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There is a farmhouse in New England with a date on the front. On a good weekend, there's a queue outside it.
Explores the oldest historic mansion in North America, revealing it is in the Caribbean, not the U.S., with detailed history and architectural insights.
Key Takeaways
- Many claims about the oldest houses in the U.S. are based on tradition, not scientific dating.
- The oldest historic mansion in North America is actually in the Caribbean, not the continental U.S.
- Historical legal definitions of 'mansion' differ from modern perceptions.
- Restorations can create misleading impressions about original interiors and ownership.
- Scientific methods like dendrochronology provide more accurate dating than oral or traditional histories.
What the video covers
- Common claims about the oldest house in America are often incorrect, typically overstating the age by a generation or more.
- The term 'mansion' historically meant simply 'house,' regardless of size or grandeur.
- The oldest great house on the continent is the Alcazar de Colon in Santo Domingo, built for Diego Colón, son of Christopher Columbus.
- The Alcazar was constructed around 1510-1514, though no official building contracts or records survive, making dates traditional rather than documented.
- The house was a large stone structure with about 55 rooms and was occupied by the Columbus family for three generations.
- After the family left by 1577, the building fell into ruin, was damaged by Francis Drake in 1586, and eventually became a protected ruin restored in the 1950s.
- The restoration included imported furniture to recreate a vice-regal interior, though most items were not originally owned by Diego Colón.
- The video also discusses other historic houses in North America, the use of tree ring dating to verify construction dates, and the complexities of historical claims.
- It highlights the geopolitical and cultural context of the Caribbean as part of North America, often overlooked in U.S.-centric histories.
- The video emphasizes the importance of documented evidence over tradition in establishing historical facts about old buildings.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and common misconceptions about oldest houses
- 02:14The Alcazar de Colon: The oldest great house in North America
- 04:59Construction dates and historical documentation challenges
- 08:11Furnishings and restoration of the Alcazar de Colon
- 11:10Ownership, family history, and decline of the mansion
- 14:14Historical context: Francis Drake and the building's ruin
- 17:00Restoration efforts and museum opening
- 20:10Other historic houses and scientific dating methods
- 24:00Legal definitions and the significance of 'mansion'
- 26:30Conclusion: Importance of evidence-based history
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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The people in that queue have been told they are about to walk into the oldest house in America. They have been told wrong. So has almost everybody standing outside almost every building in this country that makes the same
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claim. There are a dozen or so of them. They cannot all be right. Most are not close. I know that because somebody finally drilled into the beams and counted the rings.
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And the reports are dull enough that hardly anybody has read them. Sample numbers, species, correlation values, a felling season, a signature at the bottom. Read them one after another, though, and the same sentence keeps surfacing in
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different words. The building is younger than you were told, usually by a generation, in one case by 79 years.
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What surprised me was not that people got it wrong. It is that the errors all run in the same direction.
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Nobody ever accidentally decides their house is newer than it is. Here is the shape of it. A famous ancestor steps
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off a ship. Two or three generations later, somebody in that family builds in brick or stone. Then the ancestor's name walks backwards
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up the family tree and settles on it. Everyone repeats the date. Somebody prints it. Somebody bolts it to the wall.
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One thing before we go because it decides what counts. The word mansion did not mean a palace to the people who wrote these deeds.
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Bouvier's Law Dictionary, the standard American legal reference of the 1800s, defines it in seven words. This term is
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synonymous with house. So a farmhouse with low ceilings and a viceroy palace are the
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same kind of thing in law. They always were.
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And the oldest great house on this continent is not in New England.
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It is not in Virginia or in Florida or anywhere in the United States.
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It stands above a harbor in the Caribbean. Five stone arches to a floor,
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and it was built for the son of Christopher Columbus. For the better part of 200 years, it had no roof on it.
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Somebody kept livestock inside the house above the harbor. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oedo Valdez was warden of the fortress at Santo Domingo and no friend of the Columbus family. He said so in print more than once. In 1526, he sat down to describe the island
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for his king. And when he reached the admiral's house, he gave up being unkind.
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He knew of nothing in Spain with a wing to match it. He listed his reasons the way a surveyor would: its position above the harbor, its being built entirely of stone, its rooms very good ones, and a great many of them, and the view which
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he called the most beautiful of sea and land that there could be. Oedo had lived in Italy and served at the Spanish court. He had seen a great deal of good building. A compliment from that direction is worth having. The house was
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the Alcazar de Colon, and it belonged to Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus and to his wife Maria Alvarez de Toledo.
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There is a fence around that sentence, and I would rather name it now than have you catch it later. When an American says the oldest house in America, he means the United States. Geographers do not draw the line there. The standard
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division puts the Caribbean islands inside North America alongside Canada and Mexico. So this building is on the same continent as Dum. It is simply not in the part of it that does the claiming. Maria is the one worth
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following. She was a niece of the Duke of Alba, which is to say she married considerably beneath her rank, and everybody knew it. She crossed the Atlantic with 30 ladies of her court and arrived on an island where the ink was
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barely dry on the conquest. There was nowhere finished for them to sleep. So they lodged in an older stone place a short walk away, the Casa del Cordon. While the palace went up around 1510 to 1514.
