Thematic Essays

Washington, D.C., is well known for its European heritage, going all the way back to Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s development of the 1791 plan of the city, which was modeled after Paris: the plan superimposed a grid along with integrated avenues, plazas, and designated sites for major federal buildings. Yet the construction and in some cases the design of scores of Washington’s landmarks was accomplished not only by European but also by African American builders and architects. Enslaved workers contributed to the erection of notable structures, including the White House and the U.S. Capitol. When the Black…

Milwaukee dominated America’s beer-brewing industry in the nineteenth century. In large part this dominance was due to the city’s extensive German community. Among the great names of American brewing are Pabst, Schlitz, and Blatz. All three companies built sprawling complexes that each covered several of Milwaukee’s city blocks. These complexes comprised several inter-connected buildings that housed different stages of the brewing process from grain stores to malt houses, brewhouses, bottling works, shipping warehouses, and stables. They also included company office buildings, tap rooms, and beer gardens, where visitors could sample the wares in a decorative, Teutonic setting.

Around 1900 the…

“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”[1] In her 2016 speech at the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama deployed this documented fact about the construction of the White House (begun 1792) as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize her belief in the progress and potential of the United States. When the line went viral, predictably, it became fodder for pundits, but it also offered a profound civics lesson for anyone who considered the full import of the First Lady’s words. She was not only acknowledging the contributions of enslaved laborers and craftsmen to this particular building-cum-icon,…

Roadside architecture, which had its heyday from World War II until the late 1960s, has been celebrated for both its enterprising spirit and for its lively approach to architectural form. At the height of their popularity, roadside motels, diners, and gas stations sought to catch the weary driver’s eye as they leapt into view with visual gimmicks and unexpected profiles, such as that of the Wigwam Motel on Route 66 in Holbrook, Arizona. Restaurants, service stations, and motels that were oriented to automobile travelers proliferated in the 1950s, often located along popular travel corridors like Route 66, and…

The construction of a 469-mile-long linear park, linking Shenandoah National Park and its Skyline Drive to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, was proposed in the early 1930s. Starting at the southern end of the Skyline Drive in Rockfish Gap near Waynesboro and passing through twelve Virginia counties, the commonwealth's section of the parkway follows the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the North Carolina line.

Between 1934 and 1935, the engineers of the Bureau of Public Roads and the landscape architects of the National Park Service located most of the parkway's curving roads so that construction could begin in 1935. Landscape architect Stanley Abbott, the parkway's primary designer,…

Gifted by a sense of spatial design, fascinated by construction, and motivated by architecture’s power to affect the human spirit, Theodate Pope Riddle is among the first generation of American women to develop professional identities in the field of architecture. Uncomfortable with participating in the few university architecture programs or office internships then available to women, but encouraged by her family, she forged an independent path to realize her talents. She learned by doing, explored by seeing, and understood by intense personal study. These time-honored components of lifelong intellectual inquiry inspired and sustained her creative energy. The result is a small but distinctive body of work that ranges from designing one…

Brandywine Creek had long afforded Wilmingtonians with recreation: walks, picnics, bathing, skating. A proposal for the city to buy land on its banks was rejected in a town meeting in 1865. Three years later, the threat of houses going up between Wilmington and Brandywine Cemetery (WL48) and Rattlesnake Run upstream led to an outcry. A committee was established in 1868–1869 and recommended a Brandywine Park, the fast-flowing rocky river being a scenic amenity few other American cities could boast. Still, nothing was done.

In 1881, textile magnate William P. Bancroft complained that Wilmington was growing fast, with scarcely any provision for parks or open spaces…

The three blocks of Brattleboro's Main Street between Whetstone Brook and High Street exhibit a coherence of scale and strength of urban character remarkable for so small a community. Exemplary of Vermont's mid-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century downtowns, it is among the best preserved, although Burlington, Rutland, Barre, Montpelier, St. Albans, and Fair Haven are also noteworthy. Brattleboro's three-to four-story buildings form a catalogue of commercial styles that span more than a century of construction. Built in a sequence determined largely by fires and floods, and despite alterations to ground-floor storefronts, these buildings clearly speak of the periods in which they were built. The earliest, at numbers 51, 85–87, 89–93,…

