Friday, January 15, 2016

Ross County: A Peculiar Place (Part II)

This is the second post in my two-part series about the history and architecture of Ross County, Ohio.

Log Buildings

I know of nearly 100 log (and likely log) buildings in Ross County. Though found throughout the county, log structures are particularly common in the foothills east and west of Chillicothe, where the Till Plains give way to the greater Allegheny Plateau. This phenomenon is hardly unique to Ross County: elsewhere in Ohio, dense clusters of log buildings exist in similar transitional regions. It's a curious matter. I suspect that the land in these locales — being fruitful enough to attract early settlers, but infertile enough to prevent them from often rebuilding their homes — encouraged the preservation of log buildings. A now-demolished Twin Township farmhouse, owned in 1875 by Camden Cutright, could be termed the archetypal Ross County log home — a single pen structure, one-and-a-half stories in height.

Camden Cutright House; Twin Township. Razed, alas.

Ross County boasts quite a few double pen buildings, mostly barns. In Buckskin and Twin townships stood two round-log barns of remarkably similar appearance: Donald Hutslar photographed one in January 1968 (see The Architecture of Migration, plates 88, 89, and 90); the other was dismantled in 2011. So alike were these barns that I, until careful examination, regarded them as the same building! The Yeoman and Moomaw barns — both destroyed, unfortunately — featured forebays. A barn on the farm established by Joseph McCoy in 1796 or 1797 remains standing, and may predate Ohio's statehood. (McCoy erected a two-story log house (now collapsed) about 1800. That he built the barn concurrently is, I think, a reasonable conjecture.)

Round-log barn; Twin Township. Photo by Clyde Gilbert (?), circa 2011, from the Donald Hutslar collection; used courtesy of Jean Hutslar.
McCoy barn; Union Township. Likely erected between 1796 and 1811.

The county's double pen residences are, I daresay, more noteworthy than its barns. I'm aware of only five (three of which have disappeared). Superlative among them is the Joseph McConnell House, erected about 1828 and since converted into a golf course clubhouse. McConnell's home, though much-altered (and apparently damaged by fire), remains identifiable as a double pen building. A short distance southwest of the McConnell House, in the valley of Paint Creek's North Fork, stands a double pen dwelling of standard plan, with the space between its pens enclosed as a stair hall. While no doubt intact, this structure is inaccessible and derelict.

Joseph McConnell House; Chillicothe.

Another double pen house appears in the 1991 film Log Cabins and Castles: Virginia Settlers in Ohio. Hubert Wilhelm (formerly a professor of geography at Ohio University), who narrates the film, describes its location as, simply, "the Paint Valley." Though I've yet to locate this building, I'm confident it has, alas, been destroyed. Donald Hutslar includes a photo of a fourth double pen residence in The Architecture of Migration. The house, which likely stood in Huntington Township, featured half-dovetail notching and a rather wide "breezeway"; it, Hutslar writes, "burned many years ago and is known only through [the] one photograph."

Double pen house. Location unknown. Images from Log Cabins and Castles: Virginia Settlers in Ohio (1991).

Two other ex-Ross County log buildings are worth describing. Both existed on the Adena estate, established by Governor Thomas Worthington in 1798. Before commissioning Adena proper, Worthington occupied an enormous log house ("Belleview"), built in 1801 or 1802:
Two large pens . . . in the interior eighteen feet square, a story and a half high, were first raised at about twenty feet from each other. The space between was weather-boarded and plastered within. . . . Then followed a range of inferior construction, for the dining-room, kitchen, and rooms for the servants — all with half-stories above[.] . . . [This house] extended, in its length of seven or eight rooms, in nearly a direct line on the lawn some thirty yards below the steps leading to the hall door of the present residence[.] (1)
What, exactly, Worthington means by "range of inferior construction" is unclear. If the six rooms appended to the double pen portion were indeed log, the Worthington family occupied Ohio's (and, perhaps, the world's) only octuple pen building! Regrettably, "Belleview" survived only into the first quarter of the 19th century.