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I have to say around. No building contract survives. No payment record, no license. Every date attached to that palace is traditional rather than documented. And the sources disagree.
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What they built was less a house than a small settlement with craftsmen attached to it making candles and cloth and provisions.
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55 rooms or so, every Dominican source says, though not one of them cites anything. Four of their children were born in Santo Domingo. Hana, Isabelle, Luis, and Christobal.
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Luis would end up first Duke of Veragua, a title his grandfather had been promised and never received. That promise is the thread running under all of it.
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Christopher Columbus had been granted sweeping hereditary powers, and the crown spent the next 50 years trying to claw them back. Diego sued. The lawsuits ran for decades and outlived everyone who started them. In 1511, the crown set up
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a court in Santo Domingo, the audiencia, largely to curb his authority. He was governing from a palace while being governed out of a job. Diego went back to Spain in 1523 to fight for his titles and died there in 1526.
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The same year, Oedo praised his house. Maria stayed. She stayed for another 23 years running the estate and pursuing her husband's claims through the Spanish courts, and she died in Santo Domingo in 1549.
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She lived in that palace roughly twice as long as he did. It is named after him. Three generations held it. By about 1577, the family was gone, and then the building simply came apart. The decline is documented year by year, and it reads
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like a slow eviction. Francis Drake sacked the city in 1586, though the official Dominican account will only say the palace was possibly damaged. By 1776, the authorities were describing a ruin. Three years later, the roofs began coming down. Four years
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after that, the animals moved in. You will read elsewhere that it served as a warehouse and that squatters took it over. I found no reliable source for either, so I am leaving both out. What is documented is quite enough. The older
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place where Maria first slept has the stranger afterlife of the two. During Drake's occupation, it is said to have served as the house of the scales, where the ransom was weighed out. The Dominican press that repeats that story
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hedges it, and so will I. It was declared a national monument in 1870, which changed nothing at all for another 85 years. A protected ruin is still a ruin. The restoration ran from 1955 to 1957 under a Spanish architect, Javier
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Barroso, and the museum opened that October. So, the walls are genuinely early 16th century, and every roof, floor, ceiling, and door in the building is younger than the Second World War.
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The furniture came by ship. About 900 objects bought in Spain to suggest a vice-regal interior. Diego Colón owned almost none of it. The Dominican Tourism Board says so outright on its own website, which I did not expect and
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rather admire. The heads under the feet. Two armed Spanish soldiers stand with their boots planted on human heads, and the heads have their mouths open. That is the front of the Casa de Montejo in Merida in the Yucatan. Above the
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soldiers in the pediment, two heraldic lions are standing on more of the same. Under the doorway, a bearded man crouches, holding up the weight of everything above him. The date is cut into the stone, 1549.
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That makes it one of the very few dates in this entire subject that is physical evidence rather than somebody's opinion.
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The inscription says, "The work was ordered by the Adelantado Don Francisco de Montejo." Which brings us to the three men called Francisco de Montejo. And the confusion is not accidental.
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The elder was the conquistador, the Adelantado, who spent 19 years failing at the conquest of Yucatan before he finally managed it. The younger was his son, who founded Merida in 1542 and actually lived there. There was also a
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nephew who founded a different town and has nothing to do with this house at all. By 1549, the father was largely absent from the province and losing his grip on the governorship. He would be stripped of it an
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Institute states it flatly. Warriors standing on the heads of vanquished indigenous people. Richard Perry, who has written widely on colonial Mexican building, says the same and calls the imagery clearly European in origin and political in intent. Dana Libson and
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Barbara Mundy Hedge and they give a reason. Grotesque heads underfoot were standard Spanish architectural vocabulary in the 1500s. Off the shelf, they may have been read in Merida as conquered Maya. That is not the same as having been carved to mean it. Both can
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be true, and I think they are. The forms are imported and off the peg. The meaning in a Maya city, in Maya stone, cut by Maya hands is not generic in the slightest. A carver does not stop knowing where he is standing. And there
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is a third figure in this story whom almost nobody mentions. Gaspar Antonioqi was a Maya noble, an interpreter and a designer of heraldic arms in his own right. The specialist on this facade, Cody Bartit, devotes a chapter to him and reads the whole front
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of the building as a contest over authority rather than a simple boast. Maya viewers were not only being depicted in that language. Some of them were fluent in it.
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I could not get past the payw wall to Bartit's evidence, so that is his framing and not his proof. The family held the property for the better part of 300 years, though not under that name.
