PAGE "Cedarcroft," Home of Bayard Taylor 212 "Lochiel," Home of the Hon. Simon Cameron, Harrisburg 214 THE HOMES OF AMERICA. I. COLONIAL PERIOD. On the Connecticut. MCCURDY MANSION. HE architectural achieve ments of America prior to the Revolution were neither notable nor typical of any peculiar moral, religious, social, or intellectual idea. In the older civilization architecture was the mirror which reflected the character of a people. It was taught in the schools, and esteemed one of the most important of the arts. But the representatives of many nations and countries, in attempting to subdue this continent, must necessarily wait for the general amalgamation of habits, tastes, fashions, and modes of life, attendant upon the growth of a new and distinct species of the human kind. Ancestral notions as various as the lands from which they sprung guided the early settlers in their construction of dwellings. There could be no uniformity of style in domestic architecture at that period characteristic of the American nation, for there was yet no American nation. At the same time all architecture has a language of its own, and the homes of America in the Colonial period reveal more truthfully than any other existing relics the life and history of the times. The salient features of domestic architecture are to a considerable degree the outward manifestation of the individual man. It is not always that the proprietor can design his own house, or that the architect is an expert in expression. Thus instances are rare where a fine house fully reflects a fine character. But wherever ideas of beauty exist, even when the parts of a structure are not balanced through a just sense of proportion, or where the details are crude, the effect of the whole is generally spirited and pleasing, and, what is more to the point, possesses a human element. Romance and poetry are not infrequently wedded to brick and mortar. Thoughts, feelings, desires, virtues, vices, and vanities are preserved in visible forms. A man's dwelling in its most complete mold may be regarded as a type of his whole private life. Independent of personal associations, however, the earlier American homes are in the highest degree interesting to us of this generation, since they illustrate the practical adaptation of principles of architecture, culled from all ages and countries, to the requirements of a young and progressive people. Rarely was a model borrowed bodily from a foreign land. The climate, necessities of pioneer life, and social conditions of an unformed community, led to the rejec tion of many useless architectural features, and the substitution of others freshly drawn from the inspiration of the surroundings, or suggested by a sense of local fitness. And the blending of nationalities, as in the marriages of the English and Dutch of New York, wrought a corresponding combination of architectural styles. One of the most striking examples of this class, a curious mixture of Dutch and English architecture, is the Philipse manor-house, which belongs, properly |