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Delaware Valley

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Delaware Valley Delaware Valley 35

BRONCK HOUSEc. 1663, 1738, late 18th centuryWest Coxsackie Greene County, New York

The Bronck House property was owned by members of the Bronck family from 1662 to 1939, when it was given to the Greene County

Historical Society, its current owner. The Society interprets the original part of the stone building as the oldest surviving house in the Hudson River Valley. It is indeed an important early record of European settlement in northern New Jersey and southern New York, though atypical in its use of rubble stone rather than brick or frame for the exterior walls. Only after about 1710 do stone buildings begin to be built with any frequency in the upper Hudson Valley, and these are associated with Germanic, not Dutch, settlements. No less significant is the 1738 brick addition, a testament to the continuation of Dutch building practices in the New World long after the Netherlands’ political influence had been eclipsed.

The first stone house was built by tavern owner Pieter Bronck, a Swede, and his Dutch wife, Helletje Jans. Although the interior finishes have been upgraded, some evidence for early features survives, such as the framing for a jambless fireplace. The evolution of this portion of the house in the eighteenth century, and its original form and finish, are questions for the group to consider together on site.

In 1738, Pieter Bronck’s grandson, Leendert, and his wife, Anna, completed an extensive building campaign, which included the construction of a new, two-story house at right angles to the first. Its structure consists of widely spaced H-bents with brick infill and a brick veneer, with brick parapets at the gable ends. The house is divided into two rooms, each of which were originally heated by jambless fireplaces, and each of which were directly accessible from the outside. In the cellar, two early casement windows survive, with their original shutters and hardware.

Later in the eighteenth century, the stone portion of the house was extended and framed in a manner similar to the earlier building, with deep, widely spaced joists. Around this time, a short hyphen was erected to connect the brick and stone buildings.

Our visit to this building will be your guides’ first. We look forward to exploring the evidence as novices together.

JEK

Elevations of existing building, showing brick and stone phases with connecting hyphen, courtesy Greene County Historical Society.

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Existing ground floor plan, courtesy Greene County Historical Society.


Very few buildings survive from before 1700 in the Delaware Valley. Across the bay in Greenwich, New Jersey, the frame of a 1680s house remains

visible in its eighteenth-century replacement; in the same town are a handful of timber-framed houses from around 1700 but such a concentration of early buildings is rare outside Massachusetts Bay. New Castle’s Dutch House, on Second Street, is a precious relic of the earliest period of the town’s settlement and is therefore particularly prized.

The land around New Castle had been purchased for the Swedish crown in 1638 but was captured by the Dutch in 1655 and re-named New Amstel. The English took it in 1663, calling the polyglot city New Castle. The Dutch house has been so named since the 1930s, when it was purchased for the New Castle Historical Society and restored as an example of the earliest European architecture in Delaware. In 2004, it seems difficult to endorse the early decision to classify it as Dutch—its ethnic origins are, in fact, obscure, and its idiosyncratic framing system is derived from English, not continental, models. It will be instructive to compare the structure with the first two periods of the Bronck House.

As originally built, the Dutch House was a 16-foot by 24-foot, story-and-a-half frame building, with a large, 8-foot wide hearth in the east gable wall. The exterior walls were filled with brick nogging up to the plate and the interior was covered with plaster. The principal posts and ceiling joists were exposed and chamfered. The frame consists of four equally spaced bays, with story-and-a-half posts supporting heavy ceiling joists on roughly eight-foot centers. Heavy girts bridge these bays in the front and rear walls and support intermediate joists set on four-foot centers. The use of regularly spaced H-bents might suggest a Dutch origin, but the bents are much farther apart than other North American examples of Dutch practice, and have intermediate joists between them.

The interior was originally a single large room with a loft above. Early on, it was subdivided into two rooms by a stud partition along the western interior bent, creating a large, roughly square, heated room to the east with a smaller unheated room to the west. These changes were contemporary with or followed by the addition of the rear shed, which contained a small heated room that was briefly the best finished space in the house.

DUTCH HOUSEc. 1700, c. 1730, 1795, 1823, restored 1938 New Castle, Delaware


Later in the eighteenth century, a full cellar was excavated under the house and the entire exterior was cased in brick. It was at this time that the deep overhanging eave was added to the front. Photographic evidence from the 1930s clearly indicates that this was not an original feature but it must have been installed either before or with the brick veneer, which does not extend above the soffit. Shortly after 1795, the stud partition was moved two feet to the east, making the two front rooms equal-sized. These changes were likely associated with the transfer of the house, in equal parts, from Mary Thompson to two of her children.

