Old world traditions and modern sensibilities: late eighteenth-century domestic architecture in Marbletown, New York
Date
1994
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This project is a study of houses and people in Marbletown, New York at the end of the eighteenth century. It relies on the 1798 Federal Direct Tax Census for Marbletown and surviving eighteenth-century domestic architecture in the town to construct a typology of late eighteenth-century housing forms and to argue for the rise of a regional architecture. The Direct Tax "A" list for Marbletown describes 171 houses valued above $100.00. It provides valuable information such as: house dimensions, assessed value, construction materials, condition, ownership, etc. Sets of quantitative measures based on these variables provide a window onto the architectural landscape of Marbletown in 1798. A systematic field survey of extant houses dating from 1798 in Marbletown, conducted during the summer of 1992, identified 90 eighteenth-century houses. Fifty of these houses were measured and documented to provide the primary evidence for a typology. ☐ The eighteenth-century inhabitants of Marbletown, New York, reflected a variety of Northern European, African, and British cultural traditions that cannot be subsumed under the general category "Dutch." The houses that survive bear powerful evidence of this variety. Likewise, the houses demonstrate that Marbletown's wealthier merchants and farmers were not steadfastly tied to the past. Houses built toward the last quarter of the eighteenth century offer clues about how Marbletown's elite incorporated new ideas about fashion into traditional notions of architectural design. ☐ In the end, we seek a better understanding of the people of Marbletown in 1798. Objects and the way they are used reveal human values and thought. Pattern in the material world reveals culture. As we explore the houses of Marbletown, and the manner in which they were designed and inhabited, we gain a new perspective on the complex cultural life of a rural Hudson Valley community.