Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England

By Thomas C. Hubka

A classic work on farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders refreshed with a new introduction.
 
Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn portrays the four essential components of the stately and beautiful connected farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders that stand today as a living expression of a rural culture, offering insights into the people who made them and their agricultural way of life. A visual delight as well as an engaging tribute to our nineteenth-century forebears, this book, first published nearly forty years ago, has become one of the standard works on regional farmsteads in America. This new edition features a new preface by the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Nov 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684581368

Book preview

Big house, little house, back house, barn was a children’s refrain recited on New England farms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the only indigenous expression known to describe the region’s unique connected farm buildings.

Facing page illustration: York, Maine, ca. 1885.

BIG HOUSE, LITTLE HOUSE, BACK HOUSE, BARN

The Connected Farm Buildings of New England

With a new preface by the author

Thomas C. Hubka

Brandeis University Press

Waltham, Massachusetts

Brandeis University Press

© 1984 by Trustees of Dartmouth College

Preface to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition © 2004 by Trustees of Dartmouth College

Preface to the 2022 Edition © 2022 by Thomas C. Hubka

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Ed King

Typeset in Sabon

First Brandeis University Press edition 2022

Originally published by University Press of New England in 1984

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Brandeis University Press, 415 South Street, Waltham MA 02453, or visit brandeisuniversitypress.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022913094

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68458-135-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-68458-136-8

All farmsteads and houses described in this book are privately owned and readers are asked to respect that privacy.

Publication of this volume has been aided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

5   4   3   2   1

To my mother and father

Contents

Preface to the 2022 Edition

Preface to the 20th-Anniversary Edition (2004)

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. CONNECTED FARM BUILDINGS

1. Appearance and Actuality

II. PATTERN IN CONNECTED FARM BUILDINGS

2. The Buildings

3. The Buildings and the Land

4. Permanence and Change

5. Pattern in Building and Farming

III. REASONS FOR MAKING CONNECTED FARM BUILDINGS

6. Tobias Walker Moves His Shed

7. Why Tobias Walker Moved His Shed

Notes

Bibliography

Glossary

Index

Figure Credits

Preface to the 2022 Edition

Almost forty years have passed since Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn was published and more than half a century since I began my study of New England farms. Enough time has passed for the major themes and hypotheses to be thoroughly examined, including my challenge to what was, and still is, the most common explanation for why New England farmers connected their houses to their barns—to provide a convenient covered passage during the heavy snows of cold New England winters. Although my research fundamentally challenged this explanation, it is a story and popular logic that’s not all wrong, while simultaneously, not even half right. But you will have to read the book to discover the many far more important factors that convinced an overwhelming majority of northern New England farmers to connect their houses to their barns in a relatively short, fifty-year period during the second half of the nineteenth century—and it didn’t just get colder during that period.

Over the last forty-five years, I’ve given over 150 lectures interpreting connected farms. As a professor of architecture, I’m accustomed to speaking to college audiences, but most of my talks were given to local audiences in medium-sized to small towns throughout northern New England. Considering that the subject was well known to most of my rural audiences, they could not have been fooled for very long by a know-it-all college professor from away. Over the years and after more than 50,000 copies sold, I have been most gratified by the book’s wide acceptance within New England, especially because most of the research was largely unknown or unaccepted when I began my study.

Alongside the task of confronting the popular story of winter passage are other challenging explanations, myths, and suppositions about New England farm buildings requiring careful examination and explanation. These include old standbys such as: Indian shutters—window protection having nothing to do with Indians; witch windows, windows placed at an angle following the roof line of an attached building—pure late twentieth-century mythology of the Halloween and Sleepy Hollow legend type; cellar closets with difficult to identify usage—not underground railroad hideouts but almost always, cellar storage areas lacking current interpretation; and borning rooms, a historical term from an earlier colonial period of unknown popular usage, but not used in the period of connected farm making.

Other commonly used terms, such as Cape Cod house, require more careful contextual interpretation. I call attention to the term because the New England farmers who built Cape Cod-type houses attached to their barns never used the term to describe these dwellings. Moreover, they would probably have been uncomfortable with a term, popularized by academics like me in the early twentieth century, that was to them a name associated with the barren sands of a well-recognized backwater of New England agriculture.

Challenging another popular term, summer kitchen, requires lengthy analysis. But just to alert the knowledgeable reader, the term summer kitchen, so popular today, was also not used by New England farm families during the nineteenth-century period of connected farm kitchen development and appears to be derived from Southern plantation romanticism during the early twentieth century. Moreover, in hundreds of farms I have documented and thousands analyzed in an extensive literature, the practice of seasonal movement of the kitchen stove, in the manner of summer kitchen, or having two, seasonally working stoves for one family, was not recorded.* In any case, we should all be alert to unsubstantiated stories, tall tales, and exaggerations that tend to distort an already difficult to interpret New England farm history.

