Rain

by Cynthia Barnett

  But there was something more at play than a planter leaving the details to labor. Jefferson was fixated on creating the perfect home and landscape to the extent that he calculated everything from the shape and number of bricks that should line his terraces to the weight of individual peas harvested from his garden. Yet so invested was he in the image of Monticello’s perfection, including what he believed was the ideal human climate, he never spent as much time pondering where his water would come from. He put all his faith in the rain.

  —

  When the first British colonists set out across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, they made the commonsense assumption that weather patterns in North America would match up by latitude to those in Europe. In fact, they were leaving one of the gentlest climates in the world for one more prone to extremes. Western Europe is milder than the eastern United States, thanks in large part to the warmth of the powerful oceanic current that also binds the two coastlines in history and culture, the Gulf Stream.

  The colonists expected the land they called Virginia to soon flourish with the same crops as Spain and Portugal—olive and orange trees, sugar and spices. Instead, they sailed straight into the final and zenith years of the Little Ice Age in North America. Temperatures plunged to their lowest in the seventeenth century, freezing the Delaware River and much of Chesapeake Bay. Springtimes could bring dismal rains and dreadful floods, summers crop-killing droughts. High death rates and the failure of many of the early colonies changed European views of America and its climate like a flash flood wipes out affection for a summer shower.

  By Thomas Jefferson’s day, the leading scientists of Europe had come to believe the New World’s climate so wet and miserable that it actually deformed the animal, plant, and human inhabitants of America—brewing puny mammals, sickly crops, and natives cursed with lack of body and facial hair and “small and feeble” reproductive organs.

  This “theory of degeneracy” began with a world-famous French scientist named Georges Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, whom Charles Darwin would credit as the first to treat evolution “in a scientific spirit.” Buffon’s influential books, already accepted as classics by his peers, shuddered at a dank America, air heavy with vapor, vast, stagnating marshes, volumes of floodwaters “for want of proper drains or outlets,” vegetation so thick its transpiration “produces immense quantities of moist and noxious exhalations.”

  Buffon believed America’s flora and fauna were shrunken and weakened by “a niggardly sky and an unprolific land”—with the exception of reptiles and insects that thrived in the humidity. Another purported scholar of America (who, like Buffon, never stepped foot on the continent), the Dutch philosopher and geographer Cornelius de Pauw, wrote of its “putrid and death-dealing waters” over which settled “fogs of poisonous salts.” America is “overrun with serpents, lizards, reptiles, and monstrous insects,” grotesquely oversized, such as frogs in Louisiana that “weighed thirty-seven pounds and bellowed like calves.”

  Americans, and particularly Jefferson, were incensed by the atmospheric affronts. They debated the inaccuracies in college classrooms and churches, in novels and in scientific papers. They did believe, like the European scientists, that clearing the forests and cultivating the land would help moderate the New World’s extremes. But Jefferson was also convinced that America’s climate was already superior to Europe’s. He just needed the scientific data to prove it to Buffon and to the world—detailed daily records of the rains and the winds, and the temperature and pressure in the air.

  Jefferson invested in rain gauges and weathervanes, thermometers, and eventually a barometer—purchased in a Philadelphia apothecary called Sparhawk’s four days after the Continental Congress adopted his Declaration of Independence. Born of patriotism and noted in his ivory-colored Weather Memorandum Book, Jefferson’s meticulous weather observations became a lifelong passion that lasted from his law school days at Williamsburg to his final years at Monticello.

  His experience living in France, first as U.S. trade commissioner, then as envoy to the Court of Versailles, told Jefferson that American rains were more salubrious than Europe’s. Based on his observations of rainfall and cloud cover on the two continents, he hypothesized that Virginia enjoyed both more rain and more sunshine than a city such as London, where bleak skies seemed to idle in perpetual drizzle. True, it could pour buckets in Virginia. But heavy mountain rains rejuvenated. They kept the rivers and lakes filled and the groundwater robust for the well. And often, they were followed by brilliant sun and the rainbows he so admired—plunging from his vantage point at Monticello deep into the river valley below.

