Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts

The people who lived in Middle Virginia in the eighteenth century are almost unknown to history because so little has been written about them. After Glassie selected the area—roughly Goochland and Louisa counties—for study, he selected a representative part of the countryside, recorded all the older houses there, developed a transformational grammar of traditional house designs, and examined the area’s architectural stability and change.

Comparing the houses with written accounts of the period, he found that the houses became more formal and less related to their environment at the same time as the areas established political, economic, and religious institutions were disintegrating. It is as though the builders of the houses were deliberately trying to impose order on the surrounding chaotic world. Previous orthodox historical interpretations of the period have failed to note this. Glassie has provided new insights into the intellectual and social currents of the period, and has rescued a heretofore little-known people from historiographical oblivion. Combining a fresh, perceptive approach with a broad interdisciplinary body of knowledge, Glassie has made an invaluable breakthrough in showing the way to understand the people of history who have left their material things as their only legacy.