BACON’S CASTLE, THE HOUSE
By Kim R. Holmes
(For virginiacolonialhouses.com)
ARCHITECTURE
Built in 1665, Bacon’s Castle is the oldest surviving building in the Chesapeake region. It is the nation’s only surviving High Jacobean structure and is the oldest brick dwelling in the United States. It’s also home to one of the oldest formal gardens in North America. It got its name from the occupation by forces loyal to Nathaniel Bacon during the political uprising of 1676.
Bacon’s Castle is one of the most architecturally unique houses of colonial Virginia. The design is not a reflection of any one specific architectural style. Rather it represents a unique evolution of the “Virginia house” constructed in brick, expanded in size and designed with styles and mannerisms associated with Tudor and Jacobean architecture in England.
To understand the architectural origins of Bacon’s Castle we best start with a history of what has come to be called the “Virginia house.” Ever since the early 17th century Virginia’s houses had employed a single story, single-pile (one row of rooms) design consisting of two chambers. By the mid-17th century a second story of rooms was added to mirror the two chambers on the ground floor. Although larger than these early simple houses, Bacon’s Castle follows this early design; it is a single-pile house with two full stories (plus an attic and a cellar).
The first floor of the original house consisted of two large chambers on the ground floor. The larger one, called theHall, was entered by an enclosed front porch, a common feature of 17th century houses. The smaller one on the opposite side was called the Chamber. The outside entrance was placed in the center of the building, and it opened up inside the house into one end of the Hall. A holdover from medieval times, this practice was typical of 17th century houses. At the rear of the house were stairs leading to the second story. They led to a door of a large chamber on the second floor called Over the Hall. Adjacent this room was another chamber (Over the Chamber) that was also accessed through a door. On the third floor was an attic, or garret, that consisted of two more rooms divided by a hallway. Below the first floor was a large half-buried cellar.
Bacon’s Castle was no great English manor house. It paled in comparison to the palatial mansions of England. Thomas Tileston Waterman observes that Bacon’s Castle was more like an elaborate cottage, “hardly larger than a modern farm house.”[1] It was nonetheless still very much a dwelling for the upper class in Virginia. Its builder, Arthur Allen, was at the colony’swealthiest men. In style and scale Bacon’s Castle was by contemporary Virginia standards truly a house of distinction.
One reason it stood apart was its relatively large size. It may have been smaller than Jacobean mansions in England, but it was by comparison still bigger than most wooden framed houses in Virginia. More important were two other characteristics that make Bacon’s Castle unique. One was the application of Tudor and Jacobean elements to the design of the house. The other was the use of all brick in the construction.
Let’s take first the architectural design. Even though Bacon’s Castle evolved from the basic layout of the Virginia house, its cruciform plan is distinctive.[2] Remains of a cruciform shaped house likely built in the 1660s have been found at the Richneck Plantation in Denbigh, but few colonial houses employed such a design.[3]
Many of the facade and interior design features of Bacon’s Castle are taken from patterns found in Jacobean architecture. For example, the centered arched doorway and Dutch style gables on the east and west elevations are Jacobean in origin. However, the terminating stacked chimneys with clustered flues are more Elizabethan than Jacobean, which may reveal a bit of a nostalgic lag in taste. Waterman believes that the interior ceiling girders and molded chamfers are more reminiscent of Tudor than Jacobean England.[4]
The interior of the original house was plainer than what we see today.[5] The brick walls were covered with whitewashed plaster, and the oak beams were exposed. There were no baseboards, chair rails or any kind of woodwork except for the fireplace lintels. The doorways were framed in oak. The only significant ornamentation was the carved compass roundels placed at the intersection of the girders on the first floor.
The workmanship of Bacon’s Castle did not meet the high standards of more lavish houses in Britain. The director of the organization that restored the house in the 1970s described its workmanship as “crude” in detail.[6] Nevertheless, its overall quality was superior to most houses in Virginia at the time. As Waterman observes, for example, “Not only in the detail is the ceiling [of Bacon’s Castle] unique in America but also in its system of double-crossed girders, forming a series of six panels in the upper rooms, a condition not equaled elsewhere in the country.”[7]
By the rough standards of the Virginia frontier, Bacon’s Castle was a remarkable achievement. There was not only the huge expense of building such a house, something which only a wealthy man could afford. There were also a lack of tools and a dearth of technical knowledge on the part of the builders. The 17th century was an age before the great guide-books of the Georgian period, when the Lees and other Virginia gentry could design their houses from detailed sketches and plans. There was also the problem of having precious few skilled craftsmen in Virginia. Builders of Bacon’s Castle had to improvise and work from crude sketches or local models such as Green Spring. They had to use whatever tools they could import, and they relied heavily on local materials such as clay for bricks and wood for framing and paneling.
