Evidence of ethnicity and status in the architectural landscape of eighteenth-century Coventry Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania
Date
1996
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Coventry Township is located in the northern extremity of Chester County, Pennsylvania. It was originally settled by people from both the British Isles and Continental Europe. Throughout the eighteenth century, many of these individuals continued to express their disparate ethnic backgrounds in the traditional British and German houses they chose for themselves and their families. As late as 1798, for instance, two traditional German houses were still under construction in Coventry Township. ☐ By the late eighteenth century, however, many prosperous young men from established British and German families began to distance themselves from these traditional, and often meager, "ethnic" dwellings. They chose to manifest their common elite status by constructing large, durable houses based on widely accepted academic models, which incorporated design ideas founded in the Renaissance. Yet in the German community, even within these formal buildings, ethnic differences often became apparent. ☐ Seven of the fifteen surviving eighteenth-century dwellings in Coventry Township utilized the academic side-passage, double-pile plan. Four of these houses incorporated distinct traditional German characteristics within their symmetrical facades and carefully proscribed floor plans. The principle German attribute was a large, prominent first-floor parlor, which was designed without a fireplace. This room, which would have been heated by a stove, harkened back to the stube, or "stoveroom," in traditional German dwellings. It symbolized a marked difference in ancestry between the elite German and British owners of side-passage, double-pile structures. ☐ The four surviving, uniquely "German," side-passage, double-pile houses, together with extant traditional German dwellings, indicate that Germans in Coventry Township did not readily accept British architectural conventions. Although many individuals embraced the closed plans, segregated work, spaces, and orderly facades of formal academic, or "Georgian," buildings, they did so not to become "English." Rather, side-passage, double-pile plans were utilized as a way to express elite status. Although German and English houses may have looked similar from the exterior, on the inside, in their most formal room, German houses preserved distinct German qualities.