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September/October 2003

Questions

The photograph on the left shows what house related to the early history of Christ Church and Lancaster County?

Answers

Known as the “Spinning House,” the building shown here stood at Corotoman until the 1920s. Constructed by John Carter I or John Carter II sometime between the early 1650s and about 1680, the house originally was a 1 ½ story, 20 by 31 ft. layout. A frame structure built on a brick foundation, it had wooden floors raised some 2 ft. above the ground and plaster walls. A chimney stood at the western end of the house. Two dormers were cut into the steep, gable roof.

Inside, the house was divided into the hall-chamber layout characteristic of colonial Virginia’s pre-Georgian architecture: the larger room functioned as the hall, a multi-purpose space where the Carter family cooked, ate, lived, and entertained; the smaller room, called the chamber or parlor, served as the principal sleeping quarters. The half story over the first floor contained a loft with two additional rooms for sleeping. Sometime probably in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the house was doubled in size to 20 by 62 ft. with the addition of an exact copy to the eastern side of the building.

The origins of the name “Spinning House” are not clear, but the inventory taken of Robert Carter’s estate in 1732 did list one structure at Corotoman as the Spinning House. The house’s contents at this time included mostly beds, blankets, and rugs, along with some irons, shears, a mortar and pestle, and some medical items (nothing related specifically to “spinning,” however.). With Robert Carter living first in a brick house constructed on the site around 1685 and later at his own Corotoman mansion, it is possible he used the “Spinning House” for overseers and/or indentured servants’ quarters.

Archaeologist Alice Guerrant and others working with Carter Hudgins during the late-1970s excavation of the Corotoman site uncovered the brick foundations of the “Spinning House.” Seventeenth-century artifacts unearthed included delftware and bale seals, a type of security seal on goods imported into the colony. Below the floor of the hall, they discovered a root cellar probably dug in the early eighteenth century. In addition, the archaeologists found china and glass fragments as well as chicken bones and other food remnants.