Of massive stones and durable materials: architecture and community in eighteenth-century Trappe, Pennsylvania
Date
2006
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In 1745, Henry and Mary Muhlenberg built a stone parsonage in the small village of Trappe, Pennsylvania, located in Providence Township, Philadelphia County (now Montgomery). For the next sixty years, the Muhlenbergs and their descendants lived in Trappe and made a significant impact on the area’s built environment that continues to be felt today. The large, two-story stone houses built or occupied by the Muhlenbergs dominated the local landscape and were a distinct departure from the houses of their neighbors, which were predominantly wood or smaller stone dwellings. ☐ The parsonage was a two-story, center chimney stone house that simultaneously indicated the ethnic background and social status of its owners while also linking the dwelling to the Lutheran church via a processional landscape. The Muhlenbergs occupied this house until 1761, when they moved to Philadelphia. Returning to Trappe in 1776, they purchased a house built c. 1750-55 by a former church elder, Jacob Schrack. The Schrack-Muhlenberg house was a center-passage, double-pile dwelling after classical academic models. Henry and Mary Muhlenberg erected a kitchen wing behind the house and made a number of modifications to the house that enhanced the living spaces with paint, plaster, and stoves with pipes. After the Muhlenbergs sold the house to their eldest son Peter in 1787, the house underwent a second remodeling campaign that updated the interior with wallpaper and remodeled the façade with a new porch over the entry. These aesthetic alterations and the fashionable behaviors increasingly enacted within the house met with Henry Muhlenberg’s disapproval, exposing intergenerational tensions about what was considered appropriate refinement. The property adjacent to the Schrack-Muhlenberg house was purchased by Henry and Mary’s middle son, Frederick, in 1781. The stone dwelling on this property, erected c. 1778-1781 by Johannes Ried, was a side-passage, double-pile house with rear service wings, based on classically-inspired bookish models. The house was a monumental representation of Frederick Muhlenberg’s aspirations to political office and financial success and provided an elegant space for genteel living. ☐ The architectural choices of Henry and Mary Muhlenberg reflected more conservative and traditional sensibilities, while the houses and behaviors of their sons revealed an increasing desire to participate in polite society. The adoption of classicism by status-conscious Pennsylvania Germans, however, was not necessarily indicative of assimilation, but rather of the growing engagement by elites with international trends. Ownership of classically-styled houses, together with the refined spaces and objects within them, enabled the younger generation to create places familiar to all knowledgeable members of polite society. By representing the architectural legacy of one family for almost six decades, the Muhlenberg houses indicate that elite Pennsylvania Germans willingly chose classicism and that by doing so, they created spaces of mutual understanding where people of diverse heritages could traverse cultural boundaries and find common ground.