The booming economy and immigration drove a demand for housing.
Introduction
The Civil War was a watershed between an agrarian America and an industrial America. In the North, demands for products required to wage war had created an industrial boom. Lack of access to Southern ports fueled new transportation lines that remained important after the war and created new economic opportunities. While the war’s devastation in the South would continue to impact that region’s growth for decades to come, the North’s strong economy drew immigrants who flooded into Northern cities looking for jobs not available in their native countries. The booming economy and immigration drove a demand for housing.
The Impact of Immigration on the Urban Landscape
In the decades after the Civil War, the urban landscape of the United States pointed to a complex relationship between those who were the descendants of original settlers, those who arrived in antebellum America, and the newly arriving immigrants who represented a more linguistically and ethnically diverse and marginalized European population. The U.S. Census classified individuals as “native,” “white,” or “foreign-born.” The population of the United States between 1790 and 1900 grew from 3.9 million to 76.8 million, with a foreign-born/immigrant population growth from 35,000 in 1790 to over 28 million in 1900. The urban social landscape became a patchwork of ethnic enclaves in the cities, where the recent immigrants lived, and growing suburban communities just outside the cities, where upwardly mobile middle-class families settled.
In addition to immigrants from foreign countries, rapid industrialization after the Civil War attracted record numbers of Americans from the rural areas of the South and Midwest to cities. New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri ranked as the five most densely populated states up to 1890. The most populous cities were New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, Boston, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. The westward movement was especially evident in the growth of population in Chicago, which increased 118 percent in the decade between 1880 and 1890. Overall, the urban population of the United States grew from just over 11 million to just over 18 million in this single decade.
For the unskilled working class, the industrial boom concentrated more and more people in unhealthy living conditions in cities. Discrimination against immigrants was a factor in where they could live. By 1893, 70 percent of those living in New York City lived in multi-family dwellings, many of them defined as tenements. Tenements were apartment buildings with communal water supplies and sanitation facilities. Entire families lived in one apartment with little access to fresh air. This resulted in unhealthy living conditions, documented most famously in Jacob Riis’s book of photographs of the tenements titled How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890. Others concerned with the living conditions of the working class included Jane Addams, who created the Hull-House in Chicago, where immigrants could receive education and job training aimed at improving their plight.
For the middle class, the post-war industrial boom provided opportunities for housing in suburbs located just outside the disease-ridden cities and newly accessible via streetcars and trollies. Men employed in middle management positions—in fields like accounting, retailing, banking, and shipping—could afford to build single-family homes where their wives and children would be safe and where they could show off their economic success. Having such a home became both a symbol for achieving the American dream and also an indication of the innate morality of the hard-working Christian families who lived there.
Many immigrants found employment as domestic servants in the large homes of the burgeoning middle class where they took jobs assisting the women with household chores and childrearing. The architecture of these homes included servants’ quarters, usually segregated from family spaces with separate entrances.
Fueling the demand for middle-class homes were, of course, the architects and builders who designed and built houses for this growing market. Their designs were based upon a Victorian view of women and the family. The home became the expression and embodiment of the role of women in society as defined by the Cult of Domesticity and true womanhood.
Women and Homes in the Victorian Era
The “Cult of Domesticity” was first suggested as the appropriate role for women in the early 1800s and would come to be the dominant societal view by the late 19th century. Whereas in previous eras men and women worked together because many industries were home-based, the increasing industrialization and urbanization of America resulted in the idea of two different “spheres” for the sexes. Men left the home for employment, and the outside world came to be seen as male-dominated, logical, and competitive. Women, who were seen as naturally more moral and emotional yet weaker than men, served as the guardians of the home.
As the “angel of the house,” a middle-class Victorian woman was to maintain a pleasing home that provided a respite for her husband from the grueling, capitalist world outside. She was also responsible for instilling Christian values in her children, ensuring that they would serve as moral, productive citizens in the future and thereby strengthen the country and insure its destiny. The Cult of Domesticity was heavily promoted by religious leaders, social reformers, and advice book writers. Being able to maintain the “perfect” home came to be seen as the highest ideal a woman could achieve, and domestic manuals, such as those written by Catharine Beecher and Lydia Maria Child, attempted to glorify the role of wife and mother as the most powerful force in the home. The family unit was seen as sacred and as the foundation upon which the prosperity of the country rested.
