Now, Listen To A Story…

You think we’re going backward in time, but we aren’t. We showed you Dutch Colonial on the Hudson River, a style going well back into the 1600s, and over and done with except revivals by 1840 or so. Why go back one step short of Fred and Wilma and show me houses made from hewn logs?

Because someone was living in that log house when my own father was standing on the street corner in Boston selling newspapers as a boy, living in a 1920s style triple decker. And they didn’t even build that log house until about 1876.

It’s the Ehpraim Bales house near Gatlinsburg Tennessee. Ephraim bought the property and lived there from 1887 until 1930. Here’s the plan:
I love the term for the open area under the roof between the two structures: The dog trot. I’ve heard people use this term right to this very day for what many people now call a “breezeway.” The log home has a problem, and this shows it. You can’t really expand it, because you need the four corners of any room to hold it together. All you can do is add more rectangles, called pens, and join them up as best you can.

They were smart, those sons of nature that built log homes, and made the sills from rot-proof oak timbers. The rest of the boles and poles are all sorts of stuff: poplar, pine, chestnut. The frames around the doors and window openings are held onto the fabric of the place with oak pegs pounded home. Two rooms; the kitchen, and everything else.

This one is from North Carolina:
Here’s the chimney end. It’s what’s generally called wattle and daub construction. Sticks are woven together and smeared with clay. I bet that chimney caught on fire as often as whatever they burned on the hearth. That’s why it’s exposed on the end, so you could go outside and put it out. The roof shelters it a bit, to keep the rain from washing all the clay away.
Here’s one near South Union Township, Pennsylvania; the Gaddis House:

The tires and the plaque are a nice touch. Not entirely inhospitable inside, even though it’s falling to pieces while being photographed:

The joinery’s pretty good, too, for such rough work with rudimentary tools. It’s not really a log cabin. A log cabin is just notched logs, with the boles left round. It’s devilishly hard to fill the interstices. A log house has the treetrunks hewn square:You can seal it up pretty well that way. People still build them. One of the most incongruous sights in my neighboring town is a three story seaside snouthouse log home, built less than a decade ago. Some people will settle for nothing else than treetrunks for horizontal wallpaper to this very day.

Here’s the corner of the Gaddis House.
Here’s my favorite log house, just for the story of it:

If you were an NCO in the Cavalry in 1877, at Fort Missoula, Montana, here’s where you’d be living. President Grant sent the cavalry to annoy the local Indian tribe, and be annoyed in their turn. That’s not the good part. In 1896, a certain Lieutenant James Ross decided that the cavalry would be much improved if it was on bicycles instead of horses. He started the 25th Infantry Bicycle Troop, which encompassed him and 23 African-American soldiers, and they rode bicycles through the grass and mud all the way to St Louis.

When he got there, someone pointed out to him that Gottlieb Daimler had invented a four wheel horseless carriage in 1887.

I can imagine Lt. Ross reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and being captivated by Twain’s depiction of the Knights of the Round Table going into battle on the bicycles supplied to them by the time traveling hero of the book, Hank Morgan. It was published in 1889, so the dates make sense. I guess it didn’t dawn on Lt. Ross that Twain was making fun of the knights, not the horses.

If there is a God, someone will contact me and give me an advance to write the book, play, television series and three motion pictures I could get out of the story of 23 African-American cavalrymen, and the Lieutenant that loved bicycles, riding all the way from Missoula, Montana to Saint Louis, Missouri in 1896.

They didn’t have to fight the plains Indians. I imagine they all died laughing when the spectacle rolled by.
How I love America. How can you not?

Close The Window. Hansel Ain’t Coming.

We need to go back before we move on to Victorians. We forgot some people. The Dutch, for instance.

It’s intensely regional, of course. New York, New Jersey, a little bit of Connecticut, Delaware, and a sliver of Pennsylvania. The crowning achievement of Dutch Colonial architecture, the Gambrel roof, is everywhere now, of course, but that’s about it. And that’s Dutch Colonial Revival, not Dutch Colonial.

New Amsterdam is the original name of New York. Dutch Colonial was its urban style. It was very like what a medieval European city would have, but most of that’s gone now. The real estate was too valuable in what’s now Manhattan and surroundings to have anything too ancient. But up and down the Hudson River, out in the sticks, you can still find plenty of Dutch inspired farm houses. The whole style was gone before the Civil War started.

