Menokin Afield newsletter, 2002

"Under Their Own Vine"

by Camille Wells, College of William and Mary

Colonial Virginia mansions, built in an age of handcraftsmanship, involved the work of masons, carpenters, joiners, plasterers, blacksmiths, painters, carvers, and many other trades besides. Some of these builders were confident and versatile masters of their craft, while others were less adept in the use of their tools to complete a task. In addition to these skilled builders, of course, were those many laborers who hauled loads of brick to the building site, reinforced or dismantled scaffolding, and helped to heave unwieldy stones and beams into their proper places.

Perhaps more than any other surviving house in Virginia , Menokin bears the marks of various building trades as well as differing levels of skill. The stonemason who squared up and positioned the ashlar blocks of Menokin's facade may have left to less experienced colleagues the laying up of the coursed rubble that forms Menokin's other three exterior walls. The brick mason who erected Menokin's interior walls and chimney stacks quite possibly had little or nothing to do with the stone perimeter of the house. Menokin's architectural details are equally eloquent in revealing the work of different hands. Clear differences in the size of molding profiles suggest that the joiner who built the frames for Menokin's windows was not the same individual who executed the rest of the interior woodwork.

When Menokin stood, freshly completed and crisply delineated, on its site above Rappahannock Creek, one of the most arresting details of its facade was the keystone centered above the main entrance. Certainly the composition of this opening invokes the classical tradition, announcing the importance of this doorway with stolid Doric pilasters to support the compass-headed arch and scrolled brackets set beneath a molded cornice. The carving on the keystone, however, belongs to a decorative tradition that predates any familiarity, in England or its American colonies, with the ancient Greek and Roman architecture that had come to be widely accepted, by the time Menokin was built, as the proper referents for fashionable architecture.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English masons who wanted to distinguish their buildings in decorative ways chose legible figures or familiar shapes: lozenges, crosses, pinwheels, intertwining initials, dates of construction, hearts and--yes--even vines and blossoms. This tradition is often called "representational," for it involves decorative elements shaped to call to mind something that is familiar. In some respects, this form of architectural embellishment is related to the practice of embellishing coats of arms with identifiable images: the paw of a lion, the contours of a flourishing tree, the head of a unicorn. Of course, the Lee family crest is famous for its squirrel sitting upright, attention on an acorn in its paws, tail in a graceful curve.

A connoisseur who lightly glanced at Menokin's keystone might dismiss as naive the curling roots, the meandering vines, the rounded leaves, and the saw-tooth shape of the flower petals, but this would be a mistake. The craftsman who executed this design was an artist of considerable skill, for his medium, the iron-infused Choptank stone from which Menokin largely was built, has such a coarse and varied texture that delicate detailing and shallow relief carving could not have been achieved without careful and sensitively angled strikes with a frequently sharpened set of chisels. Even more remarkable is the carver's success in shaping his composition twice on the same surface without significant variations in design forced upon him by flaking, spalling, cracking, or any one of the several other means of sabotage characteristic of this locally quarried sandstone.

Menokin's keystone manifests not only the excellence of the carver's skill but also the craftsmen's active involvement in the enhancement of Menokin's original design. The presentation drawing for Menokin's facade represents its main entrance as a compass-headed arch, but one entirely surrounded by plain stone blocks of alternating width. When stonemasons began to transform this drawing into a substantial and well-detailed facade, they replaced the stones of the architrave--the sides of the doorway--with those Doric pilasters. The voussoirs, or wedge-shaped components of the arch--all became uniform in size, excepting the keystone which one of the stonemasons, with an eye for delicacy of finish, decided to enrich with his sinuous flowered vines.

In 1771 Francis Lightfoot Lee wrote to his brother William: "[i]n three or four weeks I shall be under my own vine & shall remember to drink health & every blessing to my dear connections [William Lee and his family] in London ." With this metaphor, Lee meant that he and his bride Rebecca Tayloe Lee could leave off staying with relatives at Mount Airy and Lee Hall, as they had been doing since their wedding in 1769, settling instead on their own land and in their own household. Evidence is strong that the couple did indeed move to Menokin plantation that summer.

Francis Lightfoot Lee's use of the phrase "under my own vine" was Biblical in origin: under the reign of Solomon, " Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree" I Kings 4:25. It also was quite popular among the gentry of Virginia , who liked it because it fit their perception of themselves as self-sufficient, prosperous members of an agricultural society who were quite firmly yet benevolently and peacefully in control of all their affairs. For the most part, they were right. Thus it is fitting, though almost certainly a matter of coincidence, that a stonemason at work on the Menokin great house chose trailing vines as most suitable for the crowning embellishment of Menokin's grand doorway