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The male line ran out. A daughter married into the Solis family and for a long stretch the building was known locally as the Casa de los Soliss which is worth noticing in a film like this one. Even the house that shouts a man's
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name off its own facade spent generations being called after somebody else entirely. It passed down through women under whatever surname they had married into for close to three centuries. You will see it said they lost it in 1828.
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Nothing supports that year. The sources offer 1831, 32, 34, 39, and 40, which tells you the decade and nothing sharper. The windows in that facade are not 16th century either. An engineer replaced them around the turn of the
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20th century and redecorated the interiors in French taste while he was at it. A bank foundation bought the place in 1981 and opened it as a museum.
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83 years. In 2008, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources amended a national register form. Administrative housekeeping. A date field was changed.
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What that change meant was that the oldest brick dwelling in America had stopped being any such thing and had in fact never been it. Adam Thorug good is a genuinely good story which is part of the problem. He came out to Virginia
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around 1621 as an indentured servant bound to a man named James Waters. He worked out his term. He bought his first 150 acres in 1626.
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The following year he went home to England and married Sarah Offley who came from money and brought her back. He sat three times in the house of Burgesses. By 1635, he held a patent for more than 5,000 acres. That patent
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worked on the headright principle. Bring a person to the colony, receive 50 acres. So his estate is quite literally a measure of how many other people he shipped across the Atlantic. Something over a hundred of them on those numbers.
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A man who arrived owing his labor to somebody else and who paid for his land in other people's passages. He died in 1640, aged 36. The building on his land was dated to 1719. I want to let the
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arithmetic land on its own. The man credited with building it had been dead for 79 years while the trees in its roof were still growing. Here is how it was caught. Dr. Daniel Miles and Michael Worthington produced a report for the
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Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in June 2005, revised in January 2007. Pine from the floor, joists, and roof framing ruled out construction before 174.
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Oak clapboard samples pushed it past 1716. Archaeology followed, run by Nicholas Letti of the James River Institute, somebody had tried before.
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Jack Hiken, the pioneer of tree ring dating in Virginia, sampled the building years earlier. The survey record notes his analysis and then adds flatly that the results remain unknown. That is its own small tragedy of the archive. The
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amendment's language is unusually blunt for a government form. The reports with the architectural assessments and the historical research make what it calls an unassalable case for construction about 1719.
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The brick work had been saying so all along to anyone reading it. The front is laid in one pattern with glazed headers and the other three walls in another.
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Good work facing the road, plain work behind. That hierarchy appears in the Chesapeake around 1700.
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Two things about the timing make me wse. The place was restored in 1923, restored again in the 1950s, and opened to the public on the 30th of April 1957.
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The amendment records that it was restored to its 17th century condition. They restored it to a century it did not belong to. Then they charged admission to see the result for half a century.
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I keep thinking about the visitors. 51 years of school parties and coach tours and people on holiday. All of them standing in a room being told they were looking at the 1630s. The men who cut those roof timbers were contemporaries
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of Queen Anne. The 1972 nomination put the wrong date into a federal document. The correction came 36 years after that.
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So, who did build it? The amendment leaves the builder field blank, unknown. The historic American building survey documentation points to Argal Thorogood II, a descendant several generations down, who died while the work was underway. His widow, Susanna, is thought
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to have finished it. A woman completing a house that a museum would later credit to a man born a century before her. The city of Virginia Beach owns the house now, and to its credit, it changed its own signage rather than quietly letting
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the matter drop. That is rarer than it should be. Thorogood was not alone in his county either. Linhaven House nearby presented as a building of the 1600s was cut in 1724.
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Smith's fort over in Suri dated to 1674 turned out to be from the 1760s. And St.
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Luke's Church at Smithfield claimed 1632 on the strength of bricks whose numerals can be read as 1632 or as 1682.
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the bridge. Andrew Elott Douglas was an astronomer and he did not care about houses. What he cared about was sunspots. He had a theory that the sun's cycles ought to leave a record in the growth of trees.
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Wet years and dry years written into the rings. He went looking for it in the American Southwest. The principle takes a paragraph, and it is worth doing, because everything else here rests on it. A tree lays down one ring a year. In
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a good year, the ring is wide. In a hard year, it is narrow. Every tree in a region is reading the same weather, so they all carry the same coded sequence of fat and thin. Match the pattern in a
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beam against a master sequence built from thousands of dated samples, and you can put a calendar year on every ring in that beam.
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If the outer surface survives where bark met wood, you get the year the tree came down, often the season.