We used to call the style “stone enders.” Like the house in the first photo, the ends of the house were of stone or masonry of some sort, usually with wood infill walls between them. The end walls were parapeted –project higher than the roof. Unlike the postmedieval British house, instead of a big center chimney with lots of flues, the end walls had chimneys in them, usually in both ends. The roofs would be very steep, as a rule. That goes back to when roofs were not very waterproof, sometimes thatched, and so the steeper the roof, the more likely you’d be dry inside.

Here’s a signature item that’s entered the lexicon: A Dutch Door. Open just the top, and let the fragrance from the garden, but not the livestock from the garden into the house. It’s still makes a great secondary entrance door.
Here’s a gambrel roofline. Multistory Dutch Colonials are pretty rare. They were most often 1-1/2 stories, and you’d live right under the roof. British colonial houses maximized space under the roof with dormers. The knee in the roofline in the gambrel pushed the stand up space in on the second floor out towards the exterior walls all along the eave, not just in the footprint of the dormers. This one needs painting or dynamite or something:
They’d flare the roofline at the first floor eave and kick the rain away from the sidewalls and add to the picturesque look of the thing:
Steep roof? Check:

The farmhouse version. Lower roofline, rambling a bit, flared eaves, gambrel roof:

The urban version. Masonry ends, parapets, wooden infill walls. Neat as a pin is another Dutch tradition. This one in Schenectady is:

Hey look, another term for the lingua franca: The Dutch Oven. It has a secondary, ribald definition now, but people used to call a brick oven using the preheated walls to cook things slowly a Dutch Oven. A lidded cast iron slow cooking pot is the most common word usage now, but here’s what a Dutch Oven used to mean:And of all the common details of the Dutch colonial style, the one I like best is the benches flanking an entry door. What a pleasant place to shell peas or shuck corn and smell the flowers in the beds.
If you’re going to steal anything from the Dutch, steal that. And sweep it ten times a day for the whole effect.

The League Of Nations Freakshow Deluxe

Come on in, the sepulchre’s fine.

Between the period from just before the Civil War up until the”Gay Nineties,” there was a bunch of what are termed exotic revivals. They were lesser known than the other Romantic Revival house styles we mentioned earlier like Greek, Italianate, and Gothic, but they were even more odd and exuberant and weird and strange and fantastic. I call them the League Of Nations Freakshow Deluxe.

Egyptian had a little flurry. The front door on the business shown at the top of the page is in Philadelphia. The style was suited mostly to public buildings, and since most of the buildings it’s patterned after were tombs and toys for Tuts, it has a strange sort of funereal vibe. It had a bit of reignited interest around WW2, as well, when many public building in America integrated the motifs. Here’s a VA hospital in Marion, Illinois in the style. I’m sure you’ve seen some Post Offices that look like this too:
Never really caught on. Hey, how about”Oriental:”

That’s a store in Butte, Montana. Oriental in this instance basically encompasses anything east of Crete. It had lots of polychrome stuff and odd shapes all mish-mashed together. Sometimes the only vestiges of this sort of thing will be little touches like this reverse ogee window over this doorway in Pennsylvania. It’s based on the “Onion” shaped roof of the east:

Oh heck, let’s get a real onion shaped roof. Here’s one from 1891, in St Louis:

They probably would have called that “Turkish” It was a mess, and became a mess of a mess in the picture. Of course you could go Swiss:

The Swiss Chalet had a big re-revival later on in the twentieth century, too, as the preferred crummy second house in the mountains. You’d find them often at the seashore, too, which is as visually disturbing as licking stamps in a sort of Imhotep’s Post Office Tomb ever was.

These places could get plenty palatial. Look at this magnificent dustcatcher, Painter Frederic Church’s house on the Hudson. He called it Olana:

He referred to it as “Persian,” but that doesn’t really do it justice. The vernacular of the period would have termed it “Moorish.” It’s everything thrown at the Oriental wall, and it all seemed to stick. The carpets don’t fly, but they look like they ought to.

The same Architect that did a lot of the Marble Palaces for magnates in Newport, Rhode Island, Richard Morris Hunt, signed the plans, but it’s really Church’s doodling and tinkering writ large. The decoration is so dense as to look borderline insane to the modern eye. How would you like to eat in the dining room, made “cozy” with a fire in this fireplace:

Church was born rich, made a lot of money from his art, and still almost bankrupted himself building his house. How very American the Moorish style cottage is.

The Sippican Hot Club

It’s Sunday. Birds are singing. Sun’s shining. No architecture today. Something light, please.

