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Michael Olmert is the author of the new book “Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies: Outbuildings and the Architecture of Daily Life in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic” which caught my eye in the Cornell University Press catalog because of its unusual title, and because of the strange-looking hut on the cover (it’s an eighteenth-century dovecote). An edited version of my conversation with the author appears below.

What are outbuildings and why did you want to write about them?

Outbuildings are structures, usually of brick or wood or stone, in which particular jobs associated with living on a farm or a plantation were done—things considered better done outside the main house: cooking, making butter and cheese, smoking meat, and, of course, private functions. They caught my attention when I saw that, in some cases, the outbuildings survived but the main house didn’t. And since my main interest is in the history and architecture of the Tidewater (from Delaware to the Carolinas), it was also clear that these little buildings offered up a special way of seeing how blacks and whites lived together and yet essentially apart in the eighteenth century—because blacks not only lived in these structures; they also built them.

What did you learn that surprised you?

Perhaps the most surprising thing is how well made these buildings are. Architecture is often said to be all about tradition. And here you can see it. The builders were adhering to a set of general design principles for each type of outbuilding, principles that were laid down in the late seventeenth century and continued into the early nineteenth century. The proportions are satisfying, the materials solid, the craftsmanship is impeccable—which is why the buildings have survived. No “architects” were involved, mainly just trained slaves and indentured servants.

Going back to the divisions between races, and the divisions between interior and exterior domestic work, what do these buildings tell us about how those things have changed?

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Today, most of these functions are done inside the house, except for butchering and smoking meat (which is simply done elsewhere). But even in the eighteenth century, they could have been done inside the house. It appears that, especially on élite plantations, there were two primary reasons that so much work was done outside. The first is “social separation”: keeping the races apart seems to have been important. And second, it was important that domestic tasks seem to be done as if by magic—that the food, for instance, appears on the dining-room table with no guests having to see or hear or smell the work that went into preparing it. This sort of performance is meant to justify the owners’ status and prospects; that is, God must certainly approve of their authority and wealth because he grants them magical powers. They thus deserve to have thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves. It’s known as “rule by ostentation.”

Let’s talk about privies. Is it true that in the “olden days” multiple people used them at once?

The great novelist L. P. Hartley once wrote “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” You really come smack up against one of those differences when you consider notions of privacy and hygiene in the eighteenth century. But in this regard, the surviving architecture simply cannot lie. The placement of bedroom doors in many colonial houses, for instance, often meant that you had to walk through one bedroom to get into another; halls would have been an unnecessary expense, if they were ever thought of in the first place. This is very different to what we’d accept today. It’s the same with privies. You don’t need a five-hole privy if people are waiting their turn outside. They must have been using them together. The brick five-holer at the 1787 plantation called His Lordship’s Kindness, in Maryland, has three seats at adult-seating level, one seat a child’s level, and a final one at a small-child’s level. The small, frame privy at Bowman’s Folly, 1815, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, has two adult places and two lower seats for children. At Westover (1750), on Virginia’s James River, the large brick privy is like a little temple. The room has a fireplace that faces a semicircle of three large privy holes, as if this were the round, apsidal end of a church. The central seat has the largest hole; two slightly smaller adult holes flank it. Facing them, on either side of the fireplace and mantel, are two children’s seats, for a total of five people possibly using the privy at once.

What about offices? It seems like we now think of the “study” as part of the home, but was this not always the case?

The “separate” office outbuilding appears in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But the notion of the office has medieval roots. The rise of the universities featured rooms with two cells in them—one for sleeping and one for study, the second filled with manuscripts and specimens of natural history or antiquity. In eighteenth-century America, the first offices we notice are the rooms inside parish rectories where the vicars prepare their sermons. And then the concept moves into the secular world. Most houses in the century have four rooms on the first floor—and the fourth one is usually interpreted as “the study.”

The cultural feature of all such rooms is “separation,” a demarcation of family life from the demands of “business”—either lawyering or medicine or running a vast plantation. Late in the eighteenth century, a separate building for this work appears. They are usually in the front of the lot and on the right side of the house. And they are small Neoclassical structures, looking for all the world like little Greek or Roman temples in the landscape. The Benjamin Powell house office was built about 1814, and served as a doctor’s office. It’s got four columns holding up a pediment with a “Diocletian” or “D” window in it. By contrast, John Tayloe, a major Virginia landholder, built his office in 1775 to look as much a garden folly as an office—it’s got a medieval-inspired ogee-shaped roof and a vaulted ceiling inside. In both cases, this is plainly architecture as “presentation of self.”

You must have a favorite building.

My favorite outbuilding has to be the 1755 orangery at Wye House plantation, in Talbot County, Maryland. An orangery is a building for raising tropical plants in a temperate climate. It’s usually just one room, two stories high. George Washington has a stellar one at Mount Vernon. Ordinarily, one of its four walls features floor-to-ceiling sash windows—more glass than wall, in fact. And that wall always faces south to take full advantage of the thin winter sun. In spring and summer, the protected plants or trees were normally wheeled out through the vast window-wall to be tastefully arranged in an ornamental garden. When the cold returned, the potted plants would once again migrate back into the cozy comfort of the orangery. “Migrate,” of course, implied gangs of servants and slaves who actually did the heavy lifting. Taking their name from the citrus fruits customarily grown inside them, orangeries were an architectural product of the Age of Exploration. The world was shrinking. Its natural products—plants, animals, rocks—were objects of great intellectual and scientific curiosity. In an orangery, they could be cultivated and studied. More important, their beautiful and nutritious fruit could be harvested and eaten. Expensive to build and maintain, orangeries mainly served to demonstrate the power and global sway of élite families. Able to defeat nature by growing oranges and lemons where none should exist at all, such people were plainly blessed—and thus deserved the nod from above and all their glittering prizes.

And the Wye orangery does indeed glitter. Built about 1755, it’s one of the earliest still standing. It was in place when Frederick Douglass [1818-1895] worked as a slave at Wye House. You wonder what Douglass thought of it all. Did the sumptuous orangery—heated by a version of a Roman underfloor flue-system, a “hypocaust,” of all things—set him on the path to rebellion? If so, this orangery may have meant to Douglass what the orangeries at Versailles or Paris meant to the the revolutionaries of 1789. This was the architecture that not just witnessed history, but quite possibly made it happen.


Andrea Walker 

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