Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven.
Build, therefore, your own world.
or
Life is a festival only to the wise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature/Heroism

 THE THOUSAND ACRE PROJECT
Philosophy as a Way of Life

A Pilot Program of Place Renewal
By The Innermost House Foundation
In America’s Historic Triangle

Program Description: 

Can a love of wisdom alone constitute a practical way of all life? Such a philosophical way of life is what we at Innermost House endeavor to achieve and exemplify. Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life. David Shi’s Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. Greg Nagy’s Ancient Greek Hero, Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. Michael Puett’s The Path. Joseph Piper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture. All these books and phrases have become associated with the idea of Innermost House.

We at Innermost House have been given a thousand acres of woodland, town, and university like a geomantic instrument to divine the shape of the larger world. We have been given ten thousand pounds of transparent frame in the woods for a stage from which to conjure the spirits of the whole human past, and a sacred river to unite that past with the future. We have been given a new community of wisdom lovers and seekers of a philosophical way of life. We have been given still closer friends who offer us their genius and experience for guidance.

The Woods

We began our morning together at the east end of town in the 330 acres of mature woodland adjoining 18th century Bassett Hall, the home of John D. Rockefeller Jr. during the 30-year restoration of Williamsburg. There we spoke of the Indigenous Eastern Woodland peoples who first made their home in this land, of their material and spiritual oneness with the woods, and of the earthfast immigrant culture that first mingled with those peoples here. Our literary accompaniments were Henry Thoreau’s “Walking” and Mary Oliver’s “A Summer Day.” Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The Town

From the Basset Woods we made our walking way to Palace Green at the heart of the adjoining 330 acres of the Old City. There we followed the path of our Platonic “City of God” field class, from the 1632 establishment of Middle Plantation, to the 330-acre land patent from which Williamsburg was demarcated in 1699, to the removal of the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond by Governor Thomas Jefferson in 1780, at last to the house of Counsellor Robert Carter, the founding father, religious mystic, and “First Great Emancipator” who liberated more enslaved individuals than any American before Abraham Lincoln, and sought by his example to emancipate the young nation from the stranglehold of slavery.

The University

From the town, we walked the few blocks further west to the 330-acre Historic Campus of the College of William & Mary, where the oldest university buildings in the country are preserved in daily, academic use: the Wren Building, the President’s House, and the Brafferton Indian School. We stood before the 18th century pedestal of “Concordia” at the center of the College Yard, representing the founding vision of peace and fruitful cooperation between English and Native peoples. We spoke of the Ideal of the University as it evolved from medieval Bologna and Paris and Oxford to the American Enlightenment in Williamsburg, representing the humanistic aspiration to the completeness and unity of the individual soul.

A thousand acres of village space is small to the point of non-existence in this exploded world. But it is small as a poem is small in an endless run-on world of words; or as a pictured flower is small where self-images multiply spontaneously to the sky; or as a simple passage of music is small in a world where silence is no more suffered to be heard. It is small to break your heart. It is small to call you back to what you are.

At its zenith as the leading city in the Western World, Florence enclosed one thousand acres withinside its walls. So likewise walled Paris at its golden hour. Even smaller was the walled City of London, the “Square Mile” as it was known. Williamsburg is no smaller than we are small. It is as large as we are large. “That country is the fairest, which is inhabited by the noblest minds.”

We at Innermost House take the Thousand Acres of Williamsburg, Virginia, for better, for worse, as our portion in this world. There are other Thousands of Acres. There are other worlds. There are other ways and places to stand at the heart of where you are. For now, this is ours. We came to Williamsburg by a ten-year-long, many-stop and continent-wide process of search and trial and elimination. We sought a center upon which to stand between Old World and New World, between North and South, between East and West. We sought a place of firstness, of convergence and emergence. Williamsburg is an ocean from England and Africa, and a continent from California, at once of oldest and newest ways of one common language culture. It is middle-way between Florida and Maine, where cactus plants and sugar maple trees grow side-by-side outside our door. Here in Williamsburg, Native America and Anglo-America and Afro-America first met to commence the story of what Frederick Douglass called “our Composite Nation.”

The Virginia House Project is a pilot program of 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 Foundations Stage, in which we plant our project in the earth-fast ground of material reality; the Framing Stage, where we seek to regain an original relation to structure; and the Fire Stage, founded on domesticated fire and elaborated as all forms of human culture, art, and science. Thus do we seek that fully developed condition of individual inwardness sought by the wise in all times and places. Our work combines Nature, Craft, Culture, and Spirit as inseparable aspects of one wholeness of human nature.

Through Wisdome an House is Builded.
Proverbs 24:3

I. FOUNDATIONS
The Mythic Landscape: Foundations in Earth

The foundations of our conversation with the material arts of architecture and craft are set deep in Nature. We believe the soundest foundations rest on bedrock, and that the bedrock of American wisdom lies in the mythic depths of the landscape itself. The original of Beauty we seek is the Native perception of Nature as home. To the larger world, America once stood for a paradise regained of “mountain forest and Indian stream”: the freedom of land, the wildness of land, the sacredness of land. Everything we are begins with nature, and it is deep in conversation with the living landscape of woods and water, fire and sky that we set our foundations. In Nature we seek the beginnings of wisdom.

