Abstract

"Their houses are some Built of timber": The Colonial Timber Frame Houses of Fenwick's Colony, New Jersey" analyzes the material culture of timber frame houses in southwestern New Jersey for the first time, thereby filling a gap in the literature of traditional timber frame building in the American colonial period and in the popular imagination of the colonial architectural landscape of Fenwick's Colony in the province of West New Jersey. Despite a higher percentage of brick houses in eighteenth-century Salem County than in other areas of the region, houses were predominately of wood, reflecting the long European heritage of building in timber.

In original documentation of three timber frame houses in Salem County, two different framing traditions emerge—a simplified English box frame, and a New Netherlandic H-frame. Three Cumberland County house frames from circa 1700 documented by others revealed a heavier timber framing tradition more typical of New England houses. These three distinct framing traditions can be connected to the diverse cultural groups that settled sub-regions of Fenwick's Colony in the late seventeenth-century—Quaker English and other groups who immigrated from the British Isles and the American south, an ethnic mix of people descended from settlers of New Netherland and New Sweden, and colonists from New England, Long Island and the province of East Jersey. The framing traditions uncovered are not new to American colonial building; they bear resemblance to traditions found in the Chesapeake Bay region, Netherlandic-settled areas of the Hudson Valley, and New England.

These findings point to the lack of a uniform building tradition in the colonial period, and hence characterize Fenwick's Colony as a culturally heterogeneous sub-region of the mid-Atlantic cultural hearth. By looking at frames, this thesis contributes to the understanding of its early settlement, the diffusion of building ideas, and to the significance of the heritage of timber frame building in Salem and Cumberland Counties. As the beginning of vernacular architectural study of timber frame houses as artifacts, it points the way to further study and preservation planning tasks for this property type.