THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT

There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never done before.

Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth


I have been away from writing for a bit, away and among those friends who daily go on making the pursuit of our “dream too wild” a practical reality. With each passing week, the Virginia House Project leads into deeper relation with our ground-truthing and truth-telling exercise. It is more and more difficult to tell the truth across the space that separates our expectations from the realities we encounter. We struggle to remember a lost attitude of life. We have been away in the Land that Time Forgot.

We have been rained on and washed out and buried so deep in clay and mud it threatened to interrupt six years of slow progress. We have been pulled out and picked up and borne across a field in a kindly farmer’s truck. We have had truckloads of rock dumped in our path. We have labored to dig holes so clotted with old roots that it sometimes seemed we must either surrender to broken shovels or perish to go on. We have carried water and cut trees. We have calculated the cast of the sun and found ourselves confounded by cloudy days. We have made war on white mold and on black mold. We have reshaped our project around the holiness of mother-love, the banality of smoke detectors, the weight of half a gross of bricks. We have been rescued by tender mercies and generosities without end.

When did all this begin? Perhaps it goes back to the forests of our first beginnings. Or nearer, to the woods of our remembered forebears, to the timbered houses of our ancestors in this land. Or nearer still, to that time twelve years ago when fate stole us away from our Life in the Woods. I no longer know how to mark the years and days. I count time in the kindnesses of friends.

My dear friend Allen Harding is the son of Walter Harding, the last century’s great scholar of Henry Thoreau, and founder of the Thoreau Society eighty years ago. That is Walter there in that canoe. Ah, the summer memories!

Allen and I met nine years ago at the Annual Gathering of the Thoreau Society. We have travelled half the country together since then, ever in search of a place to land our dream of regaining that Thoreauvian paradise we all left behind in California. Nine years can seem an eternity away from paradise. It is time enough to know a true friend.

I well remember when Allen called me one day from the car on his way home from yet another long, place-searching trip to Virginia. Allen is a tireless explorer of new places, and that day he had steered a circumnavigating course west on his way back north to New York. Somewhere he boarded a boat and crossed over to the Other Side. “Michael,” Allen said, “I have found the land that time forgot.”

That was three years ago now. From that day to this, we have labored together to bring this dream to renewal, else it be truly lost. How do you regain the timeless past to the timely present? How do you secure its future? Allen Harding, Michael Frederick, Jeff Klee, David Stemann and Ed Pease, Garland Wood and Matt Sanbury, Ryan Penner, Cliff Williams, John Smith, and many other generous friends. How do you thank such companions of the soul through this embodied life? We have unearthed things about this land in which we all live that would hardly yield to any but our singular course of digging. We have dug up a past world that illuminates the present, and perchance the human future.

Three months ago, at the far end of what we thought to be a settled path, we found ourselves in a dark wood, “for the straight way was lost to us.” We encountered such sudden and unforseeable obstacles in the path we had so long pursued that for awhile they seemed impassible. There was no way to go forward but to go around. It has been a long way around.

 
 

But obstacles can sometimes prove a blessing if they compel you down less-traveled roads you were powerless to choose, but needed to explore. So it has proved for us. We have not merely learned what we needed to learn. We have gone where we needed to go. We have changed what we needed to change. We have done what we needed to do.

I never expected to be where we are now. But then, I have never known where we are going. It is important, I suppose, to imagine you know where you are going from day to day, just in order to go on. But perhaps it is even perilous to be proved right for too long. Necessity wants a hand in where we go and what we are. “Let us build altars to Beautiful Necessity.” Beautiful it is to be here.

And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Farewell!

Michael



IMAGES
It’s All About the Details, by Through J’s Lens
Another Broken Shovel, March 2022, by M. Lorence
Walter Harding, Thoreau Digital Commons
Forest Landscape in Fog, by Ianachyva

QUOTATIONS
”For the straight way was lost to me. . .” Dante, Inferno, Canto I
”There are moments when we all. . . “ Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth
”Let us build altars. . .” Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, “Fate”
”And all shall be well. . .” Dame Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love c. 1393

AN HOUSE IS BUILDED

The Virginia House Frame by Moonlight

Through Wisdom an House is Builded,
And with Understanding it is established.
Proverbs 24:3


Guest Post by Garland Wood

For over forty years, I served as Master Carpenter in the Historic Trades Program at Colonial Williamsburg. In many ways, we perform the same work as carpenters did in 18th-century Williamsburg: we raise and cover new buildings, we build onto existing structures through additions, we remove and upgrade woodwork, we do repairs, we build fences and gates, and we do general woodwork sometimes unrelated to building construction.

In addition to that work, we study the history and material culture of early America, especially as it pertains to our trade, so that we can understand it better. The carpenter’s trade of more than three hundred years ago has been dead and extinct in Virginia for a long time, and it is our mission to revive that dead trade by practicing it, ultimately to demonstrate and interpret it to the guests and visitors.

Equally important to preserve the newly understood and revived trade of the traditional carpenter of early Virginia, we must bring in new apprentices and pass our knowledge and understanding of the business to them, to preserve the trade for the future. Without this system of training apprentices, the trade will become dormant and die out once again.

Our apprentices go through an intensive, hands-on training that carries them through five levels of a curriculum that is largely project-based. In the fifth level of training, the apprentice must take on the construction of a small building on their own to demonstrate their skill and understanding of the process.

 

The Wisdom of Hands: Apprentice Carpenter Harold Caldwell

 

Every building that we have constructed since the historic trade of carpentry was established at Colonial Williamsburg in 1979 has been a part of our mission: to recreate the look of the 18th century city of Williamsburg, to rediscover the lost trade of Tidewater Virginia British carpentry, to educate and entertain the general public, to advance our understanding and skill of working with traditional hand tools.

These building projects also give apprentices the opportunity to show off their skill and understanding of the work and, as a result, to be promoted from apprentice to journeyman carpenter. The hope is that they will then choose to become life-long craftsmen at Williamsburg, to continue to practice, preserve and interpret the trade, and to help train future apprentices so that the trade will continue to live on in perpetuity. Simply put, without the ability to continuously build new structures, we cannot fulfill our intended mission and we cannot promote our apprentices.

Pear Valley, c. 1740

In the fall of 2021, we took on our first project for an outside client. We were asked to build a small timber frame, based on the construction details of a house on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, Pear Valley. This smaller version of Pear Valley would stand as the centerpiece of the Williamsburg-based Innermost House Foundation, which intends to raise and finish this small house in the coming months deep in the woods of Surry, Virginia. The ideas behind the construction of this small house are both simple and complex:

The Virginia House Project is a pilot program in land restoration, historical interpretation, and cultural renewal developed by the Innermost House Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization based in California and Virginia. Our purpose is to restore nature to health and craft to wholeness, ultimately to repair the broken link between body and mind in the individual soul. We design to bring the material foundations of an American Wisdom Tradition into focus, thus making wisdom accessible again to individuals everywhere who seek a higher, deeper relationship to life. Our project is an exercise in “groundtruthing”: of testing the hypotheses of the founding American wisdom of “plain living and high thinking” by grounding that tradition in material reality.

The Virginia House Project focuses on the Historic Triangle and early Virginia as a crossroads of Old and New, North and South, East and West, Black and White, Native and Colonist. Supported upon a foundation of forest and wildlife restoration, the Project develops inwardly toward the possibility of individual wisdom in three distinct stages, each one an exercise in material re-collection: the Framing Stage, in which we seek to regain an original relation to structure; the Fire Stage, which strives to rekindle and enclose the fire at the heart of the human environment; and the Furnishing Stage, in which we seek that fully developed condition of individual inwardness sought by the wise in all times and places. Our work combines Nature, Craft, and Culture as inseparable aspects of one wholeness of human nature.

 

The Virginia House, 2022

 

This project was a wonderful way to practice the trade, to talk to visitors about construction and the variation in design of early buildings, to create an opportunity for an apprentice to finish his apprenticeship and move up to the journeyman level, and to help the Innermost House Foundation in their educational mission.

Garland Wood was Master Carpenter in Colonial Williamsburg's Department of Historic Trades from 2000 until his retirement in 2022. Beginning work as an interpreter in 1982, over 40 years he and the team of traditional carpenters built almost 50 buildings for Colonial Williamsburg, including the Peyton Randolph kitchen and outbuildings, the Charlton Coffeehouse, the Publick Armoury, and the Market House. He oversaw the construction of agricultural buildings at Carter's Grove and Great Hopes Plantation, the establishment of a permanent carpenter's yard on Nicholson Street and the creation of the traditional joinery program and exhibition shop. He has degrees from the University Virginia and William & Mary, served a traditional apprenticeship in the carpentry/housewright trade, and has trained nine apprentices to the level of journeyman himself.


This article is reprinted by kind permission of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/learn/living-history/innermost-house/

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
The Virginia House Frame by Moonlight, by D. Lorence
Garland Wood, courtesy of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Harold Caldwell, Apprentice Carpenter, by M. Lorence
Pear Valley, Drawn by Jeffrey Bostetter. Measured by Bostetter, Edward Chappell, Willie Graham, D. Hurley and Mark R. Wenger 7-17-92, courtesy of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
The Virginia House Elevation, by Jeffrey E. Klee

QUOTATIONS
”Through Wisdom an House. . . “ Proverbs 24:3

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

The California House I, Northeast Corner, Late Afternoon Light

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.
Miguel de Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies


I was away last week in pursuit of the impossible. Or possibly it was the absurd. I never entirely know where we are concerned. I only know from twenty years of experience that we are in pursuit of something irreducible to conventional categories, something that can only be defined as undefinable. Something like the sound of the wind in the trees. Something like the light of fire.

The emblem of the Innermost House Foundation is a squared circle enclosing an "IH" cipher representing a black house “H” centered upon a red fire “I”: Innermost House. The expression, "squaring the circle," has been used for centuries to suggest achieving the impossible. Dante uses the analogy in the closing lines of the Divine Comedy as he struggles impossibly to express the nature of Transcendent Reality.

The puzzle of squaring the circle was proposed by ancient geometers. It consists in the challenge of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge, in the manner of the plain old geometry we learned at school.

To the relief of schoolchildren everywhere, in 1882 the task was demonstrated to be impossible. The Lindemann–Weierstrass theorem proved that pi (π) is a "transcendental" number: that is, that pi is for real all right, but it is neither rational nor algebraic. Therefore, approximate squaring is the best we can hope for in this fallen world.

It would be difficult to conjure a more fitting symbol for our work. The impossible we seek to accomplish is built into our very foundations, right down to our statement of mission. All we can say for certain is that ours is a Mission Impossible.

Christopher Wren Building, College of William & Mary, 1695

Our American Wisdom Project at William & Mary and our Virginia House Project with Colonial Williamsburg have lately brought us a new circle of students and readers, many of whom are naturally unfamiliar with the long search that led to this place in our Foundation’s work. For long-accustomed intimates of that journey, our proof is in the pudding, with no further explanation of purpose required. But with each new circle reached, we welcome the opportunity to give an account of ourselves, however hopelessly.

In the language of that wonderful story by Hawthorne, we are Artists of the Beautiful, the benefit of whose work, even if it fly to the ends of the earth, cannot be pragmatically defined. To know us over time is to allow our work to proceed loosely understood as an Art of Life lived in public, a kind of outward keeping of the inward fire, for the most ineffable things can too easily be defined right out of existence.

Now, that kind of transcendental talk naturally passes with the transcendentalists among us. And perhaps it is natural that it should receive a warm reception at William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg, for they are in many ways our transcendental forebears. It even passes at the Registry of Charitable Trusts.

Only when we cross one of those unpredictable thresholds of new acquaintance where a password is required, do we newly cast about for something resembling a conventional statement of mission. Happily, we have a brilliantly articulate body of advisors and friends who are always delighted to take up the challenge from their own point of view. Last week I had occasion to look back over a few years of those statements as we feel our way yet again toward another Unstatement of Unmission. 

The first goes back six years. It is the draft statement we used in working documents before we were granted our 501c3 nonprofit status. Even now, it's not too bad:

The Innermost House Foundation is a nonprofit organization conceived as a living experiment in the transcendental strain of "plain living and high thinking" in American life. Our special mission is to influence thought culture and promote public awareness of the transcendental dimension in our laws and institutions, literature and arts, natural history and philosophy, spirituality and wilderness. This we propose to pursue through sponsored scholarship, published writings, film and photography, public speaking and conversation forums, employing both traditional and electronic media.

That essential phrase, “plain living and high thinking,” comes to us from Wordsworth by way of David Shi’s classic book on the history of the tradition we would represent, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. I suppose in all the world of historical scholarship, it is the one work we could least do without. Dr. David Shi is President Emeritus of Furman University, one of our leading American historians, and founding member of the Innermost House Foundation. As David tells the story, the ethic of plain living and high thinking has meant many things over the course of American history, but always it has represented the New World incarnation of an ancient and perennial idea: that wisdom consists in wholeness of view, and that the essential-most of wholenesses is a oneness of nature and spirit, of earth and heaven, of body and mind, of archetype and ideal.

