| Between 1830 and 1900, American farm families transformed their houses: the social and conceptual whole of 1830 gave way by 1900 to a heterogeneous collection of rooms, segregating people (by age and gender) and activities (leisure and work). This study uses 200 owner-designed farmhouse plans, collected from northeastern agricultural periodicals, to examine interrelationships between rural architecture and nineteenth-century urbanization, industrialization, and technological change. The farmhouse is treated as an artifact of material culture which reveals patterns of social interaction, family dynamics, and arrangement of work and leisure space.; The planners' shared interests in technological innovation, capitalistic and scientific agriculture, and reform of rural culture suggest for them the label "progressive farmer-designers." Women took a prominent part in design activities. Rural planners selectively combined vernacular traditions, original ideas, and pattern-book plans.; Owner-designed plans first appeared in the agricultural press in the 1830s, a period of rising interest in domesticity. Between 1830 and 1855, progressive farmhouse plans revealed a rural version of domesticity: men's and women's spheres were linked spatially and ideologically. Kitchen and field work arrangements facilitated efficient, cooperative pursuit of profits. From 1855-1885, events initiated on the farm (mechanization of field work, but not house work; dairy centralization; and a decline in status of hired farm labor) and outside the farm (the rising influence of urban culture) led to a re-assessment. The ideal of a unified workplace yielded to specialization, isolation, and reorientation of the kitchen, and to the removal of laborers from the farm home. Simultaneously, in response to growing emphasis upon child nurture, the nursery migrated away from the kitchen and "play-rooms" appeared. Throughout the century, the parlor's career illustrated an ongoing conflict between rural and urban cultural values; farmer-designers decame leaders in experimentation with alternatives to the parlor. Finally, with the introduction of children's individual bedrooms, 1880-1900, the farmhouse had evolved into a set of discrete spaces. By 1900, urbanization and professionalization (especially of architects and home economists) weakened the rural tradition of independent design. |
