Pigs

In the southern English colonies around Chesapeake Bay and in the Carolinas, the first settlers built wooden houses with structural posts placed directly in the earth. These houses were highly susceptible to rot and attack by termites, and none remain. A few ostentatious brick houses meant to display wealth have survived from the early colonial period. They include the Adam Thoroughgood house (1636) near Norfolk, Virginia, and the Arthur Allen house (called Bacon’s Castle; 1650-1655) in Surry County, Virginia. Also surviving is the brick church of Saint Luke, built around 1682 to 1685 in Isle of Wight County. The church is essentially late Gothic in style, with pointed-arch windows and buttresses, and as part of the Church of England it is wholly unlike the deliberately austere meetinghouses of New England. The Southern colonies, unlike the Northern colonies, did not break away from the Church of England.

Jamestown

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By the start of the 18th century, all the colonies along the Atlantic seaboard had come under English control and a more uniform culture began to develop. Architecture in the English colonies also underwent a dramatic change, moving away from ethnic vernacular traditions toward a stylish emulation of the fashionable architectural details used for public buildings and country houses in Britain in the late 1700s. The wealthiest colonists hoped to demonstrate that they were every bit as cultivated as their countrymen and countrywomen in England. Because trained architects were extremely rare in the colonies, educated gentlemen acquired libraries of current books on architecture and trained themselves in matters of design.