When our excellent attorney, young Ms. Casey Williams of the august old firm, Donahue Fitzgerald, set to redacting that statement for our Form 1023 application five years ago, it won for us our 501c3 status in record time: 

The Innermost House Foundation is a California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation organized and operated for charitable, educational, and literary purposes. The specific purpose of the Foundation is to promote public awareness and appreciation of transcendental history, philosophy, and practice, thus to renew the living spirit of transcendentalism by making its message immediate, relevant, and compelling to modern audiences.

Among the most active members of our Advisory Council is Dr. Robert Gross, Professor Emeritus of Early American History at the University of Connecticut and founding Director of the American Studies program at William & Mary. A few months ago Bob published his great work, The Transcendentalists and Their World, which I found so exciting that I read the whole book in one long sitting—all six hundred pages. It formed the principal reference for our recent course offering at William & Mary, “Walden, the Prophets, and the Nineteenth Century.” At regular intervals through the years, I have applied to Bob for at least some kind of mission statement, since we at least some kind of 501c3. Not that anyone can say exactly what kind. Bob has never disappointed me. I no sooner ask but that he dashes off another brilliant draft to suit the occasion’s need, every one a perfect model of clarity and comprehensive detail:

The Innermost House Foundation is a nonprofit organization inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s experiment of life in the woods at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, from 1845 to 1847. We seek to promote conversation and culture through educational programs and to foster efforts to conserve the natural environment through sustainable projects in small-scale living. Our aim is to renew the quest for spirituality, wisdom, and harmony with nature that has inspired some of America’s best thinkers, in continuing engagement with traditions of thought and material culture extending from the native peoples of the Americas to the classical hearths of Western civilization to the diverse philosophical and religious perspectives of Africa, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and East Asia.

Along the way there has also been the testimony of our hundreds of thousands of social media followers, particularly back when we had a Facebook page. We continually threaten to reopen that page, but ever again we choose to remain out of the social media fray. Here a long-time follower named Pam Kowal, a hospital administrator in Upstate New York, offered her spontaneous summary as a review in the ratings section on our Facebook page, which I still think eloquently expresses the experience of our readers there. We frequently receive letters expressing a similar sentiment:

Innermost House is a unique offering of love for people who are inspired to live authentic lives that embody the highest ideals of the human spirit. It provides daily inspiration and guidance from the greatest minds throughout history to encourage and support each participant as they investigate their personal relationship with the natural world of which we are each an inseparable part. Innermost House models what such a lifestyle is like in practical terms. Each part of the life there has been carefully selected to support the inner Presence in the 'timeless time' of the immediate moment. It brings to life a heartfelt awareness and a sense of wonder at the sacredness of life. It is truly an extraordinary opportunity to connect meaningfully with my own heart and to live an examined life in the online company of likeminded seekers.

I must say, that is still pretty great. There is nothing to gainsay, whatever else remains to be said.

Then there is my dear friend, Dr. James Mathew, a leading cardiologist in Minneapolis, lifetime reader of Henry Thoreau, and member of our Advisory Council. James was educated at the University of Kerala in India before establishing his practice in this country. If anyone may be said to possess the gift of what Mary Moody Emerson called "holy enthusiasm," it is he. James and I share an interest in the universalism of Swami Vivekananda, and in that connection he sent me an address by Bishop Paulos Gregorios of the Indian Orthodox Church on the "Spiritual Unity of the Human Race." The address might have served as an excellent statement of purpose for us, but—alas!—it was too long. Never to be discouraged, James suggested this in its place:

Inspired by the lives and teachings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Innermost House Foundation seeks to renew man's quest for spirituality and wisdom, and to promote life in harmony with nature and society through personal examples and educational programs.

Our corporate treasurer and philosopher-of-all-things-scientific-and-theological, Mr. Bryce Engelbrecht, regularly lends his eloquence to the question. Bryce is a focused, technologically sophisticated and serious-minded sort of person, for whom fractal geometry and angles of repose are home territory. When I lately set him the task of speaking for our mission, on the moment he plucked this out of the blue sky as a meditative statement of purpose:

Innermost House stands for an idea that does not change. At the axis of a revolving and accelerating history, it stands for permanence, a position from which to see all in perspective, a place where the first and the last things, the natural and the ideal, meet. Our purpose is to plant a seed from which to grow a new point of view equal to the needs of our changing world.

 

George Wythe House, Williamsburg, 1750

 

Mr. John Gillis, Foundation Chairman of the Board, is a self-made industrialist, great friend, and bone-deep man of principle. “Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles”—that’s John by way of Mr. Emerson. A while ago John was jetting back from somewhere or other and had our website open on his laptop. The banker sitting next to him recognized a photograph of the George Wythe house in Williamsburg on one of our posts, and asked what the Foundation was about. John is a man of few words, and found himself explaining us in this way:

We are interested in the American thought tradition and the ways it unites and transforms the best thoughts of the wider world. Preserving that tradition seems to us the right custodial thing to do, so that all may be aided in thinking the thoughts that make for better and deeper lives. 

Then there is a statement on our website homepage, which, if nothing else, has at least the virtue of brevity:

The Innermost House Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that exists to provide a place apart, in the woods and on the web, where we each alone may find a home for wholeness.

Briefer still is a motto we sometimes use to represent the essence of our transcendental aspiration:

Feet on the ground, eyes on the stars.

Is that not really just plain living and high thinking? There have been many formulations from culture to culture and from time to time of what is essentially one idea.

Just for tonight, and in the light of last week’s explorations, I shall make my own wild try at a kind of statement. I do not think it will satisfy anyone. No doubt it is yet another one of my absurdities. But perhaps it begins to complete all other and better statements with what one only learns by trying to find a way through to a place beneath and before all thoughts of mission:

The Innermost House is a work of art and thought, set on the tragic stage of American history, recollecting a thousand older works and stages. It is an eye trained upon the place of first light, an ear turned toward the sounds that echo from the foundations of the world. It is a way of remembering.

Is there something—anything—that such a variety of statements can teach us? Our mission at the Innermost House Foundation has something historically to do with Walden Pond, Emerson, Thoreau, and Transcendentalism. It has something to do with Williamsburg and the West. It has something to do with spirituality and wisdom. It has something to do with inspiration and practice. It has something to do with the ground beneath our feet, with the stars over our heads, and the woods around our memories. 

 

California House I, Southeast Window, Wild Sage

 

Our purpose has something to do with an idea of America that is original, perennial, and universal. It has to do with native American Indian peoples, with classical Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It has to do with Idealism and Wilderness, with high thoughts and plain living, with hand craft, with a harmony between nature, society and spirit. 

We have something to do with a still center, with that which does not change, with the beginning and the end, with the seed of everything. We have to do with all the ways in which the world has its solution in the soul and the sanctity of the individual human being. 

We are transcendental. We are beyond rational. We are incalculable. We have to do with a willingness to attempt the absurd in order to attain the impossible. So!—I intend to take all of these excellent suggestions and feed them into a Lindemann-Weierstrass Circle-Squaring Machine, set the dials to Mission Impossible, and see what it has to say!

With pleasure always,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
The California House I, Northeast Corner, Late Afternoon Light, by D. Lorence
Christopher Wren Building, College of Willliam & Mary, by M. Lorence
George Wythe House, Williamsburg, 1750, by M. Lorence
California House I, Southeast Window, Wild Sage, by D. Lorence

QUOTATIONS
”In order to attain the impossible. . . “ Miguel de Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies

FOUNDATIONS OF FREEDOM

John Jackson House

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden


On Monday I visited Freedom Park to examine the cabins of a small community of Black freemen of post-revolutionary Williamsburg. The tour was arranged by my dear friend here locally, Dean Risseeuw, director of the Williamsburg chapter of the Service Corp of Retired Executives (SCORE), a national non-profit organization “dedicated to helping small businesses get off the ground.” We at Innermost House certainly qualify as small, if not quite as a business. And our struggle is not so much getting off the ground as it is getting settled on it. For five years we have built castles in the air. Now our challenge is to put foundations under them.

Powhatan, John Smith Map, 1612

The story of Freedom Park is a complicated one, like so much local history in this oldest of British settlements in North America. The land was settled at least 8,000 years ago by the ancient forebears of the American Indian peoples, following the retreat of the last Ice Age. The early inhabitants were hunter-gatherers who followed the seasons and the migratory patterns of game animals. As the region continued to warm, those inhabitants settled into towns along the tidal riverbanks, hunted, fished, and farmed, much as English settlers would do thousands of years after. They developed a complex culture of interdependence with the animals and plants, lands and waters they called Tsenacomoco, the “densely inhabited land” of the Tidewater region. They learned to live sustainably on the rich bounty of the Chesapeake Bay, its tidal rivers and estuaries.

By the early 17th century, American Indian peoples of the region that would become Virginia lived in three broad cultural groups based on language family: Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan. We today know most about the Algonquian-speaking peoples of Tsenacomoco, who, by the time of the Jamestown landing, had formed into a paramount chiefdom under Powhatan. The confederacy consisted of about thirty small chiefdoms and tribes. These were the peoples first known to the early English settlers.

The first Africans arrived in the Tidewater region in 1619. They were confiscated from a Portuguese slave-trading ship bound from Angola to Mexico, bearing prisoners of the West African Kingdom of Ndongo seized in raids by other African peoples with whom the Ndongo were at war. The inter-African slave trade by that date was more than a thousand years old, and stretched still further back into remote antiquity. Britain was among last great European powers to enter into that long-preexisting slave trade, and slavery in British Virginia was not fully codified into law until 1705. One hundred years later, the historically unprecedented work of abolishing slavery world-wide had become a determined campaign of the British nation, with abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic combining with growing Black resistance across the Empire and beyond. Its watchword and symbol was circulated in great numbers as a seal by the famed English potter, Josiah Wedgewood: “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”

Into this storm of reform and revolution, thoughtful Virginians began to explore legal courses for manumission. The most famous case was probably George Washington, who freed those enslaved people in his possession in his will of 1799, to be enacted on his wife’s death. “Washington said he did not free them immediately because his slaves intermarried with his wife's dower slaves. He forbade their sale or transportation out of Virginia. His will provided that old and young freed people be taken care of indefinitely; younger ones were to be taught to read and write and placed in suitable occupations.”

 

Anthony Brown House

 

Four years later, the enslaved people living on the tract that is now Freedom Park were freed by a similar provision in the will of William Ludwell Lee, which directed that the nearly thirty newly free people in residence at the time of his death should be granted 1,200 acres for their exclusive use. The settlement thrived as a free Black community through the time of the Civil War. Between the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the death of William Ludwell Lee in 1803, the number of Black freemen in Virginia increased tenfold, from 2,000 to over 20,000, largely in response to the principles of the Declaration. Those are the foundations of where and what we are today.

Dean Risseeuw and Terry Martin

Dean and I were conducted on our tour of the three cabins commemorating that community by James City County park guide Terry Martin. Terry was a splendid guide. As it proved, the cabins were not original structures, for the originals were mostly of that manner of building we have called “impermanent architecture.” Like our Virginia House Project, the cabins are reconstructions of early house-types, significant for the role they played in laying the foundations of the American experiment, but known to us today largely through archaeological and documentary evidence.

The buildings are well-made. Our master carpenter Garland Wood visited the park to see them last week, and admired their character and accuracy. They fairly represent between them three stages of sophistication and permanency which would likely have cohabited in the community, ranging from a round-log, one-room cabin, to a hewn-log, two-room residence, to a flush-frame, two-room, Williamsburg-manner small house.

The interiors were partitioned off with plexiglass, but Terry very nicely offered to disable the alarms so that we might get inside and examine the interior fittings and furnishings. It was very interesting to see these descended cousins of our own Virginia House. A century before, free Black and White people would have built Virginia Houses. But by the 18th century, rural log cabins and urban flush-frame houses had largely replaced the earlier Virginia House, thus widening the gap between classes and races.

 
 

Still, the gap was in some ways narrowing again at the time of the Ludwell Lee bequest. Archaeology has demonstrated that, by the time of Lee’s death, Black, White, and Indian relations in the area were active and complex. Trade with American Indian tribes across the Chickahominy River in Charles City County was particularly well established. On the plantation, the cemetery mingles Black and White graves back to the 18th century.

We visited New Park to learn its history and examine its buildings, but in the most immediate and material sense, we visited to examine the foundation structures of the houses. We have been these past weeks in the maw of foundation matters, the final stage in our approval process. As with every other aspect of our Virginia House, we are seeking that rarefied middle ground where the requirements of county permitting, structural integrity, historical authenticity, and aesthetic appeal all meet. The round log house is earthfast, that is, it rests on wooden piers buried in earth. The hewn log house and the flush-frame house stand on brick pier foundations, very much like the foundations we have been striving to put under our Virginia-House-in-the-Sky.