  Jefferson’s calculations were astonishingly accurate for a man who lived two hundred years before advanced weather technologies. He estimated average rainfall in his region at 47 inches a year. Modern meteorologists peg the average at 46 inches a year, falling over the course of about 116 days. In London, more rainy days—an average 133—bring less overall rain: about 33 inches, just as Jefferson expected.

  But it would take a good deal more than the Weather Memorandum Book to convince Count Buffon to revise his theory of degeneracy. Jefferson’s exhaustively detailed report on climate and nature in his home state, delivered to the count in 1785, was not enough. Nor was his personal testimony, when the two men met in Paris later that year and the American minister told the skeptical count that the reindeer of Europe “could walk under the belly of our moose.”

  Finally, Jefferson managed to pull off what may be the greatest image-repair job in history. To prove North America’s animals weren’t puny, he wrote to his friend General John Sullivan in New Hampshire and implored him to find and kill a bull moose in the snowbound northern woods, then ship the bone, skin, and antlers to Paris. The venture was time-consuming for Sullivan and expensive for Jefferson, but it worked. Presented with evidence of the hulking quadruped, Buffon “promised in his next volume to set these things right,” according to Jefferson. But the count died soon after, and never did.

  Many Jefferson biographies revel in the story of the moose. But the incredible irony in Jefferson’s saga to disprove the theory of degeneracy is not found in the woods of New Hampshire. It comes, instead, from the skies over Virginia.

  For many of the years he painstakingly collected rainfall data to prove the New World was not an overly stormy, damp, moist, humid, clammy, soggy, dank, showery, muggy, dewy, dripping, drizzling, sodden, oozy, murky swamp, Jefferson, his family, his crops, and most especially his slaves were suffering in drought.

  The Founding Forecaster was high and dry at Monticello—wishing for rain.

  —

  For all the detail, creativity, and brilliance that went into Monticello—its carefully planned vistas, its cerebral octagonal and domed rooms, its hillside laboratories of fruits, vegetables, and other useful plants—Jefferson was overly optimistic about having the rainfall to grow the kinds of crops and live the sort of life he envisioned there.

  While he was dead-on about Virginia’s averages, the averages could fly out Monticello’s triple-sash windows on a strong wind. The truth is that for much of Jefferson’s life, lack of rain thrust Monticello into hardship. The situation would not have been so devastating had he built at the river.

  Perched as it was atop the mountain, Jefferson’s well, even at 65 feet, was particularly susceptible to drought. Between 1769 and 1797, he logged the workings of the well into his Weather Memorandum Book. In those years, it was dry a total of six. The architectural historian Jack McLaughlin figured out that two of the dry years fell during Jefferson’s marriage, before he was widowed, “which meant that for one-fifth of her married life, Martha Jefferson had no readily available source of water at her house.”

  Jefferson tried to solve his water woes with rain’s most enduring technology. Cisterns, ranging from the simplest clay pots to cavernous underground chambers, were the bedrock of water supply for most of human history; ancient civilizations could not have survived without the
m. Archaeologists have found waterproof lime plaster cisterns built into the floors of houses in villages of the Levant. During biblical times, underground cisterns not only stored water, but could serve as hiding places for fugitives or as prison cells. The Romans constructed them throughout the Empire. Terra-cotta pipes carried rain from rooftops to home cisterns for domestic use. Vaulted public cisterns collected rain from hills, clay or bronze pipes, and later the great aqueducts to feed city water supplies and the Roman baths.

  Jefferson began to work on his cisterns in the first decade of the 1800s, about the same time New York City was installing them for public use. In his book Water for Gotham, Gerard Koeppel describes the twin 200-hogshead stone cisterns built then at the wings of city hall, fed by rainwater from the roof. By 1830, there were forty-three public cisterns throughout Manhattan. They lost favor as a source of water supply when they proved inadequate to douse the Bowery Theatre fire and other blazes that raged in the city during those times. Jefferson calculated Monticello’s rooftop rain-catching potential in his Weather Memorandum Book—gallons coming in, area on the roofs, storage needed, daily supply expected. He designed four brick cubes, each eight feet square, for the four corners of Monticello’s terraces. Each could hold 3,830 gallons, and bring the house an average 600 gallons of freshwater a day. He spent years struggling to seal them, finally settling on Roman cement imported from Europe. But, contrary to the evoking of Jefferson by today’s rainwater-catchment industry, they never worked.

