
Market House, Market Drayton, Shropshire, England, 1824. This gabled, open-sided market house illustrates a relatively refined but small market structure, treated as a temple. Note how the center pair of columns in the gable end are more widely spaced than the others, suggesting that the principal axis of circulation for shoppers was down the center of the building, with market stalls on either side. This is the arrangement adopted for the Williamsburg Market House (photo: Photograph by Jeffrey E. Klee, CWF).
In two early Reconstruction Blog posts, architectural historian Carl Lounsbury described the market day scene: what you might see, hear, and smell, and how markets functioned in 18th century towns. Architectural conservator Matt Webster then walked us through the process of calculating quantities, and producing (by hand) the materials needed to reconstruct Williamsburg’s Market House. But how did we get from “there” to “here”? In this post, architectural historian Jeff Klee describes the architectural field work that informed working drawings for Williamsburg’s 18th century Market House.
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