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Colonial builders worked green, unseasoned timber because it was cheaper and it was to hand. The laboratories put the interval plainly in their own reports. Construction usually followed felling within 12 to 18 months. Douglas had a problem and it was a maddening
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one. He had two sequences and they would not join. One ran backwards from living trees. The other floated free, built from beams in ruins, unattached to any calendar at all. He needed a single piece of wood old enough to appear in
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both. It came on a Saturday morning, the 22nd of June, 1929. At the Whipple Ruin near Sholo in Arizona, Emil Horry and Lyndon Hargrave cut a charred roof timber out of the ground. It was the 39th specimen they
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had taken, so it was cataloged with their initials and that number. Its innermost ring dated to 1237. Its patterns matched both sequences. Horry wrote up the moment decades afterwards, and his verdict runs to five words. The beam has established the bridge. That
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single burnt timber out of a native building in Arizona put absolute calendar dates on about 40 archaeological sites across the southwest. PBlo Bonito at Choco, Mesa Verde, Betataken, and Keat Seal. Places that had been described for decades in
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the language of guesswork suddenly had years attached to them. The announcement went out in a magazine that December, and it was briefly a piece of public excitement. Douglas never did stop caring about the sun. He founded a laboratory at the University of Arizona
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to carry on the work and it is still there. Horry went on to run the anthropology department at the same university for decades. Neither of them was thinking about Virginia. Colonial buildings waited another 50 years and the man who finally brought the method
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to them was not an architectural historian at all. Herman Hiken called Jack was a forest entomologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. a bug man. He spent roughly 25 years helping architectural historians in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Maine. It
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is not obvious that any of them ever quite got over where he came from. Now, the limits because a method that could not be wrong would not be worth much. It dates wood and nothing else. Brick, stone, mortar, and adobe are all beyond
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its reach, which rules out a great many of the buildings I have been talking about. Reused timber lies cheerfully. A beam salvaged from an older structure will hand you a date for a building that is no longer standing anywhere. And
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there is a harder limit which the laboratories state in their own reports rather than leaving somebody else to find it. In Britain, when the bark edge is gone, you can estimate how many rings were lost and still bracket a felling
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date. For American oaks, that research has not been done. So without a surviving bark edge, an American sample gives you no earlier than not a date a floor. You can watch that happen. At Kingston in New York, the very first
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attempt of this kind back in 1977 produced a range somewhere between about 1732 and 1838.
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It neither confirmed nor overturned the traditional date. without the bark. The report said it cannot be determined how many rings were present.
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That building is still undated 49 years later. I find that cander oddly reassuring. The discipline that took a century of confident claims apart writes down the edge of what it knows. That is more than the plaques ever managed.
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The 20-year hold between 1641 and 1661. There is nothing. That is what emerges once you line the Massachusetts results up in order. And it took me a while to grasp what I was looking at. Between 2001 and 2009, the
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Oxford Laboratory worked its way across the eastern part of that state and tested the folk dates, all of them. The first generation of Massachusetts Bay built plenty. With one exception, not a stick of it is standing. Everything the
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tourist trade there calls the 1630s turns out to be the 1660s,7s and 80s. The corrections have a shape, and the shape is usually a person. Take Newberry.
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The coffin house was traditionally dated to about 1654, and that date has an author. Joshua Coffin writing a history of Newbury in 1845.
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A family historian dating the family house and out by 24 years. The Pierce House in Dorchester, traditionally about 1650, came back at 1682.
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The Whipple House in Ipsswitch, long given as 1638, tested at 1677. A marker put up at the Dean Winthrop House in 1930 announced 1637 with complete confidence.
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No part of that building is from the man's lifetime. At Sus, there was a better story than the truth, and somebody used it. A building really did go up on that site in 1651 for Scottish men captured by Cromwell and shipped
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over as indentured servants. That house is gone. The one standing there dates to 1692.
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William Sumar Appleton founded the Great New England Preservation Society. When he bought the property in 1914, he used the Scottish story anyway to raise money from donors of Scottish descent. The institution that owns it now says this on its own website along with something
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worse. Appleton also worked to force out the Italian immigrant families who were living in the building at the time. They put his motives on the record themselves, which almost nobody does.
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And then there is Beverly. The John Balch House had been promoted by the Beverly Historical Society as the oldest woodframe dwelling in the nation. Built in 1636 by John Balk.
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In February 2006, Miles and Worthington came to Beverly and took 25 samples. The society paid $35,000 for the work. They commissioned the demolition of their own claim. The frame was felled across 1677,778 and 79. John Balk had been dead 30 years
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by then. His son Benjamin built it and his grandson extended it in 1721. 43 years of error corrected for the price of a used car. And notice what the correction actually says. It does not say the Baltes were liars. It says a
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family looked at a building on land their ancestor had been granted and assumed the ancestor built it.
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That is not fraud. That is the most natural mistake a family can make. Steven Hall, the society's director, said afterwards that he was never disappointed in the truth. I have read a great many institutional statements getting to this point, and that is the
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best of them. On Long Island, the same thing happened to a whole village. The old house at Kutchog had been 1649 for decades.
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Oxford dated it to 1698 and the title of oldest English-style dwelling in New York State moved along the coast to Southampton.
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Zack Studenroth, who had commissioned the test, took it gracefully. It lost that claim to fame, he said, and it remains one of the finest surviving English-style homes around.
