Visiting the 17th Century Adam Thoroughgood House by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
One of my family’s favorite places to visit in Virginia Beach (Virginia) was the 17th century Adam Thoroughgood House, a colonial tobacco farm. (Virginia is still a tobacco state, but they are trying to diversify out of the industry.)
Captain
Adam Thoroughgood came to Virginia in 1621 as an indentured servant (usually 7
years of labor with room and board paid in return for freedom). After he fulfilled his work obligations, he
was granted more than 5,000 acres of land.
One
of Thoroughgood’s descendants built the brick house with the steep roof in 1680
that you can see today. The steep roof
helps rain water drain off.
The
Garden Club of Virginia asked landscape architect Alden Hopkins to restore the
gardens in 1958. There was no
documentation of what the garden looked like in Thoroughgood’s time, so Hokpins
chose to do the garden in what our tour guide called the Tudor Style.
The
Garden Club is most proud of the espaliered fruit trees that are spread out
like grapes on the vine. There are also
arched arbors in this garden.
The
tour guide told us that “beasties” – little statuettes of an owl and squirrel,
mounted on the poles were supposed to frighten away critters from the garden
like Peter Rabbit.
Inside
the house, the tour guide told us that the property’s location on the Lynnhaven
River, which flows into the Chesapeake Bay, makes it an ideal location for
shipping the farm’s tobacco.
The
first room in the Thoroughgood House that we visited was the kitchen with an
open fireplace that was so large that you could walk into it.
The
kitchen also served as the family room.
This has not changed over the years since colonial times. Our guide showed us reeds and said that
colonists soaked these reeds in oil and burned them for light.
Maybe
this is the origin of the phrase “to burn the midnight oil.” The reeds lasted about 20 minutes and were a
fire hazard.
The
living room had a fireplace as well. The
wood beams on the ceiling and molding around the top of the walls made this a
more stylish room. The most interesting
thing in this room was the framed sample of quilling work.
Quilling
sculpture is made of twisted paper. The
mahogany furniture from the 17th century looked ok for business, but
not for relaxing.
Upstairs
we learned that colonial children slept on pallets that they rolled up in the
morning. This practice reminds me of the
Japanese with their futons. The master
bedroom had a string bed holding up the mattress on top of it.
The
expression “sleep tight” comes from having to tighten the string on one’s bed,
so the mattress would not sag.
I
was interested in the rail, thin ruffle iron and the box in which the ruffles
were kept.
I
ironed every week and was happy that ruffles like those were no longer in
fashion.
Florence
behaved so well during this visit that we went to the store and bought her some
watermelon and bubble gum and let her smack it as loud as she wanted to.
At
home, we made brownies. I taught
Florence different volume sizes with measuring cups and asked her, “Which cup holds
more?”
While
the brownies baked, I wrote about visiting the Thoroughgood House to the family
elders and finished reading Waverly Root’s The Food of Italy.
By
Ruth Pennington Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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