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.

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 18^th 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 18^th century Market House.

Recent field research for the Market House project took the Foundation’s architectural historians to Virginia, Georgia, and Great Britain in seearch of information about how provincial markets were designed, built, used, and supplied with fittings. We wanted to learn, in particular, about their level of refinement relative to contemporary public buildings; how they provided storage and display furnishings for sellers; and how they managed the movement of people, goods, and vehicles around and through the regulated market area. Documentary and print sources hint at the answers, but we knew we would learn much by looking carefully at surviving markets from our period. The results of this research directly informed our design for Williamsburg’s market house.

Field research led to some important, sometimes surprising, discoveries. For example, even when markets were open on four sides, there was a clear orientation to one side. In other words, they typically had a “front.” A few, like one in Louisburg, Georgia, were centered in the market square, but usually markets were set to one side of the market place, accommodating market-day activities in front of them. At the wonderful Georgian-era market in Hexham, Northumberland, this orientation was reinforced in the subtle manipulation of the building’s finish. On three sides of this temple-like structure, round stone Doric columns support the roof; the fourth, the rear, does the job with much plainer, square wooden posts. Similarly, the front half of the ceiling, where buyers congregated, was plastered, while the ceiling near the wooden posts was left unfinished, exposing the underside of the roof.

Williamsburg’s market house will be similarly oriented toward Duke of Gloucester Street, with a broad market place before it; like most surviving markets that we visited, it will be well built, and modestly ornamented with chamfers decorating principal framing members.

Paving was another means to express the relative importance of the market, and served additionally, as a way to keep it clean, and to delineate the area in which the mandated price for goods must be observed. The best paving materials in surviving markets are usually confined to the floor of the market structure, with an inferior surface chosen for the area surrounding it. Our Williamsburg Market House will have a uniform, carefully laid brick floor in running bond, using whole bricks. The much larger market place is already being covered with a mixture of brick bats (half or three-quarter bricks) and whole bricks.

 

We saw many provisions for controlling movement through market houses and market places in our field research, and the importance of keeping carts and horses away from the principal sales area is abundantly supported in the documentary record. In 1790, the Selectmen of Boston ordered that “no Horses shall be suffered to stand in the Rear of the Meat Stalls, or in the Inclosures behind them, but as many Carts may be put behind staid Stalls as may be accommodated, and all other Carts shall be put in a range by the old Engine House.”1

 

The exclusion of carts and horses from market buildings was often achieved by the installation of bollards, as at Tetbury, Gloucestershire, where stone obelisks were inserted in the bays between the structural posts in 1817. Print sources suggest that a common way to regulate the movement of buyers and sellers was through the arrangement of the stalls themselves along the perimeter of the market house, creating a passageway to one side, or through the center. This was certainly the arrangement at the market in Hexham, for example, and apparently at Bewdley, as well. At Williamsburg’s market, we found no evidence for bollards in our period, so we have chosen to direct movement through the building through the positioning of stalls.

A surprising discovery in our field investigations was just how little evidence there was for permanent fixtures and fittings. Among dozens of buildings, we found very little evidence for hardware that was permanently attached to the structure. Some large meat hooks at the market in Fredericksburg and some suggestive rust stains in a little market in Deddington, Oxfordshire, constitute the entire corpus of physical evidence for permanent fittings. Market sellers, it seems, did not usually attach their hooks and shelves to the market building, but rather relied on stalls, or more ephemeral arrangements of tables and benches to display their goods. Whether this practice was the result of regulation (“…affix no hooks or other hardware to ye market posts…” e.g.) or simple economy (costly hardware could move with the seller), the pattern is clear. Williamsburg’s reconstructed market will show how sellers in the colonial era displayed their goods using large wooden stalls and more portable benches, tables, and boxes.

Our fieldwork on surviving market houses will lend the Williamsburg market the integrity, richness, and subtlety that characterize the best historic reconstructions. While attentive visitors may notice the chamfered posts and differences in paving, all who pass through the market will appreciate the nuanced quality of its design.

