Just a reminder that the Market House frame will be raised on Tuesday, May 5th, beginning at 9 a.m. If you cannot be present, remember that you can tune in to watch on the Market House Reconstruction webcam. Whether in-person or virtually, join us to witness the latest addition to Duke of Gloucester Street!

The Market House timber frame is now complete, as we prepare for frame raising day early next week. Each timber has been fit into its respective place in the frame to test the joinery, and then numbered with Roman numerals, a system of “marriage marks”, to reposition that timber in the very same place once the frame is moved into town from Great Hopes Plantation to the Market House site. Few of the timbers in the building are interchangeable, so the numbering is very important. All of the timbers on the front of the Market House, the north side, are marked with standard Roman numerals. The rafters, joists, struts and purlins on the south side of the building are marked with the same matching numbers, with an added “leg”. This is a common carpenter’s mark, seen here on the south side of the roof system of Bruton Parish church.

 

The roof of the Market House is made up of five massive kingpost trusses, designed after several surviving original trusses in the Revolutionary City. Early Virginia builders typically roofed with common rafters and not trusses, but were uneasy about spanning more than about twenty feet with the smaller common rafters. Trusses were necessary when the roof covered more than that short distance. Our Market House roof spans twenty-seven feet.

As trussed roofs are unusual in early Virginia buildings, it is probable that the 1750s builder of the Market House used British books of carpentry and architecture for the basis of his design. William Pain’s The Carpenter’s Pocket Directory shows a kingpost truss with an explanation of how to lay out the timbers.

A carpenter would draw out the truss on a piece of paper in 1/10^th scale. Once satisfied with the results, he would set his pair of dividers to the length of each piece in the truss, then “walk” the dividers ten times up each piece of wood, giving him the finished length. I have always thought it was interesting that both the Worshipful Company of Carpenters in London and the The Carpenters’ Company of the City and County of Philadelphia use a shield with three compasses or dividers upon it as their coat of arms. Why of all the tools that carpenters use – saws, planes, chisels, augers, axes, adzes, gouges, etc. – did those carpenter’s companies pick the divider to represent them?

Because it points to higher thinking, to mastery of the trade, and to the ultimate design of the building itself.

On May 5th -raising day-we will raise the long walls of the Market House as we have with so many other buildings – with ropes and push poles and lots of help from other folks. The trusses, however, are massively heavy and have to be raised up while assembled. We will build an A-frame, about thirty feet tall, with block and tackle at the top. Then we will use ropes to pull the trusses up onto the walls and secure them in place with pegs. If we get an early start, we hope to have the frame up and secured by the end of the day. Come by and watch if you can!

 

-Contributed by Garland Wood, Master Carpenter.

Just imported from England, the Williamsburg market bell! Cast at an east London foundry in late February, the market bell is made of bell metal, a bronze alloy, and measures 16 ½ inches in diameter, 14 ¾ inches from the lip to the top the cannons, and weighs 119 pounds. It is tuned to C#. To make sure that future historians will not be confused as to its origins, the side of the bell is engraved in raised lettering “Williamsburg Market House” and “2015 Whitechapel” with a circular hallmark inscribed with the image of three bells. That hallmark belongs to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry Ltd., which has been in business since the 1570s.Over its long and distinguished history, the foundry has produced many famous bells such as Big Ben (13 ½ tons) in the

Elizabeth Tower at the Palace of Westminster as well as hundreds of church and market bells in the metropolis and throughout the country. In the eighteenth century, the firm shipped a number of bells to the American colonies including the Liberty Bell for the statehouse in Philadelphia and a peal of eight bells for the steeple of St. Michael’s Church, which still call parishioners to worship in the city of Charleston. Closer to home, the surviving bell at Bruton Church (26 inches in diameter, 21 inches in height, and approximately 450 pounds), a gift from merchant James Tarpley to the parish in 1761, is said to have been cast at the same foundry though no documents survive to confirm its origins. On seeing photographs of the Bruton bell, Whitechapel director Alan Hughes unhesitatingly claimed it as one of his, recognizing the similarities in the lettering and other features with bells of similar size and date manufactured by the London firm.