In 1823, John Springer’s widow, Mary, radically transformed the house, giving it the form it has today. She removed the large original hearth and replaced it with a pair of back-to-back fireplaces in a single stack at the center of the house, converting it to a lobby-entry layout. She installed new finishes throughout the first floor, including a new plaster ceiling and new mantels. She also made the loft newly habitable, stiffening the floor by inserting new floor joists between the original members, laying new tongue-and-groove floorboards, and raising the roof several feet.

When the Delaware Society for the Preservation of Antiquities acquired the Dutch House in 1938, it was largely intact from the Springer era. The rear fireplace had been blocked, and a door inserted at the side of the lean-to but few other changes were noted by restoration architect Albert Kruse. Structural failures in the

southwest wall forced Kruse to replace it with concrete block and brick up to the second floor level, but he left the framed gable wall above intact. He also replaced the ground level floor framing and rebuilt the two front fireplaces, but did little reconstruction elsewhere.

JEK

Above: reconstructed ground floor plans in Period II and Period V (stair location PII conjectural).Below: typical bent framing in PI.


The Amstel House is a fine and largely intact example of Georgian architecture in the Delaware Valley. A precise date remains elusive

but the Flemish bond brickwork and the character of the interior and exterior trim suggest that the house was built in the mid-eighteenth century. Though the house was restored at a time when historic architects often worked with a free hand, and though it has suffered both a fire and a flood, much of its original fabric survives.

The extensive Georgian woodwork in the Amstel House is typical of substantial houses throughout eastern

North America in the late colonial period. Paneling similar to that in the right-hand room may be found in early American buildings from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Charleston, South Carolina. Several refinements, however, are particular to colonial building practice in the Delaware Valley. The deep cove cornice at the eaves is found on many early buildings in and around Philadelphia, where it is often used with a pent roof. The large fireplace in the front right room has curved cheeks and straight jambs, like the opening in the chamber above it, and the small one above the kitchen. Though not unique to the Delaware Valley, this form of fireplace is especially common in northern

Delaware, southern New Jersey, and southeastern Pennsylvania. The most striking feature of the Amstel House is the unusual orientation of its roof, with the gable end along its widest face. Although this is by no means a typical local feature, there was an example of this configuration outside Philadelphia at Whitby Hall, built c. 1754 and demolished in 1922. The interiors from Whitby, which are similar to those in the Amstel House, survive in a reconstructed facsimile in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and in the American Wing of the Detroit Institute of Art.

In 1738, the Amstel House property was sold at sherriff’s auction to Dr. John Finney, a native of Londonderry, Ireland, who had settled in New Castle in 1724. The lot at the corner of Delaware Avenue and 4th Street was one of many properties owned by Finney, including six house lots in town and several thousand acres in New Castle County. Finney, who owned the property until his death in 1774, almost certainly built the house during his tenure. If he built soon after acquiring the lot, or even after

AMSTEL HOUSEc. 1740-1755, late 19th century, 1905New Castle, Delaware

The Amstel House first floor plan, 2003, drawwn by Jeff Klee.


his 1742 marriage to his second wife, the woodwork, especially the Doric frontispiece, was precocious.

At his death in 1774, John Finney’s real property passed to his children. They leased the Amstel House to Nicholas Van Dyke, govnernor of Delaware, until 1785. In 1795, Joseph Tatlow purchased the house and maintained it until his death in 1808, when it passed to his heirs. The Tatlows sold to John and Lucinda Moody in 1832. Members of the Moody-Burnham family owned the property until the end of the nineteenth century, during which time they operated it as a boarding house. In the late nineteenth century, the Burnhams cut an exterior door in the Delaware Avenue side of the front left room, which was used as a tailor’s shop and a grocery. A second consequence of this conversion was likely the removal of the original mantel and closet in this room.