Today the connected house-to-barn arrangement is still the region’s dominant farm architecture. Yet few farms are still active and their total numbers are fast retreating. In several towns I know well, more than two-thirds of the historic connected farmsteads have either lost their connecting middle buildings or have completely vanished. Today, few newcomers or current suburban residents perceive the connected farm organization as the dominant type of regional rural architecture except in isolated pockets where unique preservation factors, like wealth from away, have altered the forces of farm building abandonment and destruction.

While it is not yet time to declare the connected farmstead organization an endangered species, it is time to alert northern New Englanders to the rapid decline of a truly outstanding example of an indigenous material culture. While most people can appreciate the uniqueness of the house-to-barn connection in relation to farms throughout America, it is important to emphasize that this regional tradition was created by average farmers in response to the dominant patterns of their agrarian life. Farmers depended upon mixed-agriculture and home-industry practices, factors shaped by their era and region, and they shaped their farm buildings accordingly. These farms are, therefore, worthy candidates for local preservation, but not the kind of preservation that singles out unique or spectacular examples, but rather a collective recognition of their significance to local social and historical traditions. As I conclude in lectures, the connected farm organization represents a popular expression of a dominant regional culture—made by, for, and about late nineteenth-century New England farmers and their agrarian way of life. Like the finest examples of art and material culture anywhere, the connected farms of New England are deeply expressive of their people and their historical time and place.

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*The analysis of the farm kitchen is made more complex by the typical New England practice of establishing a kitchen work area, with large pot boilers, often adjoining the domestic kitchen. Therefore, it is not too hard to see how these side-by-side kitchens later took on the popular term summer kitchen. We should also recognize that many farms had two kitchens because of historic connecting developments, and that many farms housed multiple families, so kitchen history on a connected farm becomes a complex topic pretty quickly.

Preface to the 20th-Anniversary Edition (2004)

Thirty-five years ago, my interest in New England architecture began with the purchase of an abandoned farm in Bridgton, Maine. Although the large barn had fallen down, the surviving buildings, though sagging, were strung together in, what was for me, a curious offset alignment—this was my first introduction to connected farm buildings. Gradually, I came to understand that what I had initially interpreted as an irregular alignment of buildings was actually a carefully adjusted, generally uniform layout adopted by most farmers to accommodate for the many variables of site conditions, farm production, climatic response, road orientation, and personal taste. As my casual observations eventually gave way to a more disciplined study, I attempted to understand the evolution of connected farm buildings throughout the entire region of northern New England. Yet, even after documenting hundreds of connected farms, I was frustrated by my inability to answer one of the most obvious questions about the connected farm buildings’ organization, Why did northern New England farmers connect their houses to their barns?

Although I was able to document the history of many farms, I had been unable to locate any early (pre-1820) connected farms, which seemed to hold the most likely key to an explanation of the unique house-to-barn connection. At that point, I could have abandoned my investigation, but fortunately I had been studying farmsteads in southwestern Maine, an area I now know to be one of the most concentrated regions of currently surviving connected farms in New England. This good fortune of a critical mass allowed me to finally realize that most common farms did not become connected farms until after the mid-1800s. Instead of beginning in an earlier colonial period, the process of connected farm making was, in fact, a more recent phenomenon initiated by most farmers only during the middle to second half of the nineteenth century. Had I begun my study in a more typical rural New England region, with a much wider assortment of farms and small town architecture such as found in the region’s seacoast and resort towns, I am quite certain that I would not have formulated the reasons why most common farmers connected their farms.

