When Colonel Abraham Lincoln moved into the Homestead in 1840 with his family, he began constructing the rear ell. An ell is an addition to a building that forms a right angle, creating the shape of an “L.” It is a two-story brick structure with two rooms on the first floor, three on the second, and an attic space. The walls are three courses thick, and the bricks are laid in common bond. There are two chimneys on the north side of the structure, one of which has a large cooking hearth on the first floor. It is likely that this addition was used as a summer kitchen by the Lincolns. When originally built, the summer kitchen was completely detached from the main home, only connected by a covered porch.
The rear ell of the Lincoln Homestead. Though originally a separate structure, the two buildings were connected after the Homestead was sold out of the Lincoln family.
Adding a separate service building or wing to a house became very popular in Virginia in the nineteenth century, and “some rural plantations created covered walkways and passageways from the dining room to the external kitchen.”[1] It is possible that the other room in the summer kitchen was used as a laundry, as enslaved cooks on smaller plantations in Virginia often played multiple roles as laundresses or maids, in addition to being cooks.[2] While there is no archaeological or documentary evidence to show where on the property the Lincolns’ enslaved people lived and slept, it is very likely that some of them may have had quarters on the second floor or attic of the rear ell.
Enslaved cooks usually lived in the kitchen building, often in a loft or second story; if the cook had family on the plantation, they would often be allowed to live in the kitchen with him or her.[3] A multitude of duties could have been performed in this building which would have helped keep the Homestead running. The rear ell would also have allowed the Lincolns to keep a close eye on their enslaved people as they worked.
Since this space was where the primary food preparation was taking place for the Lincoln family, the cooking hearth would have had a fire going, regardless of season or temperature. Unlike in the main home, the rear ell did not have a central hall. Without one, there would have been a lot less opportunity for ventilation in this building; there were also significantly smaller windows in this area than in the main house. Not only would the enslaved people have had to work in very hot conditions during the summer, but they also would have had to live and sleep in the heat as well. Because the rear ell was part of the private area of the home, and an area where enslaved people would have worked, it would not have been a priority for the Lincolns to make sure there would be optimal airflow during the summer.
This blueprint shows the two rooms on the first floor of the rear ell addition in 2019.
Since the rear ell was a decidedly private space on the Homestead, there was not a need to put so much emphasis into symmetry or decoration. Not only was it a private space, but it was also an area of the home where enslaved people would have worked. While the main house is perfectly symmetrical, the rear ell is completely asymmetrical. The building has two different sized chimneys that are both on the north side of the home, rather than one on each side. The windows are also unevenly spaced and are not all the same size. The brickwork was laid in common bond which was easier to lay and less fashionable than the Flemish bond used for the façade of the main home.[4] Because the ell was a space for only the inhabitants of the Homestead, the family seem to have put less emphasis on the architectural details when building it. Overall, the architectural differences between the rear ell and the main home clearly establish the rear ell as a private space on the homestead.
[1] Kelley Fanto Deetz, Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017) 57.
[4] Only three of the original walls of the rear ell remain, but it is reasonable to presume that since three of them are in common bond, so was the fourth wall.
Despite the prominence of German architectural influences in the Valley, Jacob Lincoln chose to build a Federal-style home. Unfortunately, there are no documents left behind by the Lincoln family to explain why he made this choice, but it seems likely that he was influenced by the new popular style of architecture, even if the style was not as popular in the Valley. The Homestead is an “unusually sophisticated example of Federal style architecture” for Rockingham County. The house overall is constructed using locally made bricks which are laid in both Flemish and common bond. Flemish bond is a form of bricklaying where the bricks alternate orientation between the header (the short side) and the stretcher (the long side), creating a pattern. Common bond, rather, is laid with multiple rows of outward-facing stretchers interspersed with a row of headers.[1]
This image of Flemish bond, taken of the façade of the Lincoln Homestead, shows how each row of bricks alternates between the headers (short side of the brick) with the stretchers (the long side of the brick).
This image of common bond, taken of the north side of the home, shows how there are multiple rows of bricks laid with outward-facing stretchers, interspersed with a single row of outward-facing headers.
This blueprint of the home in 2019 depicts the first floor of the main house.