 
 

We have rehearsed these kinds of questions many times in relation to this and that essential aspect of our building, from wood to walls to windows and doors, from cladding to chimneys to fireboxes, from roofs and ceilings to thresholds and floors, all the way down to the floor nails. I observe again what has been said before, that this little one-room house of ours must enclose more thought-per-square-foot than the studios of Leonardo da Vinci.

Contributing thinkers on the question of our modest foundations these past weeks have included Garland Wood, Matt Sanbury, Ed Pease and David Stemann, Jeff Klee, Chris Phaup, Matt Westheimer, and Allen Harding. It was only yesterday, after our visit to Freedom Park, that a truly elegant solution to “putting the foundations under them” appeared in the mind of Ed Pease, like Athena being born full grown from the head of Zeus. Now everyone is happy and we have our approvals. Signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours!


With pleasure always,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
John Jackson House, by M. Lorence
Powhatan in Longhouse at Werowocomoco, Detail from Map by John Smith, 1612
Official medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society, by Josiah Wedgewood, 1795
Anthony Brown House, by M. Lorence
Dean Risseeuw and Terry Martin, by M. Lorence
Masonry Piers and Anchor Details, The Virginia House, for the Innermost House Foundation, by Edwin Pease, Architect

QUOTATIONS
”If you have built castles in the air. . .” Henry David Thoreau, Walden

MONUMENTS OF REMEMBRANCE

Coachman Adam Canaday directs the new memorial Benjamin Spraggins Carriage into the street, bearing Director Undra Jeter and attended by footman Elijah Ford and Collin Ashe.

When your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord; when it passed over Jordan, the waters of Jordan were cut off: and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever.

Joshua 4:6-7


Last Friday we loaded and removed our Virginia House frame from the Carpenter’s Yard at Colonial Williamsburg. What had slowly risen before the eyes of fascinated visitors over the holidays now lies disassembled and neatly stacked in storage, awaiting our final labor of love in planing the timbers and cutting the chamfered edges.

The next day Diana and I attended an event at the historic courthouse in Williamsburg, dedicating the beautiful new Benjamin Spraggins Sociable Carriage, named in honor of an early carriage driver at Colonial Williamsburg who exemplified in his character and command of his craft what CW represents with its mission, “That the Future May Learn from the Past.”

 

Coachman Benjamin Spraggins, at Colonial Williamsburg 1937 - 1953

 

The occasion was introduced by the Rev. James Ingram, Jr. of the Historic First Baptist Church here, founded in 1776 as one of the earliest Black churches in America. Rev. Ingram serves as minister to the present-day church in his own person, and, in one of those providential parallelisms that could only happen in Williamsburg, as minister to the same church in the 18th century in the person of Rev. Gowan Pamphlet, a formerly enslaved tavern worker who served as minister there until 1807. Gowan Pamphlet was the first ordained Black minister of any denomination in America, knowledge of whose importance we owe almost entirely to Rev. Ingram’s twenty-five years of tireless research and advocacy.

Rev. Ingram commenced his brief sermon from the courthouse steps on Saturday with a passage from Joshua, commanding the children of Israel to erect a “monument of remembrance,” memorializing their exodus from slavery in Egypt and entry into the Promised Land. He gestured around him at the historic courthouse, at the newly crafted carriage, at the ancient city itself. What are all these but monuments of remembrance?

Indeed, he said, Williamsburg was all a living monument of remembrance, alive to be visited, alive to be entered into and lived from within. And once inside this city and these buildings, he went on to say, there was nothing so important as speaking with the people who remain as living monuments themselves of a past we all once shared—“Black, White, and Indian”—we all in common who would become the people of the United States of America. Rev. Ingram concluded with a prayer of gratitude, of petition for equality and freedom, and for guidance that we should all be set right, and do right, amen.

Among the five of us who moved the timbers into storage last Friday were two young friends who, between them, represented fewer than half my adult years and more than twice my remaining strength, Collin Ashe and Elijah Ford. The two men made a very welcome addition, without whom I should be today in even more decrepit condition than I am. Collin and Elijah are both apprentice coachmen in the Colonial Williamsburg Coach and Livestock department. A more cheerful or willing pair of volunteers in our exertions I could not hope to find. Whenever I have seen Collin since, he assures me, “If you ever need any more help with that house of yours, just let us know.”

 

Elijah Ford and Collin Ashe with the Virginia House disassembled in storage.

 

Just the day after we moved, I was delighted to see Collin and Elijah again, now riding escort as footmen in the new Spraggins Carriage as it made its inaugural way down the Duke of Gloucester Street. The carriage was driven by that irresistibly charming Colonial Williamsburg coachman, Adam Canaday. We have often stopped and spoken with Adam through the years, about history and life and horses.

A week or two ago we stood together discussing training methods while Adam masterfully managed a very frisky Cleveland Bay stallion from the ground. The horse expressed his restlessness with everything from head shaking and wild rearing to slobbering into the wind—with Adam imperturbably downwind of it all—as we discussed the fine points of horseflesh. We talked about the Cleveland Bay’s historic past and its imperiled bloodline, and the plans Colonial Williamsburg has to preserve the endangered breed. We talked about the way that older, less specialized breeds are hardier, and more likely to survive if given a chance. We talked about the way a breed of horse can preserve the past as a living memory.

 

Coachman Adam Canaday

 

Yesterday I had a long talk with our county permitting officer, who patiently walked me through the permitting process—again. As in all such matters, we are now at a stage in our Virginia House Project where particular decisions must be made in response to previously unforeseeable circumstances. No one before this time has quite been able to say what we are, or what our house project is, or exactly how to classify it for permits. Sometimes you do not know what you are, or where the path before you leads. On too many counts we fail to qualify as a proper residence—no electricity, no plumbing, no continuous foundations. As the master of our building project, Garland Wood, recently said to me, “I long ago concluded that it is not legal to build a fully 18th century building in the 21st century.”

But permitting agencies require at least some understanding of what on earth you are trying to do. That is, after all, perfectly reasonable. And heaven knows our permitting officials have been models of reason. So we resumed our Socratic dialogue on the subject yesterday. The officer patiently heard me out, then examined the code for the most appropriate classification, something they at the county and we at Innermost House could live with and be happy.

As we waded through the possibilities from a planning point of view—the waters getting deeper the further we went out—our friendly officer suggested that we were really much more like a museum exhibit than a residence. Yes, I said. And we were more like a living museum project than a preserved exhibit. True again. In fact we were more like a kind of living cultural experiment than we were like anything inside a museum. Yes exactly.

In fact, I thought to myself as he paused to consult the code books further, we are more like a kind of memory house, a way of remembering the past that is alive in the present, like a rare, living breed of animal. Or a recollection of an unsettled and impermanent interval in our past that left almost no trace of itself behind. Or a reminder of a time when many different peoples had their own perils to face and rivers to cross to enter the promised land of equality and freedom, as we are still making our way across that river today.

So, he said as he returned to the line, we’ve decided it’s best to permit the Virginia House as a Cultural Property of service to the community. Do you mean, I asked, like a kind of Monument of Remembrance? Yes, like that, he said.


Yours always,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
Benjamin Spraggins Sociable Carriage, February 2022, by Jerry McCoy, with kind permission of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Coachman Benjamin Spraggins, with kind permission of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Rev. James Ingram as Rev. Gowan Pamphlet, with kind permission of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
Elijah Ford and Collin Ashe, by D. Lorence
Adam Canaday, by D. Lorence
Virginia House Plans, Rear Elevation, by Jeffrey Klee

QUOTATIONS
”When your children ask. . .” Joshua, 4:3-7, KJV

GONE WITHOUT A TRACE


To be told that the seventeenth-century civilization of England's largest and most populous American dominion, the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, has vanished almost without trace above ground, challenges credulity. Yet, that reality, stranger than fiction, is the inescapable testament of an impressive body of evidence recently accumulated in excavations on sites south from Middle Plantation to southern Maryland, to the northern neck of Virginia, and all along the York and James rivers.

Cary Carson, “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies”

Last week our Virginia Frame began its descent from the sky to the ground. I watched as the tall rafters came down one by one, were taken to pieces and put aside. The joists were lifted out, first from the plates and then from the sills, and all arranged in a row to be moved. The heavy ground sills were pulled apart until nothing remained of the assembled frame. The last, low-lying work was accomplished without remark from once-fascinated passers-by. It was a week of going away.

There is a strange remembering in all this. We are building and unbuilding, then building again, a kind of house that lay for three centuries almost wholly unremembered, though it once populated by the thousandfold an entire landscape of what it meant to be newly American. The story of its past ubiquity and near-complete disappearance (only three or four remain) can hardly be believed, even now. I suppose the story of the architectural form we call the Virginia House is the strangest story of American place I know.

Last month at the annual Colonial Williamsburg Woodworking Conference, Master Carpenter Garland Wood told the story of the Virginia House, beginning at Jamestown in 1607 and concluding with our house now in the carpenter’s yard. The Tidewater region of 17th century Virginia was a disputed frontier, where Old World diseases borne from Europe and Africa collided against New World conditions, with the Powhatan and English peoples often at war between them. Under such conditions, an English settler was unlikely to survive. If by chance he lasted out the first five years, he was considered “seasoned,” and might hope to live a full life—at least, according to the foreshortened expectations of the time.

The settlers’ first dwellings were medieval English houses, mostly rude timber, mud, and clay piles with reed-thatch roofs. But the old building ways quickly proved unsuited to the new conditions. Garland startled his admirers by bluntly stating that the New World broke the Old World building trade, leaving it unpeopled and ill-practiced. House walls were reduced from masonry to wood, and carpentry simplified to its least remainder. The old highly-skilled practices proved unsustainable, in part because those practices were ill-adapted to the new environment, in part because so few skilled craftspeople survived. Among those few who did survive, it was found to be so very much more profitable to take up tobacco farming than to practice their trade, that even triple wages were not enough to tempt builders back into practice. Tobacco became the currency of the day. Yet a profitable tobacco crop quickly exhausted the soil, so the settlers were driven ever onward to new lands and new houses.

Many building experiments were chanced through those first decades, converging as early as the 1630s on the beginnings of the Virginia Frame house. This was the first distinctly American house-type to emerge from English precedent on the North American continent, the fragile seed of all that would follow. It was a kind of modest masterpiece of expediency, dispensing with masonry foundations, reducing complicated mortise-and-tenon joinery mostly to simple lap joints, and replacing wattle-and-daub walls and thatch roofs with a light frame covered with plain, five-foot strips of riven (split rather than sawn) boards called “clapboards.” All thought of permanence was put aside. The Virginia House was conceived to return to earth and be left behind in less than a lifetime.

 
 

These structures were called “earthfast” for being fastened directly to the earth without foundations. Sometimes the corner posts that supported the walls were extended a few more feet straight down into the ground. Sometimes the sills were simply set on the ground directly. In either case, the rot would soon set in from underneath, which was a sacrifice willingly made. There were plenty of earthfast structures in England. The house was built to last no more than a decade or two or three. But along with the rot came something for which the English were not prepared by experience: there were no termites in England.

While the posts or sills sat heavily in earth, the roof was a very lightly-built affair, constructed separately from the box frame and consisting only of a series of “common” rafters with very little lateral stability. That problem was addressed by disposing of all heavy and cumbersome roofing and instead sheathing the roof with the same clapboards that clad the walls. The nailed clapboards kept the roof from leaning, but roofs are not walls, and though they stood upright and kept the occupants dry, they seeped moisture into the rafters every time it rained. So while your house was silently being eaten from underneath, it was slowly rotting away overhead. Always, always, it was going away. Still, like the Powhatan yehakins with which it cohabited the region, it served its purpose very well. For its purpose was passing shelter, not permanence.

Such radical simplifications were compelled upon the settlers by the rigors of the North American “wilderness,” as it was to them. America was to the English settler a boundless forest of fearful prospect, and at the same time a field of apparently inexhaustible opportunity. The woods were the enemy of farming and had to be cleared. But the wood thus liberated from the land was the friend of houses. So our lot was cast early. As Garland put it, “We are a timber-clearing, wooden-building people.”

Thus arose an informal trade of “clapboard carpenters” who learned to use riven lengths of board in place of complicated joinery and masonry walls and heavily reinforced roof framing. But clapboards could only serve their simplifying purpose as a wood-of-all-work if it was practical to attach them easily and cheaply, which was made possible for the first time in history by a bounty of mass-produced nails from the new industrial machine of England. So was the Virginia House born of the brief and stormy marriage of British modernity and American eternity, of industry and wilderness.

