The Coke-Garrett House Williamsburg, Virginia

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2003 by Robert A. Leath

While some historic houses endure as monuments to a specific moment in the past, the Coke-Garrett House in Williamsburg, Virginia, symbolizes change over time (Pl. II, Fig. 1). It demonstrates how dwellings can be adapted to different historical circumstances and how approaches to historic preservation have evolved. Through the centuries, the Coke-Garrett property has been inhabited by a baker, a barber, a silversmith and tavern keeper, a doctor, a diplomat, and three former college presidents. Today, the house is the official residence for the president of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

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Built shortly after 1755 with significant additions and alterations between 1810 and 1820, in the 1830s, and again in the 1850s, the Coke-Garrett House is the result of at least four major campaigns of construction. John Coke, an aspiring silversmith in Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia, acquired the first segment of the property when he purchased three lots near the Capitol in 1740. (1) Already on the land were buildings that may have dated to the second decade of the eighteenth century. By 1750, although Coke was prospering, he decided to supplement his income by taking in boarders. The Reverend Robert Rose (1704-1751), the rector of Saint Anne's parish in Albemarle County, Virginia, noted in his diary that in April 1750 he came to the capital and "lodged at Mr. Coke's the Silversmith." (2)

Coke was successful enough by 1755 to expand his holdings by procuring the two lots that adjoined his property immediately to the west. (3) Shortly thereafter, he erected a one-and-a-half-story house with two rooms and a passage on each floor. Spacious by most eighteenth-century standards, the house was relatively plain and contained beaded ceiling joists reused from an earlier structure. The new house, which probably served as the residence of the silversmith and his family, became the nucleus of what is known today as the Coke-Garrett House.

Throughout the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Coke and his wife, Sarah (nee Hoge or Hogg), operated a tavern on their property. After John Coke's death in 1767 his widow announced:

   SARAH COKE

   BEGS leave to inform those Gentlemen who
   were so kind as to favour her deceased husband
   with their custom that they may depend on
   receiving the same entertainment as formerly. (4)

In 1769 she leased the tavern to Richard Hunt Singleton (d. 1774), another local tavern keeper, who advertised "genteel lodgings and good entertainment" at his tavern "in the house lately occupied by Mrs. Sarah Coke, opposite the north side of the Capitol." (5) During the American Revolution, Coke agreed to lease her own house for use as a "barracks for a company of soldiers." (6) The house sustained considerable damage "from the troops being stationed therein," and in 1777 the Virginia House of Delegates agreed to reimburse Coke for the additional expenses.

Early records thus make it clear that John and Sarah Coke's property contained at least two houses, one used as a tavern and one as their primary residence. A detailed map of Williamsburg by an unknown French officer and surveyor, dated May 11, 1782, shows on the Coke property two substantial houses, six outbuildings, and a large enclosed garden. (7)

In 1810, after more than a half-century of his family's ownership, John Coke's grandson, also John Coke (b. 1762), sold the property to Richard Garrett (1780-1823), a York County planter, and his wife, Ann Timson Major Garrett (d. 1845), who renovated the dwelling house to conform to emerging ideas of gentility. They removed most of the original woodwork, leaving a pair of raised panel doors on the second floor as reminders of the building's early architectural history, and installed decoration in the neoclassical taste. All the mantels were updated stylistically, a front porch was added, and the interior stair was rebuilt with a fashionable Chinese lattice stair rail (see Pl. IX). This chinoiserie detail had been used on staircases at two of Virginia's most elaborate eighteenth-century plantation houses, Brandon in Prince George County and Battersea near Petersburg, both built in the 1760s, and on porches at Prestwould in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, added at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, the Coke-Garrett House represents the only extant survival of this feature on an interior staircase in Williamsburg. (8)

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On the foundations of an earlier structure that burned in the 1790s the Garretts built the temple-fronted brick office that now defines the eastern boundary of the house (see Pl. II). The Flemish bond brickwork with decoratively glazed headers recalls colonial architectural details. The Garretts' son, Dr. Robert Major Garrett (1808-1885), continued his parents' expansion of the house in 1837 by adding a two-story wing that contained a passage with a wide staircase (Pl. I), a capacious parlor (Pls. IV, V, and Figs. 2, 3), and a substantial bedchamber on the second floor. (9) About mid-century the enlargement was completed when an earlier building was moved into place between the brick office and the two-story addition. Although erected in the eighteenth century, this small edifice was transformed into a fashionable dining room (see Pl. VII and Fig. 4). In its final form, the Coke-Garrett House had attained all the amenities necessary for entertaining in style: a passage, a large parlor, and an elaborate dining room. Early photographs indicate the use of wallpaper in many of the rooms and passages and new furniture in the rococo revival taste.