On the northern slope of the plateau underlying Adena was perched another log dwelling, whitewashed and encircled by a two-story porch; the plate logs extended beyond the pens to support this porch's roof. Two photos depicting this building (possibly taken between 1946 and 1953) exist in The Architecture of Migration.

Northern Miscellany

Northern Ross County — along with the valleys of Paint Creek, Walnut Creek, and the Scioto River — contains excellent farmland, and, by extension, excellent buildings. I haven't the space to prattle about all the interesting structures in this region (my post is quite long enough), so I'll mention only a few. The aforementioned Adena, Thomas Worthington's 1807 mansion, may be the best-documented of Ross County's rural buildings. Perhaps designed by Benjamin Latrobe, (2) Adena is, according to Rexford Newcomb, "a pleasant residence of southern Federal lines, built of warm-colored sandstone quarried on the place." (3) George Renick's 1804 dwelling, Paint Hill, also uses this "warm-colored" Berea sandstone.

Along the Scioto River, just north of the Pike County line, in Franklin and Jefferson townships, stand three remarkably similar brick farmhouses, built late in the Greek Revival period. Two were owned by members of the locally prominent Higby family, and date from 1855 and 1857; the other was built by Jacob Rittenour in 1852. All three houses are L-shaped, with low-pitched roofs, a profusion of chimneys, and restrained Grecian ornamentation.

Other rural Ross County residences worth mentioning are the Spencer-Cryder House (1830s; Colerain Township; razed), John Tootle House (Union Township), James Dunlap House (circa 1815; Union Township), John Moomaw House (1838; Paint Township; razed), Moore House (Springfield Township), William Blackstone House (Paxton Township), Simon Dixon House (Liberty Township), Radcliff House (Liberty Township), Vause House (1884; Liberty Township), Smiley Caldwell House (Jefferson Township; ruined), Daniel Crouse House (circa 1800; Green Township), William Miller House (1817; Green Township), Henry Slagle House (Concord Township), Cyrus Hegler House (1854; Concord Township; ruined), Washington Mains House (Buckskin Township), Jones House (Twin Township), Howard House (Twin Township), Joseph Baum House (Twin Township), and Cook House (Scioto Township). The list I've compiled could hardly be described as "exhaustive."

Southern Poverty

Those sections of Ross County lying south of the Paint Valley and east of the Scioto River are substantially less prosperous. Ohio owes much of its agricultural wealth to the Wisconsinian and Illinoian glaciers, which buried portions of its rugged terrain under a thick layer of till. Because southern and eastern Ross County escaped glaciation, their lands remain largely ill-suited for agriculture. The uplands of Huntington Township, though topographically gentle, are fairly infertile. Here, most farmland serves as pasture. To the east, near the Vinton County and Hocking County borders, the landscape becomes particularly rugged. The subsistence farms that occupied this region disappeared in the 1930s and 1940s, with the Ross-Hocking Land Utilization Project and subsequent founding of Tar Hollow State Park. A scathing passage in The County of Ross describes Harrison Township's "hillicans," the forerunners of today's "hillbillies":
Even the most lowly of the pioneer settlers did not compare in poverty and misery with the persisting element of this so-called 'society.' Some of them seem to be ignorant beyond the unlettered savage, and as 'do-less' as they are ignorant. A rude log hut or a 'dugout' in the hillside, without floor or ceiling . . . is their 'domicile.' . . . They are isolated from the world, and often from near-by neighbors of their own class, secluded in the inaccessible recesses of the hills, and eking out a miserable existence which they would not change if they could[.] (4)
The mountainous regions of Ross County remained sparsely populated until the final decades of the 19th century. Harrison Township, in 1840, contained a mere 631 inhabitants; Colerain Township — which lies directly to the north, and is nearly identical in size — contained 1,281. The 1840 census counted 1,159 residents in Huntington Township, and a trifling 582 in Franklin Township. In 1880, the same townships housed 2,400 and 1,233 people, respectively.