  —

  Rain has often been the bane of architects and structural engineers, who spent far more of history cursing and barricading rain than collecting it. If rain has a victory flag, it is the plastic blue tarp—flying as triumphantly over the McMansions of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard after tropical storms as atop the famously leaking flat roofs of modern architecture. As long as it took us to protect our bodies with macs, umbrellas, and other articles of rain, to this day we have not perfected the roof over our heads.

  In the first modern treatise of architecture, written in Italy in the fifteenth century, architect-philosopher-poet Leon Battista Alberti cast rain as the great enemy of any building, “always prepared to wreak mischief.” Rain “never fails to exploit even the least opening to do some harm,” Alberti wrote. “By its subtlety it infiltrates, by softening it corrupts, and by its persistence it undermines the whole strength of the building, until it eventually brings ruin and destruction to the entire work.”

  Rainwater must never be allowed to leak in, Alberti implored in his de re Aedificatoria, or On the Art of Building in Ten Books—and never to stand. The key is the roof, “the first of all building elements to provide mankind with a place of shelter.” A roof should always slope to throw off rain. Those large in area should be divided among several planes so rainwater can flow off in different places rather than one big gush.

  The admonitions make perfect sense. But, like other obvious advice such as eating only healthy foods, the human quest for something richer makes them hard to follow. “Despite all the determination and skill that man has invested in his attempt to strengthen and reinforce [the roof] against the assaults of the weather, he has scarcely succeeded in protecting it as much as necessity demands,” Alberti wrote. Six hundred years later, it’s still true.

  Rain can warp, swell, discolor, rust, loosen, mildew, stink, peel paint, consume wood, erode masonry, corrode metal, expand destructively when it freezes, or seep into every crack when it evaporates. The “most important organ of health” for keeping these maladies away, writes Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand in his tidy book How Buildings Learn, is the right roof, in the right pitch and shape.

  Many of the enduring roofs of history are vernacular—they speak a region’s native language. The Great Coxwell Barn of Oxfordshire, England, has stood for seven centuries under a steep-pitched timber roof laid with Cotswold stone, now fuzzy with soft brown moss. Other vernacular roofs were thatched with local vegetation—reed, straw, sedge, and rushes that date to medieval Europe, or palm fans and fronds in regions near the equator. In the European countryside, the high-pitched, thatched-roof cottages of commoners were often cozier and drier than the drafty castles of nobility. Still, thatching became associated with poverty. Expanding trade routes meant architects and builders could import fancier materials such as tiles, copper, and glass. As a general rule, the showier the house and roof on top, the more likely to leak, particularly around the seams of any chimneys, skylights, balustrades, domes, and so on.

  The conflict between creative design and practical rain-proofing is well captured in an old architecture-school joke: “All good architecture leaks.” The bon mot traces to Frank Lloyd Wright, his devotion to organic buildings so full that rain is practically invited in. The celebrated architect’s aesthetic masterpieces were notoriously plagued by leaking windows and right angles, walls, and parapets. His flat-roof designs were known to leak almost immediately. To clients who complained, Wright is said to have retorted: “That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.” (Wright is by no means alone; Brand found some 80 percent of postconstruction claims against architects were for leaks.)

  Wright’s exquisite Fallingwater, designed in 1935 for the Kaufmann family, straddles a waterfall in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. It lives up to its name with perennial drips, drabs, and damaged concrete. Its owner, Pittsburgh businessman Edgar Kaufmann Sr., called it a “seven-bucket building” for its leaks, and nicknamed it “Rising Mildew” for its mold.