The term Brutalism has served as a rallying cry, a stylistic label, and an epithet. The term originated in the early 1950s in England, where the phrase “New Brutalism” was associated with the architectural attitude of a younger generation of architects, particularly Alison and Peter Smithson. In Britain, as the Smithsons argued, this usage related to an ethical stance of a younger generation of architects that sought to align architecture to hard truths about the social reality of postwar Britain. After spreading quickly to the United States, the “new” was dropped and the term Brutalism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a style label for a set of late Modernist buildings that emphasized monumental, sculptural forms with surfaces of…

In many American cities, the most hated structure is the central, downtown telephone building. Public surveys and opinion pieces in New York, Philadelphia, and Houston have all identified the telephone building as the “ugliest” in town and, in the case of Fort Worth, Texas, the building most people would like to see torn down.[1] In each of these cases, the telephone building is a hulking, windowless box (often topped by a defunct satellite dish) that gracelessly occupies an entire city block. Some date to the 1960s and 1970s, a period associated with Brutalism, but others are heavily altered buildings from the 1910s and 1920s, transformed by multiple additions and blocked-up…

The expansion of Burlington's post–Civil War lumber industry fueled a residential building boom, aided by the construction of a waterworks that brought municipal water to the hill district, the completion of the street grid made possible by the filling of the ravine, and the subdivision of large estates like that of Lawrence Barnes. As a result, new neighborhoods east and southeast of downtown display the most extensive, varied, and exuberant collection of Queen Anne houses to be found in Vermont.

Middle-class houses were built primarily of wood, exhibiting the finished products of Burlington's mills with their profusion of imbricated shingles, turned posts, verandas,…

Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and extending into the early nineteenth century, the Spanish crown strategically consolidated its power in its Nueva España colony of Alta California by allowing Catholic priests to establish mission churches. By 1823, twenty-one missions dotted the California coastline from San Diego to Sonoma. Along with the presidio fort and pueblo town, the mission was the third institution that had proven successful as a colonizing method in other Spanish dominions including Mexico and South America. Manned by Franciscan priests, the aim of the missions was to spread Christianity to Indigenous populations, thereby molding obeisant, Europeanized citizens loyal to Spain. The missions’ lasting influence on the…

The Spanish colonial missions in the American Southwest, built in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, have left a lasting impression on the American cultural landscape and psyche. As a colonial project, they subjugated Indigenous populations and coalesced Spain’s control over vast territory. As conurbations, they now form the nucleus of many modern cities. In terms of their built forms, they were notably the inspiration for the Mission Revival style, an architectural and decorative arts idiom that emerged in the late nineteenth century. To understand the genesis of this historicist style, however, one must look at the twenty-one California missions erected between 1769 and 1823 that spanned the coast from modern-day San Diego…

Lower Delmarva was a center of early Methodism—21 percent of its adults were Methodist by 1810—and western Sussex County still has many rural churches. A survey in 1976 found two score of them in a twenty-mile radius of Laurel, mostly Methodist. Camp meetings were widespread, too, this being a favorite recruiting device. Historically there were around forty on the peninsula, including at least fifteen in Sussex County, the first of which was Zoar Camp between Millsboro and Harbeson, about eighty-five years old when it closed in 1919.

At all the camps, tents of brushwood or, more elaborately, frame cottages (also called tents) encircled the preaching arena or tabernacle, where the itinerant preacher hoarsely harangued a sweat…

So potently does the canal divide Delaware into northern and southern cultural zones, it is sometimes hard to recall that it is a man-made feature. Eighteenth-century Philadelphians clamored for such a transpeninsular waterway, as it would open them to western markets via the Susquehanna River, and one was abortively begun by Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1804. In summer 1822, Latrobe's former pupil William Strickland surveyed two possible routes, Latrobe's and one farther south. After furious debate, the canal company chose the latter, to the surprise of many, and it was dug across Eastern Shore Maryland and Delaware in 1824–1829 (Benjamin Wright and John Randel Jr., engineers).