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The man at the Southampton Museum was less restrained. We have known all along that we were the oldest house. One thing has to be said or this account is dishonest. This is not a machine for humiliating old buildings. At the Gedney
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House in Salem, the deed records a shipwright buying the land in April 1664, and the timber was felled that spring. Document and tree ring in the same season. At Cambridge, the wood at one house came back a decade earlier
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than the paperwork suggested. So, the pattern is not that tradition is always wrong. It is narrower and more damning.
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Where a house had a document behind its date, the wood generally agreed. Where it had only a story, the wood moved it later. The archives came out of this fine. The storytellers did not 6 ft of ceiling.
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Stand in the parlor of the Fairbanks house and the ceiling is 6 ft above you.
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Not 6 ft and a bit. Six. Jonathan Fairbanks received his lot and was accepted as a townsman in March 1637, and the town required him to be living on it by November.
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The main structural timber for half the house came from a tree felled in 1637.
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Other members date to 1638, 40, and 41. Document and Wood agree almost exactly. It is nearly the only time in this subject that they do. He built the plainest possible thing, and he built it well. An oak frame cut green, pegged
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with wooden tree nails, and no iron anywhere in it. Five windows in the entire house, glazed with small blown diamond panes set in lead. A brick chimney base, so large it takes up nearly the full width of the building.
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three hearths, which is one more than a house of this date usually had because he heated the room the children slept in. I keep coming back to that. We know a surprising amount about how the man lived because of what happened 6 days
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after he died in 1668. Three neighbors walked into the house to value what he had left. Eler Lusher, Daniel Fischer, and Peter Woodward, all selectmen of the town. These were not officials sent from anywhere. They were neighbors who had known the man for 30
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years, walking through his rooms 4 days after the funeral, putting prices on his things. They went through it room by room, parlor, hall, the chambers above them, the garrett. His woolen clothing came to 5 and seven shillings. The
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master bed and its furnishings 610. A trundle bed underneath it for whoever was smallest that year. four spinning wheels, which means the women of that house were producing cloth at something beyond household scale, weapons, cooking gear, and two pairs of spectacles.
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15 books, which in a farming family in 1668 is a library. Somebody in that house read at night in a room with a 6ft ceiling by firelight. The whole estate came to about 326 lb, and the land was
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150 of it. So a working farmer comfortable not rich and in the deeds and the wills a house like his is called a mansion house that is not flattery. It is a legal category.
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Blackstone writing his commentaries in the 1760s never bothers to define it because nobody then needed it defined. A barn or a stable counts as part of the mansion house if it stands inside the fence. A church on reasoning he takes
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from coke is the mansion house of God. And here is the test that pins it down.
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A man who rents a shop in another man's building and works there but never sleeps there has no dwelling house at all. Sleeping is the criterion.
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Scale never enters into it. And I think we have quietly lost something by forgetting that.
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There is a second clause in that legal definition and it is the one that finishes the argument. A portion only of a building may come under the description of a mansion house.
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Not a wing, a portion. One room in law could be a mansion. Eight generations of Fairbanks lived in this one. The ninth sold it in 1895 to a real estate man and then stayed on living in it as a tenant,
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which cannot have been comfortable. What saved it was not the family. Two women bought it in 1897 for the specific purpose of stopping its demolition. A Boston widow named Codman and her daughter Martha.
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The family association took it over some years later, and it was they who put the numerals on the front. The 20th century was not gentle. A car went into the East Wing in 1964.
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A fire 3 years later took out a stretch of the original clapboarding. And yet in the eastern attic gable, some of the original clay and straw do is still sitting in the wall. Somebody packed it in there by hand in the 1630s. There is
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very little of that left standing in England, let alone here, and the picturesque sprawl in every photograph of the place is mostly Georgian and federal work. Only the tall central block is Jonathan's.
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Allen's Brick House. For the first two generations of people who lived in it, the building in Suriri County, Virginia was called Allen's Brick House. Nothing more elaborate.
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Allen built it. It was brick. And brick in that place in that decade was so unusual that the material worked as a name. Everybody now calls it Bacon's Castle. Nathaniel Bacon never lived there. There is no evidence he ever set
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foot in it. We know it was standing by September 1676 because that is when armed men occupied and fortified it and the courts wrote it down afterwards. An eviction is not the usual way to date a building, but it is better evidence than most of
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the claims in this film. Arthur Allen patented 200 acres in 1649 and was dead by the middle of 1669.
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In between he put up a high jackabeian house with curvealinear gables and triple diagonal chimney stacks in a style already going out of fashion in England.
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He was building the England he remembered rather than the England that existed. People do that when they are not going home. It is usually dated to 1665.
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And I should tell you what sits behind that. No date stone, no contract, no published tree ring work. The National Historic Landmark nomination hedges, saying Allan built it probably in the early 1660s probably is doing the work. Now, why
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does this house exist at all when almost nothing else from its decade does? Because everyone around Allen was building to be replaced deliberately.
