding, and lime for mortar and plaster was not easy to obtain. Though limestone was discovered in New England in 1697, it was not known at all in the tidewater section of the South, where lime continued to the end of the era to be made from calcined oyster shells. The seventeenth century was the period of wooden houses, wooden churches, and wooden public buildings; it was the eighteenth century which saw the erection of brick buildings in America.

Up to the time of the Revolution bricks were brought from England and Holland, and are found entered in cargo lists as late as 1770, though they probably served often only as ballast. But most of the bricks used in colonial buildings were molded and burnt in America. There were brickkilns everywhere in the colonies from Portsmouth to Savannah. Indeed bricks were made, north and south, in large enough quantities to be exported yearly to the West Indies. As building stone scarcely existed in the South, all important buildings there were of brick, or in case greater strength were needed, as for Fort Johnston at the mouth of

« PrécédentContinuer »