PASSAGE AND PARLOR

By the later decades of the eighteenth century most of the better houses in the Chesapeake had more complex floor plans, as demonstrated by Cherry Grove, a Savage family house erected in Virginia in the late 1750s. Cherry Grove’s exterior door gave access to a wide passage that ran straight through the center of the house. The introduction of the passage to early southern architecture met a number of social functions and reflected an adaptation to the region’s climate, serving as an intermediary reception space—a place to accommodate those without the status to gain access to the now more refined space of the hall—and allowing for greater air circulation. Thus, the passage in eighteenth-century Virginia, which usually also included the stairway, was not just a hallway in our modern sense. The greater air flow created by the passage’s broad width and end doors brought comfort for less formal social activities and sleeping during Virginia’s hot and humid summer months.

Immediately off the passage was the most formal room in the house, usually still referred to as the hall, but sometimes the parlor. The smaller fireplace opening betrays the fact that by the mid eighteenth century cooking has moved to an external kitchen, part of the increasingly complex work yard found outside the main house. The yard also included rows of small houses for the enslaved Africans who comprised the vast majority of the workforce by the early eighteenth century. The fully-paneled fireplace wall and wainscot, the cornice, and the plastered ceiling sent visible cues about the status and refinement of the family. Their greater wealth freed them from laboring in their own fields and allowed them leisure time to entertain on a grand scale, master musical instruments, and to read their growing collections of books.

Cherry Grove had been damaged by a hurricane in 1933 and stood vacant from the mid 1940s. Decades of neglect had deteriorated the house by the time Frank Horton visited the property in the late 1960s. It was installed in MESDA in the mid-1980s.  These images show, from the top, the passage, parlor, and exterior of Cherry Grove in-situ before it was conserved and installed at MESDA.