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In 1981, five scholars established that the ordinary way of building in the 17th century Chesapeake was earthfast driven straight into the ground. No foundation. What an archaeologist finds today is a stain, a dark circle in the subs soil where a post stood and slowly
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turned into nothing. They rotted within about 15 years and the termites finished what the damp started. This was not poverty. Men with capital and land and every intention of dying where they stood built dwellings meant to last a generation. Labor cost
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two to three times English wages, and tobacco returned more than carpentry ever would. So Arthur Allen's brick work does not survive because it was typical.
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It survives because he was rich enough to be a freak. In 1673, his son bought seven enslaved men and their names are in the record. Simon, Mingo, Kamscy, Tony, Steven, Matthew, and Emanuel.
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Three years later, in September 1676, about 70 of Nathaniel Bacon's followers seized the house and held it for 14 weeks under William Rookings. Men from a ship called the Young Prince retook it at the very end of December. Those seven
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were inside for all 14 weeks. Simon and Emanuel remained enslaved on that ground until they died around 1700. The record does not stop with those seven either.
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In 1769, a later mistress of the house gave away a man called Mercury as a token in her own wording of love and goodwill and affection. Her will 5 years afterwards sold seven people and kept three. By 1860, the man who owned the
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property held more than 80. Among the household names that survive is Martha Jones who raised her daughter Cordelia in the attic of that house. The name did not arrive for another century and a quarter. The National Park Service is
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precise. It was not used in the records until 182. Encyclopedia Virginia agrees independently. Nobody can say who attached it. What we can say is that it appeared only once every person who remembered the rebellion was in the ground.
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You will sometimes read that newspaper articles in 1769 put the name into circulation. I could not verify that and neither as far as I can tell can anyone else. Treat it as a guess.
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There is one more thing about that place and it is the detail I cannot shake.
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Arthur Allen I laid out a formal garden. Nicholas Letti excavated it across the 1980s and it is the largest documented 17th century garden in the country.
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Eight planting beds in two rows, seeding aloves cut into the hedge, a brick warming wall to bring crops on early. It dates to about 1680 after his father was dead. And underneath it, the archaeologist found a large pit.
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Somebody had shoveled the wreckage from the occupation into that hole and covered it over. The son cleared up his father's war and then planted a pleasure garden on top of it.
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The dentist who could not work. In 1884, a dentist named Charles Carver bought a coina building on St. Francis Street in St. Augustine, Florida for $3,000.
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The story he told afterwards, and it is his story rather than a documented fact, is that tourists kept knocking. So many came to look at the place that he could not practice dentistry in it. He gave up trying and started charging them at the
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door. From 1884 to 1898, Dr. Carver advertised the place as the oldest dwelling in the United States.
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I have some sympathy for him, actually. He did not set out to be a fraud. He set out to be a dentist. The timing was not an accident. Henry Flaggler began the Pon DeLeon Hotel in 1885 and opened it 3
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years later. The town was filling with northern visitors who had traveled a long way and wanted something ancient to look at. Flaggler had come to Florida for private reasons on a doctor's advice for his first wife and returned years
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later with a fortune from oil and an idea about railways. What he built turned a garrison town into a resort. The hotels needed something for the guests to do in the mornings. Carver's building is genuinely old. It is not that old. The site has
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been occupied since about 1650, and there were at least two wooden houses on it before this one. The first burned in the late 1600s. The second burned in 172. The masonry house standing there now went up somewhere between 173
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and 1727. Hail Smith settled that in 1958 by excavating the lot and finding the earlier burned house underneath. The walls are coina, which is limestone made of shells quaried on the island across the water. It behaves oddly under fire.
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Cannon shot does not shatter it. The ball sinks a few inches in and stops, which is why the fort in that town survived a bombardment of 27 days. That second fire is worth a moment because the Spanish did half of it themselves.
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When a Carolina expedition besieged the town, Governor Zuniga ordered every building within a musket shot of the fort pulled down to clear his fields of fire. Then the attackers burned what was left as they withdrew, which is why
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nothing in St. Augustine predates that year. Not one of the three dozen surviving colonial buildings in the town is older. In 1917, the St. Augustine Historical Society appointed a committee to adjudicate between three rival claimants and its finding is a small
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masterpiece of institutional caution. It could not positively determine which was the oldest dwelling in St. Augustine, but it was of the opinion that the one on St. Francis Street was such. The society bought the property the following year for $15,000.
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And here is where I stop being sympathetic. And here the caution evaporates because of one man and one contract.
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The society's business manager was William Harris and his terms of employment are the most useful fact in this chapter. He drew a quarter of the admissions money as commission. Harris wrote the 1918 brochure himself. It stated flatly that the place was the
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oldest in the country, raised in 1565 by Franciscan monks. There was a wishing well on the property, and those same monks had blessed it. He cited the very committee that had just declined to determine anything. The money moved
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accordingly. Takings rose from just under $2,000 in 1926 to more than 4,62 years later. Harris drew his quarter of that and his quarter of the fort as well. There was a competitor, naturally.