The second factor in making Bacon’s Castle a house of distinction is that it was constructed entirely of brick. In 1665 most houses in the Chesapeake were made out of wood. Bacon’s Castle may not have been the first brick house in Virginia. There were earlier, smaller brick houses in Jamestown and at Smith’s Fort, as well as Governor William Berkeley’s all brick mansion, Green Spring, which was built in 1645. But Bacon’s Castle was one of the first great brick mansions in Virginia—the second in Virginia in fact, after Green Spring.
It was not, however, the mere fact that the mansion was built with bricks that made it stand out. It’s also the fact that its builders consciously applied artisan mannerisms to the brickwork. There were, for example, twin curvilinear gable parapets(Flemish gables) framing the triple stacked chimneys. They (and the chimneys themselves) are quite striking to the eye even from a distance. As attractive as the features were, the brickwork of Bacon’s Castle was rather crude by English standards. The English bond style is uneven in color and quality, and the foundation’s bricks are irregular in size.[8] The brick’s red hue was achieved by applying pigmented red lime wash over the bricks and the mortar before it had dried.[9]
Bacon’s Castle was one of the first houses in the colony to erect a false plate roof.[10] This involved laying a flat board across the bottom edge of the roof to ease construction and to support external molding. Most houses in Virginia at this time had crudely built roofs that could not support external molding. The false plate roof later became commonplace in the Georgian period as more elaborate roof moldings came into fashion. Archeological evidence suggests that the original roof was made of stone, which would have been imported and quite expensive. [11]The house’s knee wall framing, where the rafters lean inwards from the edge of the roof, was typical of houses of the day.
No original windows or sashes survive. All windows we see today were added in the 18th century. The house’s first windows were almost certainly cross-mullioned casements of lead glass. The 1711 inventory, for example, records some “window lead and glass.”[12] The 1755 inventory lists 50 foot of “diamond glass in 19 lights with some broken Glass” in the Store. The current second story windows are flat-headed, meaning their uppermost part is horizontal. They are smaller than the first story windows andframed by a broad exterior stone casement, a common style in the 18th century. The first floor windows are likewise flat-headed, although there is a brick arch placed in the wall above them.
Another precursor feature of Bacon’s Castle was the stairs in the back tower of the house. They run the full height of the building and are placed in a tower at the back of the house. They presaged the open-well and dogleg stairs that wouldlater emerge in the most genteel houses of Virginia in the 18th century.[13]In the 17th century similar stairs appeared in John Page’s house (1662) in Middle Plantation and in some dwellings at Jamestown. Other 17th century houses such as Arlington (1674-75) extended the idea of open well staircases by placing them at the end of the passages, the idea being to enhance the route of a grand ascent to entertaining rooms on the second floor. Rosewell’s (1726-37)grand staircase employed this approach. In later years closed string stairs (box stairs) became more prevalent—dominant really—in 18th century Virginia houses. John Brush’s house in Williamsburg is a prime example.
Most 17th century houses in Virginia could not afford elaborate indoor moldings. Bacon’s Castle was yet another exception to this rule. Although it did not have the elaborate moldings found in England at the time, its exposed molded summer beams on the first floor were a rare decoration for the time and place. For the hundred or so yearsthey were left exposed, they were not painted, but whitewashed. The paint we see today was added later. The exposed bolection moldings were inspired by the Baroque style popular in England around the time of Bacon’s Castle’s construction. Unlike in New England and South Carolina, exposed beams never took root in Virginia. They were soon (by the 1730s) overtaken by the classical styles of Georgian architecture.
There was no interior paneling in the original house. The raised panel woodwork we see today in the Hall and Chamber was added in the 18th century. It is elaborate but simple. A series of rectangle and square panels fill the space between the windows of the Hall. The taller panels on top are separated from smaller ones on the bottom by a bolection chair rail. It stretches across the wall horizontally at one third the height of the wall from the floor. All the paneling is painted a bluish gray green. In the Chamber, there is full coverage paneling only on the west side of the room, over and around the fireplace. The other two sides of on the east and south are paneled only on the lower third parts of the wall.
