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Summary: Powerful debunker of Maine myth!
Review: If you have ever wandered around Maine, you will have noticed a unique form of farm architecture. But ask most people why 19th century Maine farmers made such a concerted effort to physically connect the structures on their farms and the answer is "they needed a way to get to the barn through the winter snow." Trust me, I have gone around and asked current dwellers of Maine farmsteads. Thomas Hubka carefully points out that if that were so, we'd see similar connected farm architecture in parts of the nation where winters were even more inclimate and snowier. Yet Maine farm architecture remains almost totally enigmatic. Hubka's diligent field work reveals that forces were at work in mid-19th century Maine that conspired against the rural farmer: industrial competition for hand-manufactured goods produced at home for cash suppliment, a labor drain to other more prosperous farming regions, and unyielding land. The brilliance of Hubka's work is that he evokes how, despite all this, Maine farmers strove to adapt by creating resilliant islands of industry with the structure of their homes that defiantly sheltered year-round dooryard work efforts from wind and snow, but also change abroad. This book is also a perfect source of pithy detail and illustration regarding 17th century cape-style house architecture which, it turns out, is still ubiquitous in New England. Highly recommended, a stiking work.
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Summary: when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
Review: There's a type of farm layout that you see in New England that you don't see elsewhere in the US. This book is a study of that type of farm, its whys and wherefores, and how it fit into people's lives -- or better, how their lives fit into it. This book is written very clearly, with numerous graceful diagrams of floor plans, layouts, and photos of representative farms. The author has a deep sympathy for the ordinary farmers and their taxing occupation, as can be seen in the choice of photos (farmhouse buried in snow, barn on fire, farm family sitting in a front yard still dominated by those granite cobbles you expect to be piled into fences). Diagrams tell the demographic story of why these farms were created, why they belong to northern New England; how they were achieved and how people spent their lives in them. For me, the magic comes in because I fell in love with one of these farms, and its sunny Lincoln-era dooryard. It has a subtle rightness because of its orientation, its site on a knoll, and a certain flexibility of layout. But even if you don't have such a reference point, I think you will be impressed at the perceptiveness of the work, if you can muster any interest at all in the topic. p.s. I checked on the Web to see if the author is still flourishing. His current project seems to be the wooden synogogues of tiny eastern european towns. Sounds neat...
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