Williamsburg: The Role of the Garden in "Making a Town"

Abstract

Williamsburg: The Role of the Garden in "Making a Town" PETER E. MARTIN Royal commands, the best efforts of Governor William Berkeley and other governors, and pleas by merchants and the church that sizable towns be created and developed in seventeenth-century Virginia did little good. When Williamsburg was chartered at Middle Plantation as the new colonial capital in 1699, there were no true cities, either mercantile or so­ cial, in the colony. Williamsburg was supposed to be the beginning of a solution to that alarming problem. But whether it could become the thriv­ ing commercial and urban center for which Hugh Jones hoped in his Pres­ ent State of Virginia (1724)1 or which a College of William and Mary stu­ dent in 1699 apparently had in mind when he declared to the House of Burgesses, a voice crying in the wilderness, that "such a Town . . . may equal if not outdo Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and An­ napolis" was uncertain. History, of course, has replied negatively. Wil­ liamsburg never wrested from the plantation system the control of trade; it never became an economic center for the colony. It did contain some trade, naturally, but its principal importance and fame was as a cultural and artistic center. It became a venue for civilized and elitist living to those affluent plantation "patriarchs" like William Byrd of Westover who helped found and plan the town, as well as to the relatively affluent law­ yers, doctors, and politicians who liked the idea of preserving its charac­ ter as a "village," as the late Richard Beale Davis liked to call it.2 Gardens and gardening in eighteenth-century Williamsburg, both or­ namental and practical, helped determine the village character of the town, even its genteel aspects. Gardens enabled a good number of the 187 188 / MARTIN town's residents to assume a pose of an elegant living that they thought they badly needed in the Tidewater wilderness — even as late as the last quarter of the century when the Revolution permanently disrupted that pose and the town lost its claim to fame as Thomas Jefferson engineered the capital's removal to Richmond in 1781. While the garden had become an archetype in seventeenth-century Virginia, cited frequently as a meta­ phor recalling the idea of primitive simplicity and reinforcing the evoca­ tive image of Virginia as a fresh new paradise, in the following century it increasingly came to be a palpable sign of civilization and urbanity. There is ample evidence that the garden was thus used in Williamsburg by resi­ dents in town or at nearby plantations. These people wished to see gar­ dens and feel like gardeners because that carried with it a feeling of having tamed the wilderness.3 This also made them feel closer to England and rather like the urbane, perhaps semi-"retired" gardeners of London town houses or even in villages like Twickenham, Fulham, Richmond, and Chiswick. Byrd, who although not dwelling in Williamsburg would have known the town's gardens better than most,4 was compelled into rede­ signing his garden at Westover in the late 1720s because he could not bear being without a version of a naturalized garden in the then-emerging English style. He had to face up to the reality that his hopes of living in England as a country squire had almost totally faded; his garden was one of his compensations. In 1729 he wrote with no small measure of smug­ ness to Major General Robert Armiger (at one time aide-de-camp to George II) with the news that "a library, a garden, a grove, and a purling stream are the innocent scenes that divert our leizure."5 But the gardens turned out to be an impediment to the growth of Wil­ liamsburg. Once they had done their part in consolidating the villagelike elegance of the new capital, powerful and affluent residents and people who visited regularly on business were increasingly reluctant to have it become more commercial and urban. According to them, the town had nearly attained by the mid-1720s, when Jones published his Present State of Virginia, what James Thomson in Spring described as "an elegant Suffi­ ciency...