Farmhouses Have Histories Too | Post 24 | Iowa
Far down this Iowa road, on the left side beyond the farmhouse and trees to the right, is a pixel of a bump above the October corn.
Until Street View plies more of the Washington County grid, this photo from Dwell magazine will suffice to draw that speck into focus:
This is Geoff and Joanna Mouming’s house at Yum Yum Farm outside of Wellman. Designed by Seattle-based DeForest Architects and completed in 2007 (a year before the above Street View image), Dwell calls it “a modern incarnation of a farmhouse… blend[ing] modernist ideas with the agrarian Iowa landscape.”
Engaged in the organic food farming and distribution industries, the Moumings are Iowa City transplants (it’s just a 25-mile transplant), and the interior of their farmhouse is by definition straight out of a fine-modern-living magazine like Dwell.
But the family and architect’s desire “to respect the context,” “reference farmhouses of old,” and build “a structure that is as strong and enduring as any old farmhouse” raises a question: What, exactly, is the typical Iowa farmhouse of old?
The more my virtual route turns maize, the more attention I’ve paid to farmhouses and the more often I’ve raised my laptop lens to grab shots of favorites. On Street View, it’s difficult to peer through the trees and hedges guarding the average dwelling, so I’m often left with an over-the-shoulder shot as I pass by:
Could provincial old-timers like these ever breathe an architectural sophistication worthy of the worldly Dwell? It turns out that, yes, the archetypal Iowa farmhouse indeed tells a story more expansive and rich than glances at the rural landscape and present-day Main Streets would suggest:
As just two of the farmhouses I paused at exemplify, early Iowa farmhouses and many of their descendants have several features in common: two stories; gables; a core structure just two rooms wide and one room deep; a single room/kitchen/wing coming off the core.
My guidebook, Wikipedia, confirms that this “vernacular house type” has a specific name: the I-house. And Fred Peterson’s Annals of Iowa article, “Tradition and Change in Nineteenth-Century Iowa Farmhouses,” delves into the origin and development of the I-house with diagrams and examples:
I scrolled around several farmhouses and squinted long at Peterson’s graphics before I discovered that the “I” in I-house derives not from floor plan or elevation shapes, but from an architectural historian’s observation that such houses were especially prevalent in the “I states” of Indiana, Illinois, and, of course, Iowa. The architectural origin of the I-house is the “hall and parlor” houses of 16th- and 17th-century England — simple rectangle structures with a wall or passage dividing a house into two rooms — and Anglo-Americans were the primary settlers of 19th-century Iowa. In fact, Peterson reports, in the mid-1800s they outnumbered other ethnic groups five to one.
Peterson’s article explores how these Iowans actively evolved the farmhouse type they had inherited to deal with conditions on the new frontier . Still, he writes, “despite external cosmetics and changes in structural materials and methods, the I-house type remained the form to which many Iowa carpenters and farmer-builders applied their imagination and skill.”
For me, the lesson here is less architectural and more that Street View travel is capable of revealing much more than the superficial in America. Though virtual, two-dimensional, and pixelated, my cross-country trip exposes both patterns and nuggets — follow these, and even rural Iowa will take you to Elizabethan England or Dwell magazine.
In further of this point, I note Muscatine. My westward heading leaves me little bandwidth-patience for a Mississippi venture, but from my crossing at Davenport the great river runs due west for 30 miles before bending south at Muscatine, a town of 24,000 that I’d never heard of, but where I saw this sign:
Who was Lucille A. Carver? Answer: A born-and-died-in Muscatine philanthropist who with her husband Roy ran Muscatine-based pump and tire businesses that would enable them to make the largest gift in history (at the time) to the University of Iowa. By the early 2000s the Carvers had given over $90 million to the university, which soon renamed its medical school in their honor.
Who else is from Muscatine? Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank. In the 1970s, before his career in international development and medicine, Kim was Muscatine High’s valedictorian, football team quarterback, and basketball team point guard.
Thus, even unheralded river towns have great and glorious stories to tell — and these stories are there for the taking on Street View. I have found this true everywhere on my virtual trip. Though, that said, sometimes a good Mississippi picnic spot is just a good Mississippi picnic spot; and sometimes a horse bucking in the back yard is just a horse bucking in the back yard:
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: East Moline, Ill.
- Davenport, Iowa
- Muscatine, Iowa
- Lone Tree, Iowa
- Riverside, Iowa
- End: Wellman, Iowa
Trip to date:
Blog post sources:
http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9743&context=annals-of-iowa
Next post:
Where Are All the People? | Post 25 | Iowa