A place's architectural wealth (if I may coin a phrase) increases in proportion to its agricultural prosperity. Because subsistence farming predominated in Huntington, Franklin, and Harrison townships, these localities' homes were, accordingly, humble. WPA photographers canvassed Ross County during the Great Depression. The crude log houses they documented have all but disappeared.

Round-log house and shed. Location unknown. Photo by Theodor Jung, 1936, for the Resettlement Administration.
Log house. Location unknown. Photo by Theodor Jung, 1936, for the Resettlement Administration.
Round-log house. Location and date unknown. Photo from the Ohio Guide Collection, used courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society.

Most older residences in the poorer portions of Ross County date from the 20th century. In Huntington Township stand several "basement" barns (i.e., barns sunken into the ground), likely built during the New Deal era. At least one double pen log house of "dogtrot" form (with the space between its pens left open) existed near Massieville, in Scioto Township; it, no doubt, has been razed. Also in Huntington Township, at the intersection of Mount Tabor Road and Blain Highway, stands one survivor from the era of log construction.

Round-log house (likely erected in the 20th century); Huntington Township. Photo by Don O'Brien, 2011.

The counties straddling Appalachia and the verdant Till Plains — Adams, Highland, Fairfield, Perry, Licking, Knox, Richland, and, in particular, Ross — are among Ohio's most intriguing, perhaps because they contain variety. Their housing is neither uniformly grand nor monotonously modest; rather, rich and poor stand (more or less) cheek-by-jowl. A ten-minute drive separates Adena, Paint Hill, and the farmhouses of the Paint Valley from the humble dwellings of Huntington and Franklin townships. The homes erected by members of the Higby family, in Franklin Township, stand at the foot of a series of hills which, before the creation of Scioto Trail State Park, sheltered buildings of the crudest sort.

1) From Sarah Worthington's A Private Memoir of Thomas Worthington (1882), quoted in The Architecture of Migration.

2) Though most sources (including the estate's website) attribute Adena's design to Latrobe, Newcomb finds little evidence that Latrobe, in fact, planned the building. Fortescue Cuming, who visited Chillicothe a mere three years after Adena's construction, describes its designers as "two young Virginians by the name of Morris." (See Newcomb's Architecture of the Old Northwest Territory, page 63, for proper sourcing.)

3) Architecture of the Old Northwest Territory (1950), page 63.

4) I've omitted the paragraph's clumsy attempt at chiasmus.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Ohio's Log Buildings

In 2011, after reading Donald Hutslar's book, The Architecture of Migration: Log Construction in the Ohio Country, 1750–1850, I began compiling information about my state's log buildings. Hutslar, in his introduction to The Architecture of Migration, lamented that "only a small amount of serious survey work [had] been accomplished" before 1986 (Hutslar published his treatise that year). I resigned to finish this "serious survey work" and create something hitherto unknown — an exhaustive list of Ohio's historic log buildings. For years, I stored the information in scattered folders, a .kml file, and a halfheartedly-maintained ArcGIS map. (Such chaos would have me jettisoned from any office.) Recently, I discovered Google Fusion Tables, which, it seems, is precisely what I've long sought — a way of collecting mountains of information, and displaying it in the form of a map.

For organization's sake (and to prevent the map from crashing viewers' computers), I've broken my (crude) database into 86 pages. To view a list of log buildings in a particular county, click that county's name. To view a map of log structures in that county, click the tab labeled "Map of Location." Blue circles denote extant log buildings; red circles, destroyed log buildings; green circles, extant buildings that may be log; yellow circles, demolished buildings that may have been log; and question marks, buildings whose locations I've yet to discover.

AdamsAllen; AshlandAshtabulaAthens; Auglaize; Belmont; Brown; ButlerCarroll; Champaign; Clark; ClermontClinton; Columbiana; Coshocton; Crawford; Cuyahoga; DarkeDefiance; Delaware; Erie; Fairfield; Fayette; Franklin; FultonGallia; Greene; Guernsey; Hamilton; Hancock; Hardin; HarrisonHenry; Highland; HockingHolmes; Huron; Jackson; Jefferson; KnoxLawrence; Licking; LoganLorainLucas; Madison; MahoningMarionMedina; Meigs; MercerMiami; Monroe; Montgomery; MorganMorrow; Muskingum; NobleOttawaPaulding; PerryPickawayPike; Portage; PreblePutnam; RichlandRoss; Scioto; Seneca; Shelby; Stark; SummitTrumbullTuscarawas; UnionVan Wert; VintonWarren; Washington; WayneWilliamsWoodWyandot.

