STRATFORD HALL’S GREAT HOUSE
By Kim R. Holmes
(For virginiacolonialhouses.com)
ARCHITECTURE
In 1729 Thomas Lee and his wife, Hannah, were living on therented property of onethe Lee family plantations, called Machodoc,in Westmoreland County. In the middleof thenight someone broke intohouse and setit onfire. The financial loss of nearly £50,000, 10,000 of it in cash, was staggering.[1]Also lost was the great library of Thomas’s father, Richard the Scholar.Shortly thereafter Thomasbuiltanother house ontheMachodocsite,but he was not to remainthere long. He and Hannah began dreaming of building a grand mansion to reflect their growing wealth andprestige. It was a propitious time to do so. An economic depression had just ended, ushering in a new age of prosperity for wealthy people like Lee. Moreover, Lee received £300 from the government to compensate him for the loss of his burned house. He used these and other funds to begin construction of a grand manor house on a 1,442 acre tract of land he had purchased in 1717 in an area called the “Clifts,” which was a few miles north on thePotomac River.
Construction of the house began in 1736.[2] Its design was chosen by Hannah, and she was most likely the dominant force not only in building the house but operating it after it was completed. The plan followed the rather well known H pattern used in the recently built Capital in Williamsburg and at Tuckahoe in Goochland County. Paul Buchanan, a leading architectural expert on Stratford Hall, believes the design Hannah chose was created in England and shipped to Virginia. At one point Thomas had wanted to build a house fashioned by the renowned local architect, Richard Taliaferro, but Buchanan believes Stratford Hall was not planned or built by him. The architect is not known, but the master builder was William Walker. It’s likely the design was chosen from a set of plates from James Gibb’sBook of Architecture, published in England in 1728.[3] Buchanan thinks that Stratford Hall wasn’t based on one specific sketch in the book, but rather was derived from a combination of several plans.
Stratford Hall historically represents a modification of the Palladian style of architecture, commonly known as Georgian Architecture.[4]Its hallmark feature is a strict symmetry, seen in the fact that the north facade of the house is exactly the same as the south. Thehouse’s design also follows geometrically strict proportions. According to Buchanan, the house and the site are laid out in both squares and root 2 rectangles (a root 2 rectangle is the diagonal of a square as the long side of the rectangle).[5] Squares are seen not only in the site plan. They are also evident in the floor plan where 24 squares (placed in six by four squares for the whole house) are incorporated into an H design. The central hall is made up of four of these squares, meaning it is one sixth the size of the whole house. Squares are also used to design the proportioned sections of the façade and to place the roof and fireplaces. A root 2 triangle sets the water table in the façade. Oddly, the dimensions of each square are 154 feet by 154 feet--odd because the pole, which is 16 and half feet, was the common measuring unit at the time. However, the total dimension of the house actually computes to 28 poles (154 feet). Thus the pole may have been used in the original conception of the dimensions after all.
In the original design (between 1736-50) there were two double entrance doors facing north and south and four interior passageway doors reaching the most important rooms in each quadrant of the house.[6] These were 1) the red and green rooms (today making up the parlor) in the northwest quadrant; 2) the white and blue rooms (today known as the library and the blue room) in the southwest quadrant; 3) the dining and cherry tree rooms in the northeast; and 4) the library and chamber (known today as the nursery and the chamber or master bedroom) in the southeast quadrant. The passageways in the center of the house were for servants only and not for family use. Unlike other grand houses of the period that featured grand staircases in the center hall, such as Rosewell, Stratford Hall’s staircases were small and moved out of sight, used largely for service and to reach the work rooms and lesser guest rooms on the lower level.
Stratford Hall’s brickwork is a mixture of styles. Above the water table the orange, pinkish bricks are lighter and were laid out without glazed headers. Below the water table a Flemish bond style with glazed headers is used and the color of the bricks is slightly darker. The water table is marked off by a protruding line of shaped bricks that were cut and sawn after being fired in a kiln to create molded shapes. There are eight bays (windows) each on the top and lower stories of the north and south sides. The top ones are proportionately larger and rectangle in shape than the lower ones, which are capped by a brick arch. The windows are dressed in harder (red rubbed) bricks that contrast slightly in color; in the upper windows they are a stretcher closer and a header broader, while on the lower storey they are one brick in breadth. The side elevations of the house are five bays in breadth with central doorways and enormous flights of stairs. Architectural historian Thomas Waterman believes the steps are in the style of Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House in England.[7] The main exterior doors on the north and south facades are executed in brick as well and employ similarly contrasting brick colors.