Let’s have music. Something pleasant, but not puerile. Hey, how about some hot jazz from Django Reinhardt, everybody’s favorite zingari, and probably your favorite Belgian, too:

Django’s left hand was burned badly when he was a young man, and he can only use the last two fingers as a sort of blunt instrument for barre chords. It’s enough, ain’t it?

Django is a rare thing in any walk of life. He was an originator of his own style. It’s like Hemingway sort of making up his own method of writing. There’s innovation there, and originality.

Like most people that do original things, it is possible for other people to lovingly imitate them, and you can notice right away the resemblance. It doesn’t detract from it that it’s an homage.Besides, no man makes up his entire persona from whole cloth. The truly original among us just seem to distill all the things that catch their fancy down to such a fine elixir that you can’t really recognize it as an aggregation any more.

Is there any doubt who Joscho Stephan is playing like? I didn’t think so. And it doesn’t make it any less jawdropping a performance for being an imitation, does it?

American Gothic

The Bowen House in Woodstock Connecticut, could be the supreme example of American Gothic Revival Architecture.

I don’t know; I’m like a little kid, or a crow, and can easily be distracted by something shiny. If day after tomorrow you discover me writing

Fred McGillicuddy’s pigsty in West Treestump Vermont is the supreme example of American Gothic Revival Architecture

just smile and acknowledge it for what it is — a form of enthusiasm conjoined to a disorderly mind.

But it’s awesome, ain’t it?
Hey look, there’s Patsy’s port cochere. Please note that the roof shields only the persons riding in the carriage. The man driving would have to get off his perch and get rained on to walk around the coach and open the door for the swells that were visiting Mr. Bowen. My own relatives were coachman and cook for a similarly wealthy family from Boston in the 1800s. These houses are museums for the amusement of the descendants of the servants now. I love America.

It’s awesome inside, too:
Is that a Sippican Cottage Furniture catalog I see on the hall table there? Nice place to look it over. I imagine the internet connection’s a little slow. It really was a series of tubes back then, and only went from the bridge to the engine room. The stairwell is handsome too:
The furniture is appropriate for the house, which is rare. Usually the last occupants of any notable house strip the place bare before they turn the place over to some foundation or another to get out of paying taxes and painting these places. You can visit the mansions in Newport, and half of them look like Minnie Pearl was the decorator.

The heavy oak furniture and the densely printed wallpapers are perfect. The white marble tops on some of the tables were very common.


This is one of the best things in the house. That’s an oriel window. An oriel window is a window on an upper story that is built into its own projecting bay. What a lovely place to sit. And look on the right there. That dresser is the real item: Cottage Furniture:
In a way, I’m a terrible fraud. I have a business with Cottage Furniture right in the name, and I really technically don’t make cottage furniture. The original term referred to a kind of inexpensive furniture, which was painted, or painted to look like a sort of stylized woodgrain. That dresser is the real thing. Real cottage furniture is fairly rare now because it mostly fell all to pieces. I capture the essence of the concept if not the precise details of it, I hope. The falling to pieces part we can all do without.

Don’t look at this doorknob:I told you not to look at the doorknob, but you couldn’t help yourself, could you? It’s interesting, but it’s the door that’s really interesting. It’s fake.

Faux, actually. It’s painted to mimic the look of oak. Really well done too. Faux Bois, it’s called. I used to do that for a living, and it’s hard to do convincingly. It’s not really considered ersatz. The interior millwork was made of pine (they’d call it deal, back then) or poplar or some other inexpensive, easily worked wood. They’d prime it, (sugar of lead, anyone?) then paint it a sort of dull, yellow color. A slow-drying glaze would be applied, and a series of unusual brushes and combs would be dragged through the glaze to give the appearance of the desired wood. Those silvering grains were probably done with a finger wrapped in a rag, nothing more. The whole thing would get a sort of varnish stain to get the right color overall. Intact, such painted millwork is often more valuable than if it was real. Hollywood set painters are about the last place on earth where anyone’s any good at this. Everybody I’ve seen try it out in the general population makes a dog’s breakfast of it.

And of course, as promised, ladies and gentlemen, your typical Gothic Revival bowling alley. Don’t laugh, Playstations were hard to come by back then.

The place is open to the public, and you can rent it out if you’re feeling like feeling like a Gatsby for an afternoon. They don’t call it the Bowen House though, it’s called Roseland Cottage.

And by the way, it isn’t in black and white, either: