Beauty & Convenience: Architecture and Order in the New Republic (review)

Nora Pat Small's short book, derived from her 1994 doctoral dissertation, addresses changes in architecture and landscape between 1790 and 1840, along with the intellectual debates and economic developments that influenced them. Rather than explore these themes on a national or regional basis, Small offers a community-based study of the town of Sutton in the Blackstone River Valley of central Massachusetts. Despite the tight focus, Small has much to work with, noting that the people of Sutton "reordered houses, barns, and fields in accordance with newly popular and widespread notions of beauty and convenience; they created commercial and social town centers where none had existed before; they dammed their rivers and streams and built textile mills and machine shops containing water-powered machinery" and in the process these citizens of the early republic "adapted old building forms to new uses, and even created new forms" (xiii). Furthermore, the characteristics of Sutton's architectural and landscape evolution were representative of the wider American experience, thus giving the specificity of Small's subject area a larger meaning and interest for scholars interested in architecture, landscape, and related questions in material culture. Small ends her study around 1840, a logical cutoff date because architectural forms entered a new phase, as represented by such innovations as the widespread appearance of Picturesque architecture (whether Italianate, Gothic, or some other romantic form), which rejected the simplicity of the earlier Classical Revival style for a new set of values.

Postrevolutionary New Englanders, especially those with at least middling aspirations, rebuilt much of their environment to take advantage of changing agricultural production, new industrial opportunities, and evolving perspectives on housing forms and self-identity. For instance, the two-story-with-ell Classical Revival house (inspired partly by the pattern books of individuals such as Asher Benjamin) came to dominate the rural domestic preferences in Small's study area in far larger numbers than before 1783, when modest, single-story homes had made up a greater percentage of the housing stock. Another iconic development of the period was the New England barn, which fluoresced in the 1820s. Conveniently aligned to the dwelling house and with a distinctive layout in which the drive paralleled the roof ridge, this barn form could accommodate more animals and larger crops with greater convenience than its predecessors.

One of the more interesting discussions in the book examines the pronouncements of period reformers, whose views of how rural dwellers should design their homes clashed with the people who built and lived in them. Many reformers, such as the prominent New Englander Josiah Quincy, argued that the two-story home, with its pretty Classical Revival detailing around the doors, windows, and fireplaces, was inappropriate for most farm families. They thought that this sort of larger and stylish building should be restricted to the urban environment and to the homes of the rural gentry and that its adoption by individuals of more modest means reflected a retreat from the moral soundness and independence that came with frugality. This was especially worrisome to these critics because they thought that the republic's virtues were invested with particular importance among its farmers. Thus the reformers believed that there was danger when yeomen moved beyond a desirable rectitude to take on some of the debilitating luxuries of their betters. Farmers, however, ignored these blandishments and chose to live in homes that expressed their success and that provided the comforts of greater functional specificity within the rooms that made up their houses (although we must not overstate the latter, because multiple functions still occurred in many rooms). However, most people—reformers and farmers alike—agreed that the fields, fences, yards, barns, and outbuildings of the well-ordered landscapes of the early nineteenth century formed a happy contrast to the slovenly look of the eighteenth-century environment and could be equated with sound morals and prosperity (as represented, for...