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.

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.

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.

The Art of Architecture in Hillsdale County: Part 2

The Italianate style, indirectly inspired by the villas of rural Italy, predominated in the decades following the Civil War, which roughly marks the turn from neoclassical to picturesque (or, in common usage, “Victorian”) architecture. (1) After the war, Greek Revival buildings were seldom built. Some academics schooled in the classical tradition scorned the exuberance of late 19th century structures; as the designer I.T. Frary quipped in 1936, early builders “had never gotten the knack of making ugly things, an art in which their descendants excelled." (2)

Though hardly matching the classical elegance of, say, a marble colonnade in an Alma-Tadema painting, the buildings erected in Hillsdale between 1865 and 1900 reveal an optimism unique to the post-war period. Two buildings on the Hillsdale College campus illustrate the Italianate style particularly well. The Lorenzo Dow House, now a dormitory, is a textbook example of the type, with its asymmetry, tall tower (emulating the Italian campanile, or bell tower), generous roof overhang, and bracketed eaves. 

Central Hall, which replaced the original Hillsdale College building after an 1874 fire, is also chiefly Italianate.

If the Italianate and Gothic Revival styles (the latter omitted from this essay because of its scarcity in Hillsdale County) brought about the architectural eclecticism of the late 19th century, the group of related styles collectively termed “Queen Anne” perfected it. Such architecture originated as an American response to the work of British designers Richard Norman Shaw and Charles Eastlake. Carpenters, using jigsaws, turning lathes, and other woodworking tools, (3) freely combined motifs from various styles, adorning their creations with rich ornamentation. So-called “Victorian” homes are undeniably showy (see, for example, the colorfully painted Jonesville residence illustrated in this article), and, for some, obnoxious. The men who built these houses at least deserve to be commended for their invention, though.

About the turn-of-the-century, classicism once again enjoyed a renaissance.  The earliest Classical Revival residences of this period melded late 19th century forms with Greco-Roman ornamentation; at least one guidebook categorizes such architecture as a subset of the Queen Anne style, (4) rather than a style in itself. The Classical Revival mode was particularly popular for institutional structures, and architects designed innumerable courthouses, libraries, post offices, and banks in the style. In Hillsdale, notable Classical Revival buildings include the 1911 City Hall, 1912 Post Office, and a number of residences.

Neoclassicism never disappeared entirely (indeed, certain classical motifs have become clichés in suburbia), but its relevance diminished in the postmodern era. Greco-Roman architecture, it seems, is yet again in vogue, if the rift between the Hillsdale College buildings erected in the 1950s and 1960s (Simpson, McIntyre, and Olds dorms, especially) and those constructed in the last decade is any indication. That “traditional” architecture persists in the West, despite intervening faddish periods, is a testament to its brilliance.

1) Though the Italianate style emerged before the Civil War, it did not supplant the earlier Greek Revival mode until the war’s end. Hillsdale County, a location relatively isolated in the 1860s, contains few pre-1860 Italianate buildings; most standing examples exist in urban centers and dot the wealthy East Coast.
2) Ithna Thayer Frary, Early Homes of Ohio (Richmond: Garrett & Massie, 1936), 232.
3) Ibid., 237.
4) Virginia and Lee McAlester’s A Field Guide to American Houses describes these transitional buildings as “free classic.”

The Art of Architecture in Hillsdale County: Part 1

This blog is titled "Historic Architecture of Ohio"; why post a piece about Hillsdale County, Michigan, then? Because architecture, as an art, is deeply influenced by national trends; though I've illustrated the essay with photos of Michigan buildings, I could have easily chosen Lebanon, Chillicothe, or any number of Ohio communities as my subject city. In architecture, regional variation abounds, but, as Frary noted, "[o]riginality was not allowed too much license, else we should not find such close adherence to classic forms and details."

My apologies for the sloppy formatting and inconsistent spacing between paragraphs. Blogger is hardly an appropriate medium for publishing footnote-filled essays.

I plan to submit the article to the Hillsdale Forum, a student-run publication of Hillsdale College.

Buildings are both the most abundant and least appreciated of artistic creations. Ask an educated man to envision art, and he will, more than likely, imagine merely da Vinci's Mona Lisa or the jarring cubism of Picasso. The lowly Greek Revival residence a few blocks from his home hardly merits notice. Paintings and sculptures, cloistered in museums and displayed proudly in parlors, draw praise, whereas the myriad dwellings constructed in the 19th and early 20th centuries receive scant attention from lovers of art history, perhaps because they are commonplace. By nature, humans tend to overlook the ordinary. Yet buildings serve as the most tangible evidence of a society's history and its perception of beauty.

The city and county of Hillsdale, like many American communities, encapsulate the country’s changing tastes in architecture. Hillsdale County was formed from the Michigan Territory in 1829 and organized in 1835; Jonesville, platted in 1830, functioned as the first county seat, or center of government. (1) In 1843, this government chose to relocate to Hillsdale, a town slightly closer than Jonesville to the county’s center. In both locales, interesting buildings abound.

The northeasterners — natives of New York state, mostly — who flocked to Michigan’s Lower Peninsula in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, constructed primarily braced frame (2) residences in the Greek Revival style, in accordance with the architectural norms of their homeland. Unlike other Midwestern states, Michigan never witnessed the development of a rich tradition of log construction (3) (though log structures were, and remain, common in the forested counties of the Upper Peninsula, a region of Scandinavian settlement), and the state was populated too late to enjoy the formal architecture of the Federal period (approximately 1788–1835).

Thus, Hillsdale’s architectural legacy begins in the Greek Revival era. Grecian architecture rose to prominence in America by the 1840s, inspired by Jefferson’s Palladian experiments (4) and the temples of democratic Athens, and popularized by the pattern books of Minard Lafever and Asher Benjamin. Two of Hillsdale County’s finest extant examples of the style, the William Murphy House and Munro House, stand in Jonesville. The Munro House, slightly awkward in its proportions, is the earlier of the two (reportedly the oldest structure existing in the county), having been constructed in stages between 1834 and 1840. 

Murphy built his splendid house between 1845 and 1850, though its Ionic porch was apparently appended in 1911. 

A similarly detailed Doric porch, with entasis (bulging columns) and triglyphs (grooved tablets), adorns Hillsdale College’s own Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house.

1) History of Hillsdale County, Michigan (Philadelphia: Everts & Abbott, 1879), 124.

2) “Braced frame” is synonymous with “timber frame” and “post-and-beam”; this method of framing uses heavy timbers and mortise-and-tenon joints instead of the light studding of balloon framing, which had become standard by the late 19th century.

3) Crude log buildings, intended for temporary occupation, were erected in Hillsdale County during the settlement period (an image of one appears in the Hillsdale Community Library’s Mitchell Research Center), but the region’s early residents replaced their cabins with frame homes rather than well-finished log houses. The distinction between the terms “log cabin” and “log house” is beyond the scope of this essay.

4) Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), noted Italian architect, drew inspiration from Greco-Roman models. Thomas Jefferson was an early American adherent of the Palladian school.