Primary Format: Paper
ISBN: 9781584653721
Published: 03/01/2004
Pages: 240
Size: 8.75 x 11.75 in.
Subject(s):

Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The Connected Farm Buildings of New England


Thomas C. Hubka

“Big house, little house, back house, barn”—this rhythmic cadence was sung by nineteenth-century children as they played. It also portrays the four essential components of the farms where many of them lived. The stately and beautiful connected farm buildings made by nineteenth-century New Englanders stand today as a living expression of a rural culture, offering insights into the people who made them and their agricultural way of life. A visual delight as well as an engaging tribute to our nineteenth-century forebears, this book has become one of the standard works on regional farmsteads in America.

An unexpected small masterpiece…that has some of the suspense of a detective story and, at times, the poignance of deeply felt, sympathetic social history.
—Robert Campbell, Boston Globe

An important pioneering effort. The book commemorates both an unique indigenous architectural expression and a way of life that has become extinct . . . The style is economic and clear and Hubka's affection for architecture binds the buildings to their people and their times.
—Maine Sunday Times

No matter where you live, you will want this book as a model of vernacular architecture scholarship.
—Vernacular Architecture Newsletter

THOMAS C. HUBKA currently teaches in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. In 2006 he received the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s Henry Glassie Award in recognition of his lifetime of achievement. His most recent book is Resplendent Synagogue: Architecture and Worship in an Eighteenth-Century Polish Community which won the 2004 Orbis Book Prize for Polish studies, Honorable Mention.

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