This file includes supplementary information. (Alas, Google's program permits no footnote-writing.) For those interested, here's a tabulation of buildings included in the database.

Monday, January 11, 2016

Scioto, or Sciota, or Siota? A Bit of Ohio Philology

The tribes who populated Ohio before permanent settlement by Europeans—the Delaware, Erie, Miami, Huron, and Shawnee, among others—lacked written languages and, thus, standardized spellings. White explorers and settlers transcribed their words in higgledy-piggledy fashion: Chalakatha (or Chalahgawtha) became Chillicothe; Pekowi was transformed into Piqua and Pickaway; mshkikwam evolved into Muskingum; and so on.

The name of Ohio's longest interior waterway—the Scioto River—is a particularly interesting example of this phenomenon. Even though anglicized (and, one presumes, simplified from its original form), its spelling differs slightly from its pronunciation. Residents of towns and neighborhoods named for the river can be forgiven for their ire when non-Ohioans, having never heard of the stream, mispronounce it as "skee-OH-toe."

Sandy Nestor's Indian Placenames in America describes the meaning of Scioto, but fails to provide a spelling (or pronunciation) for the word from which it was derived:
It is a Shawnee word meaning 'hairy,' descriptive of the shedded hair from herds of deer that drank from the river. It was also interpreted as 'deer.'
Thomas Aquinas Burke, in Ohio Lands: A Short History, uses the spelling scionto, while Wikipedia prefers skɛnǫ·tǫ’ (which I'll transliterate as skenno-toh). According to The Wilderness Trail, "[e]arly forms of the name applied to the Scioto River included Souyote, Sonnioto, Sonontio, Cenioteaux, St. Yotoc [ha!], Chianotho, and Sikader." The corruption of the final vowel in Scioto (from "oh" to "uh"), evidently, began well before Ohio received its first settlers—indeed, well before the American colonies broke from Britain!

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, travelers and mapmakers disagreed about the proper way of writing Scioto. Joel Barlow's 1785 map of the Northwest Territory uses Scioto, the modern spelling, but Thomas Hutchins (1778) and Guy Johnson (1762) write Sioto, and Noah Webster (1806) labels the river Siota. Prince Carl Bernhard's Travels Through North America, During the Years 1825 and 1826 (admittedly a translated work) misspells Scioto as Sciota.

The currently accepted spelling, Scioto, was likely determined on March 24, 1803, when the Ohio legislature formed Scioto County from Adams County. Had the First Ohio General Assembly chosen Sciota (or another variant) instead of Scioto, our state would seem a very different place, indeed. (I write with the utmost sarcasm.)

Ross County: A Peculiar Place (Part I)

Taken from Wikipedia.

Of Ohio's 88 counties, Ross may be my favorite (with Warren vying for a close second place). No Ohio county is quite so well-studied, yet simultaneously so mysterious. Though I've scoured its valleys and searched its hills, there remain buildings which, while I know exist, I've yet to locate. It's a well-stocked candy store, and I'm but a child. Why is Ross County so delightful? For two reasons, I believe.

First, its settlement commenced late in the 18th century. In 1795, William Kent, contracted by one Nathaniel Reeves, cleared a forty-acre plot in the Paint Creek valley in present Paxton Township. (The 1805 Reeves-Seymour House, constructed of stone, now occupies this land.) One year later, Nathaniel Massie and his party founded Chillicothe; Massie eventually platted Bainbridge (in 1805), and, in 1800, built a frame farmhouse in Paxton Township (this structure remains standing). All of Ross County's townships, bar one (Deerfield, which remained uninhabited until 1801), were populated before 1800. (1) As a rule, the oldest (and wealthiest) settlements tend to contain the greatest assortment of buildings.