In 1904, Sophia and Henry Hay purchased the house and restored it with the help of Laussat Rogers, a Philadelphia artist and architect. Rogers’ view of colonial architecture was romantic, rather than archaeological, but he worked to preserve original fabric where he found it. He added modern conveniences like closets and plumbing and removed changes associated

with the nineteenth-century conversion to a boarding house. Where early woodwork had been removed, Rogers replaced it. In the front left room, he installed a federal-era mantel, taken from another house, and

added the chairboard and cornice. To provide a bathroom and a servant’s room for the Hays, Rogers built the small, frame projection behind the passage. This addition altered the circulation pattern and required blocking a window at the stair landing. Rogers made some fanciful changes as well, like a large rear porch and a small polygonal projection overlooking Delware Avenue. Both of these have been removed.

They Hays lived in the house until 1925. They sold it to Louise Rodney Holcomb, who conveyed it to the New Castle Historical Society in 1929. The NCHS, which was established for the purpose of preserving the house, has maintained it as a museum of local history since.

JEK

The Amstel House exterior, 2003. Photograph by Jeff Klee.


Though built of humble materials and of seemingly modest proportions, the McCann House was nonetheless better finished and larger than

the majority of houses built in Chester County in the eighteenth century. The first phase of the house is a now rare but once ubiquitous log dwelling. It is two stories tall above a full cellar, with an interior gable-end chimney venting back-to-back corner fireplaces. Doors in the in the south and east walls give access to the larger of two rooms, which were initially separated by a board partition wall. A straight run stair along the gable wall of the larger east room provides access upstairs, with interior access to the cellar below.

The second floor of the period I section is divided into three rooms and a stair landing, separated by board partitions. A tiny, unheated room, lit only by a small window in the west wall, is located at the top of the stair. Opposite the stair are two unheated rooms of almost equal size. As on the first floor, the east room

appears to be of higher status, as it receives light from two windows, whereas the west room has only one. The stair continues in a straight run to the attic, where tongue-and-groove floors secured with cut nails indicate that this level, too, was occupied, but unheated, by period II.

The period II addition is framed with exposed corner posts, and built against the south gable wall. It likely contained two rooms on each floor, with access to each directly from the corresponding room in the period I side. The new rooms on the second floor could both be accessed from the period I stair landing. Like the upper rooms in the log side, the east room is lit by a pair of windows but the west has only one.

JvdH

MCCANN HOUSEc. 1750, c. 1800Landenberg vicinityChester County, Pennsylvania

Left: detail of log wall in stairwell. Photograph by Jeroen van den Hurk, 2003.Above: Ground floor plan, existing, by Jeroen van den Hurk.


With good surviving evidence for cooking facilities in 1770, the 1780s, and the 1810s, the Hayden House illustrates the rapid changes

in domestic technology between the colonial and antebellum periods in the eastern United States. The earliest known structure on this property was described in a Pennsylvania Gazette notice of March 19, 1761 as “a good square log house.” This building does not survive, but its replacement, built about a decade later, forms the west half of the present house. Date stones on the main block bear the initials IA (Isaac Allen owned property in the vicinity, though not this lot) and MR/1770. Moses Rowan was the son of William, who owned the adjoining farm. The Rowans had had leased the Hayden House property in the 1760s and had planned to build a stone house to replace the earlier log building. Moses apparently finished the new house and purchased the property at a sherriff’s auction in 1770.

The 1770 stone house was originally laid out on a side passage or corner entry plan, on two full stories above a partial cellar, with a stair in the northeast corner. The principal entry was in the modern rear of the house, in the east bay of the north wall. The present straight run stair on the first floor is likely a later addition, replacing an earlier winder stair. The physical evidence for this earlier layout is not clear, though the plan was described in 1783 as having three rooms per floor. The house was well-finished on the first floor with splined floorboards but on the second floor, the ceiling joists were exposed and chamfered. There is no evidence for hearths on the upper level, though the two chambers on the west end might have been heated with stoves. The kitchen was originally the large room in the southwest corner of the first-period block with the best room in the northwest corner. Though the evidence for it is subtle, there was a bake oven in the west wall, either in the back of the cooking fireplace or adjoining it.

HAYDEN HOUSE1770, c. 1780, c. 1814 Avondale Vicinity, New Garden TownshipChester County, Pennsylvania

Ground floor plan in period I, 1790 (above) and period III, c. 1814, by Jeroen van den Hurk.