The moment would pass, and by degrees the Virginia Frame was replaced by the more regularized “flush-framing” method, which was the first step to the balloon and platform frames we use today. One manner of making Americans gave way to another. The Virginia Frame would persist in more modest applications—as the roof system in log cabins, as tobacco barns, as humble farm outbuildings.

There is something to be said for impermanence, for the lengthening shadows. Our timbers are now disassembled and waiting at the edge of the yard, to be taken away on Friday. A building that passes away is more like ourselves. Not what we dream of being, but what we are. “All things fall and are built again,” as the poet says. Are we ever truly gone without a trace remaining?

Good night!

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
M. Lorence: Richneck Barn
D. Lorence: Wall Plates
Jeffrey Klee: Virginia House Plans
M. Lorence: Clapboard Wall and Door

QUOTATIONS
”To be told that. . .” Cary Carson et al, “Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies” Winterthur Portfolio, 1981

THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

The last days of the Virginia Frame at the Carpenter’s Yard.

Tomorrow is our last working day at Colonial Williamsburg. In one week, the destiny of our one-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot Virginia Frame will bear it away to other places. After such a distinguished beginning, it will be a little strange to move the disassembled timbers into a tumbledown barn to await their fate. But thus it has been with us for ten long years as the archetype we call Innermost House sought its next incarnation.

I confess I have never known how to recognize that next home from afar. We were certain it would be in Northern California when we began, and that one or another of the spectacular offers of land partnership we received there would prove to be the right one. But the irony of being three times denied a permit to build a modest wood-burning fireplace in our unelectrified house, only to have our land burned out from under us by a massive wildfire sparked by a malfunctioning electrical system miles away, was enough to persuade us to take our search for the Mythic Landscape elsewhere. But oh I loved the immortal sea and the forests of redwoods!

 

Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area

 

We have had many wonderful offers since. One in Missouri was set amidst some of the loveliest country of rolling hills I have ever seen. Another in Connecticut was at the edge of a glacial pond surrounded by almost 7,000 acres of breathtaking forest preserve, complete with its own forestry department from Yale. Then there was North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. But always some obstacle stubbornly arose, usually an issue of permitting. A last donation of land came from Wisconsin on a beautiful island in Lake Michigan, where summer nights are in the fifties and the University of Chicago only a morning’s drive away. I think we would be building on that island now had we not by that time settled on the oldest land in British North America at Jamestown. One paradise at a time.

After all those ten years and many moves, it took us just one hundred days to go from standing trees in the forests of Tidewater Virginia to oak sills and pine plates laid prone on the ground. With the new year and the commencement of a second hundred days, we moved into the vertical dimension and began to raise a roof. Visitors poured through the carpenter’s yard at Colonial Williamsburg and delighted in this first of American “tiny houses.” Some people returned again and again to watch its progress. Just yesterday afternoon two good ladies told me we had “the coolest” house they had ever seen, for a moment mistaking me for the carpenters responsible, who really are cool.

On Monday it was Day Forty-Five of our second hundred days. Now it is Thursday, and we have fifty-two days left to solve what is still a world of problems and challenges. We have a very few days to arrange for trucking our timbers away from the yard. We have a barn to secure. We have something approaching 750 linear feet of fine chamfering to cut into the exposed corners of our Virginia Frame, when none of us have ever cut a chamfer before in our life.

We have foundation plans to alter (oops, forgot about the hurricanes). We have footings to dig and brick foundation piers to lay, when the weather is still too cold for traditional mortar to set, and our frame lies waiting and warping. While the weather is pushing our foundations further away into the spring, we have framing members that will soon begin to have their own way against our careful joinery, pulling us back toward the edge of winter. We are caught in a tug of war between wicking and warping, winter and spring, with nowhere to go but forward—but not too fast and not too far. We have permits to secure against heaven-knows-what hundred-year possibilities, so that our “impermanent architecture” should not prove too impermanent. Some days I feel like the time is blowing away.

Today I was at the planning offices in the morning, then in the woods all afternoon. My dear friend, musician, preservationist, and perennial optimist Cliff Williams was with me. We were joined in the woods by our mutual friend and foundation forester, John Smith, who is the nearest thing I know to Henry Thoreau in the forests of old Virginia. Cliff and John and I scrambled up and down trails and splashed through streams, all the while eyeing the canopy for dangling limbs and hints of dangerous leanings. This place and not that place. Not that position but this. Plans. Permits. Foundations. Bricks and mortar. Trucks. Barns. Timbers and chamfers. Winter cold. Spring warmth.

 

The Virginia Frame preparing for departure.

 

Everything changes as one arrives to the last things. Everything happens at once, expanding our slender project to an edge of unworkable breadth. One hundred and fifty square feet is not a very big house, except when you’re trying to push it through the eye of a needle.


Yours always,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
M. Lorence: The Virginia Frame from the North, February 17, 2022
Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area
M. Lorence: The Virginia Frame against a Winter Sunset, February 17, 2022

TO BENT OR NOT TO BENT

Raising the last rafter pair into place. Pictured here from left to right are Josh, Matt, Harold, Madeleine, Nick, Kenneth, Ayinde, Jack, and Bobby.

To bent or not to bent, that is the question. Or anyway, that was the question last week when the rafters were raised on our Virginia House.

Like all such events, our roof-raising was a communal affair. All the carpenters and brickmakers were present—Matt, Jack, Bobby, Ayinde, and Harold, Josh, Kenneth, Nick, and Madeleine—each taking part in the lifting and placing and leveling. There is something about raising a roof that brings a community together and lifts the spirits. It was an altogether high-spirited occasion.

In the heat and action of it all, as I watched one rafter peak after the next take its place against the sky, project carpenter Matt Sanbury directed that the middle rafter pair, number five of nine pairs, should be set 3/4” forward of all the others. This passed mostly without remark. Except, I am ashamed to say, from me. The anomalous placement introduced an irregularity into the rising line of timbers that my tailor’s eye could not not see. After a thirty-year career that rose or fell over eighths of an inch, I can see 3/4” from thirty paces. That is how the whole Hamlet thing began.

Really, it began almost fifty years ago. I was a seventeen-year-old high school senior in a class on English literature, taught by Mr. Larry Minard. Heaven knows how I landed there. Before that moment, I can truly say I had no interest at all in studies. I had somehow succeeded in passing through eleven grades while remaining almost entirely oblivious to literature and languages, science and mathematics, history and civics and just about anything else you could put a name on that sounded even remotely academic. You name it, and I didn’t know it.

Then I encountered Shakespeare. This changed everything for me. Everything. There is nothing remarkable in that, I know, except perhaps for its night-and-day suddenness. I am only one among millions. But in my case, Shakespeare leapt like streak lightening straight across the sky to Homer and Aeschylus and Plato and Euclid, to Virgil and Vitruvius, Lucretius and Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius, to Dante and Leonardo, Palladio and Bacon, to Milton and Bach and Newton, to the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, to Confucius and Mencius, Lao-Tzu and Chuang Tzu, to Lady Murasaki and Kenko and Basho, to Avecenna and Averroes and Attar, to Hafez and Rumi and all the rest. All I had to do was watch the sky.

King Lear came first, which Mr. Minard introduced with that overpoweringly bleak film adaptation featuring Paul Scofield as Lear. I almost could not breathe while watching it. Then we read Macbeth, and finally Hamlet. For me, those plays fell into place and locked like struck timbers in the forming frame of my adult mind, to make a permanent reference point in my life. From that hour to this, without any conscious effort to do so, I have measured every aspect of my whole life from that conspicuous high peak.

Mr. Larry Minard in 2019, still an honored teacher after fifty years.

I blame dear Mr. Minard for all this. He was as mild-mannered and reasonable a gentleman as one might ever hope to meet, occupying a moment in his students’ lives when mildness and reason were hormonally least accessible. This, I think, was his genius as a teacher. He presented himself almost transparently, so that the literature he introduced to us should play out before our eyes as plain and powerful as life itself, wearing all the common garb of our tragic teenage passions.

I had not thought of those days for a long time before last week. Matt and his high principles brought it all back to me. Before last week, I did not really understand what a “bent” means in a timber frame, or why it is important. I never asked myself “whether ‘tis nobler in the mind” to bent or not to bent, in principle or in fact, at any extremity of the timber framer’s art.

In my Shakespeare-intoxicated, half-timbered imagination, a bent was one of those wonderfully bending timbers you cannot help admiring in pictures of jolly old Stratford-upon-Avon. Not so, it seems. Those are called “crucks.” The term cruck, or crook, comes from the Middle English crok(e), from the Old Norse krāka, meaning "hook". It shares its origin with the word "crooked.” A cruck frame commonly pairs symmetrically curving timbers that meet in a ridge at the top of a building, bound together with horizontal tie beams.

Anyway, enough about crucks. Back to bents. A bent, as it turns out, is an independent construction in a timber frame that can effectively be raised from horizontal to vertical all as one piece, continuous from floor to roof peak. It gives unity and rigidity to the frame. The term “bent” goes back to the past tense of an early Germanic verb “to bind,” referring to the way the timbers of a bent are joined together. The Dutch form is bint, the modern German word bind. The framing elements that constitute the end-walls or “gables” in a timber frame are bents. Oftentimes, intermediate bents are introduced between one gable and the opposite gable. So long as they act as an entire cross-sectional system of support from floor to post to peak, they constitute a bent.

Now, our small, single-room Virginia Frame requires only two structural bents, the two gable ends. These each stand in their own plane, with all their structural elements—sill, posts, studs, end-girts, rafters, and tie beams—justified to the outside of the building as one flush, flat wall. So far, so good. At this point, we pause for a brief chant from the chorus, entitled The Timber Framer’s Lament.

The Virginia Frame assembly from bottom to top: sill beams, posts and braces, studs, wall plates and end-girts, tilted false plates, loft joists, rafters, tie beams, and purlins.

Most timber frames rest on “sill beams.” The sills are the big, heavy, horizontal beams that rest either directly on the ground or on a foundation. Jointed into the sills are smaller but still stout “joists,” the horizontal members that support the floor. Rising from the corners of the sills and at principle openings like doors and the hearth, are “posts.” These vertical members support the structure. Supporting the posts are diagonal “braces.” Spaced at intervals between the posts are “studs,” lighter vertical members that give a surface to the walls. As you follow the posts and studs upward, they terminate in a sort of second sill that supports the roof, called “plates” at the front and back, and “end-girts” at the gable-ends. On top of the plates and girts rise the “rafters,” set at varying degrees of the diagonal to form the roof. Those rafters are then bound together by horizontal “tie beams” (or “collar ties”) to form a pair of rafters, and, from pair to pair, by horizontal “purlins.” In our very special case, there is also the identifying feature of the Virginia Frame, the “tilted false plate,” to which we shall return another day.

The timber-framer is called upon to somehow calculate and cut and join that forest of variety into one simple, interlocking whole. To further complicate the plot, if he is using band-sawn and “wany” timbers, as we are, the dimensions and shape of even the same kind of elements, say, the rafters, are going to vary from one to the next. The final twist is that many individual timbers are themselves twisted. Every reader of Shakespeare knows all about that. A single timber may wear the tragic mask of noble nature on one side, the comic mask of dent and wane on the other. “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right”!

In order to set all that irregularity to rights, you’ve got to start somewhere. You’ve got to have some one common point of reference, something a little righter than the rest by which to navigate your way through a timber framing project. How often have I seen Matt contemplating the frame, calculating this or that relation and checking it against his charts, as though he were peering through a sextant at the stars. In a perfect world, perhaps such compromises and approximations would not be necessary. In this world, it is the nature of the tragic art.

All traditional timber framers must learn to navigate this dark territory. We all of us live mostly caught up in the comedy and farce of everyday chance. In the architectural arts, however, the master builder is perpetually engaged at a high edge where the material and the ideal meet. The timber framer’s art lies in traveling the edge between the weight and wobbliness of material nature and the abstract perfection of the geometric ideal.

That begins with the bents. Everything is measured from the uniform flatness of the bents at their outward edges. Then each particular thing is measured and placed according to its own best edge, called the “arris” (rhymes with “Paris”). I thought I knew what a bent was, at least before I woke from my half-timber dreams. I had no idea what an arris was until Matt enlightened me. The word is an alteration from the earlier French word areste, meaning “sharp edge.” It is related to arête, meaning “sharp mountain ridge.” An arris is an edge where two planes meet, as any one of four edges in a rectangular timber. Among carpenters, it is the leading edge of a timber, the “best” edge: the straightest, the truest, the cleanest edge. All measurements to establish position and relation in a timber are taken from the arris. Trees are not dimensional lumber and timber frames are not Platonic solids. An arris allows for all manner of imperfection by seeking out a single point of reference, chosen for its nearest approach to regularity.