The façade and back of the original house follows a five-bay pattern with four windows and a door on the first floor and five windows on the second floor. The gable ends of the house, however, both have two large windows on each side of the chimney with two smaller windows providing light into the attic space. The original windows were small pane sash windows; on the first floor each sash had twelve small panes of glass while the second-floor windows had twelve panes in the top sash and nine in the bottom. [2]
The original portion of the house, built in 1800 by Jacob Lincoln, is the largest. It has a 3×3 floor plan featuring a central hall with a staircase to the second floor and attic. Upon entering through the front door, the room on the right-hand side spans the entire length of the house, with one fireplace and chimney centered on the outside wall. To the left, there are two smaller rooms which share a chimney, and each has corner fireplaces. The second floor follows almost exactly the same floorplan with one small addition: after venturing up the stairs, above the entryway on the first floor, there is a very small additional room. The attic, at the time the Lincolns lived there, was an open space with no fireplaces. Each room on the first two floors had hardwood flooring and wood paneling below the windows.[3]
There are several features in the home which, when analyzed, communicate a lot about the way the Lincolns, and Americans generally at the time, wanted to be seen by visitors to their home. One of these features is the central hall. Early American homes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often had the main entryway to the house located in the main living space of the house. The introduction of a central hall into early nineteenth century homes altered this previous floorplan. Houses with central halls completely changed the way in which visitors experienced a home: rather than entering directly into the “hearthside glow” of a home, they were instead greeted in a “dark, unheated hallway.” By creating a space for greeting guests, families no longer allowed them direct access into their living space. In this way, homes such as the Lincoln Homestead, emphasized a new division between “inhabitants and visitors… [and between] internal and external.” The central hall is a physical embodiment of a new desire for privacy in a home’s architecture. Additionally, around the same time the central hall was added into homes, the master bedroom moved to the second floor. This further solidified the emphasis placed on privacy in nineteenth-century houses and the internal division of public versus private space in a home. [4]
The central hall in the Lincoln Homestead during the Bixlers’ restoration in 2021. Rather than entering the home directly into the room, visitors would have entered into the hall, creating a division of private vs. public space. Image Source: The Lincoln Homestead Instagram
The presence of the central hall in a home, particularly in Virginia, also altered the lived experience of the house. People in the past often altered the construction of their homes in order to fit the climate in which they lived. Virginians were the same. As early as 1705, people in Virginia started changing the forms of their houses to make Virginia summers more bearable. They began building larger rooms with high ceilings and adding sash windows with glass to increase airflow. The addition of a central hall in a floor plan increased the amount of airflow possible in a home. The hall would help pull outside air in through the front door, which could then be further circulated in the rooms through open windows or an open door at the back of the house as well. The Lincolns had a door at both ends of the hall, as well as at least three sashed windows in each room; sash windows could be opened from both the bottom and the top. By doing this, cool air was pulled into the room through the bottom window while hot air was circulated out the top. [5]
This is the only image which depicts the original portico and windows during the time the Lincolns lived in the home.
In addition to the central hall, the Lincolns had another strategy to help mitigate heat: the front porch. Porches were added to Virginia homes starting in the eighteenth century, likely influenced by earlier seventeenth century homes in England that had front porches. English porches were generally enclosed, but Virginia porches were altered to suit the summer heat and were left open. By the nineteenth century, however, the front porch became more of a living space for the family that was neither fully inside or outside and allowed homeowners to escape the heat indoors and look at the outside world. The absence of a front porch was often a sign of “low status” in Virginia. The Lincoln Homestead originally had a small open portico with a pediment, allowing the portico to frame the arched Federal-style doorway. The Lincolns might have sat on the portico in an attempt to cool off. [6]
Just as the layout of the home reveals important elements of the lives of its inhabitants, there is information that can be gleaned from the construction of the outside of the Lincoln Homestead as well. The earliest houses in the Shenandoah Valley were often made of stone and followed Germanic architectural styles. Crafting a house out of brick, though, required the extra step of firing the bricks that stone houses did not require. The decision to make a home out of bricks reflects a “fondness for technological complication” in early American homes.Kilns to fire clay into bricks were often built at the site of the new house. Once the bricks were created, there were any number of ways that the Lincolns could have directed them to be laid. They chose for the bricks meant for the façade of the house to be laid in Flemish bond, a fashionable pattern; the sides and back of the main home, as well as the rear ell, were laid in common bond. The Lincolns wanted the fashionable style of bricklaying for the front of the house and laying only the façade of the home in Flemish bond was likely less labor-intensive. Nevertheless, the Lincolns wanted to be viewed as fashionable and stylish by others. [7]
This blueprint depicts the symmetry of the façade of the Lincoln Homestead.