When Moses Rowan advertised the house for sale in 1783, he described it as having “three rooms on a floor [with] a large stone kitchen.” In the 13 years since his construction of the main block, Rowan had added a substantial one-story stone wing to the east, containing a twelve-foot wide hearth. He removed domestic work from the more formal part of the house and devoted a much larger area to cooking with more convenient access to the cellar and rear workyard and much improved natural light. In addition, he inserted a small, lighted but unheated room in the northwest corner of the kitchen wing.

Rowan sold the farm in 1788 to Thomas Pennington, who conveyed it to William Denny in 1813. Denny, a wealthy farmer from Delaware with nine children and four indentured black servants, was likely responsible for the significant changes to the house in the early nineteenth century. Denny raised the kitchen wing to a full two stories and extended the south wall of the second floor to be flush with the south wall of the period I block. Although the raised north wall and east gable wall were executed in stone to match the earlier building, the new south wall was laid in Flemish bond brick and supported by a large hewn beam. The large upper floor added three chambers to the house, accessible both from the kitchen winder stair and through a new opening cut in the east wall of the main block.

Understandably, Denny appears to have been particularly concerned with providing for his large family. In addition to the increased accommodations for children, his most significant change to the house expanded the facilities for food preparation and storage. The large cooking hearth in the period II wing was subdivided to accommodate a storage cupboard, a built-in cook stove, and a bake oven, which was relocated from outside the east wall. Just outside the south wall of the kitchen, under the new overhang, he installed a wash kettle. Several feet south of the kitchen wing, Denny erected a small stone outbuilding that, in conjunction with the improved kitchen, is a marvel of early nineteenth-century domestic engineering. Built on three levels, it contained a root cellar, a small, partially underground storage room with subterranean access to a well, and an above-ground room that opened onto a work area south of the kitchen. The short

distance between the kitchen and the outbuilding was covered by a shed roof. As a carefully organized work area, Denny’s changes to this part of the house are an inventive, early example of the nineteenth-century concern with household labor, exemplified in Catharine Beecher’s 1842 Treatise on Domestic Economy.

JEK, JvdH, and MBJ

Section through service wing, period III, c. 1814, by Jeroen van den Hurk.

View of north front of house, as expanded by the 181os. Photograph by Jeroen van den Hurk, 2003.


NEW GARDEN MEETING HOUSE1743, 1790, 1905New Garden TownshipChester County, Pennsylvania

Irish Quakers from New Garden Meeting in County Carlow, Ireland began to arrive in the New Garden area as early as 1706. At first, they attended

Meeting at New Ark (Old Kennett Meeting House), but finding the distance too great to travel, in 1713, requested permission of the Quarterly Meeting to hold their own First Day Meeting. This Meeting was held in the home of John Miller.

John Miller promised the Meeting he would deed land for a meeting house, but did not live to do so. It remained for his son, James Miller to deed six acres to a group of four trustees for the purpose of building a Meeting House and establishing a burying ground. The first Meeting held in the log Meeting House was in the Fall of 1715.

In 1743, the log meeting house was deemed too small for the growing population and was replaced by a larger brick one on the same site. This 1743 building is now the south end of the present building. In 1790, the north end of the building was constructed. This addition conforms with a practice among Quakers in much of America to double the size of their meeting houses by adding a wing to accommodate women’s business meetings. The symmetrical appearance communicated the emphasis on the equality of the sexes that resulted from an intense rethinking of Quaker identity in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

Many changes were made in the early twentieth century. In 1905, the porte-cochere was added, as well as the long east porch, the two front doors became one and the long galleries across the front of the Meeting room were removed. A partition in the center of the Meeting room was also likely removed at this time. In 1926, the boiler room and kitchen were dug out and in 1934, space was excavated under the Meeting room to make a social room.

At its peak in the 1820s, New Garden’s membership was over 500 persons. Today, the numbers are dwindling, with an adult membership of about 40 persons.

MBJ


in the east gable wall, ran up to the attic, which was originally lower.

The original kitchen wing was replaced in the third quarter of the eighteenth century with a two-story stone addition. The new wing was almost as wide as the original block but not as deep. Along the east wall, a cooking hearth is flanked by a built-in cupboard to the right and a cupboard and dairy closet to the left. A box winder stair in the northwest corner of the room blocks the period I door from the hall, eliminating direct access between the two sides at the first floor.