 
 

Now, in the world of flush framing, which extends from 18th century Williamsburg to our day, that would be an end to it. All a flush frame has to do is support and shape the surfaces that wholly conceal it behind flat floors and walls and ceilings. But ours is not a flush frame. It is that very special, wholly American, modestly proud, elaborately simple, dressed and exposed phenomenon of the rural 17th and 18th centuries called a Virginia Frame. That means that Matt had to examine and position every last timber, not only with the arris of measure and truth in mind, but also with respect to the face of beauty. That is what a careful craftsman would have done in the period.

But, as happened for us in many cases, the truest edge does not always correspond with the most beautiful face. Alas that is so often the case in life! So, oftentimes Matt would choose to face the arris edge to the west toward the dark back of the house and turn the prettiest face forward toward the light. Which was quite right, but it considerably complicated relationships. I said a while back that timbers are not all of one size. Well, of course they’re not. But in our case, further complications arose from the fact that the ceiling joists that support the loft floor, and the rafters that support the roof, are not the same thickness. The joists are 3/4” thicker than the rafters that rest directly on top of them. So—what?

The what is this: since you justify the side of each rafter to the side of its joist, and the joists in our case are thicker than the rafters, you have to choose which side of the joist you justify the rafter to, forward or back, east or west. And, of course, you choose the regular side, the arris, which, in our case, mostly proved to be the back side. So, for uniformity’s sake, you justify all the rafters to the back side of the joist. That too is perfectly proper, and “saves the appearances.”

Except when it came to the fifth and central rafter. That central rafter marks the outside edge of the half-loft, which formed, in Matt’s mind, a kind of third bent. So that one-and-only rafter had to be justified to the terminal front edge of the loft joist, not to the back edge, putting it out of joint with all the others. Let’s not exaggerate. We are only talking about 3/4” in one rafter pair among nine pairs in a twenty-foot roof. Certainly it’s a tall roof, but we are not talking about high tragedy. Still, I have my tailor’s eyes and Matt has his timber framer’s principles, and where the senses and the mind cannot agree, at least a little tragedy is always waiting in the wings. “Ay, there’s the rub.”

But upon deeper examination, our friendly disagreement rose to a higher plane. Not of steeper dispute, but of more abstract conception. As we discussed the situation while waiting for a long rain to run its course, it became clear that Matt’s principled stand on the position of rafter five had more of Euclid about it than any consideration of mere utility. In fact, the end of the loft did not constitute a bent in any structural sense, for it was not continuous with any posts that communicated directly with the floor, nor could it be raised in one piece. Matt’s bent was more the dimensionless plane that lay as the Ideal Form behind all actual bents. It was the Platonic Bent he felt most strongly about, by the measure of which, all actual bents are mere shadows on the wall of a cave.

 

Project Carpenter Matt Sanbury practicing the precision he preaches.

 

Well! That is a carpenter I can understand. Matt is a thoroughgoing professional, and would not like to have his craftsman’s conscience confounded with Shakespearean tragedy and Platonic Forms and all my other literary eccentricities. I am only talking to myself, really. And possibly to Mr. Minard across the years.

As soon as I understood the meaning of Matt’s principles, we were able to arrive at a mutually satisfactory solution. We would leave rafter five where Matt had put it, and budge rafters two, three, and four, six, seven, and eight, all 3/4” forward to the east. It would not take long, the arrises would have served their purpose in truth before bowing to beauty, and all bents would be set straight to the sky.

To bent or not to bent is no longer the question. In this imperfect world, it is the striving that matters. The only bents beyond question are the bents in our mind.

Yours always,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
M. Lorence: Raising the Roof, February 3, 2022
EICC: Mr. Larry Minard accepting an award as Outstanding Adjunct Instructor of the Year, 2019
Jeffrey Klee: Virginia House isometric drawing, December 2021
D. Lorence: Mallet and Rafter Tail, February 3, 2022
Jerry McCoy: Matt Sanbury notching a purlin, February 8, 2022

A LINK AMONG THE DAYS

Master Carpenter Garland Wood with his hands on the Virginia House hearth post, days before his retirement after forty years at Colonial Williamsburg.

On Friday last week at 4:30 o’clock, Garland Wood retired from forty years in the Historic Carpentry Trade at Colonial Williamsburg. The day had been coming for a long time. Still, it overtook us all with a sense of interrupted progress—of our project, of the trade, of local history. It was the end of an age.

At the 24th Annual Working Wood Conference the weekend before, Garland’s career through the decades had been chronicled and celebrated. He was introduced by his former journeyman, Ted Boscana, now Director of Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg. He was interviewed by Master Cabinetmaker, Bill Pavlak. He was congratulated in comic rhyme by his mentor of old, Roy Underhill of PBS television fame.

Garland Wood addressing the 2022 CW Working Wood Conference

There was a trades banquet and a masters luncheon. There were gifts of a handwoven blanket from the weaver, a hand-forged axe from the blacksmith, a hand-hammered silver cup from the silversmith, a hand-cut lantern and coffee pot from the tinsmith, a hand-formed wooden tankard from the cooper, a “singing saw” from his own men, and gifts of other hand-made works from other grateful friends.

In his presentation to the woodworking conference, Garland spoke of Big Ideas. “I’m a big fan of Big Ideas,” he declared. The first and biggest of his Big Ideas was born almost a century ago: that there was this old forgotten Southern town that held concealed beneath its downfallen surfaces an historical treasure of almost unbelievable value, miraculously preserved precisely because it had been so completely left behind by the expanding nation.

Here was the capital city and surrounds of the first and largest and most powerful British colony in North America; the first permanent home on this continent of the English and African peoples who would build a new nation; the ancestral home of Chief Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas; the home of the first royal-chartered college, the first law school, and the oldest surviving college building in America at William & Mary; the legislative home of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, James Mason, and James Monroe, yielding between them four of the first five presidents of the United States. Here it all was, a singularly significant historic past concealed in plain sight before present eyes.

 

W.A.R. Goodwin and John D. Rockefeller Jr. behind the Wythe House in Williamsburg.

 

The miracle was that it survived at all after most of three centuries and the ravages of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. It was a miracle that it was preserved from a century and a half of post-revolutionary development by the chance of a wartime measure taken by then-governor Thomas Jefferson when he removed the capital upriver to Richmond in 1780. It was a miracle that, in 1926, an obscure country preacher named Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin was able to interest the wealthiest man in the world at that time, John D. Rockefeller Jr., in the Big and Truly Wild Idea of buying “the whole damn town” to preserve and restore its buildings.

Garland went on to recount other Big Ideas: that the preserved town should be restored of its lost buildings by a combination of archaeology, documentary evidence, and historical imagination; that later structures of the post-colonial age should be removed to the outskirts of the Historic Area so the public might revisit the environment that so influenced the forming of the nation; that the practice of the historic trades should themselves be preserved and restored; that the army of tradespeople necessary to the restoration should be drawn largely from the local population, thus to redeem at least one region of the country from the devastations of the Great Depression.

Those Big Ideas mostly had their day almost a century ago. More than half a century later, Garland Wood began his own career at Colonial Williamsburg with a summer job while still in school. He had grown up in Williamsburg at the edge of the College Woods. His choice to work in the Carpentry Trade was partly a matter of chance opening, and partly occasioned by his summers of work for his father in restoring an early 18th century house on the Chickahominy River outside of town.

Garland Wood with cant hook in the Carpenter’s Yard.

As destiny would have it, Colonial Williamsburg’s first Master Housewright, Roy Underhill, was at that moment revolutionizing the carpentry trade. For decades by then, the other trades had been making the real old things in the real old way as sustained exercises in “experimental archaeology.” The gunsmiths, for instance, made 18th century guns in the 18th century manner using 18th century tools, presumably to be fired in an 18th century way. They made them for the Colonial Williamsburg collections, for other museums, and for private clients. So likewise the blacksmiths, the silversmiths, the weavers, the milliners, the tailors, the cabinetmakers, the coopers, the wheelwrights, and all the other Historic Trades.

The carpentry department, on the other hand, which had so scrupulously rebuilt the Historic Area with buildings that in every possible way reproduced their 18th century originals—that is, where the original itself was not available for restoration—practiced their trade using modern construction methods in the underlying structure. The results were superb, indeed revolutionary, and would change the museum world and the public’s perspective forever.

But the building work itself was not considered of public interest or educational value, so it remained behind the scenes. The alternative of actually employing the 18th century materials, tools, and methods for new construction was thought to be impossible on such a scale. Yet Colonial Williamsburg was operating at the world’s forefront in the field of preservation and restoration, and everything was open to debate in an ongoing experiment in what constitutes historical authenticity.

Roy’s Big Idea was that carpentry at Colonial Williamsburg might be operated as a proper “Historic Trade,” where buildings were constructed entirely in the 18th century manner as a means of discovering what only practitioners ever truly know about the past, and so educating the public in the structural foundations of colonial America. The idea met with a great deal of opposition at first, and was considered idealistic to the point of complete impracticability. But Roy eventually prevailed, and Garland was among his first apprentices. When Garland retired as the longtime Master Carpenter himself last week, he was the only one left of the original crew to bear the Big Idea forward.

But the last of Garland’s Big Ideas, if I may add one more to his enumeration, was all his own: our Virginia House Project. We owe to Garland the idea of the historical “Virginia Frame” house, locating our archetype in place and time. We owe to Garland the superlative model of Pear Valley, without which we would have lacked a solid historical point of reference. We owe to Garland the opportunity of building the frame with Colonial Williamsburg, so reuniting the Innermost House idea with its Virginia origins.

 

Garland Wood and the Virginia Frame, December 2021

 

From Garland Wood and Roy Underhill to John Rockefeller and Dr. Goodwin, back to James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, further back to the first Africans and Europeans on the Virginia Peninsula, all the way back to the tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy: these are the links among the days of our history that connect us with our beginnings.

At the Carpenter’s Yard over these last weeks, I have watched as a succession of tradespeople and friends came by to shake hands and express their admiration and appreciation to Garland, and say how much they will miss his benign presence among them each day. “I see friends shaking hands, saying, How do you do?” as the old song goes. “They’re really saying, I love you.”

As I stood by the fire in the yard an hour before Garland’s retirement on Friday, journeyman carpenter Jack Underwood turned to me and said, “You know, Garland is a great craftsman and a very fine man. And he is something more than that. He is one of those rare people who brings out the best in everyone around him. When he retires, some of the best in all of us goes with him.”

I stand a little apart from it all as a guest at the yard, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.


Yours always,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
M. Lorence: Garland Wood, CW Saw House, January 2022
Garland Wood at the CW Working Wood conference, January 2022
Colonial Williamsburg: W.A.R. Goodwin and John D. Rockefeller Jr
Jerry McCoy: Garland Wood with Cant Hook, December 29, 2021
D. Lorence: Garland Wood and the Virginia Frame, December 2021

QUOTATIONS
“What a Wonderful World” by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss

BEGIN WITH BORROWING


It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”


Last week an article appeared on the front page of our local newspaper, The Virginia Gazette—“Serving Williamsburg, James City, and York Since 1736”—headlining the partnership between Innermost House and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation over the building of our Virginia Frame. Though a little surprised at finding ourselves thus partnered with such a giant, however generous that giant may be, I quite enjoyed the article, and found myself reflecting yet again on the greatness of our good fortune.

I do not pretend even to myself that we could ever in any real sense be “partners” with a colossus like Colonial Williamsburg. Whatever kind of a thing Colonial Williamsburg is, it is the largest thing of that kind in the world. Whatever kind of thing we are, we are probably the smallest of that kind. At least, we strive to be.

To share even a few weeks of our project with Colonial Williamsburg is a gift to us beyond reckoning. I am told it is a unique circumstance. In almost half a century of building, the Historic Trades carpenters have apparently never before undertaken a project with an outside organization. It happened in our case that permitting delays on other Historic Area buildings opened a borrowed space of work where the carpenters could craft our frame and accomplish three things at once for the trade. They could:

  1. Offer apprentice Matt Sanbury an opportunity to earn journeyman status by supervising the frame of a complete domestic structure.

  2. Begin a project designed to coordinate with a special framing presentation by Garland Wood for the national Woodworking Conference held at Colonial Williamsburg last weekend.

  3. Gain an unprecedented opportunity to replicate one of the most interesting and best preserved early buildings in Virginia.

We, of course, were the greatest gainers of all. Our original intention had been to build our frame with the North Bennet Street School in Boston, the oldest trade school college in the country and home to an excellent and thriving Preservation Carpentry program. They certainly would have built a beautiful frame.

North Bennet Street School and Colonial Williamsburg have long cooperated in a variety of ways. Many students from North Bennet go on to work in the trades at Colonial Williamsburg. And North Bennet Street School is a regular sponsor of Colonial Williamsburg’s annual Woodworking Conference, contributing support as well as expert presenters. The two are natural partners in preserving the historic trades.

