The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An Architectural History

The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An Architectural History By Carl R. Loumbury Colonial Williamsburg Studies in Chesapeake History and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. xxii + 448pp. Plans, sections, elevations, maps, photographs, appendix, notes, and index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8139-2301-8.With this nearly 450-page study of the early Virginia courthouse, another massive block of early America's architectural history is firmly in place. Such an accomplishment is especially notable as the documentation and interpretation of our colonial heritage - especially Virginia's built history - seem so comprehensive already. Carl R. Lounsbury of the Department of Architectural Research at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, however, is of a pioneering generation of scholars intent on greater inclusiveness of a broader range of the built environment and more probing questions about the ways that forms reflect social and cultural history. Lounsbury himself is a well-known leader with extensive research in archives and in the field, voluminous writing, and great encouragement for other scholars. Characteristically, he introduces the book as simply a "study of the public buildings that formed the nucleus of the courthouse grounds - the courthouse, clerk's office, prison, and instruments of punishment - and important private buildings, especially the tavern that grew up around them" (p. 9). Not surprisingly, this book ends up providing much more - indeed it serves as a model for an extensive and in-depth study of a building type and the life that surrounded it.Chapters include one assessing the county court in the legal, social, and economic affairs of Virginia, and a pair charting the emergence of the courthouse as a building type, first in the 17th century and then in the 18th. The final two chapters examine ancillary buildings and other structures, including prisons, pillories, whipping posts, and gallows in Chapter 5, and the courthouse, tavern, and clerk's office in Chapter 6. An appendix provides a comprehensive checklist of public buildings built in Virginia from colonial times through the early 19th century.Fundamental to any study of the time is the question of who Virginians were and how they designed buildings? The relative autonomy, or lack thereof, of Virginians from their colonial forbears has been a particularly debated issue. Noting a delicate balance, Lounsbury asserts, "Colonists were not insecure rustics hovering on the fringe of empire, overawed by the monuments of London. . There was a far greater interplay between outside ideas and homegrown customs than previous scholarship has acknowledged" (p. 13). Part of this assertion is supported by another important interpretive stance - the understanding of architectural design as a collaborative process, not just a meeting of minds between the client and the architect, but rather a much richer interaction. "The design of the courthouse was a corporate affair, devised by a committee and executed by a host of individual craftsmen who had the ability and were expected to shape many aspects of a building's appearance, from its plan to the bonding pattern of its brick walls" (p. 13). While official prescriptive regulations are enumerated throughout the volume, Lounsbury always tests them against specific case studies that are localized, particularized, and revealing.A central transformation addressed in the study is between the world of the 17th century and the 18th. Lounsbury notes, "by the end of the [17th] century, Virginia county courthouses stood as poor advertisements for the material achievement of the colonial culture" (p. 82), a place where "a few tables were all that was necessary" but by the 18th century "the growing bureaucratization of the law and legal proceedings could be seen in the different types of seats, tables, chairs, and balustrated bars with attached bookshelves arranged throughout the colonial courtroom" (p. …