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A jeweler named James Dodge ran a place on St. George Street and sold it as the oldest in America. Built in 1565, it was raised between 183 and 1813 by a Morcan sailor called Juan Paredes, a building marketed as roughly 240 years older than
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it is. Ring Lardner went to St. Augustine and left the perfect record of what the town had become. First, they went to St. George Street and visited the oldest house in the United States.
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Then, they went to Hospital Street and saw the oldest house in the United States.
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The society solved the competition problem in the most direct way available. After Dodge died, they bought his attraction from his widow. 5 years later, they bought another one. One member's recorded complaint is my favorite line in the whole affair. There
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were too many oldest houses in St. Augustine, and it was causing the membership considerable embarrassment.
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Two men who said so. Charles Reynolds was a guidebook writer and a partner in a travel agency, which is to say he was in the tourism business himself. That makes what he did in 1921 more interesting rather than less. He
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had nothing to gain. He published a booklet of 31 pages with a title that leaves nothing to the imagination.
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An examination of the St. Augustine Historical Society's claim that its house on St. Francis Street was built in the year 1565 by the Franciscan monks.
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His argument had five parts and every one of them still holds. No Franciscans were in Florida in 1565.
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Menendez himself recorded regretting that he had not brought the order out that year. Permanent masonry housing was not plausible in the conditions of the first settlement. Coina was not being used as a building material then. The 1565 settlement was not on that lot at
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all. and unbroken family ownership from 1590 to 1882 is impossible across three changes of sovereignty and two evacuations.
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The society answered in the local evening paper on the 9th of March 1921. Their defense is worth hearing because I do not think they understood what they were conceding.
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Their dates and data, they said, were as near the facts as true lovers of history can establish.
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from meager historical records and from priceless traditions handed down from father to son. That is a museum admitting in print that it works from family anecdote.
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Reynolds wrote back a month later with a proposal so reasonable it reads as a provocation.
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Let there be a joint investigating committee. Three members chosen by the society on one condition only that none of them hold a financial interest in the sites. Two chosen by him. The society declined. By the 1930s, they had quietly
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dropped 1565 while keeping the Franciscan Association, and Reynolds noticed that, too. The year was abandoned, he wrote. And the guides were taught to say when telling the story that tradition rather than history says.
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The second man cost the society more. Edward Lawson was a former board member. In 1957, he published at his own expense, a study he submitted a documented study of fabricated history.
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The board voted 44-2 to expel him. The motion was argued by Albert Manusi on the grounds that Lawson's apparently vindictive efforts to discredit and embarrass the society warranted it. And now the part I still find difficult to hold in my head. Albert Manusi is the
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author of the houses of St. Augustine and of a study called evolution of the oldest house. He is the man who eventually did the honest scholarship on that building. The scholar who established the truth is the same man
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who moved the expulsion of the member who said it first. The town's second fabrication belonged to Harris as well.
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He owned a small wooden building on St. George Street and under his family it became the oldest wooden schoolhouse in North America. He put up a sign saying it was recommended by the St. Augustine Historical Society. It was not
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under deposition in a 1950 court case. His son admitted it in a sentence. My father and myself had no authorization from the historical society to place that sign up there. We just did it. A vice president of the society testified
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in the same case that Harris would stretch things historically. The property was later bought by Walter Fraser, who also owned the Fountain of Youth. He served as mayor of the town from 1936 to 1943.
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A national magazine called him a manufacturer of history in 1949 and observed that his talent was such that he could make anything, however new, look old.
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The schoolhouse claim has now collapsed from the inside without any help. Its own current official website dates the standing building to about 1800 to 1810.
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An older site still advertising it says tax records confirm its presence in 1716. Both pages are live. And there is one final turn here that I did not see coming. The fountain of youth was the most obviously fraudulent attraction in
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the town. A previous owner had invented a coina cross and a silver casket to go with it. The National Park Service looked at the landing site claim in 1934 and found it unsupported by satisfactory evidence.
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Then the archaeologist Kathleen Degan started digging there in 1976, expecting a native village. Barrel wells of a kind no native community used.
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Spanish military buttons. Jewelry made for Spanish women. A child's charm against the evil eye. The ground under the fake attraction is the real 1565 settlement.
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What they found at a coma in April 1987. William Robinson and a team from the laboratory of tree ring research went up onto the mesa at a coma in New Mexico with drills. That laboratory is at the University of
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Arizona. It is Douglas's laboratory, the one he founded after the burnt beam at Sholo. And here it was 58 years later, pointed at a native building again. They came away with 190 cores and 15 crosssections.
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All of it from the residential blocks of a village often called the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the country. Robinson had done this kind of work across the southwest for years, and the sampling was done with the permission and cooperation of the
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community whose roofs they were. The results came back tighter than anything else in this film.
