About two years ago, my husband and I bought
a house, the cutest little house, a simple
classic vernacular farmhouse with the most
amazing Victorian staircase, but wait a minute,
a farmhouse with a Victorian staircase? What
in the world is that? Being an avid researcher,
I jumped straight down the American architecture
styles rabbit hole. I wanted to figure out
what this house is.
Today, I'm going to share some of the stuff
that I found out about Folk Victorian houses,
including why they came about and some of
the classic recognizable features that all
of them have. Real quick, we are in the middle
of renovating this 1905 Folk Victorian house
and taking it back to what it could've been
when it was built. We are learning so much
about how styles and renovation and DIY along
the way, so if you want to subscribe, hit
the bell, you'll get notified every time we
share something new with you.
Victorian architecture is one of the most
universally recognizable styles of house.
Anyone who knows a little bit about old houses
can probably point to something and say, "Well,
that's Victorian-ish." Folk Victorians are
the same but a little bit different. We are
going to discuss the history of them, where
they came from, how this style came about
and talk about some of those identifying features
that are classically Folk Victorian.
A lot of the information in this video comes
from the book of A Field Guide to American
Houses. I will link it in the description
below and if you don't buy any other book
on old houses, you need to buy this one because
it is the most unbelievable wealth of information.
Let's jump into it.
Folk Victorian houses start appearing in the
Midwest sometime around 1870 and trail out
about 1910. They have their roots in the national
style farmhouse, which was made popular by
the railroads but have a little bit of extra
Victorian flair. I started my research by
trying to understand what the political and
societal and economic culture was in America
at the time that these houses were built.
To start off, there were a few different presidents
during this time period, but one of the most
recognizable and most widely known is Theodore
Roosevelt.
Around this time, Charles Dana Gibson also
created his famous Gibson Girl who became
pretty much the quintessential feminine woman
in the Victorian era. It is rumored that she
was modeled after the legendarily beautiful
Evelyn Nesbit, who became more or less America's
first "It girl." Additionally, while mass
manufacturing had been increasing steadily
since the mid-1800s, the beginning of the
20th century saw one critical difference.
Previously, all of the mass manufacturing
had been done by people, people making lots
of products, but now machines were introduced,
machines making products. The amazing thing
about this change is all of those specialized
machines that were making Queen Anne porch
spindles and detailing and trims, those machines
could be made, packed up, put on a train,
and then shipped to other parts of the country.
This allowed small local lumber yards, the
ability to make some of these very fancy,
very extravagant trim pieces and exterior
pieces that were available in the big cities.
Now, the grandeur that was previously only
available to the extremely wealthy and those
in large cities is now available to rural
America. What does this create? You guessed
it. The Folk Victorian house.
As we mentioned, Folk Victorians have their
roots in national style farmhouses. Now, these
are very simple folk houses with a few basic
shapes that are more or less one step above
a cabin. Their main purpose was to be shelter
and nothing more. Those national style farmhouses
started emerging in the 1850s primarily due
to the explosion of railroads at that time.
Railroads could now carry building materials
and people farther and into more remote locations,
which led to these smaller settlements farther
away from the big cities. Folk Victorian houses
at their core are just very basic, simple
folk houses. Some of the houses had pyramidal
roof shapes, but almost all of them have gables.
Now, a gable roof is just a roof that has
a slope on both sides. A gable is the area
underneath the roof that forms between the
two sloping planes. These houses could have
front facing gables where that triangular
gable end was facing toward the front of the
house or they could have a side facing gables
where they would go 90 degrees to the front
of the house. Overall, the facades of these
houses were very symmetrical in terms of door
and window placement, but with one very noticeable
exception.
This exception is what let me know that Folk
Victorian was the style that we had in this
house. You could obviously have just a front
gable or just aside gable or you could have
a front and side gable. Normally that front
gable would be offset to either the right
or the left. The front gable is often two
or even three rooms deep. The side gable would
come out from the middle and typically only
be on one side of the house. This would create
a T or L-shape farmhouse that is unbelievably
common around here in the Midwest.
It is so common actually that I have a folder
on my computer of houses that have been listed
since we bought this one that have the exact
same floor plan. Since this is such a common
floor plan for houses around here, you would
think that some building book or architectural
book, somewhere from the 1900s would have
an explanation of how this floor plan is supposed
to be built. But so far I have spent hours
upon hours on the Internet and I can't find
anything.
I've been all over archive.org and looked
through dozens upon dozens of house plan books
and I've come up dry. I'll leave a link to
Archive below and if you guys happen to go
through and find either your house or my house
floor plan, leave it for me in the comments
below.