One important aspect of the façade, and the house in general, was its symmetry. Symmetry in architecture represents values such as harmony, order, and unity, while also projecting an image of the homeowners that “divulges no personal information.” The façade of one’s house can share a lot about the family living inside: “The house’s façade is also its people’s façade.” In this way, families hoped that having a symmetrical house with a symmetrical façade could suggest to outsiders that they were sophisticated and organized. When adding structures to houses before Georgian and Federal-style architecture became popular, homeowners would often construct additions on the sides of their houses, making the structure asymmetrical. When symmetry became important, however, families began putting additions onto the back of their homes. This allowed them to expand their houses without altering the symmetry of the house when looking at the building from the front. The Lincolns followed this model when Abraham and his family built the rear ell to the Homestead in the early 1840s: when the house is viewed from the front, it is impossible to tell the house is not symmetrical. [8]
Similar to the façade of a home, parlors in the 19th century related directly to the way in which a family hoped to be viewed by its visitors. Early parlors were multipurpose rooms; the family would have placed the its best furniture and possessions in the parlor but they also would have spent lots of time in this space. The parlor also served as the master bedroom of the house, with the best bedframe and mattress; because the heads of the family “had the most elevated status” in the home, they would sleep in the room which featured the highest status furnishings. Parlors were used for social activities, funerals, weddings, social organization meetings, and special occasions such as Sundays or holiday celebrations. [9]
This idea of the parlor as a multipurpose room with the family’s best furnishings evolved throughout the early 1800s until the parlor became dedicated to “the presentation of an elaborated public self” to anyone visiting the home. Parlors and parlor furnishings “were constant reminders of what Victorian culture valued highly: the principles of gentility and domesticity, along with the material refinement that inevitably accompanied civilized progress.” By the 1830s, Americans began to believe that a home and its furnishings had the ability to alter one’s character. Just as the architecture of a house can communicate family values, so does the interior. Not only can purchasing the elaborate furniture and textiles common in 19th-century parlors display values such as gentility and domesticity, owning these items also helps to cultivate these values in people. Even poorer Americans began to purchase goods in order to create some version of a parlor in their homes in order to portray themselves as respectable with the same values as middle-class Americans. [10]
The clock owned by Jacob Lincoln on display in the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s “Keeping Time” exhibit in the Dewitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, August 2023.
While it is impossible to say for certain which room the Lincoln family used as their parlor, they certainly had a parlor for visiting guests. It seems most likely that the larger room on the right side of the hall was their parlor. Jacob Lincoln bought mahogany from New York or Pennsylvania and had several beautiful pieces of furniture created by a cabinetmaker named Schultz. These included a desk with a bookcase top, a corner cupboard, and a case for a grandfather clock. It is likely that the majority, if not all of these furnishings, would have been in the parlor so that visitors could admire them. The furniture was very finely crafted, and several pieces of the Lincoln furniture are in museum collections today. In addition to carving furniture, Wayland writes that Schultz also carved the elaborate mantel in the southwest room which is the large room on the right side of the hall. It is highly likely that the same person carved the wooden paneling throughout the first floor of the home as well. The paneling in the large room was painted a vibrant blue color around the trim. Since the southwest room seems to have been the most elaborate of the rooms on the main floor, it seems likely that it was the parlor in the Lincoln homestead. [11]
[9] Elizabeth Collins Cromley, “A History of American Beds and Bedrooms,” in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture IV, ed. Thomas Carter and Bernard L. Herman (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 177; Catherine Greer, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle Class Identity 1850-1930 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 66 and 79-84.
[10] Greer, Culture and Comfort, vii, 6, 17, and 70. The Victorian Era is largely regarded as starting with the reign of Queen Victoria in 1837. Though the Lincolns had a parlor earlier than the 1830s (since the home was built in 1800), it would have evolved out of its earlier form as multipurpose room into a room that communicated the family’s values by the 1830s.
[11] John W. Wayland, The Lincolns in Virginia, 85; The grandfather clock is owned by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and is currently on display in their Keeping Time exhibit in their Dewitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum. “Tall case clock,” Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Accessed August 28, 2023, https://emuseum.history.org/objects/27636/tall-case-clock?ctx=ce09da270 92e40b08578eb668306591e2c736153&idx=20. The clock was sold at auction in 1974 and purchased by Colonial Williamsburg. In the publication for the 1974 Sotheby-Parke Auction, the clock was valued at $7,750. In all likelihood it is worth tens of thousands of dollars today. Anne Jackson, Art at Auction: The Year at Sotheby Parke Bernet 1974-75 Two Hundred and Forty-First Season (New York: The Viking Press, 1976), 335. In addition to the grandfather clock, the corner cupboard, though currently not on view, is in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. “Corner Cupboard (Primary Title),” Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Accessed August 28, 2023, https://vmfa.museum/piction/6027262-15592559/.
