A Warren County Puzzle

Perched on a hillside northeast of Waynesville, in Warren County, is a curious brick farmhouse. It's obviously an ancient structure (by Ohio's standards), with its flush chimneys and rake boards, and it fronts an early thoroughfare connecting Waynesville and cities farther north. Like a few other homes in the vicinity, it makes stupendous use of its sloping site; the basement is at once a first floor, a quirk which allowed the builder to attach a two-story gallery to what seems, from one angle, a single-story structure.

My lone, woefully inadequate photo of the building.

Alas, someone, at some time (perhaps in the finest decade for tasteful design — the 1970s), thought it wise to seal half the window and door openings, then reface the entire building, including its porch's columns (!), with stones of varied size and shape. The result looks, to my jaundiced eye, like the architectural equivalent of type-I neurofibromatosis (or some other tumor-inducing disease). Thankfully, staff from the Ohio Historical Society photographed the house in 1969 or 1970, well before the remodeling. At the time, the building retained its original six-over-nine windows.

Image, 1969 or 1970, from the "Southwest Ohio Survey" collection; held by the Ohio Historical Society.

Obviously, the house is early and noteworthy, but researching its history proved more difficult than I anticipated. The earliest digitized map of Warren County land ownership, published in 1856, lists "J. Parkhill" as owner of the 204-acre tract where this home stands. As is so often the case, Parkhill seemingly left no literary footprint — he receives no mention in county histories, and grave records are equally scanty. (The closest match in Find A Grave's database is James Parkhill (d. 1896), interred in Deerfield Township's Rose Hill Cemetery.) The 1850 census, though, records a Joseph Parkhill, born about 1815 in Ohio, as a resident of Wayne Township. Parkhill had a large family, and he provided room and board for at least three non-family-members — evidence, perhaps, that local tradition has correctly identified the building as an inn or tavern.

Some time between 1856 and 1874, Parkhill's property passed to Israel Hopkins Harris (1823–1897), a Waynesville banker and member of a locally prominent family. If the postcard pictured below is any indication, Harris's name — and not Parkhill's — became attached to the house, no doubt because of the Harris family's considerable cachet.

Postcard, undated, from the collection of Donald and Jean Hutslar.

Assuming the building did function as a "wayside inn," it did so during Parkhill's occupancy (or earlier), and not Harris's. But Parkhill was reasonably young in 1850, and it's unlikely that he commissioned or built the structure. (Given that Waynesville itself was platted in 1796, and that Warren County comprises one of Ohio's wealthiest, earliest-settled regions, a construction date in the 1810s or 1820s seems perfectly believable.) But, alack, tracing Warren County property ownership beyond Franklin Pierce's presidency requires (a) good literary sources or (b) a trip to the county courthouse, so, for now, the Parkhill–Harris residence's ultimate identity will remain a mystery.

A slightly later (?) photo gives an even finer glimpse of the house's two-story porch, its twin entrances, and its most distinctive feature — a semicircular stone staircase, which partly provides ground-level access to the gallery's upper story.

Image, undated, from the collection of Donald and Jean Hutslar.

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.

Defining Our Terms

In my last post, I lament "ignorance [among Americans] about what the word 'historic' truly means." What does the word "historic" truly mean? As of 2000, the United States contained 17,380,053 pre-1939 residences. Which of these are historic? Which aren't? Does age alone render a building historic? Or is "historic" fitting for only those structures in which significant events — say, the birth or death of a president — transpired? One can continue with such questions ad infinitum.

Those who use inclusion on the National Register as a litmus test for determining "historicness" are correct in one sense — they recognize implicitly the shapelessness of the word. Perhaps historic buildings defy definition; perhaps one simply "knows," as a matter of instinct, which structures demand to be labeled as such.

But even professional historians and preservationists, it seems, disagree about what constitutes "historicness." In recent years, "mid-century modern" buildings and suburban "ranch" homes — most erected in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s — have received attention from such professionals. (In 2009, for example, AmeriCorps volunteers scoured Dayton and its suburbs for noteworthy modern buildings; the Ohio Historical Society labeled this project "Ohio Modern: Preserving Our Recent Past.") I wouldn't bother with such a survey, especially when scores of older, odder buildings remain unrecognized. I wouldn't call such structures "historic." Then again, my definition (1) is not their definition. This is the nub of the problem.

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Historic preservation is a discipline cursed with linguistic imprecision. During one scene in the film Log Cabins and Castles: Virginia Settlers in Ohio, Hubert Wilhelm (a now-retired professor of geography at Ohio University) describes a group of homes built in Ohio by Virginians. To them, he applies the familiar term "I-house":

[The two-story porch] was a standard addition to the basic 'I-house' — one room deep; two rooms up, and two down.

Elsewhere in the documentary, Wilhelm visits Albemarle County, Virginia, where he speaks with K. Edward Lay, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Lay remarks:

[This building is] different from the 'I-house,' for instance, in the sense that it looks like an 'I-house' — it's two stories, with those end chimneys and all — but it's only three bays wide, and there's a door in the middle [that] actually goes into a hall, and it's called a 'hall [and] parlor.'

Wilhelm's and Lay's definitions are muddled and mutually exclusive. If both are to be believed, the "I-house" is, in fact, a dwelling one room in depth, two rooms (and at least four bays) in width, and more than two rooms in width, (2) with chimneys placed at the gable ends. Nonsense, I say. Both Wilhelm and Lay define "I-house" much too narrowly (though I doubt whether any definition would suffice). Like "historic," "I-house," and similar classifications, are largely subjective. Yet professionals speak of them with certainty. Yes, the homes Virginians built tend to resemble one another in plan and proportions, but none of the carpenters who constructed these homes called their creations "I-houses." Nor, more than likely, did they perceive the similarities we notice. The term "I-house" is a modern invention, imposed with scientific confidence on a subject that may, in fact, defy classification. We can accept it as useful, but we cannot permit it to ossify our minds.

Perhaps this is why I admire the scholars of old; those architects and annalists who concerned themselves not with form, but with style. They didn't pretend to practice social science. They didn't hide behind a veil of empiricism. They acknowledged architectural history for what it is — a study of human creations, of art.

1) And what, exactly, is my definition? I must confess, I have none. When I visit a city to photograph its buildings, I don't "test" those buildings against a list of objective criteria, and document only those structures which pass my "test"; rather, I snap photos of whatever strikes me as interesting. Because I've spent (wasted?) so much time glancing at buildings, I believe my instinct is, for the most part, trustworthy. As Aristotle says, "[E]ach man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge."

"Historicness," as I understand it, is some combination of architectural beauty and rarity. Certain features, though, can be rare for many reasons. In some cases, those elements once most common — enclosed corner staircases, for instance — now seem scarce simply because their banality renders them less obviously worthy of preservation. We tend to praise the opulent, and overlook the humble.

2) In other words, Wilhelm regards some two-room-wide residences as "I-houses," while Lay does not.