The transformation of a country house: the Grange Estate, 1700-1850
Date
1988
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Students of material culture approach the artifacts they study as physical manifestations of past cultures, embodying the unspoken, often unconscious, values of the societies by which they were created. A chronologically layered artifact, however, poses an interpretive problem. It must, of course, be approached as the sum of its parts, or layers, but each layer must be segregated and interpreted individually before a coherent and comprehensive holistic interpretation can be advanced. ☐ The Grange Estate in Haverford Township, a Philadelphia suburb, is a chronologically layered artifact. When examined segmentally, it becomes a revealing record of three distinct sets of cultural values and beliefs each of which developed, flourished, and eventually, was superceded. The seventeenth-century Welsh farmhouse transcended ethnic differences and geographic distances to bind its owners to their cultural cousins in the English areas of Pennsylvania and in England itself. John Ross' grand country house was a celebration of his fabulous wealth and exalted social position. The Gothic villa created by John Ashhurst and John Carver was a symbol of its owner's Christian virtue and moral character. Each of these manifestations is embodied in the house at The Grange. Each is revealed as succeeding layers are peeled away and examined. ☐ An examination of the individual layers in sequence suggests the transition of a cohesive community to a segmented society in which differences between individuals are magnified, and again, to one in which the very wealthy presumed to dictate the moral character of the rest of the population. One building, a single artifact, embodies this evolution. The Grange is an artifact, not of any one era or set of cultural values, but of the aggregate of cultural change.