The earliest Virginian homes were small, impermanent structures. The most popular form of house in Colonial Virginia was made of wood and was often framed by large wooden posts driven into the ground. By the end of the seventeenth century, these post-hole houses – also called earthfast construction – usually had two rooms, a hall and a parlor (or chamber), and stood one and a half stories tall. Virginia’s economy in the 17th and early 18th centuries was based around the cultivation of tobacco; tobacco was a labor-intensive crop which would strip the land of nutrients when it was cultivated year after year. Virginians would often live and work as tenants on larger farms. Because they were only tenants on the land, they would build impermanent earthfast homes that would suffice for shelter before they moved on to a different area. Additionally, earthfast construction was easy to construct, as there was extensive amount of wood available for construction. Post-hole houses were so numerous in the colony that records soon referred to them only as the “Virginia house.” [1]
This is an image of the Bodleian plate, depicting several of the early Georgian buildings in Williamsburg. Building 2 is the Christopher Wren Building, Building 4 is the Capitol Building, and Building 6 is the Governor’s Palace. Image Source: Cornell University Library
Beginning in the 1690s, however, there was an abrupt change to the architecture of the colony. Tobacco prices began to stagnate in the 1680s, causing many Virginians to look for alternative cash crops to grow. As farmers began to diversify their crops, and began growing crops such as wheat and corn, they were no longer depleting the land as quickly. Therefore, economic diversification meant there was no longer a need for Virginians to continuously move around, and thus, no need for impermanent earthfast construction. Instead, colonists began to build permanent dwellings and public buildings, including several buildings in Williamsburg, then the colony’s capital. Between 1695 and 1710, the Wren Building at the College of William and Mary, the Governor’s Palace, and the Capitol building were the first three examples of significant Georgian architecture in the colony. The Georgian style became popular in England through the work of Sir Christopher Wren before making its way to the thirteen colonies. It is heavily influenced by Renaissance ideals and is characterized by “geometrical proportions, hipped roofs and sash windows.” Georgian buildings often featured large pilasters on the corners of buildings, two story porticos, and Palladian windows, “a large arched central window flanked by narrower rectangular windows.” Above all, though, Georgian architecture was “rigidly symmetrical,” in every component of the house, including the rooms, windows, doors, and decoration. [2]
While Georgian architecture could be found throughout Virginia, the architecture of the Shenandoah Valley was heavily influenced by a blend of German and Scots-Irish architectural forms. These immigrant groups brought several different types of houses to the Valley. The Scots-Irish in Rockingham County took advantage of the wide availability of timber to build log houses, which were inexpensive and quick to erect. German immigrants, particularly those moving into the Valley from Pennsylvania, most often built their homes out of local limestone. These early German homes in the Valley, called Flurküchenhaus, most often had an internal, off-center chimney rather than chimneys on the outside walls. A Flurküchenhaus had anywhere from two to four rooms on the first floor, but often had a kitchen, or Küche, to the right of the chimney. The Küche had a large fireplace for cooking and was also the primary living space for the family, while the room on the opposite side of the chimney, called the Stube was used as a more formal space for visitors. The Stube was usually heated using a five-plate jamb stove which connected to a hole in the back of the Küche fireplace where coals could be fed into the stove. In order to reach the second floor, there would have been an enclosed staircase which typically was located in the Küche. Many of the earliest houses in Rockingham County followed these architectural influences. [3]
The Lincoln Homestead is an example of Federal-style architecture.
By 1776, however, a new architectural form was becoming fashionable. Created by architects in Scotland, it became known as Federal-style in North America because of its prevalence in the “early decades of the new nation.” Federal architecture incorporated the symmetry prevalent in earlier Georgian architecture, and could be either square or rectangular, made of brick or wood, often with a hipped roof. The outside features of Federal-style homes were generally much less elaborate than those of Georgian homes and often the only exterior decoration was found on entryways. The interiors of Federal-style houses were usually more decorated than the exteriors, including motifs such as “rosettes, urns, swags…[and] pilasters” featured around the fireplace mantels, interior door or window frames, and ceilings. [4]
[1] William S. Rasmussen, “Drafting the Plans: Pride and Practicality in Virginia’s Colonial Architecture 1643-1770,” in The Making of Virginia Architecture (Richmond: The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1992), 1-3; Cary Carson et al., “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies,” Winterthur Portfolio Vol. 15, No. 2/3 (Summer-Autumn, 1981), 168-169.
[2] Carson, “Impermanent Architecture,” 170-171; John C. Poppeliers and S. Allen Chambers, What Style Is It? A Guide to American Architecture (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003), 12-13 and 16-17. A hipped roof is when all sides of the roof slope downwards towards the walls, rather than having some sides vertical. Pilasters are rectangular columns which usually jut out from the surface of a wall. A portico is a structure attached to a building, similar to a porch, which has a roof supported most often by columns.
[3] Isaac Long Terrell, Old Houses in Rockingham County 1750-1850 (Verona: McClure Printing Company, 1970), 5; Rasmussen, “Drafting the Plans,” 28; Edward A. Chappell, “Acculturation in the Shenandoah Valley: Rhenish Houses of the Massanutten Settlement,” in Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, ed. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 29-30.
