The Monmouth inquirer., 1925-10-01

HOMES OF PILGRIMS
TAI PAPER
Glass Not Common in Early
Days Of America.

lays OF <2HFGFtC0s
Bring oil paper for your windows"
wrote one of the Plymouth Pilgrims TO
some who were about to come over.
Window glass was not then in gem
eral use in England. and oil paper
for a long time let a dusky light into
the obscure rooms of many settlers
houses.
The Swedish pioneers on the Della
ARE used sheets of mica-"muscovy-
glass;" 1t was called-for the same
y1rpose. Farther toward the south,
where winter was less feared, a board
shutter, sometimes made very pretty
and convenient" was at first the main
device for closing a window, but about
100 window shasht with crystal
glass"-that is, with glass that one
could see through-are spoken Of as
a luxury recently affected by the Vir-
ginia gentry.
Five years after the first landing,
the jamestown ~colonists began to
build the lower story of their "com-
petent and decent houses Of brick
Of their own burning.
In New England some substantial
houses were erected very early; New
Haven people built city houses at the
outset; but primitive Carolina dwell
ings were of rough clapboards nailed
to a frame; and the houses of the poor
were generally left upholstered, not
only in Carolina, but as far north as
Connecticut. Paint was rarely seen
outside of the larger towns.
Oglethorpe, true to his military
ideals, had all freeholders' houses In
Savannah, his W included, made ex-
actly alike "a feet long and 16 broad,
inclosed with feather-edge clapboards,
rooted with shingles and foored with
deals.
It was a city of shanties-a fixed
military encampment.
Penn planned a somewhat larger
house for his colonists, to be divided
into two rooms, the walls cIapboarded
outside and in, the intervening space
filed with earth, the ground floor of
clay, and q loft floor Of boards.
To these pioneer dwellings we must
add the New Jersey house, introduced
by the Swedish pioneers. The sides
of this were palisades Of split timbers,
set upright. Nor should one omit from
the list the abodes Of some Of the
aquatic Dutch, who dwelt with their
families all the year round aboard
their sloops plying in the rivers and
bays about New York and up the Hud-
son to Albany.
But there was another class whose
congenial home was the puncheon floor
and mud-daubed walls. These people,
who had not yet emerged from Saxon
barbarism. were hereditary pioneers.
AS o as neighbors approached
them, the log-cabin jewellers sold their
little clearings to a race Of thriftier
men and pushed farther into the
woods, where wild food was plenti-
full.
Their social pleasures were marked
by rude polity without any attempt
at luxury or display, or any regard for
the restraints of refinement they were
hospitable, g%eneraus, fierce, coarse, SUI
perstitious, and fond Of strong drink;
given to lighting and some Of them to
the barbarous diversion Of gouging
out one another's eyes.
The finer American houses were for
the most part initiated from the forms
prevailing at the same period in Eng
land. The large room called "the halr'
was the most striking feature of many
Of the better dwellings Of the Seven
teenth and Eighteenth centuries.
Mansions were built not for domestic
retirement, but for ~festivity. They
were the abodes Of rich and hospitable
planters, whose delight It was to live
surrounded by friends and guests and
to rival one another In the magnih-
n Of their great assemblies.
william Penn built a similar
sion on his manor at Pennsbury, the
great room Of which was called the
audience hall here the proprietor met
his council and held parleys with the
Tndians.-Philadelphia Inquirer.