  On a “beautiful little ravine” in Pasadena, California, Wright built a small jewel, La Miniatura, in 1923 for an eternally patient widow and art collector named Alice Millard. It was the first time Wright used his new textile-block construction scheme, a way to “take that despised outcast of the building industry—the concrete block…find hitherto unsuspected soul in it—make it live as a thing of beauty—textured like the trees.” Wright biographer Ada Louise Huxtable calls Millard “a true believer who tolerated all the trials and tribulations her house and architect provided, which were almost biblical in their nonstop intensity.” As soon as the home was finished, torrential rains hit Southern California, sending floodwaters through the ravine and waterfalls through the textured blocks—inside and out of La Miniatura.

  Later in the 1920s, Wright’s cousin Richard Lloyd Jones Sr., publisher of the afternoon newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma, commissioned him to build a home there. Jones was worried about the textile blocks in an area with more rain than the West, and rightly so. Despite heroic waterproofing attempts, the home, Westhope, was perpetually damp. The roof leaked almost immediately after Jones moved in. He called in roofers to resurface, in vain. He went to his desk and placed a call: “Dammit, Frank—it’s leaking on my desk!”

  Wright calmly replied, “Why don’t you move your desk?”

  Wingspread in Racine, Wisconsin, commissioned by Herbert Fisk Johnson of Johnson Wax, had a similarly soggy fate. “For the first year or so, Johnson had workmen at the ready with putty guns whenever it threatened to rain.” The story of Westhope also became the lore at Wingspread: a thunderstorm, an outraged owner, a telephone call, an accusation: “Frank…it is leaking right on top of my head!” And the same reply, recounts Wright biographer Meryle Secrest, “given with his usual insouciance.”

  Lakeland, Florida, is home to the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in a single site, Florida Southern College, whose president asked Wright to build a “college of tomorrow” to boost enrollment during the Depression. The dozen Wright structures are known collectively as “Child of the Sun”—“out of the ground and into the light, a child of the sun,” as Wright described his work there. But Lakeland is known as much for its rain; it is the thunderstorm capital of the United States, with storms rolling in about a hundred afternoons each year. When I toured the Wright buildings during a spectacular sunset in 2013, the Annie Pfeiffer Chapel smelled of mildew. Its triumphant glass panels were clouded with trapped moisture. The building’s te
xtile blocks had leaked for decades. The college has landed a considerable grant to replace them; the blocks crafted on site by students who needed work in the late 1930s will be replaced by high-pressure mold blocks, professionally manufactured.

  Mark Tlachac, director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor’s Center at Florida Southern, told me it would be a mistake to think that Wright overlooked the rain, or had any arrogance toward climate. To the contrary, Wright loved rain—really, any showy weather—and wanted those who inhabited his buildings to feel its drama. The Florida Southern campus is criss-crossed with covered walkways hanging several inches on either side of the sidewalks so that crowds can walk in the rain and enjoy it without getting wet. Wright often eschewed rain gutters because he wanted to celebrate rain rather than hide it. “He loved the look of icicles hanging from a roof in the Northeast, and the look of rain running off in the South,” Tlachac told me. “He loved nature, and he wanted to live with nature. Sealing it off wasn’t so much of a priority.”

  —

  Sealing was the priority and ultimately the insurmountable problem for rain-loving Thomas Jefferson and his cisterns. The Roman cement was supposed to be waterproof, but the cisterns never would seal completely. Only two of the four held water reliably as years of scant rainfall stretched on.

  Jefferson’s rich correspondence makes little mention of the practical difficulties of drought for his family, or for his slaves, who, faced with a dry well, would have been forced to haul water for the house and its terraced garden up a steep incline from the nearest spring, halfway down the mountain. He fretted most in his letters about the lack of rain for quenching his fields—and those crops beginning to spread across the young nation:

  The drought is excessive. From the middle of October to the middle of December, not enough rain to lay the dust. A few days ago there fell a small rain, but the succeeding cold has probably prevented it from sprouting the grain sown during the drought.