What I discovered challenged both popular and scholarly opinions about the evolution of connected farm buildings. Previously, it was usually assumed that the house-to-barn connection was a climatic response to the hardships of New England’s winter weather conditions. But the fact that so many farms were reorganized in such a relatively short period of time during the late nineteenth century does not support climatic factors as a primary cause for the widespread adoption of the connected house-to-barn plan. (It did not suddenly become colder during this period.) In my book, I interpreted the motivation to create connected farm buildings to a popular movement of nineteenth-century progressive agrarian reform, a movement primarily motivated by a struggle to compete with farmers in other, more prosperous areas of the country. While there are those who still maintain that it was the heavy snows of New England winters that motivated farmers to connect their buildings, this interpretation seems increasingly difficult to sustain in light of the research in the last twenty years. Of course, it is understandable that in light of the continuing decline of New England’s agriculture and the disintegration of its farm buildings it is difficult to perceive these dilapidated buildings as a once-progressive model of agrarian reform. Yet, when these farms are viewed from the perspective of their nineteenth-century builders, the seemingly radical idea of connecting house and barn made good, practical sense for common farmers. The typical organization of a connected farm building combined a mixed-farming and home-industry production system (its only viable economic option because of stiff Western competition) in an efficient, practical manner. Critical to the popular success of the connected building plan was the relative ease with which most farmers could achieve the new connected layout through the movement of existing buildings and incremental growth over time. While we may still debate whether progressive reform motivated these farmers, I think there can be little argument about connected facts on the ground—a majority of northern New England farmers reorganized their farmsteads into the connected farm plan during the last half of the nineteenth century. And we can be sure they were not motivated to conduct this vast program of farm building and landscape reorganization by the heavy snows of New England winters.

In the twenty years since the publication of Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn or BHLHBHB as I sometimes abbreviate it, there have been many notable contributions to the architectural, social/historical literature of New England’s common, vernacular buildings and environments, including works by Kingston Heath, Laurel Ulrich, James Garvin, Myron Stachiw, Peter Benes, Robert St. George, Sam Bass Warner, Richard Candee, Jane Nylander, John Stilgoe, Jack Larkin, Margaret Crawford, and Ritchie Garrison. Compared to other regions of the United States, New England’s complex, multi-layered, vernacular architectural heritage presents particularly difficult problems of interpretation that resists adequate summation. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of its finest architectural studies have not engaged the greater mass of more numerous common buildings in New England’s small towns and especially in its urban centers but have focused instead on such discrete building types as mill buildings, triple-deckers, and tobacco barns. As I survey the present field of vernacular studies, two areas for future research stand out: (1) worker housing of the small towns and urban centers and its relationship to both regional and national housing examples, and (2) the Colonial Revival(s), its evolution in a variety of building types and styles, and its meaning in a broader cultural context. Both topics are immense and have yet to be substantively addressed in the current literature.

Over the last twenty years, I have been especially gratified by the response to Big House, Little House by people in the building, environmental, architectural, and planning professions who have cited my research in support of issues concerning the physical and historical environment. As an architecture/environmental educator, I emphasize the importance of thoroughly understanding the historical record, and I would like to think that Big House, Little House has contributed, in some small measure, toward the popular, regional awareness of New England’s rural history. I have also been pleased that readers have commented on the clarity and popular legibility of the book, which I interpret as my commitment to visual clarity through diagramming and multi-layered visual/textual analysis. I feel quite strongly that authors should assume the responsibility of engaging the widest possible audience with their most significant ideas, and, for me, this populist commitment is chiefly facilitated through the visualization process.

Finally, I would like to thank again the hundreds of farmers, ex-farmers, and would-be farmers who I interviewed during the fifteen years I worked on Big House, Little House. But, it is to the more numerous, previous farmers I came to know only through the faded histories of their farms to whom I owe the greatest debt—it is their history that I hope I have honored with my research. Although I have never tired of this research, I have always experienced subtle sadness about this process. Like interviewing Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel workers in the shadow of their abandoned mill, no matter how positively the story was told, it was always the story that, in the end, could never avoid the specter of the passing of a way of life. Farming, you see, is not just a partial or temporary form of employment but an all-encompassing way of life, and its passing cannot easily be told.

I frequently return to New England where I still enjoy driving the back roads, checking on the condition of old favorite connected farms, and discovering farms in new locales. When I approach one of these farms, I still automatically slow the car, catalog the building layout, calculate dates of construction, envision field systems, evaluate tree placement and species, etc.—old habits. Although I have driven past some of the same well-preserved connected farmsteads hundreds of times, I am still struck, as I was for the first time, by their unified, forceful, even self-confident expressions. Their builders had a powerful vision of their farming prospects, and it is this vision that is still evident in the imposing configuration of their connected farmsteads.

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the National Endowment for the Humanities in conjunction with Greater Portland Landmarks and the National Endowment for the Arts for the generous grants that have sustained this research. The University of Oregon has granted leave time and invaluable clerical support.

This book could not have been written without the cooperation of hundreds of residents who graciously allowed me to visit and document their homes. I would especially like to thank the Nuttings, the Bennetts, the Moshers, the Robert Walkers, and the Morses.

