By the mids, logs were the most popular building material for slave houses on outlying quarters and were used for service buildings and the houses of many whites and free blacks as well. A duplex was a double cabin or quarter with exterior doorways providing entry to each room, and no interior access from one space to the other.
Each room had its own fireplace, with chimneys positioned either at the ends of the structure or with a single chimney placed in the center with flues to serve both fireplaces. The relatively large number of surviving duplexes that date to the s—s are generally more substantial and weather-tight, with continuous foundations or masonry piers, raised wooden floors, glazed windows, and brick or stone fireplaces.
Some duplexes had interior wall plaster and trim boards, but the majority were more cheaply built. Their interiors were enclosed with plain sheathing or were left with the framing exposed and covered with whitewash, and the garret above was unheated and could be accessed only by a ladder.
Whereas earlier quarters generally had few and small windows, covered only with wooden shutters, new houses tended to feature windows with glass panes. Some masters may have used such improvements to signal to their peers that they were rich enough and moral enough to invest in higher-quality accommodations for their slaves.
More importantly, though, glazed windows provided improved light and ventilation that kept slaves healthier, and allowed for extra indoor work as well. Slave houses ranged widely in size, although they became more standardized over time.
Masters may have preferred smaller slave houses, such as the 12 by 14 feet square feet cabin that survives in Stafford County. But the range in the sizes of slave quarters was nevertheless quite broad, from distressingly small buildings measuring only 8 by 8 feet, to those 18 by 20 feet and larger.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, quarters with a single room often measuring only square feet of interior space became the norm. In the early to mid-nineteenth century the sizes of quarters expanded to about to square feet. While duplexes provided more space overall, commonly measuring 16 by 32 feet square feet , these buildings were designed to accommodate two separate households. Smaller, more private slave buildings reflected an ongoing and complex series of interactions between slaveholders and enslaved laborers.
Over the course of the eighteenth century African American populations and families stabilized, and slaveholders sought to encourage that stability out of the belief that it produced men, women, and children who were less likely to rebel. At the same time, Virginia planters began to transition from growing tobacco to cultivating wheat and other grains.
With these less labor intensive crops, slaves had the time and energy to acquire new skills while contributing to their own subsistence through gardening, gathering, hunting, sewing, and producing marketable goods.
Slaveholders thus became more dependent on their slaves who, in turn, negotiated for greater autonomy and better working and living conditions. Better built quarters and kin-based households formed a negotiated outcome acceptable to both parties. As they did on rural plantations, some urban slaveholders erected separate quarters for their enslaved laborers outside of the main house.
With the more confined setting the quarters were generally pushed to the side or rear portions of the house lot. Because most urban slaveholders owned only one or two workers, accommodations often could be found within the main house, usually in spare and sparsely furnished spaces. One common strategy, on plantations as well as in towns, was to require that laborers sleep in the buildings where they worked, including kitchens, laundries, smokehouses, and stables.
Kitchens were particularly popular as mixed-use buildings and featured either two rooms on the first floor, separated into the kitchen and quarter, or a kitchen below and quartering room above. Slaveholders often hired out their enslaved laborers to work for other masters for set periods of time.
In cities and towns, constraints of space could lead employers to secure rental lodgings for hired slaves. Depending on the circumstances, either the employers or the slaves themselves paid for this housing. As a result, hired slaves sometimes lodged in boarding houses or found other, cheaper accommodations located relatively near their work place.
This practice may have had the unintended benefit of offering a more autonomous domestic setting, and cities such as Richmond and Petersburg often featured distinct residential districts for free and enslaved African Americans.
Slave quarters were creolized, meaning that they reflected the influences of more than one cultural tradition. By far the most visible influence was that of white slaveholders, however.
They regularly determined the number and variety of occupants within slave households with reference to family relationship, gender, age, and work skills. The design of the overwhelming majority of houses also reflected white, European-American traditions, as the masters controlled the placement of the building, the degree of material investment, and construction format, making it difficult to interpret the inputs and cultural influences of Africans.
In addition, slaveholders could upgrade these quarters in order to make statements of political economy, status, and accommodation, while also drawing upon long-standing cultural traditions for worker and lower-class housing.
African traditions were not invisible, however. Even while the large majority of houses were designed in the European-American style, some scholars have suggested that certain architectural characteristics found in slave housing are African-inspired.
This structure was known as the "Quarters [or House] for Families" and was located on the service lane north of the Mansion. These quarters were eventually torn down in the s. From around until George Washington's death in , most of the enslaved people at the Mansion House Farm lived in the brick wings flanking the Greenhouse, in four large rectangular rooms each measuring thirty-three feet, nine inches by seventeen feet, nine inches, a total living space of about square feet.
Each of the rooms had a fireplace on one of its shorter walls and glazed windows. Certain enslaved people on the Mansion House Farm lived in rooms over the kitchen building, while still other families had individual cabins. The standard form of housing for enslaved people on George Washington's four outlying farms was described by one eighteenth-century visitor as "log-houses.
There appear to have been two sizes of cabins used as slave quarters, small ones made up of one room and a larger "duplex type" for two families, consisting of two rooms, each with a separate entrance divided by a chimney in the middle. It was fashioned by the well-regarded dollhouse enthusiast Jacqueline Andrews of Ashland, Virginia.
In , Barbara Grey commissioned Ms. Andrew to create these dolls and the house. It was purchased by the Weaver family in who then donated it to the museum.
The miniature slave cabin is made of wood, contains two rooms and a loft, and is one and a half stories high.
It is also elevated on wooden blocks in order to appear to have a crawl space, which was a common architectural feature of slave dwellings.
Slave cabins were most often made of logs, making them easy to build and economical for plantation owners who were looking for cheap housing options. Cabins had fireplaces for heating and cooking, but otherwise were minimally furnished. Depending on the wealth of the plantation owner and the status of the slave within a plantation, cabins were varied in terms of amenities and level of comfort.
It was not uncommon for a single cabin to house multiple families if needed.
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