The second floor of the period II kitchen wing is divided into two rooms and a small stair landing. As in the first half, the largest room spans the width of the addition along the south side. It receives its light from two

REYNOLDS HOUSE1730s, c. 1760s, early 19th century, late 19th centuryToughkenamon vicinityChester County, Pennsylvania

The Reynolds House is the product of five major periods of construction between the first half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of

the nineteenth century. The oldest surviving section dates to the 1730s and consisted of a two-story stone building on a full basement. This early building faced south, with direct entry into the large hall. A door in the east gable would might have connected this space to a presumed kitchen wing and one in the rear led to a full cellar with storage niches and access to a vaulted root cellar. Behind the hall was a smaller parlor, heated by a corner fireplace, and lit by windows in the north and west walls.

From the parlor, a straight run stair led to the second floor, whose layout was similar to the first floor. A small square chamber across from the landing was heated by a corner fireplace and lit by two windows. The larger hall chamber, to the south, extended across the front of the building. A tight winder stair, lit by a small window

Exterior view showing the evolution of the house through the nineteenth century. Photograph by Jeroen van den Hurk.


windows in the south wall and has a built-in cupboard flanking the chimney stack. The second room is located against the east gable wall and receives its light from a single window in the gable wall. A narrow winder stair leads to the attic of the period II addition, where flashing stones on the period II chimney stack indicate that its original roof pitch was in line with the original period I roof.

In the early nineteenth century, the kitchen wing was extended northward to make it flush with the first-period block. The extension and the addition of windows on the north elevation created a balanced, four-bay façade on the second floor but an asymmetrical composition on the first. It is possible that during this period the roof pitch was altered and a uniform roof was added to the house.

In the late 19th century, the internal configuration of the period I block was drastically altered. The first floor was lowered by approximately two feet, making the cellar inaccessible. The original partition wall and stair were removed, as was the corner fireplace, compromising the structural integrity of the house. A side passage was created and the orientation of the house was rotated 180 degrees, making the north elevation the front of the house. The second floor was reworked, as well, into a three-room, side-passage plan.

In this period, a fourth addition was built against the west gable end, at two and a half stories tall on the north side and three stories on the south. The first floor of this addition is divided into two spaces. The largest room, on the north side, is a projecting bay with two windows and a door to the new front porch. A door in the west wall of this room connects it to the period I block. To tie the sprawling house together visually, a new roof, with two large cross gables, was raised over the whole.

JvdH

Ground floor plan, period II and period IV, drawn by Jeroen van den Hurk. Note that period IV drawing is rotated 180 degrees.


PUSEY HOUSEc. 1722, c. 1750, c. 1826-1840, c. 1870-1886Avondale VicinityChester County, Pennsylvania

The William and Elizabeth Pusey House was part of the intensive settlement of the countryside around present-day Avondale by members

of the Society of Friends. It was designed from the start to make a bold architectural statement about its owners and to assert their position near the top of an hierarchical society they shaped and shared with their friends and neighbors.

The first phase of the house consists of a two-story stone dwelling measuring roughly 22 by 37 feet. The stone work was left exposed and finished with raised mortar joints. The original door and window openings were wider and shorter. A pent roof ran across the front and rear walls and possibly across the gable ends as well. Inside, the house consisted of a hall-parlor plan with direct access from the outside into the larger room. A smaller and more formal inner room functioned as a parlor.

At roughly 20 feet square, the hall contained both the principal fireplace and stair. The fireplace consisted of a nearly ten-foot wide opening, spanned with a heavy timber lintel. A winder stair stood adjacent to the fireplace and provided access both to the upper story and the cellar. The smaller of the ground floor rooms contained a fireplace positioned slightly off-center in the gable wall. Like the fireplace in the adjoining common room, the opening in the inner room has been reduced. A small closet illuminated by a splayed, fixed-light window occupied the northeast corner of the room. Plaster scars within the closet suggest the location of bookshelves and a possible use of this space as a writing closet, a feature found in other early elite houses in the region. The second floor contained two rooms in addition to a small lighted closet, but there is no evidence for their size or placement. The rough

Exterior view. Photograph by Jeff Klee.


surfaces of ceiling joists in both stories indicate that the entire interior of the house was intended to be plastered from the outset.

