Sugar, ships, slaves and the printing press - those are the ingredients of America's best-known architecture. America's most-visited and most-photographed mansions, churches, colleges, government halls and banks have their roots in another time and another place. If American religion and education came from Europe and were filtered out through Puritan New England, is it possible that American architecture came from another direction?
Greek Revival architecture, which dots all of the eastern United States, came from the South, according to Roger G. Kennedy in "Architecture, Men, Women and Money in America 1600-1860" (Random House). We see the legacy everywhere, most especially along the banks of the Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, Potomac and Hudson rivers, and the coastlines of the Atlantic.
The core architectural style is that of the 16th century designer Palladio, of the Italian regions of Vicenza and the Po River delta. It was a style designed to be seen from boats and barges. Mount Vernon and Arlington House (Lee's old home at Arlington National Cemetery) come to mind instantly as derivatives of that style. How Palladio's work came to America and how it spread once it landed made exciting reading twenty years ago.
Roger Kennedy believed that architecture can be better understood if we know for whom the buildings were built and for what purpose and with what funds. In most cases they were built to celebrate, but also to guard, wealth. The Palladian style lent itself to those functions better than almost any style.
The people who built Palladian villas in Italy got their money from conquests and from sugar plantations on Cyprus. They were built to show off and to protect the plantation wealth that slave labor made possible. The villas of Italy, however, would never have come to America on their own. The English picked them up from Ireland, where the Lords Burlington built them to celebrate and protect their wealth acquired from plantations once owned by Sir Walter Raleigh.
The Earl of Cork, Richard Boyle, spent his youth in the early 1700s in Italy, admiring Palladio's work. Through him, British architecture in the 18th century became Palladian. The Earl sponsored architects and spread the style to the West Indies, center of the sugar, slave, and shipping traffic of the world.
From there, they spread to American colonies, especially around Charleston, Savannah and Mount Vernon. With both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson pushing the style, who in America could resist Palladian influences?
Modified in America as free labor came later to be used and as environmental tastes changed, the Palladian style of a box with high-pillared porticoes and low wings or arms dominated public and upper-class architecture. It is in Jackson's Hermitage, at El Dorado on South Carolina's Wappoo Creek, all over the District of Columbia, at Monticello and the University of Virginia, at Williamsburg, in Mobile, at dozens of places around Natchez, all along the northern and southern banks of the Ohio, dominant in Frankfort and Lexington, Kentucky, and overpowering in Washington, Georgia. The Wade Hampton family, which once owned 430,000 Kentucky acres, 650,000 Pennsylvania acres, 900,000 Alabama acres, 700,000 North Carolina acres, 930,000 Virginia acres, 2,300,000 Georgia acres, 950,000 South Carolina acres -- not to mention Louisiana and Mississippi -- did as much as any single family to transplant the style.
What transplanted the style more than anything was the printing press. Four volumes of Palladio's works were printed and appeared in reprinted editions in almost all English and American upper class libraries. Imitation was easy when all one had to do was to show the builders the pictures, and it became even more easily once enthusiasts such as Strickland, Jefferson, Nutt, LeDuc, and the Polks started promoting the fashion.
A decade before the Civil War, the style was fading. The classical proportions were becoming bloated, and self-serving caricatures and Victorian gables and Gothic took over in the garish President Grant and Robber Baron post-war periods. But America's most gracious and most–visited architecture was a southern legacy from a region that many have thought gave little in arts or letters to the nation. We have reasons for pride among our ruins.
Larry McGehee, professor-emeritus at Wofford College, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.