Why the buildings crowd together

By GLYNIS HART
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LEMPSTER – Old New England farms don’t look like old farms in Pennsylvania or New York state or the Midwest. Architect Thomas Hubka, who bought a house in Lempster 40 years ago, threw a map up on the screen at the Lempster Historic Hall and invited the audience to find out why that is. 

“Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn,” was the name of his talk as well as an old children’s rhyme, which some of the oldest residents of New Hampshire may remember. 

The rhyme was a game children used to “predict” which building they would get married in.

In New England, beginning in the 1820s, most residents were farmers, and most farmers began moving their buildings together. 

Whereas before 1820 the farms’ buildings were spread out, from then until the 1840s, people began to add or move connecting buildings so that, instead of space in between them, the buildings were contiguous. 

The map drew a line around the areas where there are farms with connected buildings: at the heart of New England, 60 percent or more are arranged this way. At the edges — Vermont’s Champlain Valley region — 20 percent are. Outside that line, however, there are none. 

Why? 

“It kept not adding up,” said Hubka, addressing an interested audience of about 30 people at the historical building. “There was a stage in which they didn’t connect their buildings, and then there’s a stage when they did. Outside of New England, there are no connected farms.” 

In New England, however, this architectural style is dominant. 

Another curious fact is that when farmers left New England for the West, they didn’t bring their connected-building practice with them. “When agricultural people move, they bring their agricultural traditions with them, usually,” said Hubka. 

Although the current folk wisdom would have it that the buildings are close together to save the farmers from going out in the cold, if that were true, why wouldn’t it still be true when the same farmer, or farmer’s son, moved to Ohio? 

Fire was an everpresent danger, said Hubka, and remains a strong reason for keeping buildings separate. So the reason to put them together had to be compelling. 

The answer appeared on the screen in a simple pair of very old photographs: farmers in Minnesota and Kansas posing proudly next to enormous piles of wheat and corn. The rocky soil of New England couldn’t possibly produce these amounts of grain so abundantly and so cheaply. Thus, the main cash crops of local farmers couldn’t compete with products from the Midwest. 

“In 1830, you could not sell wheat from here in Portsmouth that was cheaper than Midwestern wheat. New England farmers were knocked out of their major agricultural products, again and again.” 

With the opening of the Erie Canal and migration westward, trade and people moved West. Those still clinging to the land in the East had to adapt.

“They had a tough hand dealt to them,” said Hubka. “Rocky soil, a short growing season. But the people of New England had a magnificent spirit of tenacity and independence. They developed a secondary operation on their farmsteads.” 

First, the widespread use of the woodstove, rather than an open fireplace, inspired many to move the kitchen to another building. This would be the “little house” of the rhyme. With a connection to the barn, or other secondary buildings, home industries could be managed. 

For instance, one family memorialized in daguerrotype displayed the shovel handles they produced. Others might craft tools, conveyances, equipment, clothing – what the sustainable agriculture   proponents of today call “value-added products.” 

Using the raw materials available to them, families went into business making everything from soap to shirts to harnesses, skates and signs. 

“For a while, it worked,” said Hubka. 

Since the buildings didn’t have plumbing or electricity, people often moved them around “like Monopoly houses,” Hubka said. 

After 1850, however, almost no farmsteads use linked buildings. They went back to keeping the buildings separate – as always, so a fire in one building wouldn’t destroy all the others. Around 1850, another agricultural event happened. It was the beginning of a hundred-year reign of a farm animal that defines New England as much as, or more than maple syrup: the dairy cow. 

But that, said Hubka, is another story.