William Tisdale and the Palace

or, Tryon Palace as it may have appeared in 1775. 

Tryon Palace, detail from a North Carolina five dollar bill of credit, 1775. Courtesy Tryon Palace, New Bern, NC

by John B. Green III

In our previous post we discussed the finding of the original 18th century architect's drawings for Tryon Palace in New Bern and why the two-story version of the main building was selected for reconstruction.  It would be nice, though, to have a contemporary image of the Palace, that is, one made when the building was still standing, to confirm the decisions made during the 1950's reconstruction.  The main building of the Palace survived for thirty years before it was destroyed by fire in 1798.  Surely someone must have taken notice of this remarkable structure and recorded its details in pencil or ink or paint.  Well, someone did take notice, and he recorded the Palace in the most unlikeliest of places.  The resulting image barely measures an inch by an inch and a half!

North Carolina five dollar bill of credit, 1775. Courtesy Tryon Palace, New Bern, NC

The Provincial Congress of the newly formed revolutionary government of North Carolina meeting in Hillsborough on September 7, 1775 passed the following resolution: "Resolved, That a Sum not exceeding one hundred and twenty five thousand Dollars, be emitted by this Congress in Bills of Credit, for the defence of this Colony."  They further resolved that ". . . Mr. Samuel Johnston, Mr. Richard Caswell, Mr. Richard Cogdell and Mr. Andrew Knox or the survivors of them, be a Committee to get proper plates engraved, and to provide paper and to agree with an Engraver to stamp or print the said Bills and to Frame Devices for the same[.]"  The committee reported back to the Provincial Congress on October 20, 1775 that they had employed "Mr. William Tisdale at New Bern" to engrave the printing plates and had agreed to pay him one hundred pounds for his services.

William Tisdale (1735-c.1797), New Bern silversmith and watchmaker, was born in Connecticut and briefly educated at Harvard.  He had settled in New Bern by 1770 where he practiced his trade and soon became involved in revolutionary politics.  By 1775 he was both a member of the Provincial Congress and the New Bern Committee of Safety.  After successfully engraving the plates for the 1775 bills of credit he was hired in 1779 to engrave the first Great Seal for the State of North Carolina.

The 1775 resolution called for printing bills of credit in a variety of denominations - quarter dollar, half dollar, and one, two, three, four, five, eight, and ten dollars.  Tisdale engraved each plate with scroll-work floral decoration and a vignette in the lower left corner depicting various allegorical or symbolic objects.  He chose a tiny rendering of Tryon Palace for the five dollar bill.

(top) Elevation of Tryon Palace by John Hawks, c.1766-1767, Public Record Office, London

(bottom) Detail from North Carolina five dollar bill of credit, 1775. Courtesy Tryon Palace, New Bern, NC

The image of the Palace is remarkable.  It is our only known contemporary view.  But is it an accurate rendering?  If we assume that William Tisdale, New Bern resident and member of the Provincial Congress, was well acquainted with the appearance of the Palace, then it is possible that his rendering of the building is as accurate as the very small space available on the surface of the plate allowed.  Assuming this level of accuracy, several differences between the 1775 rendering, the 1767 Palace plans, and the reconstructed building stand out.  The 1767 plans call for parapets atop the walls of the main building as well as the two flanking wings.  Tisdale shows a parapet or perhaps a railing or balustrade on the main building only.  He also includes ornamental urns atop the parapet, the central pediment, and along the roofs of the colonnades between the Palace and the wings, details not on the 1767 plans. 

Is this an accurate view of the Palace as it was actually built or just William Tisdale's artistic license at work?  We may never know.  What is known is that this five dollar bill is a rare survival.  Only this copy in the collection of Tryon Palace Historic Sites and Gardens and a scattered few in other collections are all that survive of the four thousand which the 1775 Provincial Congress ordered to be printed.

Benson J. Lossing and the Palace

or, why generations of North Carolinians believed that Tryon Palace had been a three-story building

Engraved view of Tryon Palace from Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, volume II, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855.

by John B. Green III

By the time that Benson John Lossing published his Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution in 1852, there were few people still living who could remember the long-gone governor's palace in New Bern.  Designed by English architect John Hawks and constructed in the 1760s by Royal Governor William Tryon, the Palace had served as the royal governor's residence and then as the first state capitol of North Carolina following the Revolution.  A late night fire had destroyed the main building of the Palace in 1798 and by Lossing's time only the West or stable wing survived on the site.

