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