Our project begins with the restoration and preservation of an ancient landscape of forest, river, and stream. This land was once inhabited by the Quiyoughcohanock Indians, allies of the Algonquian Powhatan Confederacy. When European explorers first made landfall here in 1607, they were graciously received and banqueted before going on to establish the first sustained English settlement in North America on the north bank of the James River. We seek conservation protection for these lands as environmentally, culturally, and historically important in order to preserve them against future development, and to make them available to educators, habitat and wildlife biologists, archeologists, historians, and Native peoples.

II. FRAMING
Sheltering Trees: The Frame of Civilization

Our second conversation rests upon forest foundations and develops inwardly to explore the theme of structure. Our experiment begins with harvesting from the forest a red cedar, a white oak, a black locust, and a yellow pine. From those elements we cut and hew and raise a frame to conjure the spirit of a unique American culture. The Virginia Frame is among the earliest building forms to emerge from European precedent on the North American continent. It remembers the past in its structure, while, at the same time, it anticipates the future. What can the evolution of frame technology from the 17th century to the present day teach us about the changing structure of our civilization? What can trees tell us about who we once were, who we are now, and who we aspire to be? Our Framing experiment brings into material focus fundamental questions of purpose and meaning. Can human culture survive unsupported by a frame?

III. FIRE
A Landscape of Spirit: Fire at the Heart of Life

Our final conversation develops inwardly toward the heart of human culture in the stored starlight of fire. Such Native houses as the Powhatan yehakin, the Ojibwe wigwam and the Plains tipi, such African houses as the rondavel, and such European immigrant forms as the Chesapeake Virginia Frame were largely constituted as roof structures sheltering a fire. With our concluding stage, we explore the meaning of fire and the ways it kindles human consciousness by establishing an orientation toward reflection.

Fire made us what what we are, and there never was a time before a century ago when humans were not wholly dependent on fire. Domesticated fire in the hands of our ancientmost forebears is perhaps one million years old and more. Fire brought us out of the trees. Fire shrank our stomachs and grew our brains. Fire illuminated our thoughts into language, our language into worship, our worship into works of craft and art and science. The earthfast home structures of Native Americans and early settlers were not small houses but large, enclosing fire-places, where all material and spiritual relations were dictated by a universal fire-reliance. Our Fire stage explores the inward-focused building culture that prevailed among all human beings everywhere until the modern age. What can fire teach us about what it means to be human?

REPRESENTATIVE ARTS AND CRAFTS

The original California House was a sustained, seven-year-long experiment in woodland simplicity, solitude, and self-reliance. The Virginia House Project revisits that experiment as an inclusive exercise in traditional craft, patronage, and community-building. By cooperating to bring the whole wisdom of hand-work into artistic focus, we seek to reconstitute the material foundations of an American Wisdom Tradition, to explore and demonstrate the many ways in which “the hand is the cutting edge of the mind.”

The only gift is a portion of thyself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We express our abiding gratitude to all our generous colleagues for their voluntary contributions of time, land, materials, craft, resources, and expertise:

Master Builder: Mr. Garland Wood
Land Stewards: Mr. Clifford and Mrs. Joy Williams
Architectural Historian and Designer: Mr. Jeffrey Klee
Consulting Architects: Stemann I Pease Architecture
Journeyman Carpenter: Mr. Matthew Sanbury
Apprentice Carpenter: Ms. Mary Herbert
Preservation Carpentry Millwork: North Bennet Street School
Master Joiner: Mr. Michael Burrey
Consulting Restoration Carpenter: Mr. Peter Post
Consulting Forester: Mr. John Smith
Timber Mill: Mr. Ryan Penner of RST Timber Works
Timber: Mr. Ryan Penner and Mr. Randy Thompson
Reclaimed Old Growth Timber: Mr. Taylor Moore of E.T. Moore Manufacturing
Restoration Brick Masonry: Mr. Lawrence “Cheetah” Waller
Land Chair: Mr. Allen Harding
Landscape Services: Mr. Thomas Hite
Special Design Consultant: Rev. Ulrich Haas
Documentation Chair: Ms. Melinda Levin
Videographer: Mr. Aaron Dye
Consulting Videographer: Ms. Kirsten Dirksen of Faircompanies
Weblog Consultant: Mr. Kent Griswold of Tiny House Blog
Project Photographer: Mr. Jerry McCoy
Special Advisor: Fr. John Swickard
Legal Advisor: Mr. William Miller
Event Catering: Trader Joe’s Williamsburg


Colonial Williamsburg Historic Trades Program
College of William & Mary
Osher Lifelong Learning Institute
Northampton Historic Preservation Society
University of North Texas, Department of Media Arts
North Bennet Street School, Preservation Carpentry

Suggested General Readings