After William Pusey’s death in 1730, Elizabeth Pusey continued to live in the house until her death in 1742. Following a series of court decisions and family negotiations, their son Joshua Pusey and his wife Mary Lewis Pusey acquired the property in 1736. Joshua and Mary Pusey dramatically remodeled and enlarged their house in the mid-eighteenth century. The architectural evidence suggests that they began their efforts around 1750; a 1760 probate inventory indicates that they had completed them a decade later. When they were finished, they had doubled the size of house, making it one of the largest residences in southern Chester County and nearby Delaware.

Joshua and Mary Pusey extended their house with a two-story brick gable addition, with two rooms on each story. The brick walls of the primary (south) elevation were laid in glazed header Flemish bond with penciled mortar joints. The outline of a door to the new addition remains visible under the later stucco on the south elevation. This door, in what would have been the front elevation of the Puseys’ new brick wing, opened into a large and elegant parlor that overlooked the public road and the family mill.

A corner fireplace heated each of two ground floor rooms. The larger of these was the roughly 18-by-22-foot front parlor. As built, the second floor above the parlor consisted of a single undivided space entered from a new stair landing, dominated by a corner fireplace, and isolated from the new room behind it. The ground-floor back room and chamber to the rear of the wing were not only smaller than the parlor and the chamber they abutted, they were also plainer. The ground-floor back room contained a corner fireplace with a bake oven but the chamber above was unheated.

At the same time Joshua and Mary Pusey were erecting their new parlor and best chamber, they undertook an extensive remodeling of the older house. Their efforts included making the window openings the same size and style as those in the new brick wing, as well as narrowing the front south door opening. The massive common room fireplace was reduced from nearly ten feet to six and lowered. The remaining space from the older fireplace was made into a storage closet in the northwest corner of the room.

Work on the old inner room or parlor was more extensive. The original partition was removed and a new stud wall inserted approximately three inches to the west. At the same time, the Puseys introduced a new closed string stair into the old room. It ran across the

south wall, ascending in a straight run to a second-floor landing. The new stair led up to a landing, fronting a suite of three unheated rooms and providing access to the new best chamber in the brick wing. There was no internal access between the three second-floor rooms in the east end of the old house and the newly refinished common room chamber in the west, however. This room had been assigned by the court for the lifetime use of widow Elizabeth Pusey and it remained largely isolated in the overall plan of the remodeled house. Although Elizabeth Pusey died in 1742, this room retained its quality as a separate apartment, accessed only by the winder stair from the old hall below.

Following the deaths of Joshua and Mary Pusey in 1760, the house descended through the family to Isaac and Esther Pusey in 1826. Isaac and Esther Pusey turned their attention to the service end of the house abutting the west gable of the original stone dwelling. They pulled down the original kitchen and replaced it with the south or front half of the present two-story kitchen wing. The addition of the wing also occasioned the removal of the old-fashioned pent eaves and their replacement with a porch that ran full length of the house. Their changes to the main block of the house were limited, with the most visible alteration being a further closing in of the old common room fireplace and the replacement of the mid eighteenth-century woodwork with a simple Greek Revival mantel.

The Puseys’ new brick kitchen wing was laid in plain seven-course common bond and rose to the same height as the original house. It contained two rooms on the ground floor, with entry to the front room through a door just west of the seam with the stone house. A stair ascended in this space against the gable of the original house and provided access to the chambers in the second story of the service wing. The second-floor landing at the head of the stair opened onto a large front and smaller back chamber, both likely heated by iron stoves and serving as sleeping chambers for servants, mill hands, farm laborers, or children. The new ground floor back room likely served as the kitchen.

The Pusey House descended by will to Joshua (III) and Maria Pusey. Although Joshua Pusey died in 1870, the widowed Maria Pusey continued to live in the dwelling until 1886. Like Isaac and Esther Pusey before them, Joshua (III) and Maria Pusey focused their remodeling efforts on improving the service spaces within the house by adding a two-story brick leanto to the back or north elevation of the period IV kitchen. It is also possible that the extension of the service wing was undertaken late in period IV.

On Maria Pusey’s death in 1886, the property was purchased from the estate by her unmarried daughter


Emily. Emily Pusey retained possession until she sold the house and remaining lands out of the family in 1912. The Pusey House survives as a remarkable example of how a single family made and remade their domestic environment for two centuries (c. 1718-1912).

BLH

Pusey house ground floor plans for period I, period III, and period VI, drawn by Jeff Klee.


