Reediting the Architectural Past: A Comparison of Surviving Physical and Documentary Evidence on Maryland's Eastern Shore

Abstract

Reediting the Architectural PastA Comparison of Surviving Physical and Documentary Evidence on Maryland’s Eastern Shore Orlando Ridout V (bio) The extent to which time and humans have altered our view of the past is a recurrent problem for architectural historians. Standing like beacons in the landscape, individual buildings attract our attention and inevitably encourage us to pursue particularistic, site-specific research. Yet these buildings represent only part of the setting in which they were conceived and built and inevitably direct us to a biased and incomplete view of a region’s architectural and cultural history. Hence, we must search for opportunities to create a multidimensional “biography of the land” that places surviving buildings in a more accurate setting unedited by the passage of time (Figure 1). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Friendship, Kent Island, Maryland. Solidly constructed of brick with a handsomely detailed interior, this mid-eighteenth-century house is typical of the building stock that has survived, long bereft of its original complement of outbuildings. Courtesy of the Historic American Building Survey, Library of Congress, 1936. Documentary sources such as land and probate records provide the basic building blocks for reconstructing the pattern of development in a community over time, and census records and historic maps make it possible to recapture the number and general distribution of people on the land. What is usually lacking is a comprehensive [End Page 88] census of the built environment, a record that provides the same degree of statistical data for buildings that the U.S. Census Bureau provides for people. The 1798 Federal Direct Tax is just such a record. Unlike most surviving assessments of real property, the 1798 tax incorporated detailed descriptions of real property improvements. By joining an intensive analysis of the 1798 Federal Direct Tax for one Maryland county with the results of a comprehensive field survey of all surviving preindustrial buildings, it is possible to reconstruct to a considerable degree the architectural landscape of one community at the end of the eighteenth century. By turning to a second documentary source, the county orphans’ court records, it is then possible to place that single-year model of the landscape in a broader continuum that extends for more than a century.1 Queen Anne’s County is one of nine counties that form what is known in Maryland as the Eastern Shore. Bounded on the west by the Chesapeake Bay and on the east by Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean, the Eastern Shore is rural and traditionally conservative. Rich farmland, vast salt marshes, and tidal estuaries still form the mainstay of economic life on the Shore (Figure 2). The first permanent Anglo-American occupation in what was to become Queen Anne’s County occurred in 1631 when William Claiborne established a trading settlement at the southern end of Kent Island. As new emigrants arrived, settlement expanded across Kent Island to the mainland, following the major estuaries to the east. By the end of the seventeenth century, much of the best land had been taken, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, the accessible interior portions of the county had been settled, as well. The population grew steadily, reaching about three thousand in 1700 and fifteen thousand by the 1760s. By the close of the colonial period, the county had reached its effective economic carrying capacity, and better opportunities beckoned from the west. The population fluctuated between fourteen and eighteen thousand throughout the remainder of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, in fact, did not substantially exceed colonial levels until the 1960s. As a result, the region has remained largely undisturbed by urban development and is widely perceived to retain much of its early architectural heritage.2 The superficial impression that much survives is in many ways misleading. The comprehensive architectural survey undertaken for Queen Anne’s County from 1978 to 1982 documented approximately 450 structures. Only about 150 of these predate the mid-nineteenth century, however, and fewer than 75 date to the eighteenth century. No seventeenth-century buildings have been found (Figure 3).3 A careful evaluation of the surviving early dwellings reveals several clear patterns. First, although more than a dozen...