Garden Design - Wood Fences in 17C & 18C Virginia - The Wattle Fence

Wattle Fence Landauer Twelve Brother's House manuscript 15C

What might be called a systematized brush fence, that is, the wattle fence, was known in medieval Europe. Wattle construction, also called hurdle-or wickerwork, was well established in 17C England as a method for infilling the walls of timber-framed buildings. 

Wattle Fence From the Theatrum of Casanatense 14C Sage 

Composed of thin, vertical staves about which were woven flexible withes, wattle was finished with mud, clay, & sometimes plaster in its architectural context. Without this earthen covering & with staves or stakes driven into the ground, the wattle fence provided an effective windbreak & more or less defied the invasion or escape of small animals. Availability of materials coupled with familiarity & simplicity of construction suggest the use of wattle-and-daub infill in 17C Virginia. 

The wattle fence also seems to have made an early appearance. Archaeological investigation of Wolstenholmetown, one of the Martin's Hundred sites in James City County, revealed a curving line of small post holes defining what was probably a domestic yard protected by a wattle fence.

At the Clifts Plantation site in Westmoreland County, Virginia, wattle fences appear to have been constructed in conjunction with ditches about 1705. Archaeological findings suggest that such an arrangement enclosed the rectangular gardens, kitchen yard, & possible orchard adjacent to the main house. At the very end of the 18C, just such a combination fence was specified by George Washington in a letter to his farm manager: "When the Angle of Wood, adjoining the present Cornfield at Mansion house is cleared let all the Poles which are of a proper size for a wattled fence, either in whole, or by being split in two, be preserved; as my intention is, when I come home, to have a neat fence of that kind, on a ditch from the White gates along the road to the turn of it, as Allisons stakes will run to the present-fence."

As late as 1850, The American Agriculturist reported that the wattle fence was a common Virginia type & supplied instructions for assembling a "cedar-brush fence … first, throw up a ridge of earth about a foot above the level, & in this drive stakes on a line two to three feet apart, three & a half to four feet high, & then wattle in the cedar limbs, beating them down with a maul as compactly as possible." 

In the same journal, it was noted that the use of banking, as well as ditching, was an important aspect of fencing in the "low lands" of Gloucester & neighboring counties & along the Rappahannock River. Washington's pole variety of wattle fence also endured into the 19C; the placement of its stakes was observed to be 8 to 10 feet apart. Praised for its durability, especially when constructed with stakes of the cedar or chestnut then abundant in Tidewater, the wattle fence was said to survive for about twenty years with relatively little maintenance.

That wattle fence construction required less labor than other types is suggested by the comments of Landon Carter of Richmond County: "I fancy I must put a Watle fence round my new corn fields for I see what with idleness & sickness I can't get rails ready nor all in place."

Philip Vickers Fithian viewed the wattle fence with greater equanimity & wrote an account of fence building at Nomini Hall, Westmoreland County, in 1774: "I walked to see the Negroes make a fence; they drive into the Ground Chestnut stakes about two feet apart in a straight Row, & then twist in the Boughs of Savin which grows in great plenty here …"

In the 17C & 18C Atlantic British American colonial coast, fences were built for mainly practical reasons. In the southern colonies, livestock of all kinds was accommodated in the woods surrounding the cultivated fields. As the animals could be branded or otherwise marked for owner identification & cleared land was often limited, crops came to be enclosed & livestock was thus fenced out. 

But, in New England & parts of the middle colonies, livestock was customarily fenced in.  By no means restricted to agricultural use, fences also defined & protected all types of rural & urban spaces, such as churchyards, gardens, & work-yards, throughout the colonies.

These fences were common in the Chesapeake & in Tidewater Virginia. Fencing was sometimes achieved by the use of masonry walls, but native stone is a scarce resource in the Tidewater region, though brick was used to build some churchyard walls & to enclose certain buildings there. The majority of Virginia fences were constructed of wood. All fence types co-existed during the colonial period; the historical record offers no indication that one type completely supplanted another.

Text from: Partitioning the Landscape: The Fence in Eighteenth-Century Virginia by Vanessa E. Patrick. December 6, 1983. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library Research Report Series - 0134

1750s Seeds & Plants - Philadelphia Seed Merchant Quaker Hannah Dubre (1709 -1775)

The Gardener After François Boucher (French, Paris 1703–1770 Paris) by John Ingram (British, London, ca. 1721–1759)

From the 1750s through the 1770s the most successful Philadelphia seed merchant & nursery-owner was a Quaker woman, Hannah Bissell Dubre (1709 -1775) of the Northern Liberties area 2 miles from the Philadelphia city limit, on the Wissahickon Road.  Hannah's parents were William Bissell (1680-1748) & Mary Pugh (1680-1713) & step-mother Hannah Warrington of Worcester, England

Hannah married Joseph Dubree or Dubre (1707-1748) in 14 Mar 1740/41; and they owned 33 acres, which they later increased to 50 acres, with a bearing orchard of grafted fruit trees, some meadow land, a large brick house and detached brick kitchen with a pump just outside the door, a barn and several other outbuildings, and a large kitchen garden that included many asparagus beds.

From 1754 through 1775, Hannah offered locally grown seed and fruit trees on both a retail and a wholesale basis. To accommodate customers who didn’t want to trudge out to her remote plantation, she introduced the idea of relying on agents in town to sell and supply to retail and wholesale customers, including international traders.  

By 1766, she was advertising that she could fill large orders for “Captains of Vessels” for exportation to the West Indies “on the shortest Notice.” Even after her husband’s death in 1768, “the widow Dubre” kept her garden and business going.   She warranted her seeds as “fresh and good" and sold large quantities to local shopkeepers for resale to their clients and to exporters for trade out of the country.  

Before 1770, she kept agents in town, including her brothers on Third Street John Bissell (1729-1805) and Samuel Bissell (1727-1762), and also with John Lownes, and Ann Powell near the Work House on Third Street, to supply both retail and wholesale customers who did not want to travel the two miles out of town to visit her plantation.  After 1770, she used James Truman, a butcher and meat curer in Elbow Lane near the Harp and Crown Tavern, as her local Philadelphia city agent. Over a twenty-year period, Hannah Dubre expanded her operation from a small local seed concern to a large-quantity supply business catering to merchants and international traders.

Note: Some claim Hannah Dubre as the wife of Jacob Dubre was an early relative of Jefferson Davis of Civil War note.

1799 Garden Design - The Rural House & Yards by Pennsylvanian John Beale Bordley (1726/27-1804)

John Beale Bordley (1726/27-1804) . Essays & Notes on Husbandry & Rural Affairs. Printed by Budd and Bartram, for Thomas Dobson, at the stone house, no 41, South Second Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1799

Design of the Rural House and Yards

The whole yard and its buildings, should be in view from the mansion; and that they be construdted at a proper distance, neither too near nor too far from the mansion. The food should be near to the housed live slock, for readily distributing it. The yard ought to be compact; and the doors of the buildings, and the gates of the yard, seen from the mansion.

It is not to save ground that compactness is here desired; but that the attentions due to the live stock may be performed in the readied and best way. A yard containing cattle always housed, is never to be littered with straw, but all litter carelessly dropt on it, is to be raked off, for security against fire dropt on the way to the boiling house; and the beasts are not suffered to stroll about wasting dung and urine. When let out and watered, they are to be instantly returned to their stalls, regularly in detachments, one set after another.

