Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
practices. Bricks were moulded to a size that was little different to the typical
English brick, which were wood-fired in either clamps or updraught kilns. Most
brickmakers were also bricklayers, as Lucas (1997, 151) emphasises:
Thomas Eames, resident in Medford, Massachusetts, described himself as
'Brickelayer, and maker of bricke' when in 1660 he took Joseph Mirrible as
apprentice, agreeing to instruct him 'in the art and trade of a brickelayer, and
brickemaker'. Contracts in seventeenth-century Virginia assumed that bricklayers
made the bricks they would need to lay.
Among the first use of brick for building were places of worship, where the
architectural styles, brick types and craft techniques initially employed owe
much to the late sixteenth ecclesiastical and early seventeenth vernacular build-
ings of England and the Low Countries. English bond was at first popular with
the bricklayers, but in the later seventeenth century was replaced on the prem-
ier façades by Flemish bond, and header bond, which enjoyed some popular-
ity from the 1740s in parts of southern England, appears on some façades in
the second half of that century. Although purpose-moulded special shapes
were used, the prolific skills of cutting and rubbing bricks among the majority
of English bricklayers meant it was frequently employed for cut-mouldings and
tracery on churches like:
●
St. Mary's Chapel, St. Mary's City (
c
1660), Maryland (see case study,
p. 111). The first brick structure erected in the state.
●
St. Luke's, Newport Parish (
c
.1685), Isle of Wight County, Virginia, is the
states oldest surviving church, and the only one to be built with an original
tower as a feature. Much of the tracery of cut and rubbed work is original,
but has been replaced down the years (Fig. 63).
●
St. Peters Parish church (1701-03), New Kent County, Virginia - Cornelius
Hall bricklayer for the body of the church built 1701-03. Williams Walker
was the undertaker of the tower in 1740, but the bricklayer is unknown,
though Williams employed one named William Frazer for a parsonage
nearby at the same time (C. Lounsbury, 2006).
●
Bruton Parish church (1715), Williamsburg, Virginia.
The same English influences are to be seen on the major sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century brick-built domestic and civic buildings in Virginia, like
Bacon's Castle (
c
.1665), Surry County with its so called 'Dutch' gables and
diagonally-set shafts. As the fashion for classical, Anglo-Dutch style and use
of refined gauged work became popular, spreading out to the rural shires
of England in the late seventeenth century, so it was by the early 1700s that
this style and its associated craft practices began to be seen in the colonies.
Colonial church building in Virginia was coming under similar influences
