Remaking the Georgian Landscape

Britain’s North American colonies contained some very wealthy men, such as the New York land proprietors or the leading planters of Virginia.

But those men were nowhere near as rich as the landowning aristocrats in Britain. What counted for a mansion in North America would have been an average country manor across the ocean, where the richest lords were building giant palaces.

Furthermore, as Nicola Cornick wrote at the Word Wenches, some wealthy men even remade the landscape around their homes just for aesthetic reasons:

If we look at the Georgian and Regency period, there did seem to be a penchant for noblemen sweeping aside old villages in order to improve the look of their country estates. At Wimpole Hall, the 2nd Earl of Harwicke commissioned Capability Brown to redesign his parkland to improve the views from the mansion in 1767. Sadly this involved sweeping aside various small villages! . . .

In 1780, Joseph Damer, Lord Milton, decided that the market town of Middleton, adjacent to his home at Milton Abbey, was spoiling his rural peace and quiet. He commissioned an architect called William Chambers plus the ubiquitous Capability Brown to design a new village, Milton Abbas [shown above], in a wooded valley away from the Abbey.

Most of the townspeople were relocated there and Middleton was demolished and the site landscaped. Thirty six identical thatched cottages were built with the intention of each housing 2 families. Each house was fronted with a lawn and planted with a horse chestnut tree. No doubt Lord Milton felt he was being very generous and perhaps plenty of people were grateful for a new house. To us these days, however, does it feel like generosity or breathtaking arrogance?

American scholars often write about how much effort George Washington or Thomas Jefferson put in (and forced from others) to make their homes just the way they wanted. But no project in the colonies or early America reached that Old World level of grandiosity.