Historic Architecture
(excerpt)
By Julie Riesenweber

Kentucky's historic architecture tells stories about the past much like those written by historians or told by family and neighbors. Buildings and structures stand in every town and along every country road to provide an immediate sense of the past. The history, made up of people's stories can be influenced by poor memory or personal point of view. But buildings represent the past directly, providing historical information without human opinions.

Many of history's stories relate great achievements because people tend to write down and tell the most remarkable events. Likewise, some architectural studies focus on outstanding buildings. This "great and few" approach groups structures like Liberty Hall and the Old State Capitol in Frankfort into architectural styles and asks how recognized architects influence one another. Although great buildings are part of our past, they make up only a small portion of our historic architecture. Many more ordinary buildings remain to tell about the everyday lives of most past Kentuckians.

Few of the buildings in the state's first white European settlements survive. The earliest standing structures date to the 1790s, when people left fortifications to establish farms and towns. Much of the architecture built in Kentucky at this time was log, and, although settlers constructed all kinds of buildings from log, those still standing are dwellings.

The first dwellings were log cabins containing round logs, wooden plank roofs weighted with poles or stones, dirt or split-log floors, and few window openings. Like forts, these cabins were meant to be temporary. People soon replaced them with well-built and tightly sealed log houses with plank floors, wood shingle roofs, plastered interior walls and weatherboards to protect chinking between logs from moisture.

Kentuckians used familiar methods of construction to build these houses, joining squared logs into standard forms with interlocking notches cut into logs' ends. The basic units of log dwellings were pens or rooms that were either square or rectangular in shape. Rectangular pen houses often had a board partition dividing the interior ground floor space into two rooms of unequal size called hall and parlor.

The floor plans based upon these basic square and rectangular units have a long history. People in the British Isles constructed dwellings with similar sized rooms arranged in the same plans during the 1600s and 1700s. While most English colonists built American versions of these familiar forms from heavy frame, people from Sweden, Finland, or German-speaking countries brought the idea of log construction to the New World. Americans blended English house forms and log construction, building log houses in large numbers as they moved westward from the eastern seaboard.

Kentuckians enlarged small square and rectangular pen houses by adding units to create floor plans with more than one pen, such as the double-pen, saddlebag, and dogtrot floor plans. They sometimes used wood frame or other materials like stone or brick to build these additions. Rather than enlarging their houses with additions, some Kentuckians constructed such multi-unit plans in a single effort.

While we often think of log houses as crude dwellings connected with the state's settlement, most of those still standing in Kentucky were well built and finely finished. Prosperous landowners often chose log for constructing their two-room, two-story houses and installed elaborate woodwork and other ornamental details. Log buildings went up as late as 1870 across the state and until the 1930s in some parts of eastern Kentucky. Many of these later log dwellings have the same types of corner notching and the same floor plans as log houses built before 1820.

Other well-to-do settlers chose to live in houses built from limestone. Most of the state's stone buildings date between 1785 and 1835 and are found in central Kentucky, where this material was abundant. To construct a stone wall, a mason laid two rows of carefully shaped stones about a foot apart, fitting them closely together. He then placed other stones lengthwise over both rows to tie them together with mortar. This "dry stone" method came from Ireland or Scotland and can also be seen in Kentucky's many rock fences, although these were not common until about 1840.

Buildings constructed in Kentucky before 1820 also were made of brick and wood frame. Brick began to be used during the 1790s and replaced stone as the favorite masonry building material about 1820. Like stone, brick construction required a mason's skills and was thus expensive compared to log: only the wealthiest Kentuckians could afford the labor costs involved in making and laying brick. The brick houses surviving today represent the largest and most elaborate dwellings of their time. Kentucky's frame architecture before 1860 employed posts and beams nearly the same size as logs. This type of structure is called timberframe because of the large size of the framing elements. The timbers were joined by means of tongues shaped at the ends of vertical posts that fit into pockets cut into horizontal beams. Before the Civil War, Kentuckians preferred log over timber frame for wooden houses because log was a simpler system of construction for which most had the necessary skills and tools. They used frame more often for large buildings such as mills and barns.

Many stone, brick and frame dwellings built before 1810 have a hall/parlor plan. The majority of early Kentuckians lived in houses we would find very small, carrying out most daily activities in two ground-floor rooms. The larger hall was used for general living, eating, and working, while entertaining and perhaps sleeping took place in the smaller, more formal parlor. Most surviving Hall/parlor houses have exteriors carefully designed to disguise their unequal interior spaces. Whatever their form, many buildings constructed before 1835 have Federal ornament, which features geometric shapes, especially ovals.