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In one housing block, every original room on the first and second levels dated to 1646 without exception. The third level roofs arrived in the early 1650s.
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Some beams had complete outer rings, so the felling season is known, autumn or winter. The Society of Architectural Historians reached the same conclusion independently. Roof construction in the northern blocks began in the late summer of 1646 and ran to completion around
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1652, which means the standing roofs at Aoma are about 20 years younger than Arthur Allen's brick work in Virginia.
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Now, hold that against the other fact because both are true and neither cancels the other out.
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The mesa has been inhabited since at least 1200. Ceramic evidence suggests people moved up onto it somewhere between 1150 and 1200. Local tradition and the archaeology both reach back to the 11th century. So why are the roofs from the 1640s? Because in 1599, Spanish
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forces under Juan Deonate destroyed the PBLO. The assault and the punishments that followed it were severe enough that onate was later tried in Mexico City and banished from New Mexico for life. What the tree rings dated is the rebuilding.
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It was carried out between about 1629 and 1646. Those are the same years in which the frier Juan Ramirez was raising a mission over the ruins of what stood before. The community is older than every European claim in this film by centuries. The
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wood in the roofs is not. Both of those sentences are in the same report and the report states them together without any sense of contradiction because there is none. I want to be careful here because this is where a documentary can go wrong
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in either direction. It would be easy and wrong to say the tree rings prove a coma is not as old as it says. A coma has never claimed its roof beams are a thousand years old. What is a thousand
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years old is the community, the site, and the continuity of people living on it. And none of that is disputed anywhere in the scholarship. It would be just as easy and just as wrong to leave the 1646 date out because it complicates
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a tidy line. The distinction the wood forces on us is the one this whole subject has been circling. A building is not a lineage. Fabric is one thing and continuity is another. Wood rots and gets replaced, and the replacing is what
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a living settlement does. Every claim in this film ran a ground on exactly that difference. The Balch family in Beverly, the museum in Virginia Beach, the historical society in Florida.
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All of them were doing the same thing in different accents, pointing at a structure and naming a person when the structure had outlived that person's involvement by a generation or more. At a coma, the same instrument in the same hands produced a
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story running the other way. The people are far older than the timber. I would not have expected the most honest answer in this business to come from the one place that was never trying to win the argument. A footnote because
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the temptation to overreach is strong here. Nobody has done this work at Taos. The National Park Service dates the present site to about 1,400 and says plainly that the excavation behind that figure was limited. So I am not going to
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give you a number for TA. Neither will anybody else who is being straight with you.
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So where does that leave the question everybody actually wants answered? Here's the best I can do with every fence left standing because the fences are where the truth lives. Go to the Osama River in Santa Domingo, and you
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are looking at walls raised in the 1510s. They went up for the man who inherited the Columbus name and spent his life suing to keep it. Nothing European anywhere in the Americas is older and still standing as a great
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house. It is on this continent, and almost nobody counts it. Almost everything above those walls was put there in the 1950s.
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In Merida, there is a date cut into a facade in the 1540s. the earliest inscribed on any private dwelling in this hemisphere.
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Most specialists think the man it credits was not the man who built it. Denim Massachusetts holds the timber frame that tree rings have actually verified. That verification clause matters. Several possible rivals have never been tested and until somebody
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drills them, nobody knows. Siri County, Virginia has the brick from the early 1660s under a name belonging to a rebel who never went near the place. Florida's oldest building went up around 1723 in a city that sold it as 1565 for well over
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a century. Even the famous exception proves the rule. The Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe is called the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States.
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Its own landmark nomination admits that no fabric has been positively dated to that earliest period. Its most photographed feature, the long shaded portal on the front, was built in 1913.
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Every one of those statements carries a qualifier in the Americas in English North America verified by tree rings.
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Take the qualifier away from any of them and the sentence becomes false at once.
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That is not a weakness in the record. That is the record being exact. And it took a hundred years and an astronomer chasing sunspots to get us there. One last thing, and it is what has stayed with me longest. Hardly any of these
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buildings was raised by the person whose name is on the door. Bacon never entered his castle. Thorogoods is the work of a great grandson and most likely of that man's widow.
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Benjamin Balch built what his father is still credited with. And standing behind all of them are people whose names took a great deal more digging to find. They turn out to be in the record after all once somebody bothers to look. Simon and
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Emanuel, two of the seven men bought in Sururi County in 1673 were inside those brick walls when the rebels came through the door. They were still enslaved on that ground a quarter of a century afterwards.
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The other five are in the same ledger waiting for anyone who wants them. The Maya laborers who cut and set the stone in a conquered city and carved the heads their own conquest was standing on.
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Maria de Toedo who lived in that palace above the harbor for twice as long as the man it is named after. The plaques were wrong about the dates. Most of that has been
Topics:oldest house North AmericaAlcazar de ColonDiego ColónChristopher Columbushistoric mansiontree ring datingSanto Domingocolonial architectureCaribbean historyhistoric restoration
