OLD CHARLESTON GATEWAYS 
By Corinne Horton 
/ T'HE Palladian dictum that “the entrance 
-*■ to a house should signify the import¬ 
ance of the owner” might easily have been 
translated to refer to the gateway as well, 
and probably was. At any rate, no branch 
ol architecture has come in for more careful 
treatment at the hands of designers. None, 
too, has been found to afford more agree¬ 
able expressions to personality, and that 
indefinable something—charm, perhaps— 
that makes an object of stone and mortar, 
bricks or what-not, agreeable to the eye or 
the reverse. Still, notwithstanding their pic¬ 
turesque qualities, which no one will deny, 
(and when was picturesqueness not worth 
its price ?) the day of the gateway is largely 
over in America except in connection with 
country places more or less extensive. 
Time was, however, when every dwell¬ 
ing that boasted a garden boasted also a gate¬ 
way, or several of them. This was when 
life here was reproduced more or less from 
European models, and old world exclusive¬ 
ness had not given place to new world pub¬ 
licity. To-day, students of American gate¬ 
ways must make their way to the oldest 
cities and villages—Salem, Massachusetts; 
Charleston, South Carolina; and to such out- 
of-the-way villages and localities as have 
been heretofore slighted by progress. 
In the Erench quarter of New Orleans, 
for instance, one occasionally comes upon 
remarkable old gateways, usually of panelled 
oak, occasionally of wrought iron, opening 
from the sidewalks into flagged passageways 
that, in turn, lead into the courtyards, which 
are the inevitable feature of all the really 
antique Franco-Hispano houses of that 
quaintly foreign region. Through the Louisi¬ 
ana Parishes, up and down the Teche, as 
well as through the length and breadth of 
the Acadian country generally with its sugar 
plantations on all sides, gateways of all kinds 
are to be seen, most of them designed from 
GATEWAYS OF HAYWARD HOUSE 
2 45 