Between 1780 and 1820, the wealthiest Kentuckians had separate kitchen buildings for cooking and other heavy household work like laundry and soapmaking. When present, kitchens were usually in the back yard, but most people probably did these dirty tasks outside. Kentucky's mild climate made this possible and meant that farm animals could generally do without shelter. Kentuckians rarely constructed outbuildings before 1830.

Three related house plans appeared in the state as early as the 1790s but were not widely used until about 1830. Although each of these contains a passage or hallway that usually includes a stair, two are called central passage because the hallway is located between two rooms of equal size. One central passage plan has a total of four rooms, two arranged one behind the other on each side of the passage. This type is called double-pile, central passage. Another version called single-pile, central passage is the front half of the four-room type. The single-pile from has only two rooms on the ground floor, one on each side of the hallway. A third variety is basically two-thirds of the first. Called the side-passage plan, it includes a hallway with two rooms, one behind the other, at one side of it. Side-passage houses were almost always built in towns and could occupy individual lots or be joined with common end walls to form rows.

The passage helped to solve the space problems of other house forms. It gave the house's occupants more privacy because visitors entered the passage instead of directly into a living space. With four ground- floor rooms, each opening onto the passage in the large double-pile house, plans with passages also allowed homeowners to make clear spatial separations between work activities like cooking from leisure ones like entertaining. Passages also meant that sleeping could take place in a private chamber that was never seen by people outside the household.

This separation of work and leisure and public and private activities because so desirable that, beginning in the 1830s, many owners of small houses sought ways to create the necessary extra spaces. One way that many Kentuckians did this was to build a rear wing that provided one or two additional spaces for household work, creating a three-or four-room house from a smaller one. Such a rear wing is called an ell because it was most often located to one side of and at a right angle to the house, giving the dwelling an "L" shape when viewed from above. The passage and the extra spaces provided by the ell were so popular that by 1850 the house type built more often than any other had a single-pile, central-passage main block two stories high and a rear ell either one or two stories high. Many earlier dwellings were altered during the mid-nineteenth century to conform to this ideal, which continued to be built until the 1880s.

Kentuckians also extended the idea of special spaces for various activities outside the house so that after about 1830 rural Kentuckians built farm buildings in greater variety. By 1840, almost all farmers had a springhouse for storing dairy products, a cellar for keeping fruits and vegetables, a meathouse or smokehouse for curing meat, and a log or timber-frame barn for storing hay and grains.

Another outbuilding common in antebellum Kentucky was the slave house, which took the same basic forms as the dwellings inhabited by free men. But while their owners enjoyed large central-passage houses with distinct spaces for unique activities, slaves lived in comparatively crowded conditions. Rather than building a number of individual dwellings, Kentucky slave owners preferred houses with two-room plans that could be adapted to accommodate two families or groups of single men or women in a single building. The saddlebag plan, which includes one room on each side of a central chimney, was a very popular form for slave houses. When each ground-floor room contained a front door, and the house lacked doors between the rooms on either side of the chimney, both sides of the building were independent units much like a modern duplex. Many of the small one-and two-room houses intended for slaves were hastily and poorly constructed, rarely contained woodwork, and often were not even plastered. Since the average Kentuckian owned only a few slaves, there often was no separate slave house. In such cases, bondsmen had accommodations in the second stories of outbuildings such as kitchens or in the same house but apart from their owners in attics or second-floor rooms that did not connect with the front of the house.

Beginning in the late 1830s, the Greek Revival style appeared in Kentucky architecture. This style adopted ideas for design and ornament from classical Greece and was popular after the Civil War. The Greek Revival element most popular in Kentucky and most recognizable on its buildings was the portico, an elaborate porch supported by columns. At the same time, many public buildings were constructed to look like classical temples.

The new architectural ideas of the 1830s-central-passage plans and Greek Revival ornament-soon combined to result in a different look for Kentucky's landscape. Many of the state's buildings were replaced or altered during the 1830s and 1840s because people at that time, like those today, wanted to be up-to-date. Small dwellings gained additions, became ells to center-passage units, or were torn down. Greek Revival ornament replaced unfashionable woodwork both inside and outside. By 1840, most farmhouses were two stories high and had fronts with five openings organized window-window-door-window-window. Their faces, bearing porticos and classical ornament, overlooked roads rather than streams.