East Tennessee Cantilever Barns by Marian Moffett, Lawrence Wodehouse (review)

58 ARRIS Volume 5 1994 Two-crib, double-cantilever barn at the Tipton Homeplace, Cades Cove, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee (Marian Moffett). Marian Moffett and Lawrence Wodehouse, East Tennessee Cantilever Barns, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993, xvi + 141 pp. (appendices, notes, bibliography, index, 33 photographs, 16 maps, 16 drawings, 5 tables, charts). Continuing the established tradition of inquiry into vernacular architecture in the southeastern United States, East Tennessee Cantilever Barns investigates the origins and development of a distinctive agricultural building type.1 The cantilever barn has a remarkably stately form combining wooden frame and log construction. It is slightly top-heavy, with its generous overhangs providing shelter on two sides like the wings of a greatbird. The barn uses traditional log building techniques transported to the New World from northern Europe and developed in the Southeast at spots along the migratory routes of the early settlers. As the title of the book suggests, the study is restricted to a two-county area of East Tennessee, the only region in the country where large concentrations of cantilever barns still exist. East Tennessee Cantilever Barns makes a valuable contribution to the study of log building in the Southeast as it explores European origins, climatic responses, construction techniques, and subtlevariations of a specific building type. Research on the barns themselves is augmented by information on prolific barn builders and the communities in which they lived and worked. Family trees and individual farming practices have more than 1. For an introduction to vernacular architecture in the southeastern United States, see Howard Wight Marshall, American Folk Architecture: A Selected Bibliography (Washington, D.C., 1981); and Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens, Ga., 1986). Also important, especially to the topic of log construction, are Robert F. Ensminger, The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America (Baltimore, 1992); Terry G. Jordan, American Log Buildings: An Old World Heritage (Chapel anecdotal significance; the way the builders lived helps explain why this building type does not appear to have spread farther. Its geographic concentration is a major focus of the book and, arguably, what separates study of the cantileverbarnfrom the study ofother, more influential log building types such as the double pen house and its agricultural derivatives. Why did these barns proliferate in such a restricted part of East Tennessee? If the building worked so well in response to function, material, and climate, why was there seemingly so little interest from farmers in other southeastern states? Why, also, did it eventually fall out of favor with the farming community, and what cultural changes brought about its demise? These are some of the questions Moffett and Wodehouse set out to answer. East Tennessee Cantilever Barns is clearly set out, and the informative text is supported by photographs, drawings, maps, and charts. The main body of the text runs to only 78 pages; however, the rest of the book contains supplementary information, including barn locations, building surveys, farming records, and census data for farmers who were known to possess cantilever barns. The more one studies the appendix, the more one appreciates the depth of the research on which this book is based. The authors have succeeded in producing a serious piece of scholarship, obviously based on sound fieldwork, that remains clear in its goals, is easy to comprehend, and leaves the reader with the desire to see one of these extraordinary buildings "in the flesh." The antecedents of the cantilever barn are found in northern Europe and predateboth the southerly migration of mixed European settlers and the development of log building techniques along the Appalachian range. Moffett andWodehouse restrict their attention to those antecedents that employ the cantilever principle. Surprisingly, their research led them to Russian sources as well as to the established cultural influences of the Germans, Swiss, Scandinavians, and Scots-Irish. Here, in addition to their own work, they rely on the research of others, notably Jordan, Ensminger, Glassie, Noble, and Kniffen. The book progresses logically from the generalities of cultural diffusion to the specifics ofcantileverbarnbuilding in East Tennessee. In the introduction, the authors acknowledge their surprise at just how many wellHill , N...