These ideals extended to housing design. An example was a housing concept developed by Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe. This house included Gothic features such as bay windows and gables adorned with crosses to emphasize the concept of the family home as small church. Because efficiency was considered a Christian virtue, even the layout of the basement was designed so that the effort of hauling coal, water, and ice (for the icebox) was minimized. This design, combined with the latest technological innovations, was seen as the ideal home for a Christian family.
The physical location of the home in Victorian America was also intended to emphasize the importance of being a safe haven from the outside world. As cities grew larger, they were seen as sources of filth, noise, and corruption. Newer homes on the outskirts of cities meant families could live in peace but were still within commuting distance. The separation of the suburban home from the increasingly crowded cities allowed families the privacy they needed in order to engage in recreational activities. Landscaping reflected this ideal as suburban homes were also designed to emphasize the connection to the natural world. Front lawns created ribbons of green up and down streets, and porches opened the house to the outdoors.
The home became not just a place of refuge from the chaos of the cities but increasingly a vehicle for women to express their creativity. Since women were thought to naturally possess a greater appreciation for art and beauty, they were now also tasked with ensuring that their homes were aesthetically pleasing. By emphasizing the artistic elements of homemaking, housewives sought to increase the importance of the work they did. The emphasis on aesthetics also resulted in an increased focus on a family’s possessions; sofas, fancy wallpapers, patterned rugs, and other household furnishings gave rooms a sense of opulence. Handmade embellishments enhanced the interior design. Self-improvement and self-expression became one of the most significant characteristics of the Victorian American family.
The post-Civil War period saw the transformation of America into an enormous corporate unit, brought
about by the expansion of technology and media such as railroads, newspapers and magazines, and the telephone and telegraph. In addition, the growth of factories resulted in the mass production of goods at cheaper prices. The availability of ready-made items, new labor-saving devices, and the practice of immigrant women performing much of the domestic work all presented a challenge to women’s accepted role. Furthermore, as women became increasingly educated, they began looking for an outlet for their talents. These changes resulted in a revised ideal of the middle-class Victorian woman in the last years of the nineteenth century: that of the “professional” homemaker. Domestic manuals of the time reflected these ideals. Fields such as chemistry, medical science, nutritional science, and psychology were now applied to every domestic task, from cleaning the home to preparing food and raising children. Some college educated women, denied entry into the traditionally male sphere, found status and influence as arbiters of professional housekeeping standards.
Pattern Books Promote the Victorian Ideal of Home
To design houses that fit Victorian ideals of woman and family demanded a new kind of home and a new kind of person to build it. The Greek Revival home that had been common among the upper class in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was replaced by the Gothic Revival home. Gothic Revival houses were built with a new construction method pioneered by architect Andrew Jackson Downing called the “balloon frame.” Downing’s book The Architecture of Country Houses, published in 1856, contained numerous examples of country cottages that could be built rather cheaply if builders used his building techniques. The balloon frame focused the weight of the home on the exterior walls, with interior walls made of lighter framing. Despite being lighter, the houses were stronger, and they could be designed with complex roofing systems that included steeply pitched roofs, sharply pointed dormers, and ornamentation on the gables. The home design reflected elements of ecclesiastical architecture, thus creating a feeling of the house as a holy sanctuary for the family. Some designs even incorporated stained glass to enhance the feeling of the home as place of worship.
To sell these homes, architects used pattern books depicting plans for homes, oftentimes showing what the house would look like within its landscaped setting. Pattern books, which were published by the thousands in the latter half of the 19th century, allowed those who wanted to build such a home to bypass architects and instead employ builders. The builders could purchase the plans directly from the pattern book publishers.
