Commonplace Classicism in a Michigan City

A few days ago, I spent an afternoon walking the streets of Hillsdale, Michigan — my adopted (and soon-to-be former) hometown. Like a great many small Midwestern cities, Hillsdale has endured its share of economic and cultural oscillations. The community, platted in the 1830s, enjoyed moderate prosperity in the nineteenth century (thanks, largely, to its status as county seat), then entered a full-fledged boom about the turn-of-the-century, when the railroad industry reached its zenith. The city suffered little in the postwar years, but more recent decades have brought stagnation (albeit stagnation of a moderate sort). Thankfully, the presence of Hillsdale College guarantees the community a modicum of vigor.

Hillsdale retains an unusually fine housing stock — a smattering of Greek Revival holdouts, a few examples of the Gothic picturesque, and a bounty of Italianates. (If my experience is any indication, Michigan cities, in general, tend to be architectural treasure troves.) A majority of the town's homes, though, date from the thirty-year period spanning the presidencies of Cleveland and Coolidge — the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s, when American cities underwent something of a building boom. Stylistically, this era was marked by a return to the classical. Already, by the 1890s, architects at the cutting edge of American design (to use a cliché) were eschewing Romanesque massiveness and ornate scrollwork for entablatures, pediments, dentils, and volutes. The turn-of-the-century popularity of classical forms is evident in Hillsdale, and evident, moreover, in the homes lining one of Hillsdale's streets.

Once upon a time, Howell Street served as Hillsdale's primary north–south thoroughfare. It formed the focal point of the city's commercial activity, constituted one border of the courthouse square, and connected the community to Ohio and points farther south. It also witnessed quite a transformation during classicism's reintroduction.

Some of Howell Street's homes only flirt with classicism. A few date from the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, when the Italianate style dominated. 99 Howell Street is a typical example—a one-and-a-half-story home of "upright-and-wing" form (so popular among the New Yorkers who dominated early Michigan), originally built in a vernacular Greek Revival–Italianate mode and updated, about 1900, with a vaguely Ionic porch. The porch's columns are disproportionately slender, and the volutes jut from the capitals at a 45-degree angle—a feature exclusive to the corner columns of Greek antecedents.

65 Howell Street — occupied, in 1894, by members of the Prideaux family — is a more developed building. An irregularly shaped frame dwelling of side-passage plan, it combines Italianate and Classical Revival details in a way that makes determining a construction date difficult. A bracket-supported cornice crowns each of the home's windows, many of which feature leaded glass. More interesting, perhaps, is the way the eaves are treated — chunky scroll brackets, pierced and paired at the corners; a divided frieze; and an abundance of smaller brackets which rather resemble classical dentils or modillions.

The house's two-door entry is sheltered by a well-proportioned porch — a porch with a full three-part entablature, small eave brackets (similar to the ones adorning the windows and roofline), and fluted columns topped by simplified Corinthian capitals. (This capital design, it seems, was inspired by the Athenian Tower of the Winds.)

Other homes in the vicinity were born in a state of classicism. In general, the earliest turn-of-the-century-era Classical Revival residences combined neoclassical ornamentation and irregular, picturesque late-Victorian forms. (The McAlesters classify such houses as the "free classic" subset of the Queen Anne style.) 93 Howell Street exemplifies this turn. In proper late-Victorian fashion, it's well-supplied with turrets and towers, but it lacks much extraneous adornment. Beyond the turret and the narrow frieze board running beneath its eaves, its only claim to a stylistic identity is its stumpy Ionic porch.

In a similar — albeit later — vein is 75 Howell Street, another balloon-frame dwelling with an Ionic porch and an asymmetrical plan. This house seems to anticipate the Craftsman movement, with its purlin-esuqe modillions and double-slope roof.

96 Howell Street is one of the neighborhood's grander Classical Revival abodes. The omnipresent Ionic columns (and pilasters) may be awkwardly scaled, but the home's irregularity, entablature, modillions, elliptical (and keystone-surrounded) attic window, and two-story porches lend it an air of respectability.

Near Howell Street's southern terminus lie a few gambrel-roofed homes. Though predominantly astylistic, they approach the classical.

By far, the crowning classical jewel in the neighborhood's crown is 147 Howell Street. I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

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.