RESTORATIONS
Bacon’s Castle started out, in the words of Angus Murdoch, the director of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities that oversaw the restoration of the house in the 1970s, as a “crude but robust Tudor gothic statement of wealth and authority.[14] However, over the years it was changed dramatically, ending up in the 1850s as a “heavily disguised neo-classical manor house.”[15]
The first major alteration of the house occurred in the 18th century. In the 1720s, the Allens added a partition creating a central passage between the first floor Hall and Chamber. The passage reduced the size of the Hall and meant that guests now entered the house through the passage, rather than directly into the Hall. The single 17th century opening on the north wall was replaced with two new window openings. Original window openings were likely altered in the 1740’s; a brick arch can be seen in one of the north windows showing its original position.[16] There was a succession of wooden porches on the front of the house, at least two of them, that were renovated about the same time the window openings were altered.
In addition, a doorway was installed from the hall into the central passage. In the Hall and Chamber the whitewashed plaster walls were built over with raised panel woodwork. A window replaced a closet in the hall next to the fireplace, and the 17th century single window on the south side of the hall gave way to two new windows flanking the central panel. Closets or small rooms were built, likely around 1740, against the north façade and adjoining the west side of the stair tower. There were actually two of them, one replacing the other. In the Chamber an original window was likewise removed and a doorway put in its place leading to small room in the back (north) side of the house. There’s some confusion about whether windows existed on the north side of the chamber; archeological evidence suggests there were no windows there, and yet the 1755 inventory of the chamber lists curtains for three windows.[17]
At some point in the 18th century a partition probably made of boards or panels was installed to create a central passage. A doorway was cut into its east side opening into the “Over the Hall” chamber. The most likely construction date for the partition was between 1728 and 1755.[18] It was later replaced in the 1850s by the existing partition. At some point chair rails were added to the walls of both second story rooms, and the large fireplace in the “Over the Chamber” room was reduced in size.
Most of the attic space, or garret, looks much like it did in 1665.[19] The west room windows were replaced with large gothic sashes in the 19th century, and the attic room in the porch tower has a window opening in a wall (now closed) likely made in the 18th century. Except for these changes (plus a few replaced rafters in the stair tower and other minor modification), not much has changed in Bacon Castle’s garret. Original nails can be seen today in the roof of the garrets.
Sometime in the 18th century—definitely before 1815 (and possibly around 1800)--a wooden frame wing was added to the east side of the house.[20] It had a small single-storey hyphen-like frame building connecting the larger wing to the main house. In 1851, John Hankins moved the wood frame addition to another location on the grounds. In its place he built a neo-classical wing of brick and connected it to the main house this time with a two-storey hyphen. It took him two years to complete, and he may have contemplated building another similar wing on the west side. But he never did it. In addition, Hankins replaced many of the window frames in the old house, installed new plaster walls and made repairs. Hankins neo-classical wing remains at Bacon’s Castle to this day.
In the 1970s after the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities purchased Bacon’s Castle, a major restoration of the old mansion was undertaken. The APVA’s basic philosophy was above all to stabilize and secure the old property.[21] It was a very wise decision, because the house today is extremely well preserved.
For educational purposes, the APVA decided to interpret the interior of the house by “zones”—that is, to display rooms in different time periods to show the full history of the house. This required some modifications. The original fireplace in the Over the Chamber bedroom on the second floor was reopened, to show what the house looked like in the 17th century. The plaster from 1854 was removed to expose the 17th century joists. Reconstructed 17th century glass was put in the undisturbed 19th century sash windows. In addition, the hyphen wing was altered partly as a fire barrier between the new wing and the old house, and other minor (and well hidden) changes were made to accommodate tourists.
In 1982 a wood shingle roof was installed in 1982[22] It replaced a 1950 roof that had, in turn, been built in place of an old seam metal roof constructed in the 19th century. The roof sheathing is 18th century and possibly even original.
The stabilization and repair of the brickwork was extensive. Some areas had lost their mortar entirely, and many bricks needed replacing. The west chimney stack had started to tilt and needed to be underpinned with a modern brick foundation. The exterior door in the stair tower was bricked up to prevent water from entering.
The most extensive restoration work on Bacon’s Castle involved repairing the timberwork.[23] The framing damage on the second floor required the most replacements, including more than half of the north and south wall plates. There was extensive termite damage as well to the second story beams. Whenever possible the APVA kept and repaired damaged frame members; only five of the original chamfered oak joists were repaired. Some steel reinforcements were used, but not extensively (a steel post, for example, was placed in the 18th century passage). The central section of the chimney girt was removed and replaced with new oak. New lintels were put in the south basement windows and fireplace. And three missing ceiling joists were replaced in the stair tower and the stairway was reconstructed.