24 Schoepf, Travels, II, 62; Cleanth Brooks, The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain (Baton Rouge, 1935), cf. J. L. Dillard, Black English (New York, 1972). This question has given rise to an absurd academic controversy so typical of our times, in which scholars of radical politics stress African origins of the southern accent and conservatives take the other side. Both interpretations contain important elements of truth, and are in fact complementary. The dialect of the tidewater south was an English regional dialect, with an overlay of old London speech and the later addition of Africanisms.
1 Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, III (1647), 340.
2“The Virginia house was a transplanted English house,” wrote Henry C. Forman in The Architecture of the South: The Medieval Style, 1585-1650 (Cambridge, 1948). Most scholars agree; see Thomas Waterman and John A. Barrows, Domestic Colonial Architecture of Tidewater Virginia (1932, rpt. New York, 1969); Fiske Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and the Early Republic (1922, rpt. New York, 1966); Cary Carson, “Settlement Patterns and Vernacular Architecture in Seventeenth Century Tidewater Virginia” (thesis, Univ. of Delaware, 1969); Dell Thayer Upton, “Early Vernacular Architecture in Southeastern Virginia,” (thesis, Brown, 1980); Henry Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United Slates (Philadelphia, 1969); idem, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia (Knoxville, 1975).
In the architectural historiography of Virginia, the first generation of Forman, Waterman, Barrows and Kimball stressed great houses and public buildings as ideal types. The second generation of Carson, Glassie and Upton rejected this emphasis as a “cavalier myth.” Upton writes (p. 1), “ … the large houses and public buildings of early Virginia are exceptional and unrepresentative in almost every respect. Until the twentieth century, the characteristic rural eastern Virginia building was a single-pile frame house, one or two rooms long, with end chimneys.” Both groups of scholars have enlarged our knowledge of this subject, but neither have encompassed it. Great houses and smaller ones were both part of the vernacular.