During the course of this study I have consulted with a group of dedicated local historians, including Mary Carlson, Sue Black, Stanley Howe, Ben Conant, Helen Prince, Robert Dingley, Sandra Armentrout, Ruth Landon, Jim Vickery, Harry Walker, Ernest Knight, Eleanor Walker, Margaret Sawyer, Betty Barto, Mary Bryant, Marion Carroll, Joy Malloy, Pat Townsend, Aubrey Palmer, George Allen, William Pierce, Randy Bennett, Roberta Chandler, and Phyllis Coolidge. Joyce Butler significantly contributed to the research and organization of Chapter 6. The dedicated assistance and untiring inspiration of Ursula Baier from the North Yarmouth Historical Society has immeasurably contributed to the entire work.

Four books have significantly influenced me and shaped many of the ideas in this work: Folk Housing in Middle Virginia by Henry Glassie; The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx; The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson; and The Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz.

This work has benefited from the advice of a number of people, who are, however, not responsible for its content, including: Fraser Hart, Jere Daniell, Charles Clark, Richard Candee, Earl Shettleworth, Henry Glassie, Edward Ives, David Smith, Pierce Lewis, Robert Dalzell, Abbot Cummings, John Fitchen, Joyce Bibber, Wilbur Zelinsky, Ronald Brunskill, John Hakola, Joel Eastman, James Garvin, and Paul Frederic. I especially acknowledge the generous assistance of Leo Marx, who has helped me develop many of my initial ideas and has allowed me to appreciate the complexity of my task.

Mary Williams did a superb job of typing, Garry Fritz assisted with the graphics, and Kurt Brown took many of the photographs. Several of my architectural students assisted with the development and presentation of drawings, including: William Holland, Robert Kleinkopf, Scott Benson, Tom Stacey, Nancy Sussman, William Rudd, William Gould and Jeffrey Hoover. Finally I thank Mary, Terry, Sarah, and Rachel Hubka for providing a connected home away from home without equal.

But the people who most deserve acknowledgment are the most difficult to acknowledge. They are the hundreds of farmers who have contributed to this study. It is these farmers whom I especially thank with the hope that some measure of their lives will find a likeness in these pages.

Introduction

This book, about the buildings that farmers made, traces the historical development of connected farm buildings, an architectural form common in rural New England. This is primarily a book of detailed architectural analysis, but it is also a cultural study. Buildings are seen as an expression of their culture and can be interpreted to reveal insights about the people who made them and the reasons they made them.

There are three parts: Part I provides an overview of connected farm buildings; Part II, the main body of the text, analyzes connected farms according to patterns of construction, usage, and change over time; and Part III explains why connected farms were built. This three-part organization follows an architectural logic in which building analysis precedes the explanation of historical development. I have found this strategy to be the most productive way of approaching an exceedingly complex problem of architectural interpretation, in which the late nineteenth-century product of connected farm builders is clear, but the way in which they developed this form in the first part of the century is not. My architectural training and respect for ethnographic inquiry have convinced me that a solid knowledge of how these buildings were made and how they were used will provide a basis for answering the difficult question of why they developed into their unique form. Consequently the major hypotheses of this study are derived from a detailed architectural documentation of many farms and an analysis of how they worked in the nineteenth century.

This study describes an example of American popular architecture. The term popular is used here to mean the buildings that most farmers made most of the time. This strategy differs from that in most architectural studies, which have usually recorded buildings of unique or original characteristics, and instead tells the story of buildings that were the common and traditional selection of a farming population. It focuses upon a striking change in New England’s rural architecture between 1800 and 1900, when many farmers reorganized their detached house and barn arrangement into a connected house and barn plan.

Although the primary research data for this study was collected in southwestern Maine, fieldwork throughout New England has revealed a unified type of connected farm building most commonly found in northern New England, except western Vermont, and in some areas of southern New England. Since other building arrangements coexisted with it, my hypotheses are intended to apply to those farms that were arranged in or converted to the connected building plan. I have extended these ideas to include connected farmsteads in the entire region with great caution, because there is significant variation in architectural form even between adjacent counties and towns in New England. Nevertheless, the term New England connected farm building is appropriate because the remarkable similarity of most connected farmsteads suggests that a homogeneous agrarian culture once unified the entire region.

Although this book follows the architectural development of the connected plan during the nineteenth century, the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914 mark the outer boundaries of the study. The end of colonial Indian hostilities is significant because it marked the beginning of a major period of agricultural settlement in New England’s interior. The beginning of the twentieth century concluded the era of connected farm building, although a few connected farms continued to be built until 1940.