A force of 2,600 men at a time, Irish with some…

It is no coincidence that West Virginia’s slogans, “The Mountain State,” “Almost Heaven,” “Wild Wonderful West Virginia,” and its association with the John Denver song, "Take Me Home, Country Roads," underscore the state’s identification with the land. Contributing to this indelible association is West Virginia’s state park and forest system, wherein each park averages over 3,900 acres. In a state with a population of 1.8 million, over 7.1 million in- and out-of-state sightseers visited West Virginia’s 36 state parks, 8 state forests, 5 wildlife management areas, and 2 river trails in 2015. Traveling along West Virginia’s country roads, Hawks Nest State Park (established 1935) beckons with its picnic amenities; its forested wilderness…

In 2010 the last remaining house on Holland Island off the coast of southern Dorchester County was subsumed by the Chesapeake Bay. The former residents left long ago in 1918 when erosion and rising water levels forced the once thriving town of watermen and their families to move to the mainland. The vulnerability of the Delmarva peninsula, which has been slowly sinking since the last Ice Age, makes it a startling early warning case study in climate change sea-level rise. Scientific data indicates that troublesome flooding dismissed by some as the natural ebb and flow of water levels portends coming problems for settlement in low-lying coastal areas. Where previously it took 1,000 years for the Bay’s water levels to rise three feet, they…

Cobblestone buildings are rare in the United States. They mostly occur in areas near bands of glacial moraine, where retreating glaciers left behind large cobbles. Migrant masons from upstate New York brought the technique to southern Wisconsin in the 1840s. They laid stones of various sizes and shapes in a thick matrix of mortar to clad walls, creating delightfully colorful and richly textured surfaces.

The largest concentration of these buildings in Wisconsin is in Racine County. Pliny Perkins came from Oneida County, New York, to Burlington and built a multicolored cobblestone house in c. 1845. The V-shaped joints between the cobbles cause the stones to…

The county courthouse set in its town square is the centerpiece of Texas architecture and urbanism. The square with its courthouse is the spatial, symbolic, and often economic focus of the community.

Town planning in Texas reflects its landscape and the backgrounds of its colonizers. The generally level topography over most of the state presented no natural barriers to an almost universal application of the Greco-Roman grid to settlement layout. This classical model entered Texas first with the Spanish and later with Anglo immigrants. The Law of the Indies, established by Spain's Phillip II in 1573, stipulated colonial towns to be planned as a grid of square blocks with an open plaza in the center surrounded by blocks dedicated…

Tobacco and Danville grew together. By the mid-nineteenth century, the thin, marginally fertile sandy soil in the counties around Danville, along with an improved flue-curing method, produced the highly valued bright-leaf tobacco. In 1858, Thomas D. Neal inaugurated the “Danville System” of open warehouse tobacco auctions, which allowed buyers to inspect and bid on each pile of tobacco, as opposed to the old system of purchasing based on a sample from tobacco already packed in closed hogsheads. The new system spread like wildfire and helped make Danville a major tobacco marketing center. Even more important was the rapid development in the 1870s and early 1880s of the plug and twist chewing tobacco industry. Then in the 1890s…

According to Winterthur Museum historian Margaret Lidz, Delaware's Chateau Country resembles enclaves of the ultra-rich on the Gold Coast of Long Island, New York, and the Main Line grand estates outside Philadelphia, but with differences: a greater physical scale and pervasive Francophilia. Even the railroad stations received French names in honor of the du Ponts' Old World origins: Montchanin, Cossart, and Granogue.

The landscape of northern Christiana Hundred preserves the distinctive impress of the country estate, a phenomenon that reached its peak in 1910–1940. These estates, Lidz notes, showed common characteristics. They were frequently 500 acres or more, embracing diversified agricultural endeavors that were managed…

T. Coleman du Pont will always be remembered for his highway (U.S. 13 and 113) that carries traffic ninety-seven miles north–south through Delaware. In 1908, looking for some contribution to make to the state, he considered a school, hospital, or fountain before deciding on a road to help farmers. “I will build a monument a hundred miles high and lay it on the ground,” he is supposed to have said.

