Regionalism and the Humanities

15. Architecture Crosses Region: Building in the Grecian Style

15. Architecture Crosses Region Building in the Grecian Style patrick lee lucas Much of the work to establish a national identity for the nineteenth -century American nation was accomplished in the transAppalachian West, a region that incorporated present-day Kentucky and Tennessee; the Northwest Territory states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and parts of southern Michigan; as well as both Mississippi and Alabama, which were together sometimes referred to as the Frontier South. Social historians described this trans-Appalachian region as a place where diverse peoples occupied and transformed the landscape into a national model. Susan Gray examines how “Yankees” moved west and reconstructed familiar communal institutions and thus transferred ethnic identity to shape a new regional identity.1 Nicole Etcheson, like Gray, evaluates the presence of both “Yankees” and “Southerners” who migrated to the trans-Appalachian West and whose ideas refashioned the region as something different than regions south and east. Despite their diverse geographic origins, settlers “transported a traditional social order to a new environment and . . . progressively transformed the landscape in ways compatible with their own priorities.”2 Each of these historians suggests that civic institutions , created by diverse populations through a common vision of community within the region, actually contributed to a stronger sense of nationalism. Other historians support this position that the Architecture Crosses Region 275 West was a crossing ground for streams of settlers emigrating from the Northeast and the South, and that the West emerged as a release valve for sectional differences bubbling up as early as the first decade of the nineteenth century.3 The cultural work performed by the settlers from other regions of the nation resulted in “new forms and new values to satisfy the deep and enduring need for community,” forms and values that represented both the region of the West and the nation as a whole.4 Despite the relative isolation and provincial nature of the trans-Appalachian West landscape and its cities, communities there organized themselves in remarkably similar fashion. People often moved in family units and established the same kinds of cultural institutions (churches, organizations , clubs, etc.) as they had in the East or in Europe, while simultaneously displacing the Native Americans who had previously occupied the landscape. Most significant for purposes of this analysis, they chose to emulate Hellenistic Athens in their architecture. Though classical building forms existed both in the East and the West, the Grecian style curried more favor in the western states as a symbol for both a return to the core of ancient civilization and as a symbol for an optimistic future for the region within the national framework. Architecture simultaneously united the West with the nation in the classical mode but divided the West as a particular subset in the Grecian idiom. Grecian-style buildings gave a sense of unity that belies the diversity apparent in historical accounts that characterize the antebellum North and South as fundamentally different places. Architecture illustrates that the built environment and these regional landscapes were more similar than different. The architecture of the trans-Appalachian West demonstrates that the early republic might be best conceptualized as a unified West rather than the conventional North-South division adopted by historians to explain the Civil War. Furthermore, architecture helps demonstrate the importance of order to nineteenth-century Americans, especially in the trans-Appalachian West, a region in the midst of rapid transformation from Native American occupation to an American “wilderness” ripe for exploitation and settlement. The architecture of the antebellum Frontier South and the Old 276 pl ace is political Northwest demonstrates the cultural similarity of these two areas of the nation. West of the Appalachian Mountains, as Northerners and Southerners purchased newly available public lands and created new communities, they performed remarkably similar cultural work by relying on a common architectural style. In the construction of buildings designed to look like structures of ancient Greece, nineteenth-century Americans manufactured and perpetuated connections to the past, in order to claim cultural meanings associated with the world’s first democracy and the glories of Athens. The Grecian style imprinted idealized notions of order, gentility, nation, region, and democratic values on the nineteenth-century trans-Appalachian landscape. Grecian style defined the people of the trans-Appalachian West, their communities , their region, and their place within the nation; Grecian-style architecture also put into built form a model for both the western region and the nation...