An early example of the pattern book is Samuel Sloan’s The Model Architect: A Series of Original Designs for Cottages, Villas, Suburban Residence, Etc., published in two volumes in 1852. The book includes enlarged details of Sloan’s houses, along with lithographs of fully executed designs for rural residences shown within their environment. The book also makes clear the connection between a man’s house and how he is perceived by his acquaintances: “A man’s dwelling, at the present day, is not only an index of his wealth, but also his character,” Sloan states in his introduction. He also outlines the sentiments that will influence home design throughout the Victorian period:
“Around this spot all the thoughts and affections circle. Here is rest. If peace not here, it will not be found on earth…. Indeed, all that is pure in human nature, all the tender affections and gentle endearments of childhood, all the soothing comforts of old age, all that makes memory a blessing, the present delightful, and gives to hope its spur, cluster around that holy place—home.”
Sloan’s houses, like most of the Victorian era, included both public and private spaces. The dominant feature of the first floor was the hallway, the primary public space, where guests would be greeted. It usually contained an ornate hallstand where hats and coats of guests could be placed and calling cards left. Since it was the first piece of furniture a guest would see, it was generally ornate and expensive. The parlor and dining rooms on the first floor were also intended as the public spaces. The parlor was one of the most important rooms; here guests were entertained with games, music, and conversation. A fireplace with an elaborate mantle usually dominated the room. The kitchen was at the back of the home and not intended as a public space. Bedrooms and chambers, where family life occurred outside the public realm, were located on the upper floors. These floors were the woman’s sanctuary, where she fostered the development of her children and supported the needs of her husband. Since Sloan’s houses were intended to be cottages, they often did not include servants’ residences. If homes included quarters for servants, those were accessed through back hallways out of public view. In later years, many from the working class found more lucrative employment in factories, leading to a sharp decline in the number of domestic servants employed in middle-class homes and the elimination of servants’ quarters.
One of the first pattern books clearly aimed at potential owners and builders and not architects was Architecture: Designs for Street Fronts, Suburban Houses, and Cottages, by C.C. Miller of Toledo and M.F. Cummings of Troy, New York, published in 1865. Rather than include complete architectural plans of homes, the Miller and Cummings book contained drawings of details of buildings such as entryways, cornices, roofs, and gables. As stated in the introduction,
“This work will be found particularly valuable in situations where it is not convenient to secure an architect; in such locations owners and their builders are usually thrown upon their own resources of knowledge as to what is good and proper taste to introduce into the design of the building they propose to erect…. If they possess a work in which every needed architectural feature, both those of utility and those of ornament, is given, necessary to complete construction of the building, it will be a difficult task to make the structure a good-proportioned and inviting one.”
The end of the book includes full facades of suburban homes that could be constructed by combining the various elements detailed in the book. The architects also advertised that they would sell plans for the elements if builders wished to purchase them.
Soon, pattern books were a flourishing market. One of the most popular was Palliser’s American Cottage Homes. The book was printed on cheap paper and sold for 25 cents. Readers could select the home they liked and purchase plans directly from Palliser. The back of the book included advertising from local suppliers. The designs covered everything from simple “workingman’s cottages” to 12-room, brick mansions. Palliser’s designs featured the later stages of Gothic Revival, a style known as Queen Anne. Queen Anne is perhaps best described as eclectic Gothic, with many design elements thrown together in an effort to design ever more elaborate homes in order to show off the owner’s success. They included large front porches, turrets, towers, different types of shingles and siding, and many styles of roofs, all on one house. Builders were encouraged not to try to build the homes without purchasing Palliser’s plans: “Without working drawings, it is impossible for any builder to carry out the spirit of a design and the detail as intended by the designer, much less make alterations to suit the requirements of different individual wants without marring the design,” the book stated.
Other popular pattern book publishers included A. J. Bricknell. In addition to their own pattern books, they also published those by architect Daniel Wood and the Pallisers. The fact that Bricknell was successful specializing in pattern books provides some indication of the popularity of these volumes and their influence on American domestic architecture.
By the turn of the 20th century, social critics began to question the appropriateness of the Victorian home. Many felt they were too large, too ornate, with too many rooms and too much clutter. Women also began to question their role in society as the keepers of the home and hearth. Some became social activists, taking on causes like the dangers of alcohol and the right to vote. They also sought a less formal, more comfortable family life, and a new style of house that would allow them more time for activities outside the home.
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Originally published by the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections, The University of Toledo, 10.19.2016, under an Open Access license.