A builder of street railways in several cities, du Pont was a Good Roads advocate in the visionary National Highway Association, which pushed for 50,000 miles of paved Federal arteries. Du Pont saw in Delaware a chance to jumpstart the process, proposing to fund the ribbon of concrete himself, an extraordinary contribution to a state…

Construction materials are often the supporting actors in architectural history, but at times they take the leading role. One such example is log, which has transcended the humble role of construction material to become part of the American national mythology, entwined in the identity of folk heroes and the origin story of a president. Its own American origin story is contentious and has been much studied by architectural historians. Earth as a building material, on the other hand, with the exception of adobe, has earned little recognition in the United States, particularly its use in combination with wooden framing. Existing studies of earth-and-timber buildings in the United States tend to focus on isolated examples rather than…

American architect Elizabeth Roberts has come to be known as a master of the Brooklyn brownstone. Trained in both architecture and historic preservation, Roberts has made a name for herself by breathing new life into New York City’s nineteenth-century town houses, restoring eighteenth-century country houses, and constructing modern dwellings from the ground up. In a field where only seventeen percent of registered architects are women, Roberts has sustained a multi-decade career developing spaces for New York creatives and elite.

Roberts’s firm, Elizabeth Roberts Architects (also referred to as ERA), is an architecture and design studio based in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. ERA is known for highlighting original and…

Buildings and landscapes molded by diverse cultural groups are among the richest parts of North Dakota’s heritage. Over hundreds of years, Native American population groups developed sustainable strategies for living in the harsh context of the northern Great Plains. Domed earthlodges and agricultural landscapes synthesized by the Mandan and Hidatsa on the Missouri River bottomlands embody a remarkable reconciliation of culture and context. Little evidence remains of the place-making of Assiniboine or Cree people in the northeastern parts of the state, but their contacts with French and Métis cultures helped shape the way the land was occupied. The architecture and mobility of the Lakota Sioux Nation were suited to actively resisting…

Surrounding Ryegate Corner is the “Nelson Family Farm Neighborhood” developed by Scottish immigrants who settled the area during the eighteenth century. John Gray arrived in May 1774, built a log cabin on the hill now north of what the locals call the Corners, and spent the next year working in Newbury to buy his land. Five months later William Nelson, a primary investor in the Scots American Company of Farmers which organized Scottish immigrants to purchase land in North America, arrived and constructed his log cabin southeast of Gray's. Hugh Gardner arrived in 1784 after purchasing land through the company and he settled southwest of Nelson and Gray. He married Nelson's daughter in 1791, and their daughter married…

Since no standards existed in the mid-nineteenth century for military buildings for frontier forts and officers were not educated in planning at military schools, commanders drew upon their knowledge of traditional military hierarchies and organization and their memories of forts where they had previously served. As a result, frontier forts in Texas were structured in nearly the exact form of eastern forts, but without fortifications. Essentially, they were residential camps with only minor defensive structures and can more accurately be called cantonments.Almost all the forts were organized around a square…

The frontier forts the U.S. Army built in Texas between 1849 and 1870 helped secure the frontier for settlement and, through their architecture and planning, served as outposts of order and tradition in an unfamiliar landscape. At the end of the Mexican War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) required the United States to protect Mexico from hostile Native Americans. When the first line of posts was built along the frontier in 1849, the army not only fulfilled this duty but also encouraged new settlement by providing protection, maintaining a presence during border disputes with Mexico, and surveying land to find resources and strategic sites.…

From the moment of its founding in 1790, the District of Columbia changed its Maryland neighbors. The federal city was created from Maryland and Virginia property ten miles square on either side of the Potomac River. In 1846 the Virginia portion, including Alexandria, retroceded to the Commonwealth, leaving only the original Maryland territory to accommodate the national capital. 