The president emeritus of North Bennet, Miguel Gómez-Ibáñez, is an architect, fine-furniture maker, and founding member of our board. I remember when I first visited Miguel at the school. In the splendid new atrium connecting their two historic buildings, there stood a fully-framed and assembled Jacobean gallery for the Shakespeare Company of Worchester, recently completed by their students. It was so beautiful I just stood there gazing at it, much as I do now at our Virginia Frame in quiet moments at the Carpenter’s Yard.

But Garland Wood prevailed by urging the model of Pear Valley, an historical treasure in our near-midst and the earliest surviving example of the Virginia Frame house. Unlike most of the thousands of other examples of early Virginia “impermanent architecture,” Pear Valley survived because its builder took the extravagant step of placing it on a brick foundation. Thus was thirty years transformed into three hundred years, and we made its beneficiary.

The Gazette article discusses how what would become the Innermost House Foundation began twenty-five years ago with another extraordinary experience we enjoyed at the generosity of Colonial Williamsburg. Diana and I were given leave to live an experiment of two years in a 12 x 12-foot quarter just off the Duke of Gloucester Street. It was at that time that we first weaned ourselves away from domestic electricity, opening up our senses to an older way of seeing and hearing and thinking and feeling. The article calls our Virginia House Project “a journey and a homecoming.” It has been all of that for us: a very long journey, and a very welcome homecoming.

The Colonial Williamsburgs and North Bennet Street Schools of this world belong in partnership together, for the benefit of all. For the Innermost House Foundations of this world, it is difficult to begin without borrowing of others’ skills and materials and time. “But perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise.”


Yours always,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
M. Lorence: Virginia Gazette, January 19, 2022
North Bennet Street School, Annual Report, 2017
M. Lorence: Carpenter’s Yard and Virginia Frame under snow, January 22, 2022

QUOTATIONS
”It is difficult to begin without borrowing. . .” Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”

A YEOMAN’S HOUSE

Journeyman carpenter Ayinde Martin applies finishing touches to the front door post in the Virginia House.

 

I shall assume that the aim of each young man in this association
is the very highest that belongs to a rational mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Man the Reformer”
Read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association, Boston, 1841

 


Good day dear friends,

On Saturdays I like to go over to the Carpenters Yard to rejoice in our progress and visit with journeyman carpenter, Ayinde Martin. I am not good for much at the yard beyond picking up and helping to carry, but Ayinde indulges me by working right through our conversation without interruption.

Ayinde’s story is an unusual one, even at so unusual a place as Colonial Williamsburg. When he was just eleven years old, he enlisted as a junior interpreter in the African American Interpretation Program. His parents and his minister encouraged him, and he found meaning in the work. He has worked at Colonial Williamsburg ever since, and that was twenty-seven years ago.

Idealism and innovation established the trajectory of the African American program under the direction of leaders like Rex Ellis, now Associate Director at the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, Robert C. Watson, Professor of History at Hampton University, and Christy Coleman, now Executive Director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. The values Ayinde absorbed from them and from cherished mentors like Emily and Greg James, Rose McAfee and Robert Watson, Jr.—an attitude of self-discipline, individual responsibility, and service to a higher cause—are the values that guide him still.

Ayinde has pursued a wide variety of roles at Colonial Williamsburg, from first-person character interpretation and third-person teaching to program development and an apprenticeship in the trades. Seven years ago he achieved independent journeyman status in the Historic Trades Carpentry Program, where craftspeople study to master the practical skills of 18th century carpentry while engaging with thousands of visitors of every age and interest each year.

Last weekend we discussed the Virginia Frame house and how it stood in the 17th and early 18th century as a kind of midway house between Old World and New World, permanent and impermanent, rich and poor, Black and White, representing an archetype of unity and wholeness. In that way and others, the Virginia House was a true “middling” house, an original American house. Indeed, it was perhaps the very first American house-type to emerge as fully independent from English precedent on New World soil.

The Virginia House is sometimes referred to in the literature as a “yeoman’s house,” that is, as the house of a yeoman. But what is a yeoman, and what is his house, and what does it have to do with the archetype we seek to embody in the Virginia House Project?

The word “yeoman” has a long and varied history in English, disappearing at last into unknown origins. It is a word we do not much use today, except as a commendation of great and loyal service: “He did a yeoman’s work in seeing the project through.” It is a thoroughly English word, with no known cognates in related languages, nor any similar words in the languages of continental Europe.

In England back at least to Chaucer’s time, the word designated a middling place in an aristocratic world, below the nobles and landed gentry, above the tenant farmers and domestic servants. The role of the yeoman in all its various incarnations, from Chaucer’s forest-huntsman, to Robin Hood and his Merry Men, to Shakespeare’s Henry V and his heroic longbowmen at the Battle of Agincourt, seems to partake at once of noble virtues and of an ethic of dutiful service.

It was in this middling role that the yeoman would come to embody the ideals of the English and Scottish Enlightenment, ideals that migrated to British North America during the 17th and 18th centuries. The yeoman farmers of the Thirteen Colonies became the citizen-soldiers of the American War of Independence from Great Britain.

Independence. That is the key to the ideal of the yeoman in America, as it would become the key to the American idea of citizenship. In America there never was a titled aristocracy. By slow degrees over two centuries, old hierarchies eroded away, and the yeoman’s middling and independent character established itself as the new ideal.

After the Revolution, even the age-old aspiration of financially independent leisure gave way to a new ideal of self-supporting and conscientious labor. The ideal citizen of the new nation became the independent family farmer, along with their urban cousin, the tradesman or “mechanic” who had earned “the tools of his trade.” The qualities most to be desired were honesty, independent judgement, industry, equality, and simplicity:

Writers like Thomas Jefferson and Hector St. John de Crèveceur admired the yeoman farmer not for his capacity to exploit opportunities and make money but for his honest industry, his independence, his frank spirit of equality, his ability to produce and enjoy a simple abundance.

A yeoman’s house is thus such a house as becomes a yeoman, one whose virtues of free reason and sound good sense are balanced by strengths of self-relying labor. Especially in early days, it would have been the house of modest freeholding Black and White families alike. The American ethic of “plain living and high thinking” had its expression in the Virginia House.

The Virginia House is not just a house built in Virginia. The English houses first constructed here were largely rude mud-and-thatch structures valued solely as practical shelter, where solid structure was all. A century later, a new manner of building was pioneered at Williamsburg that would spread across the entire Chesapeake region, which sought to conceal structural elements within and without, and reduce all surfaces to a neat elegance. Massive supporting timbers, heavy joists, and complex roof systems were to be seen no more, as all gave way to the new “polite style” of flush-framing. Everything was to be aesthetic.

Between these two, from about 1640 to 1740 and beyond, a radically simplified, impermanent way of building developed that was distinct from both, the Virginia Frame. In this newly American way of making a home, the corner posts were “earthfast”—buried directly in earth—while the principle framing members above ground were left exposed on the interior, as the simple wooden structure was itself gradually recognized as possessed of virtues worthy of aesthetic celebration. Such workmanlike refinements to the timbers as planing, chamfering, and lamb’s tongue stops all developed as a rural tradition alongside the urban taste for concealed structural elements.

Ayinde’s temperament places him midway between the strength and structural understanding of a carpenter-framer and the refinement of a finish carpenter-joiner. All the “dressed” primary timbers in our Virginia House will bear the mark of his hands on their exposed surfaces. As he points out, much of the built environment in 18th century Virginia bore the mark of Black hands, and he is proud of the work he does. He is a most conscientious craftsman.

In complement to his work as a carpenter, Ayinde is helping develop a program called “Voices of Their Hands,” where Historic Tradespeople are able to research their choice of a Black tradesperson of the 18th century and create a tour for visitors around that person. Surviving documentation of such individuals is scant, so research will require an act of imagination as much as recovered memory. But half of Williamsburg’s population at the time of the Revolution was Black, and there is hardly a building left in it that has not a Black as well as a White story to tell.

The conversation we seek to cultivate with the Virginia House Project connects a plurality of cultural traditions with origins in Native America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, composing their many perspectives into one whole. In the American Wisdom Tradition of e pluribus unum, we seek the revelation of a native unity we can all call Home.


Yours with pleasure,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
M. Lorence: Ayinde Martin
Jeffrey Klee: Rochester House
D. Lorence: Ayinde Martin

QUOTATIONS
”I shall assume that the aim. . .” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Man the Reformer”
”Writers like Thomas Jefferson. . .” Richard Hofstadter, American Heritage Magazine, Vol 7, Issue 3, April 1956

THE HAND HAS ITS REASONS

Master Carpenter Garland Wood and Project Carpenter Matt Sanbury at work on the Virginia House frame in the carpenters yard at Colonial Williamsburg.

The heart hath its reasons, which reason doth not know.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees


Good evening dear friends!

I arrived at the Colonial Williamsburg carpenter’s yard this morning with another one of my cockamamie ideas about how we might improve things. We could do this, we could substitute that. It doesn’t matter what. There is always something.

It was early morning and still freezing, but the carpenters were there before me. The yard fire was already going, and carpenters Garland, Matt, and Bobby already at their work.

We adjourned to the saw shed to discuss my idea, such as it was. They listened attentively. Yes, they said, there was this way and that way of doing the same thing. This is why they chose the way they did. I persisted. They remained imperturbably patient. Before long, by fine degrees and friendly persuasion, they imparted to me the wisdom of hands.

After thirty-five years as a tailor, you’d think I would know by now. There are some things only the hands ever know, that only experience teaches. The friendly carpenters never put me in the wrong. They never made themselves right. They simply spoke with the knowledge of years in their hands, the weight of walls on their shoulders, the strength of jointed timbers in their minds.

“Strength is the chief of his Study,” wrote The London Tradesman of the carpenter’s trade in 1747. Buildings stand solid in certain kinds of ways. Roofs yield shelter for certain reasons. The art of knowing those ways and reasons is learned over time, and is never wholly reducible to words or concepts, nor even to figures or plans. Modern engineering may seem to give the lie to that limitation, but modern engineering is better at building bridges than making a home for human nature.

A couple of months ago, Garland Wood was interviewed by Innermost House founding advisor, Rob Yagid, of Fine Homebuilding Magazine. It was an illuminating hour, full of lively interest. You can listen to it here. Garland reflected on his forty-year career at Colonial Williamsburg, and on the satisfactions and challenges of practicing fine craft today. Particularly 18th century woodworking craft, of which he is a master. And most especially here in Williamsburg, which stands as near to the beginning of things as any fully independent American craft tradition can do, poised just at the edge of the modern world.

Garland and his crew have constructed nearly fifty buildings in Williamsburg’s Historic Area over the last four decades, all with materials in use here in the 18th century, all with 18th century tools used in 18th century ways, all entirely by hand.

This is an extraordinary achievement. There are other timber framers, certainly. In the last fifty years their numbers have multiplied across the country. But there are none operating on such a scale who limit themselves entirely to traditional tools and methods. What can be learned from such a rarefied practice?

That question will occupy this journal for much of the coming year. The traditional trade crafts, wherever they may be practiced; the Historic Trades at Colonial Williamsburg, the largest and most complete program of its kind in the world; and the Virginia House Project in particular: all these bear messages from the past which are perennially relevant, even necessary, to any truly human future. Our framing experiment seeks to bring into material focus fundamental questions of purpose and meaning. Can human culture survive unsupported by a frame? It is so easy to have cockamamie ideas up here in the clouds, to believe in them, even to allow oneself to be provoked by them. But to what end?

 
 

As I took my leave this morning, Garland startled me by mildly observing that he has fifteen working days left at Colonial Williamsburg. Fifteen days after forty years. Garland will still be here in town, and I hope I shall see him often. But when hands like his retire from a lifetime of learning, something in all of us takes a step back from the edges of living knowledge. I do not think our humanity can afford to surrender too much of what only learned hands know of wisdom.

“The heart hath its reasons, which reason doth not know.” The hand has its wisdom, which the head alone cannot conceive. Sometimes I feel I am lunging at the last of a living knowledge before it is wholly lost. I thank heaven there are young people like Matt Sanbury committed to learning from masters like Garland Wood, to knowing the way of things with their hands.

Yours with pleasure,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.


IMAGES
D. Lorence: Virginia Frame
Jerry McCoy: Saw House
Garland Wood with 18th c. Level
M. Lorence: Hewing False Plate

QUOTATIONS
”The heart hath its reasons. . .” Blaise Pascal, Pensees

A NEW YEAR, A NEW DIRECTION

The Virginia House frame takes its first steps upward from the ground in the historic trades carpenters yard at Colonial Williamsburg under a cover of the new year’s snow.

And suddenly you know: It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.
Meister Eckhart


Good new year dear friends!

One hundred and three days ago, we began this journal account of our Virginia House Project. After five-years of forbidden fireplaces and minimum footprints and rampaging pandemics across the continent from west to east and north to south, it appeared to us then we had at last begun in earnest.