Allin all, the brickwork of Stratford Hall is masterful. The effect is a marvelous harmony of shapes and colors that balance and ease the rigid symmetry of the facades.
There is nothing quite like Stratford’s two arched and clustered chimneys in Virginia or anywhere else in America. Laid in Flemish bond, each chimney has four shafts that rise in a cluster to a cornice capped of molded and corbelled brick. The bond shafts are subtly framed by vertical single lines of different colored bricks and are connected by arches and balustrades (a railing supported by balusters) on four sides. They ascend dramatically above a hipped roof, and at various times in the house’s history formed monumental bookends to a balustrade walkway that ran across the top of the roof.According to Waterman, the chimneys are not Palladian in character, but were possibly inspired by the more recent work of Sir John Vanbrugh who built Blenheim Castle.[8] In this respect, Stratford Hall’s style is transitional, less a strict classic Palladian house than a classic romantic one. It overlays more recent designs from the baroque period on top of the strict symmetrical designs inspired by Palladio.
Most of the monumental designs and ornamentation we see in Stratford Hall today were added by Philip after 1750.[9] The interior of the house had been quite plain in Thomas’s time. In those early years there were only wooden steps into the house. Later Philip added brick and stone steps on the south, east and west sides of the house. Philip didn’t change the interior design of the house all that much. He closed off the doorways from the Great Hall to the adjacent rooms and made bookcases out of them. He recessed the doorways in the passages to the rooms so there would be solid walls next to the fireplaces. He took out a closet and created a door from the passageway into the master bedroom, and changed the old library into a nursery. He added a porch over the wooden steps on the north side going down to the kitchen side of the house.
The next big changes to the house occurred under Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee’s occupancy.[10] Henry’s first wife, Matilda, had been content to leave the house as it was. But Henry’s second wife, Ann Hill Carter, was more ambitious. Buchanan believes that Henry and Ann were impressed by architectural designs of the Capital building in Washington, D.C., which they visited frequently after they were married.[11] It was by now the federal period in architectural history, and the changes Henry made fit the style of that age. Probably inspired by the Capitol, Henry added a semicircular porch on the north side of the house that required taking out Philip’s stone steps. He also connected the two chimney clusters with a roof walk (it’s possible a roof walk existed in Philip’s time, too).
Most of Henry’s alterations of the exterior were minor. He reserved the most significant changes for the interior of the house. He widened the doorway partition in the master bedroom. He moved an interior wall making the nursery much smaller and dramatically reducing the size of the fireplace. He remodeled the dining and cherry tree rooms making the latter a parlor or withdrawing room, and he replaced the door between the two rooms with a large archway that exists in today’s model of the house. Henry left the Great Hall alonebecause it was still relatively new. However, he changed the parlor significantly. He moved a partition and put in ornamental woodwork in the Federal style. He made the old red room smaller and built a staircase to the lower floor. The parlor as exhibited today reflects the look of the room from Henry’s time. He also moved the schoolroom downstairs and put in some bedrooms to accommodate guests. All of this wasfinishedaround 1800 and represents the peak of Stratford Hall’s architectural development.
Stratford Hall is somewhat unusual in that it's formal and living rooms were on the top floor. Other houses from the same period such as the Governor's Palace and Rosewell put family living spaces upstairs and away from the formal areas on the lower floor. In addition, much as Thomas Jefferson would do some fifty years later, work rooms were placed in a basement and out of sight. The rooms on the lower level occupied half the floor space of the house (even more if you include the wine cellar). When combined with the various outbuildings such as the kitchen, all this constituted a huge working space. There were only two designated bed chambers on the top floor, making Stratford Hall formally only a two bedroom house, which by modern standards is astoundingly small. Butwe should not be deceived and think it a small house. Throughout the lower level numerous other rooms existed not only as guest bedchambers but as bedrooms for children and the staff. What mattered most by the standards of the time was a balance of space, form and function--the upper floor being used for public presentation and the easy living of the family, while the rest of the house and the outbuildings were workplaces to support the family.
Like many great colonial houses, Stratford Hall fell into disrepair in the 19th century. Photographs at the turn of the 20th century show a tired and neglected old house with clumsy, utilitarian additions and rundown yards and fields. The house was restored in the 1930s under the direction of Fiske Kimball, a prominent architectural historian and architect of the 1920s and 30s.[12] He decided on a restoration reflecting Stratford Hall at its peak in the early 1800s, or about the time of Robert E. Lee’s birth. By most measures he did a fine job, although there are questions about the accuracy of the tapered steps to the north and south doors. There’s also some question as to the accuracy of Umberto Innocenti’s 1942 designed West Garden. Nevertheless, by far most of what the visitor sees today is a correct rendering of the Great House as it existed around 1800.
