Chapter 16
Folk Homes of Louisiana
Sarah Midboe and Jay Whittington
Basic Principles of Folk Building
Folk building- includes those built "of, by, and for" the people who occupy it; the concepts come from oral tradition; the owners and his neighbors build it, and it meets common, traditional nations of goodness, fitness, and convenience.
Principles:
Types of Folk Homes
SHOTGUN AND BUNGALOW TYPE
Shotgun House
3 or more rooms, all in one row, aligning under a front-to-back
gable roof. May or may not have a porch on front or rear.
Almost always built of lumber
Almost always has a ridgepole (single board to which the rafters are connected at the peak of the roof.
Began primarily as a "camp", but came to be used as rental houses and slave quarters.
No log shotgun house has ever been found in Louisiana.
Origin of Shotgun house unknown. It has often been attributed to Louisiana Indian palmetto-covered cabins, slave memory of West African houses, houseboats placed on land, or European waterfront settlements
Bungalow House
Plan is basically a double shotgun design. Two rooms wide and three or more rooms long.
Plan usually includes a porch or gallery.
Lumber dominates construction, but any material may be used.
Almost always homes of independent or middle class families
Some constructed of a two shotgun design under the same roof
Most had two front doors, sometimes three
North Shore House
Basically a shotgun house With a tee of two or three rooms across its rear and a gallery around two or three sides. This style appears specifically near Covington and Abita; the "North Shore" of New Orleans. It would generally serve the purpose of a weekend getaway or summer house.
Camelback
A shotgun or Bungalow with a two or three room second story above its rear portion.
CREOLE AND CONTINENTAL FRENCH HOUSES
French House Types
Only small part of French Louisiana has this type; landscape from
France or Canada. Actually derived from Caribbean
Aspects of continental French that made it to the new world were mostly from western France: Picardi, Normandy, and Brittany. Continental French Aspects: Multi-roomed module, both nipped and gabled roofs, internal chimney, both half-timbered(mortise-and-tenon, carre’)and palisade (vertical posts) wall framing, filled walls, internal stairs, tiny dormers for light, and a foundation either on the ground or on a masonry full-story basement. Creole denotes eclectic mix in the Caribbean of French, Spanish, and African traits with Indian elements added.
Logs- When French Louisiana used logs to build rarely laid them horizontally; usually placed vertically to form poteaux-en-terre (palisade)walls.
Most colonial French houses used Carre’ construction. A frame made by mortising one timber into another and making them fast with a hardwood pin. Not distinctively French.
Spaces would be filled (nogged) with bricks (briquette; entre-poteaux) or mud and moss(bousillage). Better houses used bricks.
Sides and rear of Carre’ constructed weatherboarded or siding with clapboards made of cypress trunks.
Walls of the façade under any gallery (full length porch) were plastered and painted, not sided.
Creoles introduced use of Galleries with front windows running the full height of the wall.
UPLAND SOUTH HOUSES
Aside from single-pen houses, the Upland South generally developed from a two-room floor plan
Double Pen House- formed by a common wall joining the two pens with a chimney at each gabled end. Most often used as quarters.
Saddle Bag House- formed when two pens were joined with a common central chimney
Dogtrot House- Two pens joined by a common central hallway
Bluffland House- Based on dog trot plan. Often had enclosed central hallway; full length gallery, story plus one half height, two external end chimneys, kitchen-dining ell, and a false gallery.
TIDEWATER (Lowland) SOUTH HOUSE TYPE
The Tidewater, or Lowland, South house type is not very common in Louisiana, but some do appear where pioneer planters moved to Louisiana directly from Carolina or Virginia.
These homes reflect a British tradition as well as a sub-cultural distinctiveness from the Atlantic Coast
These homes typically use some brick, with the more prosperous land owners using almost all brick. Characteristics of the Tidewater house: mostly exhibit square ground plans with hipped roof forms. Gabled roofs also occur. Internal chimneys are dominant over exterior. The Tidewater settlers also used half-timber wall framing; in many instances, though, brick walls were preferred. Seldom used horizontal notched logs for wall construction of houses, but used this plan for barns. Galleries, especially in the Gulf states were frequently added to the basic plan. Central halls later appeared in some of the homes, specifically after Georgian Architectural elements were introduced.
Tidewater Raised Cottage- a variant of the Tidewater South house type which shows some cultural convergence with Creole building traits. The Cottage exhibits a brick basement on the ground floor, at least one full gallery, external stairs, and expanded dormers.
I-HOUSE; CAROLINA I-HOUSE
Characteristics: Two rooms over two rooms; that is, a basic unit that is two rooms wide, two rooms tall, and one room deep. It usually has a gable roof with eaves to the front and , in Louisiana, one or two-story gallery, central hall, rear shed rooms, and exterior end chimneys. The specimens built by the Mid-Westeners who moved in the 1880’s on the prairies generally lack the hall and gallery, had internal chimneys, and ells goin the main core directly at the center of the rear. These same differences are noticed between older parish seat towns and later railroad towns.
This house was built by Euro-American culture groups in North
America. Its persistence, durability, and acceptance stem from similar homes built in parts of Western Europe and from its association with the better class in this country.
Rooms, porches, and even columns might be added in almost endless variety, but the basic part of the house was always the same.
A special sub-type of I-house is the Carolina I-house, so called because it is so common in western South Carolina and adjacent North Carolina. It occurs in Louisiana where settlers from the Carolina’s migrated during the first half of the nineteenth century. Basically the same pattern PLUS: A one story gallery and one story rear shed. One notable cluster of five occurs in Western East Feliciana Parish, and all of them are connected to South Carolina.
MIDWESTERN HOUSES/MIDWESTERN I-HOUSES
The late nineteenth century entry of Midwesterners into southwest Louisiana importantly changed the landscape there. These settlers arrived with up-to-date notions, not only of farming, but also of house building. They used new techniques, and though many of components were mill made, they still built houses reminiscent of their customary houses of the Midwest. This was the Midwestern I-House.
The basic layout is very plain, almost austere. It usually lacks chimneys and central halls, and commonly has only a small porch, rather than a gallery. It seldom has shed rooms across the rear so that, when an ell occurs, it directly joins the rear of the main core of the house. Governed by priggish notions of efficiency, Midwestern I-houses have a very "upright" aspect, rather than the "reposed" appearance of the Upland South houses, with their central halls and galleries.
These homes were almost always built of lumber often in vertical-board construction. Eventually galleries appeared on some of them, as styles changed and as the farmers prospered. Midwesterners also introduced pyramidal houses to Louisiana. Normally based on a four-room plan, these houses were built in one and two story models. If present in the original plan, the chimney occupied the center of the house, its flue protruding near the peak of the four-sloped roof.
EXTRA STUFF:
-Shed additions- to front, rear, or both
-Chimneys-usually outside main walls
-Piers- Supports under the house
-Ells-1-3 rooms in a line extending from rear of house, usually with detached kitchen
-Multiple front doors- 2-4 are common on Creole houses; Upland South Houses- each pen in the early days had its own door; this also true with Bungalow
-False gallery- no floor, sort of awning, built on the site, rather than manufactured or sold through a lumber yard.
Pictures : Folk
Houses French
Houses Lowlands
South Houses Where
the houses are Located
All Pictures were created by M.B. Newton