And so it has proved. We began back in September with the example of the Chesapeake’s oldest surviving one-room Virginia Frame House, “Pear Valley” as it is known. Pear Valley must be one of the most thoroughly studied houses per-square-foot in the country, yet I cannot find a single case where it has been reconstructed in an experimental manner. Our model was adapted and refined by architectural historian Jeff Klee through a succession of meticulous designs in consultation with our architects David Stemann and Ed Pease. After many changes and most of three months, the plans were done and perfect.

As detailed specifications became available, Gloucester sawyer Ryan Penner volunteered to provide the framing members. As requested, he skillfully milled the many timbers required from the leanest possible trees, sometimes being compelled to cut so close as to leave long corners still deep in bark. The result was three truck loads of mostly very regular timbers, yet none ever far from the edge of “Beautiful Necessity.”

Those cut timbers were then delivered into the charge of project carpenter Matt Sanbury and his crew, who sorted them into “wany” (as in “going away” at the edges), full, and best, and assigned them accordingly to positions inside or outside, public or private, candle-level or up in the dark.

Our Virginia House is Matt’s journeyman project, and it is a challenging one. Not only are our timbers cut close to the bark, and the 17th century framing method unfamiliar and complex, but the structural members are to be left largely exposed, as they would no longer have been in the 18th century period for which Matt is trained. Our countryman’s frame requires skills almost lost even to the age of old Williamsburg.

Overseeing everything with his benevolent eye is master carpenter Garland Wood. This is Garland’s last frame, concluding forty years as an historic trades carpenter at Colonial Williamsburg. Yet it is his first proper “yeoman’s house,” the sort of modest dwelling that would have been common throughout the Chesapeake region in the first century after the Jamestown landing. So it is Garland’s first time working with such early details as clasped purlins and chamfered corners and lamb’s tongue stops. Such little refinements seem trivial to us now only because we do not labor in the field or cut our own wood or grow our own food. They would have been the pride and elevation of the humble farmer once.

 
 

All that work and all those considerations combined to stretch our Virginia Frame out across the ground on oak sills and floor joists just as the year closed. Now, in the new year, our frame takes a new direction and begins to rise on pine posts and plates and rafters. Lowly though it certainly remains to the passing eye, to me after all this while, it almost seems to be taking flight.

Spes in Caelis, Pes in Terris

“Hope in heaven, feet on the ground,” as the old saying goes. To what end do we lay down our foundations and raise up our house? To regain our footing and reach up toward the sky. To raise up our minds from the solid earth. To recapture the magic of beginnings.

Yours in all good hope,

Michael

 

The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.

 


IMAGES
M. Lorence: Carpenters Yard Under Snow
Jeffrey Klee: Virginia House Plans
D. Lorence: Dovetail Joint Pocket
M. Lorence: Virginia Frame Under Snow

QUOTATIONS
”And suddenly you know. . .” Meister Eckhart

FOUR DAYS: THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST

 

”I am the Ghost of Christmas Past”
“Long Past?” inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish stature.
“No. Your past.”

 


Good evening dear friends,

I suppose we all live among the Spirits, mostly unseen, glowing out from behind the screen of the world. I suppose we are each sometimes beneficiary to their intervention.

Tomorrow, Ryan Penner makes his final delivery of cut timbers to the carpenters yard, while Matt Sanbury continues his work of laying out walls and preparing joinery. Over the course of the coming week, we shall move from horizontal foundation beams to vertical posts, and enter a new dimension.

Some weeks ago we spoke of archaeology, which we defined as the study of the human past through the investigation of its material culture. I asked a ten-year-old at the carpenters yard last week if he knew what archaeology means. Without hesitation he answered, "digging things up from the past." That pretty well says it all.

Taking one step further back to active participation in that past, we have spoken of "experimental archaeology," the more familiar cousin of which is "living history," such as is practiced at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and the Plimoth Patuxet Museums in Massachusetts. Both experimental archaeology and living history involve the fashioning and use of period artifacts under recreated circumstances to test hypotheses about past culture.

Beyond archaeology and history, we coined a new phrase, "experimental archetypology," which keeps company with the past for a distance, even into the archaic ages, until that past at last gives way to eternity: to the "archetypes" that presumably precede material creation "in the mind of God." Archaeology, archetype, archaic—these words all derive from the Greek arkhē, meaning simply, "the beginning."

Our Virginia House Project is a deliberate search for the material beginnings of what we are now, in order to regain what Emerson called "an original relation to the universe." That sounds sorrowfully esoteric, as if one had to be initiated into the Mysteries to understand it. But we know from our years of experience with the California House that the case is almost opposite to that.

Ask a ten-year-old what archaeology is and they'll tell you straight out. Ask an eight-year-old to draw a house, and they'll sit straight down and draw you an Innermost House. I have watched plenty of third graders do exactly that, and so have you. Door, window, wall, roof, chimney. The past is native to us, and requires little more than an inward remembering to recollect, if sometimes along with a little digging.

Ours is a search for beginnings, for the seed of things, for the ground of being. Not for the ground of some esoteric being, but of our being. "I am the Ghost of Christmas Past," the spirit announces in A Christmas Carol. "Long Past?" inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish stature. "No. Your past."

A constant advisor to our projects, Dr. Robert Gross, has a marvelous theory of Transcendentalism. Bob proposes that the transcendental is always present as the light that glows from behind the screen of the world, but which shines on us directly only in times of crisis, when one age is giving way to another. The transcendental is the light that shines out from between worlds in collision.

If ever there were a tale of Transcendentalism, it is Dickens' Christmas Carol. If ever there were a Realist, an unrepentant Materialist, it is Scrooge before the Spirits. If ever there were a man transformed, an Idealist, a Transcendentalist, it is Scrooge on Christmas morning. One glimpse of the spiritual light, of the archetypes of birth and death and love and loss and meaning, and he is changed forever. "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future! The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me!”

When I write to you next, it will be a new year. Everything will change. What was prone will stand upright. What was dark will move toward the light of a growing season. I do not entirely know what happens next, but together I feel we are prepared to meet it.

Happy New Year dear friends. May this year to come bring the world much good.

Yours always,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation remains an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.


IMAGES
Sol Eytinge: “A Retrospect”
Sol Eytinge: “Scrooge Awakes”

QUOTATIONS
”I am the ghost of Christmas Past. . .” Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol”

TEN DAYS: THE SEED OF HOME

Southern yellow pine log squared for cutting on the mill at RST Timber Works in Gloucester, Virginia

 

I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there,
and I am prepared to expect wonders.
Henry David Thoreau, “The Dispersion of Seeds”

 

Good evening dear friends,

I continue to count the days till the end of the year, but have come to mark the time that matters by Ryan Penner's deliveries of timber and Matt Sanbury's mortises and tenons. And by Jeff Klee's latest designs.

The original of the Innermost House archetype in California was a thoroughgoing exercise in solitude and self-reliance, suitable to the wild conclusion of humankind's long westward migration at Land's End and the Pacific Ocean. The Virginia House Project is an exercise of a different kind. It is an experiment that seeks to explore the solitary individual's relation to the community, and the community's role in the support of solitude. It is a society of self-relying solitudes we seek to form.

The Virginia House we are building was among the first distinctly American house forms to emerge from English precedent on this continent. It is classified as "impermanent architecture," for it was an evolved adaptation to circumstances of radical instability and change. The early Virginians valued independence above all else, so that they hardly developed villages or cities as did colonists further north or south. It was not quite a log-cabin, frontier-type independence they sought, however. That would come later and elsewhere. It was more an independence of remotely-related communities of self-supporting family units they valued, where the individual was of supreme value, but the "individual" itself was a kind of community.

This is a strange idea to us today. We mostly think of the individual as the opposite of the community, and the California House certainly appears to represent something like an extreme of such individualism. But there is a different and earlier form of individualism, one equally associated with early America. In that form, the community came together from time to time to provide the individual with the material means of independence, while independence and not community remained the objective. The communal barn raising is the familiar example, but the principle was often applied more widely. Benjamin Franklin's famous Junto Club comes to mind.

What made the Virginia House of the 17th and early 18th century different from the western cabin of the middle 19th century was its relative sophistication. It was still a "first house," a seed from which larger houses would one day grow. It was still commonly a "single-cell" structure, a one-room house we today would call a "tiny house" of 300 square feet or less. It was still centered upon the all-important cooking fire. In plan, in broad outline, in overall size, in windows and doors, in ground floor and sleeping loft, it would be difficult to distinguish between the California cabin and the Virginia House.

But Diana and I might have built the whole house in California with our own unskilled hands, and we mostly did. The immediate community neither aided in its making, nor knew of its existence. It was unpermitted, unvisited, unknown. No architect nor designer nor team of carpenters had any hand in it. It was meant to be that way, and we would gladly have surrendered almost any convenience to keep it so.

The historical Virginia House, on the other hand, was from its earliest days usually built by one with at least some skill in carpentry, sometimes by a professional crew, and was in late examples often quite refined in its treatment of exposed structure. It was distinctly American, but of an earlier America, where common people still had something much more like an English expectation of life. It was more two houses in one, half English Enlightenment house, half American Wilderness house. Or perhaps it would be more accurate, if a little theological, to say it was an all-English and an all-American house at once.

I have learned a great deal from Jeff Klee this past week, and this past month, and these last Ninety Days. Jeff has devoted hundreds of patient hours to this house since we set to work in earnest. There have been hundreds of questions to answer, large and small and everything in between, and not one of them simple. This house is not only all-English and all-American, it is all-North and all-South, all-East and all-West, all-ancient and all-modern, all-letter of the law and all-spirit of the laws. Jeff has guided us through all that strange territory--as strange to him as to the rest of us--somehow allowing me to see what I needed to see to take each new step.

 
 

We now have Jeff's full set of construction drawings. I look back and can hardly say how we arrived here. The house is exactly what I had in mind, and nothing like anything I imagined. It is two houses and twenty houses in one. It is the one house we needed to take our next steps forward toward the perennial wisdom of hand craft we seek.

I attach one page of beautiful elevations from plans completed just this evening. It now appears all so incredibly simple. Next week I'll say a little more about what an archetype is and what these elevations mean. For tonight, I wish you all a very happy holiday season,

With pleasure,

Michael

The Innermost House Foundation remains an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.


IMAGES
M. Lorence: RST Timber Works, Squared Pine Log
M. Lorence: Chimney Post Mortise and Tenon
Jeffrey Klee: Rochester House
Jeffrey Klee: Virginia House Plans 2021:

QUOTATIONS
”I have great faith in a seed. . .” Henry David Thoreau, “The Dispersion of Seeds”

SEVENTEEN DAYS: FIRST WE SHAPE OUR BUILDINGS


Good day dear friends,

One week ago this morning, Ryan Penner delivered his first load of cut timbers to the carpenters yard here at Colonial Williamsburg. It took seven strong-hearted souls an hour to unload the heavy timbers, among which, the sills and plates alone weighed over five hundred pounds apiece. No weight could prevail against the high spirits of those souls, however, and the work was undertaken and finished with the good cheer of expectation. And the expectation was for work.

The minute Ryan's truck drew up to the yard, apprentice carpenter Matt Sanbury took charge. Matt is one of Garland Wood's crew of carpenters, and our frame is his journeyman's project. An apprentice in any one of Colonial Williamsburg's two dozen historic trades must pass through five stages of demonstrated competence before they are offered the opportunity to undertake a journeyman's project. For the historic carpenters, that final project is always building a frame.

 
 

The historic tradespeople here are a most unusual lot, who have made a lot of most unmodern choices. They have chosen passion over prestige, meaning over money, permanence over passingness. They have chosen a unity of hand and mind over all the advantages of fragmentation. In their commitment to seek out and embody the archetypal roots of material craft, they have chosen the timeless over time.

Matt is such a person. Before he came to Williamsburg five years ago, he was for ten years a farmer, a cooper, and coordinator of trades at the Genesee Country Village and Museum, the largest living museum in the state of New York. Matt grew up on a family farm, where the principal produce was tree fruit for preserves. You learn lessons about life on a farm, teachings largely forgotten in our time. As Aldo Leopold observed, "There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

In that way, one might say that the historic trades at Williamsburg stand as a bulwark against the spiritual dangers of ungoverned modernity. Not that the tradespeople themselves ever speak in that highfalutin way. But they often exemplify it.

I was at the tinsmith's shop with some visiting guests the other day. One of the tinsmiths was speaking about his hunger for meaning, and the ways in which even a quite specialized trade like his opens up a window on the complex interconnectedness of things. He was working on a lightweight tin stove that day. You begin with a stove, you work your way backward to tools and hands, to mining and smelting and mineralogy. You work your way forward to labor and pay, to war and peace, to international trade networks, to political parties, to freedom and slavery and conscription, to the philosophy of history, to a whole world lit only by fire.

Among the carpenters, Matt is a passionate collector and connoisseur of traditional tools. He studies the tools he collects, and fashions many of his own tools for use in his trade. He demonstrated to me yesterday how different tools serve often very subtly different purposes, and how each individual leaves the marks of their individuality on their tools in everything from habits of daily care to finger grooves to patterns of use. If the hand is the cutting edge of the mind, I see now how the tool is the cutting edge of the hand, and the crafted object the cut edge of an infinitely complex web of material, cultural, and spiritual relations.

The same day the timbers were delivered, Matt had them sorted into building sections and ordered for priority. In the relatively uniform world of modern building materials, one does not think much about prioritizing posts and beams. But in a life lived much closer to nature than we mostly live today, nothing is truly uniform. Everything has individuality. And not merely the individuality of "self-expression," which seems a pretty insubstantial thing when you're hoisting five-hundred pound beams, but the individuality imparted by nature and iron necessity.

The oak trees from which Ryan expertly wrested our sill beams were in some cases so barely sufficient that their narrow ends were very irregular. You would hardly accept them from a lumber yard. But modern lumber yards work upon principles of abundance and uniformity. Ryan and we are committed to making the most of necessity. Those "wany" timbers were only fit for the "male" tenoned sills, with the more substantial ones reserved for the load-bearing "female" mortised beams. The five principal posts were likewise distributed into their various places according to their regularity, the most irregular put into private corners, the very best at the public front door.

Over the course of the early week, the sill beams were jointed and drilled—all with period hand tools—and laid down just above ground level. The minute they went down, the crowds of visitors poured in. What is this going to be? What is it for? How does it work? When will you finish? I was amazed at such a reaction to so lowly a start. Even the children seemed to sense that this was a house destined to revisit the sacred beginnings.

Then the sill beams were lap-jointed and the floor joists laid in. That work was mostly done when the yard closed last evening. Today the joists were finished and corner posts begun. Matt supervises everything, lays everything out, checks everything, and does much of the work. For the length of the frame-building project, he is the apprentice-master in charge. His inexhaustible high spirits make every operation a kind of lark, while remaining an exercise in strength and craftly precision.

These are the hands upon which the world has always depended for shelter and survival. Whether they be weaving marsh reeds into mats to clad a yehakin, packing mud and stone into circular walls to form a rondavel, or chamfering timbers to refine a farmer's one-room house, we can only live as well as our homes permit us. "First we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us." So may it be.

Yours with pleasure,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation remains an entirely volunteer organization,
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.



IMAGES
D. Lorence: Matt Sanbury
M. Lorence: Crew unloading first timber at the carpenters yard
D. Lorence: Matt Sanbury marking out wany timber


TWENTY-FOUR DAYS: PEOPLE WHO CAN DO THINGS

Ryan Penner of RST Timber Works in Gloucester, Virginia

Good evening dear friends,

Last week I introduced Gloucester sawmill owner and new member of our Virginia House building team, Mr. Ryan Penner, of RST Timber Works. We spent a fine winter's day together pulling white oaks out of the woods in preparation for building our frame.

In immediate succession after we left, Ryan suffered 1. a blown hydraulic hose on his dump trailer, 2. a permanently exhausted battery on his tractor, and, just two sill beams into his first day's work, 3. a stripped mechanism on his band saw, the replacement part for which would require an impossible ten days for delivery. By then, the opportunity we have worked toward for five years would have forever expired.

The combat engineering division of the U. S. Navy in which Ryan served is known as the SeaBees, so called for a contraction of their formal name "Construction Battalion": C for Construction and B for Battalion, therefore CBs, or Seabees. Their informal motto is a simple American "Can Do."

In that spirit, Ryan first put his trailer, then his tractor to rights by salvaging local parts and materials. Then he set about can-doing his way to a solution on his broken bandsaw. He called upon a friend or two for advice. He thought back to what was, by his own account, his pretty rusty recollection of welding techniques. But rusty or no, he plunged into the fray and shaped and machined and welded a new apparatus into place. That it would hold together, on the other hand, was by no means a settled thing. But it held, even improving on the original in places. And all at a loss of only two and a half days instead of ten. Ryan called our builder Garland and explained the situation. Garland came up with an accommodating change of plan. Between the two of them, Ryan was on schedule again by Friday.

Then over the weekend I visited Ryan at his home and sawmill, situated on about ten acres of wooded land. Like Ryan himself, the place is an exercise in self-reliance. What he and his family eat, they or their neighbors tend or grow or harvest from the land. When something breaks, Ryan fixes it. Against the rain, he raises his own shelter. Against the cold, he builds his own fire. Against the sun, he casts his own shade. What he buys he mostly acquires among his neighbors and friends. There is room in Ryan's view for a whole wide world of different people living in different ways. His dream is to expand his timber works sufficiently to accommodate visiting combat veterans, who he hopes may find some healing in cultivating a harmony with the land and a reverence for wood, as he has done.

Milling to order is a much more exacting business than one might suppose. The thick dimensions of timbers required for a traditional timber frame, in combination with the natural irregularities of trees, make carving one out of the other a slightly hair-raising affair. One of our heavy oak sill beams was nearly too much for the available dimensions of our last log. As Ryan explained to Garland, it had to be left "with a lot of bark still on." But Garland knew how to shift its position to make it work, and on went the milling.

 
 

I took so many pictures at the sawmill that day that my no-can-do cellphone battery finally gave up on me. We were almost finished, though, so nothing was really lost. Nothing, that is, until we set out on our way back home again through the maze of country roads without GPS for a guide. It is strange how you do not notice what you do not expect to need. In short order we were pretty well lost.

I asked myself what Ryan would do. In the first place, he would not have gotten lost, but that was no help to me then. So I stopped and asked the next farmer I saw from the road, who was deep in meditation over his seedbeds. Quentin was his name. He looked up as I approached through the field, no doubt appearing to him like some hopeless city slicker. But he smiled at me warmly, and nodded as I told my sad tale. Then, with inexhaustible patience and good will, he pointed out the way.

Ryan called me late this afternoon to say that his first load of sills and joists and posts and braces was done, a day ahead of schedule. He will be delivering it to us here first thing in the morning. Mr. Emerson once observed in his journal, "I like people who can do things." So do I. I would be lost without them.

Yours always,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.


IMAGES
M. Lorence: Ryan Penner of RST Timber Works
M. Lorence: RST Timber Works

THIRTY-ONE DAYS: A REVERENCE FOR WOOD

In the beginning, all the world was America.
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government

My dear friends,

When I was a boy of about ten, a book entered our Iowa home that made a lasting impression on me. It was called A Reverence for Wood, by the American antiquarian and illustrator, Eric Sloane.

I would learn much later that Sloane's given name was Everard, but that, when he was a young art student in New York, he had taken the name Eric from the middle two syllables of "Am-eric-a." The idea of America would remain central to Sloane's mature work, which Andrew Wyeth called "an Artistic Treasure of Americana."

I was reminded of Eric Sloane and that book last weekend. I spent Saturday in the woods with two new friends of the Foundation, Ryan Penner and Randy Thompson. Ryan has generously volunteered his expert timber milling services to us, and is now at work providing master carpenter Garland Wood with all the necessary timbers and scantling to build our Virginia Frame. Ryan is also volunteering the southern yellow pine logs from which most of the individual timbers will be cut, save only the heavy white oak ground sills.

The white oak was a problem. Ryan had none on hand. White oak has become very scarce and expensive in recent years, owing to the rapid growth of craft brewing, which employs white oak as the wood of choice for barrels. As I know from the coopers here at Colonial Williamsburg, oak has been the favorite of barrel makers through the ages, for a wide variety of applications. Its strength and malleability, its water-tight cell structure, even its imparted taste, make it the perfect wood for barrel staves. For much the same reasons— though I don't expect anyone to be tasting our timber frame—it is also the wood of choice for framers when it comes to ground sills, which must combine great strength with natural rot resistance. The sills are the horizontal members in a frame that sit nearest the ground, supporting the rest of the structure.

So, last week, Ryan's friend Randy came to the rescue and volunteered four fallen white oaks from his property deep in the woods of Gloucester County, across the York River from Williamsburg. Randy and Ryan are both combat veterans, Randy of the Air Force and Ryan of the Navy. Technically, they spent their service careers as "combat engineers," undertaking heavy construction projects in combat zones. The two friends met at the local chapter of the VFW. That is "Veterans of Foreign Wars" for those of you too young to remember.

Ryan and Randy have the quiet, formal manners of the men I grew up around, partly born of hard experience, often of life on the farm, expressed through the rhythm of the seasons as a certain reverence for the woods. With little talk and less fuss, we spent the day cutting, chaining, and hauling three or four tons of prime white oak out of the forest and onto a trailer. I say we, but I mean they. I was mostly a bystander in the drama. Still, to be out in the woods again to some solemn purpose, to witness the passing of wooded life to earth in preparation for a new existence, was in some ways to be renewed myself. Trees are only trees, I suppose. Frames are only frames. But there is a quality in the woods and things made from wood that is not entirely to be taken in vain. "In the woods we return to reason and faith," as Mr. Emerson said.

In the timber practice Ryan has crafted for himself, he almost never takes a living tree down. Trees are felled every day in this world, for good reasons and for no reason at all. Ryan accepts the inevitability of such casualties, and does what he can to see that they are suffered to some worthy purpose. He is a gleaner of the modern landscape, much as we were at Innermost House. In seven years of living "in a world lit only by fire," we never once had to fell a living tree. By living modestly and treading lightly, we lived at peace with the landscape.

Jeff Klee is now providing Garland with the last dimensioned drawings and full-size details he requires. Randy has provided the white oak and Ryan the yellow pine he is now milling to specification on his band saw, the 19th century heir to the pit saws of earlier times. America was different from Europe in the beginning. It was made of wood, not stone. It was born of the eternally returning life of the woods, of a reverence for the passingness of things. It was a kind of echo of ancientmost ages. "In the beginning, all the world was America."

Yours always,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization
dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.


IMAGES
Eric Sloane, A Reverence for Wood, 1965
M. Lorence: Ryan Penner in Gloucester woods

QUOTATIONS
”In the beginning. . .” John Locke, Second Treatise on Government

THIRTY-SEVEN DAYS: THE ELEMENT OF TIME

My dear friends,

At thirty-seven days to the end of the year, one's perspective begins to change precipitously. I remind myself of those lines of Mr. Emerson I have so often revisited: "We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life." That is the hope in which I live.

Last week Jeff Klee finished our plans (below) to the extent necessary to specify our timbers. To me, those plans are as beautiful and invigorating as sea air blowing off the Chesapeake and running up-river on the open James. Certainly they are as "neat and plain" as a frame can be, to employ the phrase of the time. But in their modest austerity, I see the new spirit of a new land, poised between one world and the next, struggling to be born.

The impermanent "Virginia House" was the spontaneous expression of a new relationship to life. Compared with Old World precedent and early European structures on this continent, it rested lightly on the land, as if nothing were certain in this new world where materials were abundant but skills scarce, and much had to be made of little as a matter of necessity. It was, in that way, as much akin in spirit to the lightly-built domestic structures of the Powhatan Indians as it was to more permanent English structures. The humble Virginia House would develop over the course of a century as a bridge between settler and native, black and white, enslaved and free. It was a new thing, an American thing.

This afternoon I visited David Stemann of Stemann Pease, our architects. David saw me from his upstairs window and graciously came down to meet me in the hall. In the space of five minutes we had agreed upon our next steps, which I then bore away to Garland Wood, our master builder. With his imperturbable good cheer, Garland made light of the quite terrible constraints now pressing upon his work, as if he were a true initiate into the mysteries of Emerson's sense of time. Garland then spoke to David about rough and finished dimensions, about what could be circular-sawn and what must be band-sawn, and we concluded the day a few steps closer to home.

This past week we also opened our class at William & Mary on "The American Wisdom Tradition." We have a couple of hundred adult students enrolled for the series so far, and I was amazed at the response to our first meeting. Even among those few who had occasion to identify their profession, there were university professors, lawyers, an artist, a physician, a country parson, and an international court judge. I shall never again despair of an American indifference to wisdom.

The relationship between our two projects, the American Wisdom Project at William & Mary and the Virginia House Project at Colonial Williamsburg, is as intimate as that between the natural mind and the spiritual body. They represent between them the first link to separate in the broken chain of human history of which we suffer today. If we could somehow repair just that one link, then we should truly justify all our efforts and prove a living "link among the days."

Yours always,

Michael


The Innermost House Foundation is an entirely volunteer organization dedicated to renewing transcendental values for our age.


IMAGES
Jeffrey Klee: Virginia House Isometric 1
Jeffrey Klee: Virginia House Isometric 3
Jeffrey Klee: Virginia House Isometric 2