Second, its myriad landscapes and diverse population demand variety in architecture. Geologists tend to love those localities which exist at the collision of physiographic regions; likewise, architectural historians flock to boundaries between ethnic settlements. Ross County is bisected by the Scioto River. West of the river exists the Virginia Military District, with its irregular tracts (a legacy of the "metes-and-bounds" survey system) and distinctively "southern" architecture. East of the river are Congress Lands, settled, primarily, by Pennsylvanians of German descent. In Ross County, and elsewhere along the Scioto River, the two populations mingled. (2)

What did 19th century Americans think of this veritable Eden? John Kilbourn, in the 1819 edition of his Ohio Gazetteer, describes Ross County thus:
Ross [is] a populous and wealthy interior county[.] . . . It includes a population exceeding 16,000 inhabitants, and valuation of 3,681,639 dollars. . . . The land is generally fertile and suitably diversified with meadow and upland; the latter of which is peculiarly well adapted to the production of grain. . . . In many parts the farms are beginning to have the appearance of an old settled country.
Half a decade later, Prince Carl Bernhard, during a tour of the United States, visited Chillicothe, among other Ohio cities:
The 10th of May we rode nineteen miles, from Circleville to Chillicothe, formerly the capital of Ohio, situated on the right shore of the Sciota [sic]. Our way led us through a handsome and very well cultivated country; we saw fine fields, good dwelling-houses, orchards, and gardens; also several mills, turned by the water of the Sciota [sic], and several other little creeks; some of these mills are at the same time fulling, flour, and saw-mills.
The city of Chillicothe deserves its own post (or ten), but I'll confine my ramblings to Ross County's rural portions. (For a good description of early Chillicothe, see Christopher Busta-Peck's piece "Earthworks and Cows and Hills, Oh My!")

Stone Houses

Between Chillicothe and Bainbridge lies a range of flat-topped plateaus, interspersed with narrow valleys and hummocky benches. Split into two sections by the fertile Paint Valley, these hills are, according to the 2003 Soil Survey of Ross County, Ohio, composed largely of Berea sandstone. The section north of the Paint Valley — encompassing portions of Buckskin, Concord, Paint, Paxton, and Twin townships — contains a plethora of stone houses.

This cluster of homes is the subject of Ralph Cokonougher's 1978 book, Vernacular Stone Structures in Southwestern Ross County, Ohio. (Because the book's text is freely available, I won't belabor its findings here.) Cokonougher mentions twenty stone buildings. Of these, six (including the Hays and Gray residences) have been razed. One is now abandoned. Interestingly, Cokonougher omits the aforementioned Reeves-Seymour House, perhaps the grandest of western Ross County's stone homes.

The house built by Daniel Pricer, a Pennsylvanian, in 1816 (in Paint Township) collapsed about 1960, long before Cokonougher published his book. The stone cottage on Tong Hollow Road — truly an anomaly in Ohio — remains standing, as does Buckskin Township's Dolphin dwelling. Most of this region's stone houses, it seems, were erected in the first quarter of the 19th century by natives of Pennsylvania. (3)

Rear, Christian Benner House (1805), Paxton Township. Benner's home is constructed of a colorful sandstone unique to the region.
John Benner House (circa 1833), Bainbridge.

1) A list of Ross County's townships, with years of first settlement: Paxton, 1795; Concord, 1796; Scioto, 1796; Springfield, 1796; Union, circa 1796; Colerain, 1797; Twin, 1797; Franklin, 1798; Green, 1798; Harrison, 1798; Jefferson, 1798; Liberty, 1798; Paint, circa 1798; Buckskin, 1799; Huntington, before 1800; Deerfield, 1801. Sourced from The County of Ross (1902).

2) The differences between Pennsylvanian- and Virginian-settled communities are not so noticeable as books tend to suggest. In most Virginia Military District townships, there lived a significant minority of Pennsylvanians, and vice versa.

