Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature

Coda: Black Cabin, White House

Coda | 189 Coda Black Cabin, White House Architecture is politics by other means. —Russell L. Mahan, “Political Architecture: The Building of the President’s House” (2004) In 1891, architect George F. Barber of Knoxville, Tennessee, published his third booklet of house designs, Cottage Souvenir No. 2, A Repository of Artistic Cottage Architecture and Miscellaneous Designs. His first two booklets, produced in 1887 and 1888 while he was still practicing in DeKalb, Illinois, had been modestly successful, but Cottage Souvenir No. 2 made Barber , so to speak, a household name. Advertised nationally in high-circulation periodicals such as The Cosmopolitan (Fig. 36), Barber’s booklet attracted customers interested in his “very attractive” and “artistic dwellings” from all parts of the country, and soon, from abroad. Over the next twenty years, thousands of homes modeled on Barber’s designs, often known colloquially as “Barber Houses,” were erected in the U.S., Canada, and as far away as China, South Africa, and the Philippines, making him one of the most popular mail-order house plan designers of the nineteenth century. Operating just before the heyday of precut mail-order companies like Aladdin—Barber sold plans, not build-it-yourself kits—by 1900 his firm employed close to thirty draftsmen and twenty secretaries to copy his nearly 800 designs and handle the firm’s voluminous correspondence. Barber’s houses, too, differed from Aladdin’s. Instead of bungalows, he specialized in the more quirky verticality of the Romanesque and Queen Anne styles. (The house pictured in the advertisement in Figure 36, Design 36, is fairly typical of the types of homes that appear in Cottage Souvenir No. 2.) Many of Barber’s houses still stand today.1 Inside Cottage Souvenir No. 2 Barber featured designs for fifty-nine different homes as well as plans for a few nondomestic structures (barns, storefronts , a church, a chapel). To prospective buyers he touted his broad experi- 190 | Coda Figure 36. Advertisement, George F. Barber’s Cottage Souvenir No. 2 (1891), Cosmopolitan 12.6 (April 1892), “Advertising Department,” 16. ence designing for different regions and classes. “I have had several years of personal practice in the West, and especially in the North, . . . and have lately had two years experience traveling over the South, from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico, planning, arranging and designing residences for every class of people, thus gaining a very clear knowledge of the various requirements of house planning for any section of the country.”2 Judging from his widespread success, such credentials convinced. In our own period, many of Barber’s designs have been reprinted and analyzed in histories of American architecture and domesticity, offering as they do tremendous insight into late nineteenth-century ideas about, and attitudes toward, design theory, building practice, craftsmanship, gender relations, and a whole host of other social, cultural, economic, and aesthetic issues surrounding the American home. What has received significantly less attention, however—indeed, almost total silence—are two prominent images from the book that provide equally valuable insight into late nineteenth-century ideas about, and attitudes toward, race: the pair of engravings Barber asks his readers to study before turning to the house plans themselves, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Old Cabin Home” (Fig. 37). Jointly captioned “Contrasted Architecture,” these images of impoverished African Americans standing in front of crude one- or two-room cabins in the rural South appear just after Barber’s twin prefaces (“Remarks on the Principles of Design, Harmony of Form and Proportion in Architecture” and “Hints to Home Builders”) and immediately before the first actual house design. Barber explains the purpose of the images in a brief note on the facing page: Coda | 191 Barber may have seen the images more benignly. His explanatory note does not refer to the people in the photographs, only the structures; nor does he mention race at all. In declaring that the “two homes” pictured in the engravings provide “an idea of the advancement of modern architecture in this country,” Barber may have simply been trying to illustrate what had become a common trope in late-century pattern books: that American architecture had evolved from the “log cabin” to the “modern house.” According to Linda E. Smeins, only a few years before Barber published Cottage Souvenir No. 2, for example, Robert Shoppell included in his own pattern book, Modern Houses, an illustration purporting to show precisely that trajectory.4 Perhaps Barber just...