Christian Sipe's Log House

Once again, Greene County provides fodder for a post — albeit a brief one.

I've known about the above abode for a few years, and I long ago included it in my list of likely log buildings. (If houses could talk, this one would holler, "Look at me! Look at my thick walls! Look at my boxy proportions! I'm log! For Pete's sake, I'm log!") Remodeling has spoiled its purity, but it remains a splendid example of early-nineteenth-century building practices in southwestern Ohio; the box cornice, rake boards, and asymmetrical facade are all traits peculiar to the period.

Yesterday, I decided to research its history. I must say, I expected to find little — perhaps the name of its owner at mid-century, and whatever information I could glean from census records and Find A Grave's ever-handy database. But I struck gold. First, I turned to an 1855 map of Greene County, which clearly labels the house with the name "N. Sipe." A quick Google Books search revealed this passage (in G.F. Robinson's 1902 History of Greene County, Ohio):

In 1856, Mr. [Noah] Sipe erected a brick house upon the old home farm, where he now resides. There was but one other house anywhere in the locality at the time the old home had been erected. The first structure was a log cabin, which was succeeded by a fine log house built when Mr. Sipe was a young lad, and is still standing, one of the mute reminders of pioneer days . . .

Eureka! Not only does Robinson mention Sipe's log house (a rarity in county histories), but he also gives a construction date (Sipe was born in 1820) and, more importantly, draws a distinction between the Sipe family's first-generation cabin and its better-finished, second-generation log house. Examples of this distinction are numerous in nineteenth-century writings, but I can't recall ever finding such a description of an extant building.

Christian Sipe (d. 1855), Noah's father and (I presume) the log house's builder, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, in 1814. Sipe spent two years with family in Clark County, Ohio, then purchased his Bath Township tract and cobbled together a cabin. Sipe spent anywhere from, say, five to ten years in this cabin, then contented himself, for the remainder of his years, with his "fine" two-story log house.

The Hartsook House and the Trustworthiness of Atlas Illustrations

In Ohio, the overwhelming majority of nineteenth-century log houses followed a simple plan — a single log pen, divided into one or two first-floor rooms and a loft, with minimal ornamentation (save, perhaps, for a mantel and the omnipresent enclosed staircase) and as many window and door openings as were absolutely necessary. Of course, homes often accreted additions, wings, and lean-tos, all of which lent a bit of variety to the architectural landscape; but, for the most part, one log house looked — to the untrained eye, at least — very much like another. But every rule has its exception, (1) and I relish finding them.

One of Ohio's more inventive variants of the single-pen log dwelling stood at the southern periphery of Greene County, in Caesar's Creek Township (2). The home belonged to James Frederick Hartsook (1831–1912) in the 1870s, and it stood, in almost unaltered condition, well into the 1970s. Donald Hutslar describes (and illustrates) it in his Architecture of Migration.

Photo by Donald Hutslar, 1971, published in The Architecture of Migration.

The house's distinctive features were numerous: overhanging plates, a centered second-floor tripartite window, a twelve-over-eight sash pattern, scalloped rake boards (barely visible in the photo above), a partly enclosed storage area adjoining the house proper, and, most notably, two front entries. Now, such paired doorways are a common sight in Ohio — particularly in regions settled by Pennsylvanians and Germans — but they tend not to adorn log buildings (no doubt because of the interior divisions they presuppose). As its fenestration suggests, the house was divided into two rooms, albeit not by the usual board or frame partition; instead, the builder opted for a central log wall. This wall, of course, terminated at the upper floor, just below the window. I'd love to know how the second floor was arranged, but, alas, Hutslar's description falls just short. I can say that the interior contained an enclosed staircase, placed against the central log wall. The six-panel doors are standard Federal-era fare.

Much to my surprise, researching the house's history was a breeze. An 1855 map of Greene County lists "E.B. Hartsook" as the property's owner. "E.B." was no doubt Elijah Benjamin Hartsook (1798–1863), father of James (mentioned above), who must have inherited the farm after Elijah's death. The Hartsooks hailed from Hagerstown, Maryland (though they seem to have tarried in eastern West Virginia), and their family farmhouse appears to have Mid-Atlantic antecedents. Attached to Elijah's Find A Grave page is this helpful note:

Eleazer United Methodist Church, 1765 E. Spring Valley-Paintersville Road — Elijah Hartsook bought land in Caesars Creek Township in 1834 to build a home. He donated a plot of land for the church and cemetery. The church was probably finished around 1846, at a cost of $600.