The other possibly most recognizable feature
of Folk Victorians is the millwork. The porches
often had flat jigsaw cut porch trim up around
the roof of the porch and it almost looks
like a lace border around the porch of the
house. The porch detail can also contain turned
spindles as we're seeing in many of the larger
more ornate Queen Anne Victorians of the day.
On our front porch, we actually have both.
Obviously, you can see the flat jigsawed portion
with these kinds of interesting trefoil designs,
but then we also have a little bitty bit of
spindle stuck in the middle of it. It's not
super fancy, but it is also kind of fancy
and pretty special. Remember those gables
we talked about earlier? Oftentimes those
gables had brackets under the eaves and roof
lines. Sometimes the gables were sectioned
off with fancy trims so they could be a little
bit more ornate. Other times there were just
other fancy architectural details up against
the roof line, not too much, just a little
bit of extra fancy.
All of these little exterior bits are the
kinds of things that would be created by these
specialized machines that are now no longer
restricted to the city. So you can take your
basic national style farmhouse, stick out
a few little fancy bits, and now you have
a Folk Victorian. Now, a field guide to American
houses primarily focuses on the exterior features
of the house that kind of define all of them.
I have very little historical knowledge to
back up this next theory. But if we know that
the exteriors of these Folk Victorian houses
were just basic national style farmhouses
dressed up with a little bit of extra molding,
we can reasonably assume that the interior
of the houses was probably the same. This
is at least the case for our house. Unfortunately,
we only have one remaining doorway in the
house that has its entire trim remaining,
but you can see that it is just a little bit
fancy. With the carved wood casings and the
pretty circular rosettes, it's a little step
above your basic flat molding.
When we were renovating this house, we actually
found the name of the man who built it along
with the city on the back of some of these
trim pieces when we pulled them down. We are
assuming that this was a shipping address
so that the lumber mill or whoever made these
pieces, was able to ship the pieces to him
and kind of reinforce that idea of mass-produced
trim molding. One final point to discuss.
How can we identify a Folk Victorian whose
character and who's gingerbread and who's
trim has been stripped out? Well, I don't
know. This is exactly what happened to this
house. Almost all of the original exterior
trim is gone. Most of the original interior
trim is gone. A lot of the original character
like fireplaces and mantles and tile is all
just gone. This is why I really struggled
to determine what style of house this is.
We are again in the realm of historical conjecture,
but the only tangible difference that I've
been able to see is in just the overall size
of the house. Since the national style houses
are older and more for basic shelter and are
really just one step above cabins, they tend
to be a little bit smaller in their footprint
than Folk Victorian houses. The room, ceiling
heights, the room dimensions, the staircases,
everything is just a little bit shrunken.
For example, before we bought this farmhouse,
we actually toured a different house that
I realize now in retrospect was a national
style farmhouse. It was very cute. It was
the same kind of T-shape with a front gable
and an end gable, but the rooms were just
noticeably smaller. Upstairs it had one large
bedroom, but then the smallest bedroom was
something like 8 by 10. It was tiny. By comparison,
the rooms in this house are all about 15 by
15. They're pretty good size, even by modern
standards.
I'm not saying that a Folk Victorian can't
have small rooms and I'm not saying that a
national farmhouse can't have large rooms,
it just seems to me that the Folk Victorians
were a little bit bigger as people started
to spend more time in their house and less
out of it. This is not a hard and fast rule
by any means and in fact, could be entirely
wrong. I am not an architect, I'm not an architectural
expert, but given the rather ambiguous nature
of identifying the age of these farmhouses
around here that are just kind of vernacular
style, that's the best I can do.
That is everything that I have for you today.
I very much hope you enjoyed this video. If
you did, would you mind clicking the like
button, subscribing and sharing with all of
your old house enthusiast friends? I am hoping
to do more videos in this American architecture
series where we can break down some of the
common architectural styles around the country
and figure out what exactly makes them what
they are. So if you would like to see that,
please leave me a comment below letting me
know what style of house you would like to
see next.
My husband and I are sympathetically renovating
our own Folk Victorian taking it back as best
we can. And if you want to see all of our
daily updates on that and our little projects
around the house, follow us on Instagram @farmhousevernacular.
Also, go ahead and subscribe to our email
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planning course for you guys to kind of help
you manage a whole house home renovation or
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on that.
And also we have tee-shirts now they say,
"Renovate With Respect." I'll leave a link
into description if you want to grab yourself
one of those. They're really comfy and represent
old houses. Thank you so much for watching
guys. I will see you next time. Bye.