One of the most controversial assertions in this book concerns the dating and origin of the connected farm building organization. Popular opinion and some historical studies have assumed a much earlier date, while my research has indicated that most farms achieved their connected configuration after the early nineteenth century. Both positions are partially correct. The subtle distinction I will attempt to make is that while buildings employing connected arrangements were built in colonial New England, they did not constitute a popular form for most farmers. The making of most connected farms will be shown to be a product of an intensive period of farm modernization and building experimentation that occurred during the nineteenth century.

While farm architecture is the principal concern, it is often difficult to distinguish farm buildings from other forms of rural architecture in New England. A large and diverse body of connected town houses in the small villages of the region share basic characteristics and origins with the more agrarian examples studied in this text. New England farms also have a long history of home-industry and nonagricultural activities, which blur distinctions between farm and town examples. In spite of these similarities, farm architecture maintains distinct differences in form and function from town and city examples, particularly because of its primarily agricultural nature. Perhaps a future study of New England’s popular small-town architecture would parallel and complement this study.

A number of major ideas in this work are challenging to three prevailing orthodoxies within New England. The most pervasive I would describe as a New England antiquarian orthodoxy, which has romanticized the story of New England’s past by glorifying old-time ways and rustic settings, often at the expense of historical accuracy. Second is a New England architectural orthodoxy, which has usually chosen to examine the houses of the region’s wealthy classes and neglected examples of popular architecture. Unfortunately, data from these studies have often been applied inappropriately to the analysis of common farms. Finally, a popular opinion orthodoxy in New England has been a powerful shaper of ideas about New England’s architectural heritage. It has often crystalized many imprecise stories about the region’s farm architecture into brittle myths about its origin. While each of these orthodoxies contains important truths about connected farm buildings, all three have failed to analyze them in terms of the value system of the people who made them. It is this value system that I seek to portray.

A consistent goal of this study is to link the lives of farmers to the buildings that they made and to establish the relationship between the built form and the ideas that generated its making. This requires that common farmers be seen as active participants in the design and building of their farmsteads. Some readers will probably object to the designation of common farmers as designers, or even folk designers, because faculties such as design decision making and aesthetic preferences are usually associated with architects or urban people. Of course, pragmatically oriented farmers do not design their buildings in the same way as architects, but this study will show that they acted through the traditions of their building and their work to create their farmsteads. In Part III I develop this theme by examining the complete building history of one farmer, Tobias Walker, whose design decisions were rigorously shaped by the constraints of his environment, economy, and culture but who still exercised a considerable degree of individual choice in the organization of his farm.

Finally, this book attempts to answer the question, Why did New England farmers build connected farms? But the reader should be forewarned; there is no definitive statement that proves all. Rather, a case for understanding these structures is built out of their physical history and then set into a larger cultural history in order to understand the individual and collective motivation behind building decision making. This might seem like a weak and long-winded answer to a simple question, but the answer is not simple. It is similar in complexity to the problem of understanding the development of any popular architectural form. For example, the question could be asked, Why did millions of middle-class Americans build suburban ranch houses between 1950 and 1970? Having studied this phenomenon, I am confident that the answer cannot be summarized in one builder’s statement or in specifications from a Federal Housing Administration manual, but must emerge from a careful artifact and cultural study of many buildings and the people and conditions that combined to shape them. It is this comprehensive approach that will provide an answer to the question, Why did New England farmers build connected farms?

Tobias Walker, a farmer from Kennebunk, Maine, described in his journal the events of April 11, 1850: [The carpenters were] here putting shoes under the wood house to move it [to] the other side of the house. P.M. Moved the building over next to the barnyard. Had forty oxen. Walker recorded here the relocation of his large, multipurpose woodshed, carriage house, workshop. Twenty teams of oxen were required to pull the 18-foot by 24-foot building onto its new site. It had previously been connected to the east side of his house, but he decided to move it to the west side into a position between house and barn. Walker’s building realignment was an act integrally related to a large pattern of farm reorganization that transformed much of the rural landscape of New England in the nineteenth century. While not all farms were rearranged exactly like Tobias Walker’s, thousands were formed in this manner and many thousands more were constructed in a similar connected house and barn arrangement.

I

Connected Farm Buildings

Image: Fig. 1. Nevers-Bennett Farm, Sweden, Maine.

Fig. 1. Nevers-Bennett Farm, Sweden, Maine.

1

Appearance and Actuality

The buildings on the old Nevers-Bennett farm stand at a small rural crossroads in the town of Sweden, Maine (fig. 1). Every summer tourists stop their cars to admire the impressive string of gleaming white buildings. The Nevers-Bennett farm

Reviews for Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn

[willszal-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.