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What was life like when a dozen people lived in a house not much bigger than a modern garage? When children were born at home, people were married at home and later, died, were laid out, mourned and buried at home?
This book is about how early American families lived in these old houses and the range of their lives in them - from the impossibly wealthy to the unimaginably poor, from Boston and New York to the small farms and plantations of the rural South, from trim New England villages to the raw frontier "West" of Missouri, Ohio and Illinois.
Here is the most evocative look to date of how families lived at the dawn of the republic and how their houses shaped their lives.
Old houses seem full of something glimpsed but not completely knowable - the everyday life and tangled family emotions of the past. Where We Lived takes us into these old houses and lets us hear the stories they tell.
As the author shows, houses were never just wood and brick, plaster and glass. These early houses were places not only to live but to be born, to fall ill and be cared for, and to die. Never simply neutral containers, these old houses shaped the lives of our ancestors, who in turn shaped the nation we've become.
Illustrated with the starkly beautiful photographs of the Historic American Building Survey, Where We Lived guides us through the country when it was young, telling in a direct and powerful way the stories of early American families and their houses.
Where We Lived presents for the first time a marriage of eyewitness accounts of early American life with remarkable Depression-era photography. Combining images with text by gifted historian Jack Larkin, Where We Lived offers a new look into everyday life during America's early years, from the lives of slaves and paupers to those of frontiersmen and East Coast elites.
This handsome book is perfect for history lovers, homeowners, and everyone interested in the original and authentic America. Where We Lived enriches our understanding of America as it was at the beginning and shows, ultimately - though much has changed - that at heart we are the same people with the same love of home.
Like people, houses are created, live, and grow old. Like us, they eventually disappear.
In Where We Lived, these houses are our guides as we journey through the vanished landscape of our country when it was very young. Mile markers on this journey are the remarkable photographs of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), created to document the nation's early structures.
On this journey, you'll come to understand what houses meant to individuals and families in early America, from great mansions to tiny cabins: How did they work as "machines for living"? What did they signal for their owners: wealth, respectability, independence, survival, or poverty?
The narrative of our journey draws heavily on travelers' accounts, public records, community and family histories, letters and diaries, even novels and stories. It also takes note of the Direct Tax of 1798, which counted and measured houses from Maine to Georgia.
Still, Where We Lived isn't a chronology of architectural development but an exploration. Page after page, you'll move across time and places to weave together stories of regions, ways of life, houses, and families. Beginning with a look at the common features of home life - you'll understand size and scale, space, crowding, privacy, cleanliness, and everyday life of the inhabitants of these houses.
From New England to the Middle States, from the South to the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River called the West, you're treated to the earliest surviving homes of the New World to the "new" houses of the Greek Revival.
From the Introduction:
A Journey Through a Vanished Landscape.
Like people, houses are created, live, and grow old. Like us, they eventually disappear. Houses that survive to be studied, explored, and admired by distant generations should be regarded as emissaries from another time, as gateways into our past. In Where We Lived, these houses are our guides as we journey through the vanished landscape of our country when it was very young. Mile markers on this journey are the remarkable photographs of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), created to document the nation's early structures.
The Survey had its origins in a time of national crisis. It began in 1933 as a program to find meaningful work for thousands of architects and draftsmen left unemployed when the Great Depression virtually brought construction in America to a halt. From 1934 to 1940, architectural survey teams documented thousands of houses, public buildings, and other structures, dating from the early 1600s through the mid-1800s. Many of the houses they documented, weakened even then, have not survived to our time.
Working out of offices in each state, HABS surveyors produced thousands of measured drawings, short histories of many buildings, and hundreds of thousands of photographs. Reborn on a smaller scale after World War II and more recently revitalized, the Survey has recorded more than 35,000 structures, creating a little-known treasury of American culture. Most of these black-and-white images are striking and evocative; some are starkly beautiful. They offer us a path to understanding the intertwined stories of early American families and their houses. Equally important, these photographs are crucial documents linking us to the past, as important in their way as our own family photographs.
Looking at these images reminds us that houses are familiar but also often mysterious. Old houses seem full of something glimpsed but not completely knowable - the everyday life and tangled family emotions of the past. We know that houses are not just wood and brick, plaster and glass. They are the physical settings for our deepest memories and strongest attachments, and they resonate with powerful emotions. In the past, houses were places not only in which to live but also to be born, to fall ill, to be cared for, and to die. A family living together was a household - a group of people held together, contained, and shaped by their dwelling place. Houses have lost some of these roles today, but they still shape our experiences of self and family. "Home, sweet home" may not always have been sweet, but it has always been important.
Most of us remember the details of our earliest home - rooms, doorways, windows and views, furnishings - imprinted on us in childhood. Many of us could jot down a floor plan from memory. Yet few of us ever record these memories and neither did most of our early American counterparts. Such things were too ordinary to be worth describing or too intimate to be expressed. Much of what we know about life in early American houses and their surroundings comes from outside observers - travelers in a strange land who marveled, or were shocked, at what they saw and described it in letters and journals.
On this journey, we re-imagine what houses meant to individuals and families in early America, from great mansions to tiny cabins: How did they work as "machines for living"? How did houses signal for their owner's wealth, power, respectability, aspiration, comfort, independence, survival, powerlessness, poverty and bondage? What did they look like, feel like, smell like? What compelling stories do they hold, and what significance do these houses and their stories have for us today? What so strongly connects us to them and our lives to those of our ancestors who were sheltered by these old houses?
The narrative of our journey draws heavily on travelers' accounts. Our first eyewitness speaks to us from 1775 - Edward Parry, who kept a journal of his stay in Massachusetts at the very beginning of the American Revolution. It also relies on many other sources, including public records, community and family histories, letters and diaries, even novels and stories. It also takes note of a much earlier and almost forgotten Federal survey of buildings, the Direct Tax of 1798, which counted and measured houses from Maine to Georgia and today remains the only census of American houses ever taken.
Still, our story isn't a chronology of architectural development but an exploration. It moves across time and places to weave together stories of regions, ways of life, houses, and families. It begins with a look at the common features of home life - size and scale, space, crowding, privacy, cleanliness, everyday life.
Our journey follows the path taken by many early visitors to America: It starts in New England, moves to the Middle States, then to the South, and finally to what was the West - between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River, the territories and new states.
Although the houses you see range from the earliest surviving homes of the New World to the "new" houses of the Greek Revival, the period we visit is that of the very young United States. It includes houses built as late as the early 1840s but goes no further. By that time, a radically new way of building houses - balloon framing - was emerging, a technology that would sweep traditional modes of construction. So here we draw the line.
Also at that time, the transforming power of the railroad and the factory and the growth of great cities were already at work to create a very different society. Its houses and families would be the subject of another book and another journey of exploration.
Contents:
Chapter 1: How We Lived. Chapter 2: New England. Chapter 3: The Middle States. Chapter 4: The South. Chapter 5: The West. Resources.
About the Author
Jack Larkin is museum scholar and chief historian at Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Massachussetts, affiliate professor of history at Clark University in nearby Worcester, and a frequent consultant and lecturer for museums and historical organizations. A Chicago native and graduate of Harvard College and Brandeis University, Larkin is author of The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840, which was a Distinguished Finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction in 1989. |
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