attic, one could see that the house indeed resembled an inverted ship: the
supporting beams were pegged to a “keel” that served as a roof beam. What
was different from a ship was that the whole structure hung on a massive
central chimney, which occupied about a quarter of the total interior space
of the house. The main fireplace, large enough to walk in, was used both for
heating and for cooking. Each of the original rooms had a fireplace, and
opposite the kitchen fireplace was a smoke room, large enough for hanging
and preserving several carcasses of deer or wild boar. The house was built
around 1692, but not until at least half a century later was the outside of the
house painted. Paint was a luxury; bulletproof sheathing, heating, and
cooking were necessities.
My house in Harvard was relatively sophisticated. Roughly half a cen-
tury earlier, the thirty houses that Manhattan then boasted were mainly
made of tree bark on Indian patterns, since there were as yet no sawmills or
brick kilns; as late as 1685 many families in Pennsylvania were living in
caves or lean-tos called “half-faced camps.” As the settlers prospered dur-
ing the eighteenth century, particularly along the Atlantic coast, they began
to turn to England for guidance on building their houses. The works of
Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones were published in what amounted to
early versions of coffee-table books; the neoclassical works of the great six-
teenth-century Italian mason and architect Andrea Palladio, especially,
inspired the buildings being constructed in the colonial South. When,
shortly after the Revolution, a French traveler, the marquis de Chastellux,
visited Monticello, which Thomas Jefferson had begun in 1768, he compli-
mented Jefferson on being “the first American who has consulted the Fine
Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.”
Houses in the new cities were jammed together. Benjamin Franklin
complained in 1753 that “This Town [Philadelphia] is a mere Oven.... I
languish for the Country, for Air and Shade and Leisure, but Fate has
doom’d me to be stifled and roasted and teased to death in a City.”
To complement their houses, the colonists imported English furniture.
Thomas Chippendale not only made furniture but also published designs;
hisGentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director(1754) was much admired in
the colonies, where it stimulated the growth of a new furniture-making
industry. Soon, American adaptations of English styles were announced by
146 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA