Still it was an interesting little place. Bacon’s Castle is one of the three oldest standing brick buildings in the Northern Hemisphere. The other two are in the Caribbean, one of those is in Barbados.
It was a bit of disappointment driving up and not seeing a castle like we would think of castle, but a Jacobean/Greek revival house.
The house was actually built by a one Mister Arthur Allen, who apparently came from nothing and made his own fortunes. Allen’s house was HUGE for the time, being one half of the house you see above (the left half). But even today, the house is large for a middle class family home.
So, why if Mr. Allen built the house, is it called Bacon’s Castle? Because of Bacon’s Rebellion, of course!
Yeah, exactly. Bacon’s Rebellion? What the heck are you talking about? Bear with me as I attempt to explain a political uprising from 1676… Nathanial Bacon was a plantation owner who demanded an aggressive policy against the native Americans. However, Governor Berkeley didn’t want an aggressive policy against the Doeg, Susquehannock and Appomattox people. Well, Bacon didn’t give a damn. He went and kidnapped some of the Appomattox because he said they stole some corn. Berkeley didn’t like that, so he gave the Appomattox some guns and gun powder. Bacon didn’t like that, so he went and laid siege to the capital of… something. Richmond maybe? They fled to the Eastern Shore and on the way laid siege to Mr. Allen’s house.
Here’s the thing—they aren’t sure that Bacon ever even walked in the door of this place. Just that his buddies took over, and made it a fortified place to hide from the governor*.
And because it was fortified, it was therefore given the moniker of “castle”.
Bacon’s Castle is down a barely paved road that you get to by following a small country road. You go down the barely paved road and find a dirt road. At the end of this dirt road is the house. Oh, I might mention that there are tobacco fields everywhere.
This house has stood through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, it’s changed hands dozens of times. There were wealthy owners, there were poor owners. The original house was a Jacobean style house. There are almost no examples of this in the US, whereas England… well they’ve got towns built like this.
The second part of the house was an addition in the late 1700/early 1800 and is called Greek Revival. If you take a look at it up there on the right, it’s more boxy, and there should actually be a large porch with columns, and you would really see it.
So we pulled up, and… we’re the only ones visiting at that moment. Private tour. Sweet. Well, it’s a partially empty house because they don’t have the right furniture to put it to accurately portray each period that the house occupied. One of the rooms however, they not only have furnished, but furnished to the time period, restored the windows, and have an original piece in the house.
In the master bedroom, where the masters of the house would have take breakfast every morning (so this room is LARGE) was the bed**, some pots, two tables, a dresser and a cradle. The cradle was apparently the property of Arthur Allen. So that cradle is original to the house. They were surprised to find it in the attic of the house when the AVPA bought the house in 1972. They also found a spinning wheel from the mid to late 1600s in the attic with it.
The attic was actually a grain storage bin when the house was originally built. It was eventually turned into a spinning room, wood storage and servant’s quarters. You could see the roofing nails through the roof, and I was a little surprised to see that they looked just exactly like the one that my parents had throughout their house*** when they were revamping it.
There were a few other room, but most of those were unremarkable because there was no furniture in them. We went down to the basement. Houses in this area (Hampton Roads) don’t have basement because of the extremely high water table and very rare chance of frost freeze down far enough to endanger the house. So the basement was a bit of novelty.
And the gentlemen who took the time to restore this house was amazing. He used as much of the original building as he could—which meant that he dove-tailed in pieces of new wood with the old stuff in the support beams! so that it was as authentic as possible. I had never seen this before and I was amazed at the dedication to authenticity that this man had in order to do something like that.
The basement was a summer kitchen, wood (then coal) storage and a wine cellar. The summer kitchen didn’t have windows. Well, there were windows, but they were holes to the outside. Small rodents and mammals could get in and out of the kitchen with ease. There were bars to keep the larger ones out****. It the winter, they used the kitchen as a smoke house and storage for winter goods.
So, then we were bought up to the Parlor. The house reigned over by a very strong woman for the later half of the 1800s (who name I cannot remember for the life of me) and during this time, she whipped the house back into shape. She decorated this parlor with the sense of the time***** and it was apparently a smashing room!
Well, here’s a little something you didn’t know about these wacky Victorians: it was all the rage to write in the glass of the windows. As you walk around the room, you see phrases and names and pictures in the glass. I just kept thinking how I would gotten my butt beat for even thinking of that. But they have a pane out of one of the windows that has an entire original letter written to one of the ladies who lived there who was being courted by a gentleman. It was neat.
We came across a window with some names on it, and I was shocked to see my maiden name on it! I had done some research years ago to see if I could find out more about our ancestry, and I was fairly unsuccessful+. However, I did come across a Captain in the Civil War (for the North who served in and around Richmond) who could have been related to us. Like I said, I was “unsuccessful” in my pursuits. Well, here was someone who either could be related to me or to this gentleman++ I had found in the research. It was really cool.
Outside this parlor you could see a warming wall and a garden. The garden was a restoration of the original kitchen garden that had been planted by Arthur Allen to supply his family with fresh herbs, spices and vegetables. It had been lost for years and years, and some historians weren’t even sure the stories of it were true. It was a garden that would have been helpful to both American and English historians, as most kitchen gardens from the 1600s are long gone, plowed under and built upon.
Well, the gentleman who did the restoration said that there had to be a garden out there because of the way the land was laid out. He sent a few workers out to poke around and low and behold, they found the original paths. It didn’t take long to uncover the whole garden and by the layout were able to recreate 4 or the original 8 garden squares. The warming wall was built at the back after the discovery to make more of a traditional English garden than a kitchen garden. There was a wedding setting up in the garden.
So, the last thing they have to display in this house is the midden heap findings. The garbage people. Art and architecture can tell you what people thought and appreciated, but garbage tells you the real story! Any archeologist who finds the community dump hits pay dirt. They had selections from the midden heap that included bottles of wine, pottery, real china (when china was from China) and some silver and copper. I won’t bore you with details, but suffice to say that if you were into archeology, it was most delightful.
We thanked the lady and walked back out the car. Tom looked back at the house as we climbed in. “Well, it’s a really nice, historic old house, but not nearly enough bacon.”
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*At the time, Bacon was considered a hero, but within about 10 years, he was and still is considered a traitor. Want to learn more? Bacon’s Rebellion
**I’ll get into Renaissance, Jacobean, and Georgian beds when I get to the Jamestown Settlement blog.
***We’re inclined to believe their house was built around 1915 because we found newspaper from 1917 stuffed in places as insulation. Houses weren’t built in 6 months back then like they are today.
**** It always amazes me how people years ago were so non-plussed by animals and rodents and insects. If we found a chipmunk in the kitchen, we’d scream, freak, call animal control and sanitize once the offending animal was gone. They shushed it with a broom and went on with life.
*****Victorian, which actually loved to pull on it’s history, so the room had a Tudor Rose on the floor, and Tudor Rose to match on the ceiling. She was only off by maybe 50 years, since Herny VIII was James I’s grandfather. (Henry/Elizabeth = Tudor, James = Stuart/Jacobean)
+Read: Lazy
++Aunt Barbara, if you read this, email me and I’ll give you the names.
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