 

 

1. Whitmore, William H., ed., A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Volume 27, Containing the Selectmen’s Minutes from 1787 through 1798 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, City Printers, 1896), p. 131].

 

- Contributed by Jeffrey E. Klee, Architectural Historian

As the last blog post suggested, our Market House design is based on historic precedent, and the material choices have been determined by what was available in Williamsburg during the 18^th century. The foundation will be made of brick, the lower framing of white oak, and the upper framing will be poplar and pine. Shingles are to be cut from cedar, siding from cypress, and trim work from pine. All of these were common and widely used materials in the Williamsburg region during the 18^th century.

It sounds simple so far. However, as many of you know, a brick or a post at Colonial Williamsburg is not as simple as it sounds. We start, as they did in the 18^th century from the beginning: a brick begins as raw clay and a post as a tree. Our craftsmen then turn those raw materials into the needed form. So with the designs developed for the new Market House, we do a lot of working backwards to get the materials we need.

For the masonry, we know that it takes roughly 18 bricks to make a cubic foot of wall, which means that the Market House foundation will require 5,500 bricks. To make 5,500 bricks we need roughly 32 tons of raw clay. Approximately 25 gallons of mortar are required to lay 100 bricks, so we will need 1,375 gallons of mortar. To make the mortar we do analysis of 18^th century mixes and come up with a mixture of roughly a one part lime to one part sand with minor amounts of clay and brick dust. The lime source in the 18^th century was oyster shell, which was burnt to make a material called quick lime. For our needs, we had to burn over 687 gallons of shell to produce the quick lime needed for the mortar.

Our carpenters have been hard at work too, forming trees into the necessary elements for construction. To make a 10 inch by 10 inch post, we need to find a log measuring at least 16 inches in diameter and the proper length. This allows us to remove the sap wood so the framing is structurally sound. The shingles to cover the roof and protect the structure also have to be made. It takes approximately 650 shingles to cover 100 square feet of roof. To make these shingles it takes a log 18 inches in diameter and 20 feet long that is free of checks and knots. It will take 9,360 shingles to cover the roof, which means (you guessed it) 9,360 nails from our blacksmiths. …..

And so it goes. The process is carried out over and over to assure that the building is constructed as accurately as possible. The finished product will combine material knowledge and trade skills of our 18^th century predecessors carried out by our present day historic trades workers.

Contributed by Matt Webster, Director of Architectural Preservation

 

The weekly Williamsburg market was a bustling forum that spread across a large paved area, defining the limits of the “market place” on the south side of the Duke of Gloucester Street. Shoppers heard the pattering cries of vendors hawking their wares to shoppers, and encountered a bevy of smells from fresh comestibles arranged in open stands, baskets, or hung from hooks, to the more powerful aromas of fish and oysters packed in barrels carefully placed in a far corner. Though it may have appeared to the uninitiated as a frenzied clamor of people haggling over the best cuts of meat or the lowest price for a dozen eggs, market day was a carefully orchestrated event that was governed by a set of rules and regulations established by the mayor and aldermen of the city, known as the Common Hall, and enforced by the clerk of the market.

Rather than a freewheeling environment, the Williamsburg market, like all English and American markets of the period, was intended to provide householders with equitable access at reasonable prices to the “necessities of life,” as they were called. The market place was instilled by the ethos of a “moral economy” rather than an unabated capitalist one. Food supplies left unrestricted to the laws of supply and demand were seen as deleterious to the community. This attitude derived from deep-seated Christian tenets tinged with folk memories of famines that had resulted from crop failures during the late Elizabethan period.