3) The construction dates Cokonougher provides in Vernacular Stone Structures are, in a few cases, simply inaccurate. Carved into one house's woodwork, apparently, is "1795." This must be a misreading, or else some carpenter's joke. If not — and landowners were building (relatively) grand homes in the unsettled wilds of Ohio before the Treaty of Greenville — our history books need a bit of revision.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

A Manifesto

After ruminating about the ideas I introduced in "An Unnamed House-Type" and expanded in "Defining Our Terms," I wrote this essay. It's a bit acerbic and unpolished, and, more than likely, alters a molehill into a mountain.

By writing this piece, I'm throwing a bomb into a movement which, since its emergence, has remained remarkably stable. The preservationists have always stood united against their common enemies: the property owners; the real estate developers; the unsympathetic mayors; the curmudgeonly city councils. But a stable discipline is, in some ways, a stagnant discipline. I wish to agitate its waters.

The architectural historians of an earlier generation — the Frarys, Newcombs, and Morrisons — tended to classify buildings (if they classified them at all) by style. We see, in their work, few references to form, and fewer references to what we call "house-types." This is, in my opinion, hardly surprising: style is conscious; form, unconscious. When Frary does choose to categorize his subjects of study, he invents a system for this purpose by tying a home's form to its builder's place of origin. Hence, in Early Homes of Ohio, he writes, "[T]he southern influence is unmistakable," (1) and, "The low, compact farmhouse of Massachusetts and Connecticut . . . is the characteristic type in the northern part of the state." (2) Beyond such vague epithets as "low" and "compact," Frary dares not to tread. He understood, no doubt, the importance of form in defining a building as archetypically Southern or obviously northern, but he gives this matter no more than a passing glance; because, as I've mentioned already, form is largely unconscious. The significance of unconscious design in architecture, I think, is best demonstrated by a digression:

Why do we, when building a two-story house, put our bedrooms on the second floor, and our kitchens on the first? I don't know. We tend not to think about such matters. Surely, there must be some reason for our space-planning. Perhaps, by arranging a floor plan in this way, and placing heavy appliances underneath the bedrooms, the builder avoids tragedy, should those appliances crash through the floor and tumble onto the family sleeping below. Perhaps the builder spares the homeowner the awkwardness of directing his visitors through bedchambers en route to his living room. The substance of my digression is less important than the phenomenon it illustrates. We don't question the convention of setting bedrooms above kitchens; we merely set our bedrooms above our kitchens. That a home ought to be designed in this manner becomes, for us, an axiom.

The carpenters who built the structures we study and cherish also accepted axioms. The "I-house," as some call it, is one such axiom, as are the "four-over-four," "upright-and-wing," and "shotgun." (For the remainder of this essay, I shall use the "I-house" as historic preservation's whipping boy, though my comments, by no means, apply only to it.) The workmen who erected Butler County's Christian Augspurger residence — touted in How to Complete the Ohio Historic Inventory as an exemplary "I-house" — did not, obviously, describe their creation as an "I-house." Nor, more than likely, did they perceive its similarities to other "I-houses" in the vicinity. They regarded it as simply a house, designed as any decent house should be designed. In it, they replicated the work of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers (or so they believed); if they invented, they did so unintentionally or by necessity.

Yet professionals confidently apply the label "I-house" — which, no doubt, would have baffled them — to their work. That the Christian Augspurger House is an "I-house" is, in the sphere of preservation, as certain a truth as oxygen's combining with hydrogen to form water. Just as matter can neither be created nor destroyed, so Augspurger's home is an "I-house." But physics and architectural history are very different subjects of study, indeed. Even within our field, some matters are more differentiated, and some elements more classifiable, than others. A half-dovetail notch is quite clearly different from a steeple notch. None of us would conflate a hip roof with a gable roof. The point at which an "I-house" loses its identity, though, is not so well-defined.