With the loss of Williamsburg’s corporate records during the Civil War, information about the manufacture, size, and placement of the original market bell disappeared.

In most markets, bells sat in small turrets or cupolas atop the market house or occasionally on a post in the market place as in Fredericksburg in 1785. Imported European bells appeared in America by the late seventeenth century in places such as New York and Philadelphia. By the 1730s and 1740s, a small but steady supply of such bells appeared throughout the colonies. Unfortunately, contemporary records shed little light on the size of these market bells. In 1741 the corporation of New York ordered a good bell to be purchased from London of 200 pound weight, which may have been on the larger side compared to a number of eighteenth-century ones still found in English market houses, which suggest that smaller sized bells may have been more commonly used for markets.

Whatever their size, bells needed to be heard above the din of vehicular traffic and the voices of tradesmen setting up their stalls. Just as paving and bollards demarcated the formal boundaries of the market place, the sound of the bell announced its temporal dimensions. Around sunrise, the clerk of the market rang the bell to signal the opening of the market and later in the morning or early afternoon announced it close with another tug of the rope. In Alexandria in the early nineteenth century, a “small” bell was rung for a minute at the end of the market day, which was then followed by a “great bell” to indicate its termination. Most Americans are still familiar with this practice thanks to the opening and closing bells that still signal the opening and closing of trading on the New York stock exchange. The market bell marked precisely when the rules of the market applied with its prohibitions against forestalling, engrossing, and regrating. Without it, city officials would have been hard pressed to control the sharp practices that sometimes crept into the frenetic pace of market day.

Contributed by Carl Lounsbury, Architectural Historian.

Webcam watchers and those within visiting-distance will want to mark their calendars for the upcoming Market House frame- raising! Activity begins at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, May 5^th with the raising of the walls, followed by ceiling pieces and trusses. Master Carpenter Garland Wood predicts that this will all be in a day’s work, but if he and the crew run out of day, raising will continue on the 6^th. Hope to see you there!

If you visited Williamsburg’s Market House in the late eighteenth century, you would see customers making their purchases in a variety of ways. In some instances, customers might barter goods or services for their purchases. Merchants could offer credit at their stores, and those short of cash could turn to “country pay,” using foodstuffs and tobacco as currency, the latter at a rate set by the legislature. Sellers and buyers would periodically review and settle their accounts.

Very often, coinage or paper money changed hands. British coins were minted in a number of denominations, from fractions of a penny to more than a pound. Before the 1770s, relatively little British coinage circulated in Virginia, so residents were comfortable using a range of coins from other empires, particularly Spain. According to Colonial Williamsburg’s curator of Mechanical Arts and Numismatics (historical currency specialist) Erik Goldstein, a Spanish silver coin called a pistareen, worth two reales, was the most common silver coin circulating in mid-eighteenth century Virginia. Spanish colonial reales, then valued at about ten pence, have also been unearthed at many sites in Williamsburg. After the British government minted and shipped 1773-dated Virginia copper halfpence the following year, they became very common. And in 1775, Virginia’s paper money began to be issued in large quantities. The smallest denomination, however, was one pistareen, which had a value of one shilling and three pence –showing that Virginians were so accustomed to this denomination that it warranted a paper equivalent.

Because so many different coins were in circulation, they were often weighed to determine their value based on their metal content, rather than taken at face value and converted into pounds, shillings, and pence. All silver and gold coinage might be “clipped” – trimmed of small amounts of metal which made the coins worth less than their face value, and allowing the clipper to profit illegally. To make change for a customer using coins, the seller could cut a coin into halves, quarters, or even eighths and return the appropriate amount to the buyer. These “bits” would be useful for making other small purchases. Many of the coins excavated in the Historic area were halved or quartered, some of which were probably dropped by customers as they went about their daily lives.

Contributed by Lindsay Keiter, Associate Historian, Digital History Center.

Webcam watchers will see renewed activity at the Market House site this week—a sure sign of spring! Weather permitting, ground will be broken tomorrow, Wednesday, March 11^th for the Market House footings. From that date forward, there should be continuous activity on site through the end of the reconstruction project in the fall. So be sure to bookmark the Market House Reconstruction webcam, and visit often!

In upcoming months webcam watchers and on-site visitors will be able to watch reconstruction of two buildings: the Market House (which we have described in previous posts) and the Scale House…which may require a little more explanation. In this blog post, Architectural Historian Carl Lounsbury describes the function of a scale house and the forms they took in various market towns.

Pertinent to market activities, scale houses contained the corporation’s weights and measures. Every market had a set of scales, steelyards, weights, and dry and liquid measures that were kept by the clerk of the market or the sealer of weights and measures. In some places, scales were sizeable and hung up to facilitate the measuring of larger items such as wheels of cheese. Market regulations required that these instruments be on site each market day in case disputes arose between buyers and sellers over the volume or weight of items sold in the market place. Scales were used regularly and needed to be on site during market hours. To secure them (and other small valuable items), some corporations erected buildings near or against the market house. The large Philadelphia market had a scale house. Baltimore officials called for a “plain suitable building in the most convenient part of the market space for the preservation of public scale and the moveable stalls.” Alternatively, a superstructure was sometimes built to protect the large scales used for measuring hay. Philadelphia, New York, Fredericksburg, and Lynchburg had such buildings in the late eighteenth century.

The Frenchman’s map of Williamsburg depicts three buildings on the east side of the Magazine in the market place. The largest was the Market House; the one behind it the Guardhouse; and the third and smallest one to the east was probably a Scale House. Excavation in 1948 produced a portion of a foundation in this area measuring at least 14’6” wide. The building’s depth, unfortunately, could not be determined as the brick from the foundation had been robbed.

With little surviving brickwork to build on, the dimensions and details of our reconstruction are based in part on historical examples. In 1787 Norfolk built a shed at the west end of the market house for its scales and put in a loft for storing provisions brought to the market for sale. In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the borough ordered the clerk to erect “a small room or house fit to deposit the scales and weights.” The one built in Alexandria in 1809 was constructed of brick at the east of the market house and made to match its architectural details. It had two double doors and a window on the two main walls of the building. Although the size of these sheds and houses are not articulated in these records, they may have been similar to freestanding scale houses built at tobacco inspection stations in Virginia. The one built in Spotsylvania County in 1743 was 16 feet square and the 1754 scale house at Nomini warehouse in Westmoreland County measured 16 by 12 feet.

 

Based on combined physical evidence, documentary sources, and examples of surviving scale houses, our computer modelers and architectural historians have developed a design for Williamsburg’s reconstructed Scale House, which you can see above. Computer modeler Cindy Decker explains that the colors in this AutoCAD version help her to group and identify structural elements such as sills, joists, and studs, making changes easier. Not quite as colorful as Cindy’s version, the frame for the Scale House will be raised on Sunday, June 21st. Enclosure of the building will begin in mid-July and is anticipated to last through mid-August. If you are unable to watch in-person, be sure to check the webcam!

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Work on reconstructing the Market House picks up in March. While we wait for winter to take its leave, enjoy this video in which Architectural Historian Carl Lounsbury describes the sights, the smells, and the atmosphere of 18th century Market Houses.

Webcams can be marvelous things. Through the lens of a webcam, Colonial Williamsburg’s “virtual visitors” kept up with daily progress as the Coffeehouse and Armoury reconstructions took shape. With its constantly updated stream of images, this simple piece of technology has generated more questions from blog readers than the content of the blog itself, making it an invaluable “conversation starter.”

But occasionally we find ourselves at a lull in the action, and this too is captured by the webcam. Those who have checked for recent progress on the Market House reconstruction may have noticed that the project appears to be on hold….but appearances can be deceiving. The action has simply shifted into various shops and work yards for the duration of the winter. For those of you just joining the story, here is quick summary of what’s happened at the Market House so far, what’s presently happening (and where), and a suggestion as to what lies ahead.

Market House reconstruction began last summer with some of the necessary, but less photogenic, tasks: erecting a construction compound to receive and store materials, and installing a drainage system along Duke of Gloucester Street. During the summer and early fall, our brick masons laid foundations for the Scale House, a small freestanding structure in which the 18^th-century town’s weights and measures (scales, steelyards, weights, and dry and liquid measures) were secured. Archaeologists discovered traces of such a building just to the east of the Market House location. Also in the fall, the northern part of the site was graded to prepare for laying extensive brick paving in front of the Market House, providing a level surface for outdoor stalls. This paving came as a bit of a surprise. Not recorded, its presence was discovered during a 2013 archaeological excavation. Well into the fall, our Historic Trades Brick-makers were busy turning out and firing roughly 52,000 unanticipated bricks. To date, much of the action visible on the webcam has followed the installation of this brick paving.

Then, in early December, all activity seemed to grind to a halt. Or did it? A quick turn through the Historic Area reveals a number of sites where Market House reconstruction continues humming along. At Great Hopes Plantation (now closed for the season), Garland Wood reports that Historic Trades carpenters are building the frame for the Scale House (above), and sawing framing members for the Market House. Closer to town, the joiners have been working on Market House furnishings, including 8 large counters, or baker’s stalls (left). Also underway: construction of window frames and sashes for the Scale House.

The first of these, constructed by Mr. Howlett, is (in the image at right), being weighed to calculate the necessary sash weights. Unfamiliar with this sort of scale? It’s a steelyard, made for the Market House by Chris Henkels in the blacksmith shop, and pressed into early service. Blacksmiths will also be making hooks, the clapper and hanging hardware for the Market House bell, and of course, nails by the sack full. On a recent Friday morning, nails were being bundled for eventual transport to the site.

 

 

In March, as the weather begins to moderate, webcam watchers will see on-site activity resume on Market Square. The Scale House will be constructed on top of foundations laid last year, and brickwork for the Market House foundation will begin. Later in the season, above-grade construction of the Market House will take center stage, followed by the installation of Market place booths, and Market House furnishing. The project is anticipated to extend through the fall of 2015. While a precise timetable is difficult to project, we will alert readers to major, upcoming events. And as always, continue checking the webcam and this blog for all the latest on this latest reconstruction project.

Over the coming months the Virtual Williamsburg team will be updating readers on the virtual model of the Market House. Continuing with the approach we previously took for the Armoury reconstruction, this model is being developed alongside the physical reconstruction to illustrate the supporting research and show the site without the concessions reflective of modern living. In this first of a series of occasional installments, we will cover the physical elements of the building, along with the initial research and planning undertaken on the details of the Market House.

 

As part of their initial design work for the physical reconstruction, the Foundation’s architectural historians created a virtual model of the Market House in the 3D software SketchUp ™. This model was used to develop the final design for the building, and thus offered an excellent starting point for developing the 3D virtual model for Virtual Williamsburg. The basic SketchUp™ model geometry was imported into 3D Studio Max ™, and the modeling team began detailing it by adding wood and brick textures to the geometry. With the help of the architectural historians, some of the modern features necessary for the physical reconstruction were remodeled to their 18th-century appearances. These included elements of the physical building that have been added to conform to the modern practices, such as ADA requirements and product sales points. This preliminary virtual reconstruction was then added to an environmental model of Williamsburg in 1772. This provides us with the first real glimpse of the building and how it looked amongst the other 18th-century buildings on the Market Square. The research team will continue to review this updated model to ensure it reflects all of the available historical evidence, and then the modelers will undertake additional detailing and texturing, which will be described in future updates.

 

With modeling of the structure well underway, we also began to research other aspects of the original 18th-century Market House, such as butcher, fish and poultry stalls. These features will not be incorporated into the physical reconstruction, but the virtual model will provide a sense of the 18th-century market house environment, some features of which may seem unusual to modern sensibilities.

 

The physical Market House that is being built in Williamsburg’s Revolutionary City will provide guests with a unique personal experience, and access to a wide range of 18th-century style goods and products. Virtual Williamsburg will offer a complementary experience for guests to explore and compare how an 18th-century market house functioned.

Dr. Peter Inker, Manager of 3D Visualization, Digital History Center.