During the early nineteenth century Washington grew slowly, and even the close-by Maryland jurisdictions remained economically and socially distinct. Tremendous growth during the Civil War and its aftermath changed all that, particularly following the Pendleton Act of 1883, which mandated merit-based civil service rather than political spoils. The U.S.…

A horticulturist's delight, the flora of Hawaii is as cosmopolitan as its human population. During the past two centuries, over five thousand different varieties of plants have been introduced to the Islands, providing them with the largest number of introduced plants of any geographic area on the globe. Add to this vast introduced population the fact that around 90 percent of Hawaii's approximately one thousand native species are endemic, found nowhere else in the natural world, and a landscaper has an incredibly unique and diverse palette upon which to draw. Over the years Hawaii's architects have taken full advantage of Hawaii's flora to embellish and enhance their designs, and structures such as Ala Moana Park's…

The 267,277 square miles of Texas encompass a richly varied landscape of sea coasts, rivers, forests, high plains, deserts, and mountains. The area of Texas included in this book covers much of this landscape. The flat coastal plains along the broad bend of the Gulf Coast extend nearly one hundred miles inland, sloping barely one foot per mile. From the Sabine River on the eastern border with Louisiana and westward to the Trinity River are deep pine forests, the western edge of the once great Timber Belt on the Gulf. West of the Trinity, the blackland prairies feed south across the Red River into the heartland of Central Texas, with characteristics similar to the midwestern Corn Belt.

The picturesque rocky…

In the postwar period, with industry in California booming, migrating workers flocked to the state, more than doubling the population of Los Angeles between 1940 and 1960. This rapid growth led to the expansion of the suburbs, and the once vast tracts of orange groves surrounding the city of Los Angeles became the sites of new housing developments. Simultaneously, the construction of a network of freeways, funded by the 1947 Collier-Burns Highway Act, facilitated transport around this decentralized metropolis. With economic prosperity bringing car ownership within the reach of many more households, and with the warm climate of Southern California making for perfect driving conditions, Los Angeles soon became synonymous with the…

The first large sheds for working granite in Barre and elsewhere in the United States followed a design developed in the Roman period: a one-story, wood-frame, horseshoe-shaped shed that surrounds a central derrick pole for hoisting heavy stones from ox carts onto stone sleds used to move stone into each bay of the shed. Although at one time there were more than two dozen such sheds in Barre and Montpelier, only three bays of a single shed remain on Blackwell Street, built about the time that the 1875 railroad spur from Montpelier gave Barre its first rail transport. In 1889, the E. L. Smith Company experimented with an enclosed modification of the old design on the south side of Burnham Street 23 Burnham Meadows.…

Grout, a form of poured concrete, was briefly popular as a building material in the mid-nineteenth century. The town of Milton in Rock County has a particularly large concentration of grout buildings thanks to the arrival in the 1840s of Joseph Goodrich from upstate New York. Although Goodrich did not construct all the grout buildings in Milton, he was responsible for the Milton House and the neighboring Goodrich Blacksmith Shop see RO21. Built in the 1840s, they are the oldest known surviving examples of grout construction. The Carl Gifford House see RO21 of 1868 is unusual because it is composed of grout blocks rather than Goodrich’s solid-wall technique. Several grout structures in Milton were built to store…

Scholars often subdivide the study of Native American culture into vast, multistate regions, including the Northeast, the Plains, and the Southwest, to name a few. The Southeast represents a zone bounded by present-day Texas, Missouri, Georgia, and Florida.1 This swath is expansive, and covers multiple environmental geographies: from the tropical tip of the Florida Keys to the Ozark Highlands. A quick survey of Native American building typologies from this region is equally expansive, and includes the famous earthen mounds of Cahokia in Illinois as well as the post-and-lintel chickee huts of the Seminoles in Florida. Honing…

In an effort to promote travel and tourism in the Southwest, the Santa Fe Railway contracted with the Fred Harvey Company to supply Harvey House dining services along its routes at principal watering stops. English immigrant Fred Harvey (1835–1901), who had a railroad and restaurant background, made an oral agreement in 1876 with Charlie Morse, superintendent of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, to “bring good food at reasonable prices in clean, elegant restaurants, to the traveling public throughout the Southwest.” The partnership ultimately built eight-four restaurants in Santa Fe depots, twenty-seven in Texas. The restaurants were staffed with resident managers and…