GREAT HALL
Stratford Hall is perhaps best known for its Great Hall, which at the time of its building had no other rival, not even at the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg.Its basic layout was present in the original house, but it lacked the fine paneling we see today. Paneling and pilasters were added by Thomas’s eldest son, Philip, after 1750.[13] He employed a local architect, John Ariss, who had been trained in England, to help him with the design. Paul Buchanan believes the original designs for the Great Hall came from James Gibbs second book on architecture.[14]
At twenty-nine square foot, topped by a tray ceiling of 17 feet, the Great Hall is an architectural ode to Georgian symmetry.[15] The walls are paneled in light gray-blue painted units with the largest section sitting on top of a smaller one (called a dado). The panels are molded with the bisection profile style described in William Salmon’s book,Palladio Londinensis, or the London Art of Building, which was published in 1738.[16] The whole ensemble is pulled together by a unique (to Virginia at least) chair rail utilizing an ogee bolection mould. Adding to the monumental effect, windows and doors are flanked by Corinthian pilasters set on pedestals. Hung all around the room are family portraits, including not only Thomas and Hannah but Thomas’s father, Richard the Scholar and his grandfather, Richard the Immigrant.
In the original design (between 1736-50) there were two double entrance doors facing north and south and four interior passageway doors reaching the most important rooms in each quadrant of the house.[17] These doors were placed in the Great Hall. The four doors led to1) the red and green rooms (today making up the parlor) in the northwest quadrant; 2) the white and blue rooms (today known as the library and the blue room) in the southwest quadrant; 3) the dining and cherry tree rooms in the northeast; and 4) the library and chamber (known today as the nursery and the chamber or master bedroom) in the southeast quadrant. The passageways in the center of the house were for servants only and not for family use. Unlike other grand houses of the period that featured grand staircases in the center hall, such as Rosewell, Stratford Hall’s staircases were small and moved out of sight, used largely for service and to reach the work rooms and lesser guest rooms on the lower level.
Of particular importance architecturally is the Great Hall’s tray ceiling. These were common in the West Indies but not in Virginia. The high ceiling not only allowed for cooler air in summertime. It also reflected light and contributed to the spaciousness of the room. Hanging from the ceiling is a single chandelier. The mahogany tilt-top tea table on display today in the hall belonged to Thomas Lee’s granddaughter, Anne Fenton Lee.
In warmer weather the Great Hall was used as a formal area for balls and entertainment, and as a family gathering room. Since it had no heat source, it was likely frequented less in the winter and possibly closed off. However, it was opened for winter holidays when energetic dancing would stave off the cold (referring to this problem Philip Vickers Fithian joked in the late 1770s that “Virginians will dance or die.”)[18] During the winter months the family probably spent most of their communal time in the parlor which was heated.
PARLOR
The room that is today called the Parlor has had many different configurations and uses.[19] In the original house (1736-50) it was divided between two rooms, the larger “Green Room” and a smaller “Red Room.” There were two fireplaces, one in each room, and a small closet was placed on the north side of the Red Room. One or both of these rooms were most likely bedchambers in these early years. This configuration remained through Philip Ludwell Lee’s time, but was changed substantially by Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee.Between1796-1800,Henry replaced the red room with a stair case leading to the rooms on the lower level. The entrance to the old Red Room became the entry way to the stairs, which was called the Upper Stair Passage. The Red Room’s fireplace was closed and the Green Room’s wall was extended several feet into the area that became the Upper Stair Passage.
Most historians believe that Henry was inspired by the new Federal style with its emphasis on light colors, delicate woodwork and larger rooms.[20] The woodwork on the stair passage and the new fireplace mantel was inspired by the classic revival fashion of the time. The room’s floor is today covered by a remarkably purple colored carpet that was designed and woven in the United Kingdom and shipped to Stratford Hall. The purple color may appear by contemporary tastes to clash with the green painted walls, but at the time the contrast was considered fashionable. The purple-green motif was also reflected in the swirling color pattern of the carpet.
Hanging on the wall today in the room is a portrait of Henry attributed to Gilbert Stuart. Also in Stratford Hall’s inventory is a painting of Henry’s father, Colonel Henry Lee, which also often hangs in this room. According to Charles Carter Lee, there was once a portrait of William Pitt by Charles Willson Peale hanging in the parlor. Other notable figures whose portraits hung in the parlor at one time or another were the Marquis de Lafeyette, George Washington, Peyton Randolf, Sir William and Lady Berkeley, and Henry Lee III.