This ethical perspective went hand in hand with the belief that a hungry population was a dangerous one. An echo of that fear appeared during the Revolution when inflation threatened to disrupt the orderly victualing of Williamsburg’s population. Hence magistrates set the maximum price for basic items such as meat, poultry, cheese, eggs, butter, and other goods. Strict market hours, clearly defined market boundaries, and laws against forestalling, regrating, and engrossing were intended to protect consumers from unscrupulous practices of hording, collusion, and price gouging. Sign boards in the market house posted regulations, prices, and market hours. Ideally, the householders of Williamsburg could procure their daily provisions at a single convenient location and choose among several competing vendors. After the clerk rang the bell to signal the end of the market for householders, regulations were relaxed and hucksters and retailers—including tavern keepers such as Henry Wetherburn who required larger quantities of produce for his customers—were allowed to make purchases for resale at higher prices.

By consolidating market activities, the municipality could better enforce health codes, clean and police the market, and collect revenues. Everything from the maximum price for a pound of beef to the official weight of a bushel of wheat was determined by the court and enforced by the clerk. When disputes between buyers and sellers arose, he examined the disputed goods using the corporate weights and measures. Those found putting lard at the bottom of a firkin of butter or using private scales that were rigged had their goods seized and sold for the public good and their faulty devices destroyed. The clerk also had the power to seize and destroy “blow meat, leprous swine,” and other goods that might endanger the health of the community. He registered sales and collected a percentage of the transactions so that money entered into public coffers as a sales tax. Some this money went back to the market to pay for its upkeep and make improvements in its services. (Click on images for captions and to enlarge).[envira-gallery id=”15975″]

Contributed by Carl Lounsbury, Architectural Historian.

 

Market day for the “country people” started early when the stillness of the predawn hour in the capital was broken by faint and then distinct sounds of the rattling rumble of carts and wagons on the unpaved roads leading to Williamsburg. Traveling several miles from distant plantations or nearby farms those in vehicles and their neighbors who walked alongside carrying parcels, baskets, and small tables and stools converged on the broad open space in the center of town on the south side of the Duke of Gloucester Street just east of the magazine. These farmers were joined by resident butchers, bakers, and other people with goods to sell who set up temporary stands and more permanent stalls in the open-sided wooden market house that stood at one edge of a broad brick pavement.

Within a very short time, they transformed the area into a shopping emporium with baskets filled with fresh vegetables, fruit, eggs, cheese, herbs, and gingerbread. Fishmongers with barrels of eels, fish, crabs, and oysters stood off in one corner where the smell of their catch would not be overpowering. All these stands were arranged within carefully delineated boundaries that marked the boundaries of the corporate market separating it from the area beyond where no such goods were allowed to be sold. After unloading their produce, tubs of butter, loaves of bread, sides of beef, and other items, the vendors led their horses and carts to nearby stable yards or pushed their wheelbarrows out of the way before they were told to do so by the city officials who were charged with overseeing the market. As dawn approached, the clerk of the market rang the bell that hung in the turret of market house, signaling to sellers and customers alike that the market was now open, an echo of which survives today with the clanging of the stock market bell on Wall Street.

Familiar in many respects to traditional farmers’ markets and more specialized boutique organic markets that have flourished in many cities in recent decades, the Williamsburg market in the colonial period was integral to the lives of all its residents for it was the place where they purchased most of the food that they put on their tables. Although some people raised chickens, fattened a pig or two, or tended small gardens to supplement their daily diet, their principal commodities could only be found for sale each week at the regularly scheduled public market. It was a busy crossroads in a town where people of all ranks, sex, and age met to do their shopping and to catch up on news and gossip that spread through the assembled throngs. City butchers and bakers in their rented stalls shaded from the sun by the overhanging eaves of the market house, country people at temporary stands on the pavement, and hucksters walking about crying their specialties hawked their goods to housewives, servants, slaves, and visitors. In Philadelphia in 1787, the Reverend Manasseh Cutler observed that “the crowds of people seemed like the collection at the last Day of Judgment, for there was every rank and condition in life, from the highest to the lowest, male and female, of every age and every color.” And so it was in Williamsburg like no other place in the city. (Click on the images below for a market day tour). [envira-gallery id=”15979″]

Carl Lounsbury, Architectural Historian.