The homestead includes this yard; together with its stockyard, the garden, nursery, orchard, and some acres for occasional use: such as the letting mares, or sick beasts run in, at liberty. The farmstead should include:

Mansion
Pigeon-house
Kitchen, Oven, and Ash Hole
Poultry-house and yard
Wood-yard
Laboratory
Milk-house
Ice-house.
Cloacas
Family yard
Pump
Watering troughs
Sow and Pig Sties
Cow-house
Boiling-house
Hogs
Granary
Stercories
Barn
Sheep-house and yard
Stable, for farm
Bridge and vault
Chaise-house and stable
Bees
Waggon and cart-house
Implements of husbandry house
Workshop

1818 Garden Design - Formal Garden in Pennsylvania by Jacob Maentel (1763-1863)

Attributed to Jacob Maentel (American artist, 1763-1863) 

Pennsylvania Gentleman in Formal Garden c 1818

Jacob Maentel (1763-1863) was born in Germany & immigrated to the U.S. around 1805-6. Some report that Johann Adam Bernhard Jacob Maentel was born in the 1770s in Kassel, Germany, son of Frederich Ludwig Maentel & Elizabeth Krügerin. He may have immigrated to Baltimore, Maryland, sometime between his father’s death in 1805, & the appearance of a Jacob Maentel, “Portrait painter,” in the Baltimore directory of 1807, where he advertised for portrait commissions.  

Jacob Maentel made his living as a portrait painter, first in Maryland and then in Lebanon, York and Dauphin Counties in Pennsylvania. He painted more than 200 portraits of friends & neighbors. Although the first image in this posting is the only painting of a formal garden we know of by Maentel, the artist often painted his subjects in outdoor settings. 

Most landscapes the artist used in his portraits were farms or nature's choice.  Maentel was probably traveling as an itinerant artist up to Pennsylvania by about 1807, based on portraits of subjects in Dauphin, Lebanon, & York Counties. He traveled north of Baltimore about 50 miles, & applied for citizenship at York, PA, where a large German-speaking immigrant population thrived.  From September 1, 1814, to March 1, 1815, “Jacob Mantell” of Lancaster served in the Second Regiment of the Second Brigade of the Pennsylvania Militia based in York. He was paid $6.00 for this service & was
naturalized a short time later, in York County.

In 1816, Maentel was sketched by artist Lewis Miller of York County, PA.  Another second, older Jacob Maentel, identified as a confectioner, was also sketched at the same time.  Following his marriage in 1819, Maentel settled in Lebanon County, PA. He married Catherine Weaver of Baltimore in about 1818 or 1819, & had a daughter Louisa, born c. 1822; 4 more children followed.  Over the next 2 decades, the artist produced numerous portraits of local residents, many of them German Americans.

In 1820, Maentel is listed in the census for Dauphin County, PA, where he painted many subjects standing in grassy landscapes. By 1830, he was living in Schaefferstown, Lebanon County, PA, where 2 of his children were born & where his name appears with many of his subjects—Zimmerman, Bucher, Haak—in the parish register of the Saint Luke’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Jacob Maentel name also appears, until 1833, in the Zimmerman ledger books for purchases of paint & confectioners’ supplies.

According to one of Maentel's granddaughters, Maentel & his family were bound for Texas in 1838, when illness forced them to stop in the vicinity of New Harmony, Indiana; where they stayed with their friends, the Jacob Schnee family. Maentel apparently went on to Texas, leaving his family with the Schnees. When Maentel returned from Texas & decided to stay in Indiana, Schnee helped him lease a farm.  In 1838, Maentel is listed in the Indiana tax rolls for New Harmony Township, where he continued to sketch members of the tight-knit German community, some of whom he had known in Pennsylvania. The German community there grew from the 1st attempt at a utopian society in New Harmony.

New Harmony, Indiana, is a small town located on the Wabash River in southwestern Indiana. During the early part of the 19C, New Harmony was the site of 2 attempts to establish Utopian communities.  The 1st, Harmonie (1814-1825), was founded by the Harmonie Society, a group of Separatists from the German Lutheran Church. Led by their charismatic leader Johann Georg Rapp, they left their home in Harmonie, Pennsylvania, & established a 2nd community on the western frontier of Indiana.  During the 10 years in which they cultivated the new town of Harmonie, the Harmonists, with their strong German work ethic & devout religious rule.  The Harmonists combined the Swabian work ethic "Work, work, work! Save, save, save!" with the Benedictine rule "Pray & work!". This resulted in an unheard of economic achievement that was recognized as "the wonder of the west."  Slightly more than a decade later, however, they sold the town & surrounding lands to Robert Owen, a Welsh-born industrialist & philosopher, for his communitarian experiment. The Owenite social experiment was an economic failure just 2 years after it began.

As late as 1850, Maentel continued to work as an itinerant portrait painter in Indiana & Illinois. The older Maentel also appeared in Indiana, after the artist was settled there, where there were also references to the artist’s wife as a confectioner.  Apparently some of the portraits Maentel painted of local residents were done in exchange for goods. In 1858, his house burned to the ground, & he moved in with his daughter Louisa & her husband Thomas Mumford. Jacob Maentel died in 1863, & is buried in Maple Hill Cemetery, in New Harmony, Indiana, where his initials, J.M. are recorded on the gravestone.

Garden Design & Plant Lists - The Kitchen Garden 1759 Moravian North Carolina Settlement of Bethabara

Bethabara, North Carolina, by Christian Gottlieb Reuter, 1766, Wachovia Area, NC. Moravian Archives, Southern Province,  MESDA

The Moravians were among the 1st Protestant groups in Europe during the 15C. For more than 300 years, they suffered religious persecution, which caused them to periodically uproot their community or go into hiding.  By the early 1700s, they had fled to Germany, where they built the town of Herrnhut.  From there, they sent missionaries to many areas in the world, including the British America colonies in North America, where they established a strong foothold in Pennsylvania.  In an effort to carry their religion to other parts of the American British colonies, in 1753, Moravians purchased a 100,000-acre tract in central North Carolina. There, missionaries established Bethabara as a temporary settlement on the new frontier; while they laid plans for a more permanent central town, which would become known as Salem.

The Upland Garden at Bethabara, laid out and planted by Bro. Lung, May 1, 1759. Bethabara (from the Hebrew, meaning "House of Passage," the Biblical name of the traditional site of John The Baptist & of the Baptism of Jesus Christ) was a village located in what is now Forsyth County, North Carolina. It was the site where 12 men from the Moravian Church first settled in 1753, in an abandoned cabin in the 100,000-acre (400 km2) tract of land the church had purchased from Lord Granville & dubbed Wachovia.

“Old World gardens in the New World: the gardens of the Moravian settlement of Bethabara in North Carolina, 1753-72” by Flora Ann L. Bynum, Journal of Garden History, (1996), Southern Garden History Plant List.

Allium cepa Onions
Allium sativum Garlic
Anthriscus cerefolium Kerbel (possibly chervil
Apium graveolens, var. dulce Celery
Armoracia rusticana [Cochlearia armoracia] Horseradish
Asparagus officinalis Asparagus
Beta vulgaris Mangolds (beets)
Brassica oleracea, Botrytis group Cauliflower
Brassica oleracea, Capitata group Cabbage
Brassica oleracea, Gongyloces group Kohlrabi
Capsicum annuum, Longum group Spanish pepper; Chili and red
Cochlearia officinalis Spoonwort, scurvy grass
Cornus sanguinea Dogwood (blood-twig or European)
Cucumis melo, Reticulatus group Melons
Cydonia oblonga Quince
Daucus carota var. sativus Carrots
Dianthus caryophyllus or D. plumarius hy. Cloves
Humulus lupulus Hops
Lactuca sativa Lettuce
Lepidium sativum Cress
Narcissus pseudonarcissus Daffodils
Origanum majorana
[Majorana hortensis] Marjoram
P crispum, var. tuberosum Turnip-rooted parsley, Hamburg parsley
Pastinaca sativa Parsnips
Petroselinum crispum Parsley, curly
Phaseolus vulgaris Black beans
Pisum sativum var. sativum Sweet peas
Raphanus sativus Radish
Ribes uva-crispa
 [R. grossularia] Gooseberries
Spinacia oleracea Spinach
Syringa vulgaris Lilacs
Thymus vulgaris Thyme
Tropaeolum majus, T. minus Nasturtium 'Kaper'
Valerianella locusta
[V. olitoria] Field salad or corn salad