It's worth digressing, yet again, to discuss my unfortunate victim, the "I-house." (And, if I may risk a digression within a digression: the "I-house," though ostensibly named for three states in which it frequently appears (Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana), is far more common outside those states than in them.) Different sources give myriad definitions for the term, so I won't bother compiling them here; their point of unity seems to be that the "I-house" is a dwelling two stories in height, multiple rooms in width, and rather long relative to its depth. But "a wide, shallow, tall residence" hardly constitutes a precise definition. Social and natural scientists alike seek precise definitions; without them, their work becomes impossible.

Science requires testable hypotheses, and its findings must be repeatable. Can a farmhouse be "tested"? Is a summer kitchen, somehow, "repeatable"? In isolation, no. The scientific method demands data, but data can be collected only if the data-collector knows what categories in which to place his tally-marks. He needs a precise definition. Some aspects of our discipline are easily quantified, but others are not. And to reduce the unquantifiable to something quantifiable, the scientist must lie about its nature, or else draw distinctions which do not, in fact, exist. This is scientism — the belief that "investigational methods used in the natural sciences should be applied in all fields of inquiry." (3) The field of historic preservation, I believe, is guilty of latent scientism — a fairly mild form, yes, but not without its consequences.

A discipline's tics are amplified when someone outside that discipline opines about its objects. We see this, especially, in the writing of journalists (whose job is to learn quickly, then disseminate their knowledge). I have read far too many accounts of demolitions containing a passage like this (purely hypothetical):
The Edward Redenbacher House was demolished on Tuesday after much fighting between its owners and the Cedartown Zoning Commission. Sarah Smith, who owns the property, is perplexed by the public outcry. According to the Clay County Historical Society, the house is not listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The passage implies that only National Register-listed buildings are noteworthy; that the Register is, somehow, a thorough catalog of all structures worth preserving. This nonsense is one consequence of the scientism which threatens to ossify our minds. We divide the world into a number of categories, then believe that those categories, when recombined, constitute the world. But this isn't so. In the very act of categorizing, we lose something of the world. Architectural history is not simply the sum of the terms it uses; not merely an amalgam of "I-houses," jerkin roofs, dormers, newel posts, balloon frames, bargeboards, steeple notches, mantels, fanlights, and the like. Humans construct buildings, and humans are, as Montaigne says, "marvellous[ly] vain, fickle, and unstable subject[s]." (4) Their products aren't so tidy and predictable as natural phenomena. The pre-World War II academics (and some contemporary historians), I believe, understood this implicitly, for they received classical, humanistic, or artistic educations. Frary attended the Cleveland School of Art; Morrison graduated from Dartmouth; Weslager studied education at the University of Pittsburgh; Hutslar studied fine arts at Ohio University. I desire only that we recapture a bit of their worldview.

I have no desire to destroy the discipline of historic preservation — the means of its improvement is not a flamethrower — nor do I wish to abandon the system we use to classify buildings. The "I-house," for all its faults, is a useful concept. Even I employ it, but with reservations. We cannot permit what is merely useful internally to harden into Truth. We needn't elevate convenient, though arbitrary, classifications to the level of proper nouns. There is no Four-Bay Brick I-House; only a plethora of "I-houses" that may or may not be constructed of brick, and which may or may not exceed four bays in width. Even in its nascent years, the field of architectural history was subdivided between the historians and the artists; now, the scientists threaten to swallow both. I implore only one thing (and its surface effects will be minimal) — the discipline must remain conscious of that within it which is unconscious.

1) I.T. Frary. Early Homes of Ohio (New York, New York: Dover, 1970), 156. Originally published in 1936.
2) Ibid., 127.
3) The American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd college ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 1,098.
4) Michel de Montaigne. Michel de Montaigne: Selected Essays (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2011), 3.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

The French and the Overhanging Plate

As I mention in a previous post, the overhanging plate (perhaps my favorite architectural enigma) is a distinctive feature of log homes in Loramie Township, Shelby County, and Wayne Township, Darke County. Two towns — Versailles and Russia — anchor this settlement. Both communities were populated largely by French immigrants, who arrived in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. (A few, apparently, fought in the Napoleonic Wars; hence the name Russia.) Hoping to learn about their use of the overhanging plate, I spent a bit of time researching the genealogy of these Frenchmen.