Over the last two decades, Louise Blanchard Bethune has increasingly gained recognition as the first professional female architect in America, although she may not have appreciated that kind of attention during her lifetime. She was the first woman to be admitted to the American Institute of Architects (AIA). She was the first, and appears to have been the only, female principal in an architecture firm in America during the nineteenth century. Her professionalism helped pave the way for subsequent generations of women architects including Lois Lilley Howe, Josephine Wright Chapman, Sophia Hayden, Mary Nevan Gannon, Alice Hands, Julia Morgan, and Beverly Greene. By the time Bethune died in December 1915, nearly 200 women were practicing…

Throughout the hill country of rural Vermont, there remain small town centers that have changed little since the mid-nineteenth century. Corinth Center is an unspoiled, representative example that features architectural icons of rural community—tavern, town house, church, and cemetery clustered around a triangular green.

One year after Corinth's charter of 1764, fifteen settlers had made their way up the Native American trail along Waits River to the town, and by the end of the Revolution several hundred had arrived. As in most towns, residences were widely scattered and only slowly did villages coalesce. In 1789, the town's residents voted to purchase a “Publick Lot” and fence the “Buring yeard” atop a hill…

The Hilton hospitality empire started in Texas. Conrad Nicholson Hilton (1887–1979) was born in San Antonio, New Mexico, and worked in his father’s general store, where rooms in the back were rented to railroad travelers. He returned to New Mexico after serving with the U.S. Army in France during World War I and decided to pursue a career in banking. In 1919, he traveled to Cisco, Texas, in pursuit of a bank purchase opportunity. The deal fell through when the seller raised the price, so Hilton checked into the forty-room Mobley Hotel for the night. The oil boom in the area was keeping the hotel busy, with rooms…

Few cities in America enjoy so distinctive an urban identity as Savannah, with its squares and broad streets, its trees and bordering marshes, and its remarkable state of preservation. Yet it is also a place marked by paradox. Founded in 1733 as an agrarian colony of equals, the city prospered greatly from industry, trade, and slavery. Its urban plan attracts worldwide attention, yet few of its buildings are famous or appear in histories of American architecture. Historically a relatively small city with a population in 2015 of about 150,000, Savannah has nonetheless played a significant role on the national stage in terms of the religious, military, agricultural, transportation, and industrial history of the country. Most recently the…

It would be hard to point to a more pervasive impact on buildings and landscapes than the two transcontinental railroads Northern Pacific and Great Northern and the multiple spur lines that speculatively platted countless towns and cities, often naming them to appeal to particular immigrant groups. Land grants were offered to railroad entrepreneurs and speculators, resulting in a checkerboard of parcels they offered for sale and supplementing the federal homesteading initiative. Bonanza farms in the Red River Valley afforded the proof that these lands could be productive. Railroad recruitment agents in European newspapers and East Coast cities aggressively marketed North Dakota settlement land. The railroad companies dropped off groups…

Humans have lived in the regions of what became the state of Texas for nearly thirteen thousand years. The earliest peoples, Paleo-Indians, were nomadic hunters and left a record in beads, grinding stones, flint points, and pictographs.

By the first century AD, a Woodland culture arose in east Texas with settled, hierarchical societies that were supported by farming, localized hunting, and trade. They made pottery and built burial and ceremonial mounds.

Before the arrival of European explorers in the sixteenth century, the lands of Texas were occupied by hundreds of groups of peoples with drastically diverse cultures, including the farming Caddo of east Texas, the seminomadic Wichita of the Red River…

Breaking with the city grid, the sinuous Kentmere Parkway was meant to connect the two new parks, Brandywine and Rockford. William P. Bancroft, who donated the latter, designed a 150-foot-wide parkway in 1889 and sent the blueprint to John C. Olmsted in Boston, who corrected it with a more graceful curve. The aging master Frederick Law Olmsted visited Wilmington in December 1892 to meet with William Canby of the Park Commissioners to discuss the delays in implementation of the scheme—owing, he thought, to mutual misunderstanding. In driving over the parkway, Olmsted saw that his plans had been deviated from, the Wilmington parties having proceeded without him in 1891. Impatient with continuing slow response from the Olmsteds, the park…