Standing on a bluff overlooking the Appoquinimink Creek just south of the town of Odessa, Old Drawyers Presbyterian Church

is a testament to the ubiquity of the meeting house plan in early American ecclesiastical architecture. Neither devised by nor solely associated with New England Congregationalists, the plan, containing the principal entrance on the front long wall and the pulpit located opposite it on the back wall and surrounded by a three-sided gallery, can be found from Maine to Georgia. The Presbyterian congregation that had its origins in this region of northern Delaware in the late seventeenth century was quite familiar with the form when it replaced an earlier structure with this substantial and well-crafted 52-foot by 42-foot brick building in 1773. In the Delaware Valley as indeed across the American colonies, congregations of Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, and even Anglicans erected similarly arranged buildings. Old Drawyers, for example, closely resembles in scale and form St. Anne’s Church, an Anglican church built in 1768 in neighboring Middletown. The principal difference within this standard plan was in the placement of the communion table—the Baptists, Congregationalists preferring a small table placed before the pulpit; the Anglicans railing the table in behind a balustrade on the east wall of the church; while many Presbyterians

were served seated at long tables temporarily placed in the center of wide aisles. The nearly eight-foot broad central aisle leading to the pulpit at Old Drawyers suggests such a practice at this church.

Within this universal plan, there are the features in the design that anchor this building to others in the region. Foremost is the brickwork. The foundations are set on stone rubble and then a plinth of 1:3 bonding up to the double molded watertable. This use of 1:3 bonding in this secondary location is standard for late colonial brick buildings in the Delaware Valley, but would be precocious for structures in the Chesapeake. All four walls above are laid in Flemish bond with a minimum of glazed bricks. There is a four-course string course around the front and two sides and stops short on the side walls near the corner with the back wall. The windows are segmental on the lower floor with flat jack arches at the balcony level. None of the jack arches are rubbed or gauged, standard practices south of this region in lower Maryland and Virginia. The use of two, oversized compass-headed windows to light the pulpit on the rear wall is typical of meeting house design in the mid-Atlantic, but would be unusual in New England, the Chesapeake, and the Carolina lowcountry.

The sizes of the bricks are typical of the region, measuring 8 1⁄2 to 8 5/8 inches in length, 4 1/8 inches in width, and 2 1⁄4 inches in height. It is this latter measurement that locates the brickwork to the Delaware Valley, being slightly shorter than the standard height of bricks in the Chesapeake. There are a number of inscribed bricks around the three doors and elsewhere. On the front wall between the left two windows is a brick with the initials WD 1773 picked out in lime. On either side of the front door (the frontispieces is a later, early-nineteenth century insertion—see the chopped watertable and plinth bricks for evidence) are the initials MAS 1773 on the left and PA 1773 on the right. On the south side door to the left is a brick inscribed AB 1773 and on the north side to the right is a brick AG 1773. It would appear that many members of the building committee decided to leave their mark upon the building.

OLD DRAWYERS PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH1773, alterations and remodeling 1823, 1833 Odessa vic., New Castle County, Delaware

Floor plan, drawn by Carl R. Lounsbury.


Though altered in the early nineteenth-century, Old Drawyers retains its original configuration. The interior is dominated by the pulpit located on the north wall between the two large compass-headed windows. A smaller window lights the area immediately in the center of this ensemble, much of which was rebuilt around 1825-35 including the double staircase and railing with an oval, unmolded handrail and slat balusters. The ogee-shaped canopy crowned by the dove may date from the original construction, but more detailed examination is warranted. It certainly matches the appearance of those that were built in the colonial period. Elsewhere, the pews have been altered to modified slips with raised panel wainscoting and doors enclosing the long benches on the ground floor. Side entrances on the east and west walls open immediately to staircases in the two front corners of the building. These retain their earlier, late colonial woodwork and lead to the three-sided gallery that is supported by a series of

columns that stand on plinths. The long benches at the upper level were also altered in the early nineteenth century, perhaps executed in 1823 when documentary evidence suggests that the building was also plastered for the first time. The plastering of the arched ceiling running in an east-west direction now covers over the raised king post roof truss system.

CRL

Above: exterior view, 1986. Below: interior view, 1986. Photographs by Carl R. Lounsbury.

Documents

Delaware Valley - Colonial Williamsburg