Thiebaud (1803–1863) and Nicholas Didier (1807–1881), prominent residents of Loramie Township, emigrated from Étueffont, France, to Shelby County in 1840 and 1851, respectively. Pierre Pepiot (1734–1839) lived in Neuvier until 1835, when he relocated to the United States and joined the French settlement near Russia, Ohio. Louis Peltier (1823–1876) left Évette-Salbert before 1848. The LeMoine and Gasson families, who settled in Darke County, hailed from Combres-sous-les-Côtes and Hennemont. The Russia-Versailles settlement's inhabitants, it seems, originated in extreme northeastern France, and reached Ohio via New Orleans and the Mississippi River. Where, then, did they learn to build log houses? No (or few) such buildings exist in AlsaceFranche-Comté, and Lorraine, whence they migrated. And New Orleans is hardly a bastion of log architecture. (1)

I suspect (but, alas, cannot prove) that the French immigrants tarried in Louisville, Cincinnati, or other sizable Ohio River cities before traveling to Shelby and Darke counties. The overhanging plate is particularly common in Kentucky, Indiana, and southwestern Ohio. If the French received an education in log construction from residents of these regions, they may well have assimilated knowledge of the overhanging plate!

1) Most of the "log" buildings the French encountered along the Mississippi River were, no doubt, of the poteaux-en-terre and poteaux-sur-sol varieties. Neither is, so far as I know, replicated in Ohio.

Friday, January 1, 2016

Minutiae of Log Architecture: Notching

Most scholarly works about architectural history mention four types of corner notching: the steeple (or, more accurately, (1) "saddle") notch, the half-dovetail notch, the dovetail (or "full dovetail") notch, and the round notch. We shouldn't suppose this list is exhaustive. Other varieties of notching exist: the Finns of Minnesota and Wisconsin, for example, used the intricate hammasnurkka joint; while some builders avoided notching their logs altogether, and instead merely squared the ends, permitting the structure's weight to protect it from lateral force. (2) Still others, working with round logs, hewed the ends into a teardrop-like shape.

Standard steeple notching in South Charleston, Ohio.

If Weslager's thesis is correct; and Swedes and Germans introduced log construction to the English and Scotch-Irish, who carried it westward; one would expect to find a great variety of notching types in regions settled by the latter populations. But this isn't so. Those who adopted log construction, it seems, adopted only its simplest techniques. No Scotsman erected a replica of a Swedish parstue, with meddrag and full-dovetail notching. In America, myriad architectural traditions blended into what Donald Hutslar labels "an eclectic nonstyle."

In Ohio, two types of notching — steeple and half-dovetail — predominate. Though steeple notching remained popular throughout the 19th century, the half-dovetail notch was seldom used during the century's first two decades. Ohio's earliest extant half-dovetailed structure is, I believe, the Benjamin Iddings House, built about 1804 in Newton Township, Miami County. The 1811 Gebhart Tavern, in Miamisburg, may be the state's only full-dovetailed building. (Though I've heard reports of other full-dovetailed structures in Ohio, I haven't confirmed them.)

Miamisburg's Gebhart Tavern is constructed of full-dovetailed logs. Photo by Jackie Zelinka (?), late 1970s, from the Donald Hutslar collection; used courtesy of Jean Hutslar.
Half-dovetail notching in Arnold, Ohio.

The varieties of notching associated with round-log construction are, as expected, nearly nonexistent in Ohio; cabins, and the features unique to them, have disappeared from the landscape. Square-notched buildings lie scattered across the state, primarily in late-settled regions.

Square notching. This residence, built about 1824, stands in London, Ohio.

1) In the 18th and 19th centuries, builders likely applied the word "saddle" — instead of "steeple" — to this method of notching. Donald Hutslar discusses the philological confusion surrounding "steeple notch" (and other terms) in The Architecture of Migration.

2) Typically, notching prevents logs from slipping sideways if pushed. Friction between stacked logs is often sufficient to avert collapse.