West Virginians have one of the highest rates of home ownership in the United States. One way they have achieved this is by purchasing kit homes; pre-cut, prefabricated, and manufactured houses; and mobile homes. In fact, according to the West Virginia Manufactured Housing Association, between 1961 and 2001, 63 percent of all new dwellings were manufactured or factory-built housing. The history of such housing in the state dates to the early twentieth century. There are still examples of Sears (1908–1940), Montgomery Ward (1909–1932), Aladdin (1904–1958), and Gordon Van Tine (1912–1947) kit homes throughout the state, some bought by individuals and some by coal, lumber, and other companies to meet housing needs in the first half of the…

Books, catalogs, and magazines influenced the design of many distinctive Texas houses built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Architects had published books for centuries in order to build their reputations and entice clients. Early in the nineteenth century, skilled workmen brought carpenters’ manuals such as Asher Benjamin’s The Country Builder’s Assistant (1797) and Owen Biddle’s Young Carpenter’s Assistant (1805), spreading current styles into the new state. The use of catalogs and periodicals to sell plans by mail proliferated from the mid-nineteenth century, with hundreds of issues marketing house…

Situated along the Chesapeake Bay, the world’s largest estuary, Marylanders could not help but embrace boatbuilding for both commercial and recreational purposes. Responding to the singular conditions of the Chesapeake Bay and the requirements of the fishing, crabbing, and oystering industries, Maryland boatbuilders created such distinctive sailing vessels as the log canoe, brogan, bugeye, pungey, crabbing skiff, two- and three-sail bateaux, and the fishing shanty. Also originating from broadly recognized forms are the Chesapeake schooner, sloop, skipjack, and the Baltimore Clipper. While Baltimore was internationally recognized for its commercial ships, many Chesapeake boats were built by watermen for their own use, adapted to allow…

Bennington retains a coherent pattern of nineteenth-century mill neighborhoods, with owners' mansions and workers' housing in close proximity to their mills. The Holden Mill (BE29) is accompanied by row houses and duplexes for workers that were built on both sides of Benmont Avenue over a forty-year period and by a two-story, brick, Italianate mill store c. 1865 at the corner of Benmont Avenue and River Street.

A series of showpiece owners' houses on Pleasant Street back up to their pottery works along the Walloomsac River, including the Greek Revival Norton houses (BE35,…

America’s fascination with mimetic architecture began with an elephant. In 1881, James Lafferty built a colossal tin-plated pachyderm topped by a canopied howdah to attract customers to his seaside real estate venture in Margate, New Jersey. Lafferty took prospective clients up to the howdah to view land parcels and used the belly of the beast for his business offices. Because it is in the shape of an animal, Lafferty’s Elephant Bazaar (now known as Lucy the Elephant) is an example of zoomorphic architecture, but more broadly, it is an example of novelty architecture or what architectural historian David Gebhard labelled “programmatic architecture”: a building type that uses the mimetic, sculptural form of the structure to communicate…

As with states farther south, architectural modernism took only shallow root in Delaware and was usually diluted with historicizing motifs. But as early as the 1930s, a few architects embraced it enthusiastically. Victorine du Pont met her husband and partner Samuel Homsey in an architect's office in Boston. After their practice was wiped out in the Great Depression, they settled in Wilmington and undertook a career that was both historicizing (Mount Cuba, 1935–1937 [MC4], which emulated Colonial Williamsburg) and progressive (their starkly modernist, and now demolished, Henry B. Robertson House in Centreville of 1936 was depicted in Architectural Forum in…

Ruth Reynolds Freeman, the first woman architect in Vermont, was known for her significant contributions to modernism and, together with her partners, introduced a modernist aesthetic to the state. When she graduated from the College of Architecture at Cornell University in 1936, she was only the eighth woman to earn a degree in the program’s 65 years of existence. As a founding partner and lead designer of the firm Freeman, French, Freeman, based in Burlington, Vermont, she established a successful architectural career that lasted more than three decades until her death in 1969.

Born on April 13, 1913, Ruth Millicent Reynolds was raised in Brainardsville, New York, and attended Franklin Academy in Malone, New York. Upon…