This corroborates nicely with Hutslar's estimated construction date of 1833. Elijah Hartsook, then, built or commissioned the house in 1833 or 1834, in a style amenable to his central-Maryland origin. There. Simple. Case closed.

Like a few dozen other Greene County landowners, James Hartsook enjoyed the honor of his residence's inclusion in the Combination Atlas–Map of Greene County, Ohio (1874). The lithographer tasked with capturing the Hartsook farm's likeness did much justice to reality (and equal injustice to perspective). The illustration faithfully reproduces all that made Hartsook's abode distinctive: its second-floor window, its overhanging plates, and even its scalloped trim.

This raises an interesting point. Instinct and cynicism inform me that I ought to treat such illustrations with skepticism. After all, citizens paid for these engravings, and what homeowner wouldn't forgive a bit of artistic license, provided that it flattered him? Evidence and experience, though, suggest that the hundreds of illustrations adorning Ohio's nineteenth-century atlases are, for the most part, accurate depictions of reality. And we architectural historians ought to study them.

1) Does the rule that every rule has an exception itself have an exception?

2) No other Ohio township name is so inconsistently spelled. Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century documents use Caesar Creek (without a possessive), whereas others add that lovely English vestigial genitive, but omit the conventional apostrophe (making Caesars Creek). Wikipedia smashes together the two words in horrifying (but oddly trendy) fashion — hence Caesarscreek. (Gesundheit!) I'd throw my support behind the one variant that seems not to appear in print: Caesar's Creek.

Another Regional Quirk: Southwestern Ohio's Conspicuous Built-In Gutters

As I've said ad nauseum, every locale has its own architectural flavor (if you will), and that flavor tends to be a function of certain circumstances — when the community happened to develop, where its inhabitants originated, and so on. Often, clusters of distinctively similar structures betray the influence of a particular builder or carpenter. Other times, though, the origin of a locally (or regionally) distinctive architectural quirk can be more difficult to trace. The "monk-bond"-brick farmhouses near Bellevue, Ohio, are one such enigma; so are the myriad southwestern-Ohio homes adorned with built-in gutters.

Gutter, John Elliott House (1802); Symmes Township, Hamilton County, Ohio. This NRHP-listed stone dwelling was built within a year of Ohio's statehood. The frieze board, cornice, and gutter likely date from mid-century.

Describing these gutters — and what differentiates them from their counterparts elsewhere — is a bit of a challenge. They're scattered widely across Ohio's southwestern counties (historically, the state's wealthiest region), from Preble and Darke (in the northwest) to Clermont and Brown (in the southeast), with the densest concentration in the Cincinnati orbit; occasionally, though, examples appear farther north. They're formed when a cornice reaches its wall's plane, then juts out horizontally, creating a distinctive "kick." As far as I can tell, they seem to be a mid-nineteenth-century innovation — most common to Italianate-era structures, but sufficiently abundant in other contexts to leave me scratching my head.

House; Eaton, Preble County, Ohio. This building's cornice is more developed than the John Elliott House's, but the integral gutter remains equally striking.

South gable, Van Ausdal House; Eaton, Preble County, Ohio.

Lest anyone think I'm inventing my assertion, I searched my database of historic rural residences; the distribution of built-in gutters is striking: 48 examples in Warren County, 17 in Butler, at least a dozen in Hamilton,* 10 in Clermont, and nine in Preble; but three in Greene and Montgomery, one in Brown, and none in Clinton and Adams.

Workers' cottages in Columbus's German Village neighborhood — well outside the integral gutter's core region of popularity. Compare the foreground home's eaves with those of its neighbors.

Now, whenever I happen upon such a localized — nay, regionalized — quirk of architecture, I begin wondering about the origin (regional or ethnic) of those who employed it. (Of course, in this case, the method seems less useful, given the great temporal gap between the element's appearance and the settlement of the region in question.) The built-in gutter seems to correlate with concentrations of New Jerseyans, who flocked to the Symmes Purchase and surrounding lands. But such gutters aren't common in Ohio's other significant region of New Jersey settlement — the southwestern portion of the U.S. Military District. And, obviously, plenty of non-New Jerseyans employed the method, too. (It appears in Columbus's German Village, for goodness' sake!)

So, why are built-in gutters concentrated in Cincinnati and bordering counties? I don't know. A bit of meticulous research — tracing particular buildings' owners' immigration and combing through other states' NRHP listings — might reveal something, but I'll leave that research for the future.

* As of October 11, 2017, I've finished only part of my Hamilton County survey.