Thomas C. Hubka

Earlier this year I read Fine Homebuilding's compilation, "Farmhouse." It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but it did say, if you wanted the definitive book on New England agricultural architecture, you needed Hubka's magnum opus.

As a child, I recall driving up from Massachusetts to Thanksgiving at my relatives' place in northern Vermont. We would drive by all of these beautiful old farmsteads, with a house in front, rambling slowly back from the road until they terminated in a barn. This was also the architecture of the house where we had our Thanksgiving dinner, although this was only the case after my uncle's renovations of the place, taking down the historic barn, and reusing the materials (in an age-old New England tradition), to construct a new barn (converted into an office), tied to the main house by an addition for the kids, followed by a garage, followed by an apartment for an aging parent.

As a native of rural New England, this architectural style is intuitive and pervasive enough as to fade from consciousness—until you travel to other regions and realize that not all agricultural architecture follows in this tradition. Hubka, an architectural historian, set out to explore how and when this occurred. The book, with extensive photo documentation and architectural drawings, documents his learnings.

Colonial American architecture was developed in 14th century England. This includes the farmhouse with a massive central chimney, with hearths in each rooms, as well as the English barn—small, with the primary door located on the side. In the middle of the 19th century, both of these forms of architecture were overtaken by new designs. With the proliferation of the wood stove, massive central fireplaces were replaced with much smaller chimneys, which could be oriented more or less anywhere within the structure (with many structures having more than one chimney). And the English Barn was replaced with the New England barn, which was engineered and constructed entirely differently, dropping the more complicated gunstock posts, and moving the main door to the gable ends (allowing for more practical access with barn expansion, as well as meaning those entering and leaving the barn don't end up with snow and rain on their heads).

The first step towards the "connected" farm, as Hubka refers to it as, was the addition of a kitchen "ell" on the back of an existing house. This was almost always a kitchen (often a kitchen with the newly-popularized woodstove rather than a hearth), and amazingly, Hubka's research revealed that 75% of these structures were constructed of lumber not freshly sawn, but recycled from other structures. This foreshadows a tradition of, whenever possible, relocating and readapting structures (even if they must be dragged by teams of oxen many miles away) rather than building new, which can be found in the architectural record in subsequent decades, as farms reoriented around the connected plan.

One thing this plan did, which substantially enhanced the efficiency of New England farmsteads, was to establish three yards, each adjacent to the next: the front yard, the door yard, and the farm yard.

Hubka documents the larger historical trends that framed the backdrop for this shift in farmstead layout. During this period, New England experienced a decline in its rural population, as unsustainable agricultural practices ran into the limits of poor soils, as workers moved to urban industrial settings, and as people moved West. In other words, these communities were in decline, and were effectively forced to evolve or die (although Hubka points out, they could have followed a number of other pathways, and the connected farmstead plan was not inevitable).

This book was published in 1984, and Hubka prophetically predicted, with the advent of the plastic-wrapped hay bale, the demise of the New England barn. A drive through farm country today will reveal countless crumbling and collapsed barns, and it does seem like New England rural architecture does face many threats.

If you have a relationship with rural New England, you'll love this book.… (mehr)