By the middle of the century there was some attempt at more monumental treatment, even in the house. Tall pilasters marked the corners and the centres, or stood all about. In a few houses on the eve of the Revolution—Drayton's Palace and the Brewton House in Carolina, Monticello, the home of Jefferson, and Lans downe, that of Gov. John Penn—storeyed porticos rose one above another at the front.
This trend toward a modest grandeur was more clearly evi dent in the churches. Those of the Church of England in the colonial capitals, like St. Philip's and St. Michael's in Charles ton, Christ church in Philadelphia and King's chapel in Boston. These had columned interiors and steeples like those of Wren's churches in London ; some even had the great external portico brought in by Gibbs' St. Martin in the Fields.
With the increasing power of the colonial assemblies, public buildings began to assume importance and pretentions. Inde pendence hall, the old Pennsylvania State house, stands as the type of the earlier ones, still half-domestic in character. The painter Smibert in Faneuil hall at Boston and the gentleman amateur Peter Harrison in the town hall at. Newport, with their arched and pilastered fronts, set new standards of conformity to the old world.
In the domestic interiors (see INTERIOR DECORATION) just be fore the Revolution the Chippendale vogue brought in the rocaille ornament of Louis XV., appearing in the carving of chimney-pieces, the ornamentation of plaster ceilings with deli cate leafage and tattered shell, as at the Phillipse Manor in Yonkers, at Westover on the James River and elsewhere.
These were mansions in which the ideal was conformity to current English usage, and the achievement was comparable to that of the smaller houses of gentlemen in the English shires.
Far more racily American were the provincial types of the by roads, lagging behind the march of progress. The wooden New England farmhouse with its roof extended to the northern storms by a long lean-to and rambling sheds, the "Dutch colonial" type about New York with low gambrel roof and wide overhanging eves; the Pennsylvania houses of stone, hooded, perhaps, above the lower storey, the cottages of rural Virginia with their tall chimneys and detached outbuildings, are vernacular or dialect types purely American in their development.
More distinct still are the stone houses of the French in Quebec, the stuccoed and whitewashed walls of the few Spanish buildings in Florida, the French and Spanish buildings of Louisi ana, with their formal ordonnance, the Spanish missions of the south-west. Here, after beginning with structures of the sim plest adobe, the Jesuits brought in, at the missions of San An tonio, some of the fire of Churriguerra ; the Franciscans of Cali fornia carried on a chastened Spanish tradition into the 19th century.