Title page from New Bern historian John D. Whitford's copy of The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution

Benson J. Lossing (1813-1891), illustrator and engraver, editor and publisher, was also one of America's most popular historians of the 19th century.  Lossing is today considered to have been one of the first Americans to utilize modern standards of historical research.  He traveled thousands of miles interviewing participants in, or eyewitnesses to, the events he chronicled.  His books made extensive use of original documents which were quoted within the text or within footnotes.

Elevation of Tryon Palace by John Hawks, 1766, Francis Lister Hawks Papers, New-York Historical Society, as published in Fiske Kimbal and Gertrude S. Carraway, "Tryon Palace," New-York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin, January 1940.

In the course of preparing the illustrations for the Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, Lossing sought out the Rev. Francis Lister Hawks of New York, grandson of John Hawks, the Palace architect. Rev. Hawks had in his possession a number of his grandfather's original plans for the Palace including the elevation seen above.  Lossing based his rendering of the Palace on this plan.  His engraving of Tryon Palace, showing a three-story central block, would serve as the definitive illustration of the legendary building for the next eighty years.  The image was copied and modified numerous times for use in books and pamphlets, postcards and souvenirs.  The original plans in the possession of Rev. Hawks were all but forgotten and the possibility that other, perhaps conflicting, plans for the Palace might exist was not considered. 

Postcard, Tryon Cotillon Club, M.E. Whitehurst, publisher, c. 1915

This all changed in 1939.  In that year New Bern historian Gertrude S. Carraway, in response to a growing interest in reconstructing Tryon Palace, began the search for John Hawk's plans for the building.  Using as a starting point Benson J. Lossing's statement that the drawings were "in the present possession of a grandson of the architect, the Reverend Francis L. Hawks, D.D., L.L.D., rector of Calvary Church in the city of New York" Miss Carraway contacted various members of the Hawks family.  None knew where Rev. Hawks' papers were.  Eventually, through contacts in the Episcopal Church, it was discovered that the papers were in the collections of the New-York Historical Society.  The Historical Society quickly confirmed that the Palace plans were still present in Rev. Hawks' collection.  The plans were published for the first time in January 1940 in a article written by Miss Carraway and noted architectural historian Fiske Kimball for the Bulletin of the New-York Historical Society.  

Elevation of Tryon Palace by John Hawks, c.1766-1767, Public Record Office, London, as published in Alonzo Thomas Dill, Jr., "Tryon Palace: a Neglected Niche of North Carolina History," North Carolina Historical Review, April 1942.

There was just one problem.  Although the New York plans showed Benson Lossing's three-story Palace, the dimensions of the two wings did not match the dimensions of the surviving West wing in New Bern.  Was the New York plan a preliminary and ultimately rejected version of the Palace?  Had there been a revised set of plans and could they possibly survive?   In an effort to answer these questions, Dr. Christopher Crittenden of the North Carolina Historical Commission, wrote to the British Public Record Office in London.  Might they possibly have plans for the governor's palace in North Carolina?  The answer was yes!  They had the plans which Royal Governor William Tryon had transmitted in 1767 to the Board of Trade for approval.  These plans had dimensions which matched the surviving stable wing and the still visible remains of the Palace foundations.  The accompanying elevation, however, showed a two-story building not a three-story building.  After much study, the two-story version was chosen as the version most likely to have actually been built in New Bern.  This is the version, with some modifications, that was reconstructed in the 1950s by the State of North Carolina and opened to the public in 1959.

Rendering of proposed reconstruction of Tryon Palace, postcard, c.1955

A Church in the Country

An early view of Croatan Presbyterian Church

Croatan Presbyterian Church, Number Six Township, Craven County, photograph c. 1945.

by John B. Green III

About ten miles down U.S. 70 between New Bern and Havelock sits the small community of Croatan.  Once a stop on the Atlantic and North Carolina Rail Road and boasting its own post office until 1928, today Croatan is best known for two historic structures - Tom Haywood's Store, now closed, and Croatan Presbyterian Church.

The Presbyterian congregation at Croatan was organized in June 1882 and the church was dedicated in August 1883.  The frame, gable-roofed meeting house, though simple in plan, was ornamented with imaginative sawn-work decoration - scrolled cornice brackets, door and window hoods with scroll-work finials, and saw-tooth gable-end decoration.

The above photograph, taken about 1945, shows the church as it stood before later twentieth century remodeling added a porch, cupola, and rear additions.

Croatan Presbyterian Church, after 20th century alterations, from Peter B. Sandbeck, The Historic Architecture of New Bern and Craven County, North Carolina, New Bern: Tryon Palace Commission, 1988