The Old Neighborhood Part I

This 2 1/2-story cross-plan house is typical of the earliest houses in the neighborhood in the 1880s and 1890s, and they were also often built  on farms and across rural areas. This type of front gable house is sometimes referred to as a Homestead house, and sometimes called an example of Folk or Vernacular style.  These houses are more vertical than horizontal to allow more space on narrow city lots and more wall room for high windows to allow lots of natural light.  Houses like this can be found all across the country in the last decades of the 19th-century. They were built to standard plans using pre-fabricated lumber and hardware that was available from building catalogs or from local lumber and building supply merchants.  Many of the houses on Westcott, Dell, Columbus and South Beech are variants of this type.  Some are cross plans like this, with projecting bays on either side. Others have a L-plan, with just one extension.   Almost all have a front gable and steeply pitched roof.