DONALD A. HUTSLAR
The Ohio Farmstead: Farm Buildings
as Cultural Artifacts
Ohio's rural landscape, though
dwindling, constitutes a signifi-
cant area of the state, some 17 million
acres, largely in the central
and western counties.1 However, Ohio's
agrarian past is still evident
in the urban centers where an occasional
farm building remains
on-site, often adapted to some
commercial use such as a dairy store
or carry-out-an ignominious end at best.
The barn, in particular, has become a
romantic symbol, another in
a long tradition of such symbols which
have become fashionable in
the United States. The cult of the barn
has become so strong that
several firms in the New England area
offer original barn frames for
conversion to dwellings; in fact, one
firm advertised newly manufac-
tured barn frames suitable for houses,
an anomaly perhaps better
interpreted by a psychiatrist than a
historian.2 Romance (defined
here as the imaginative or emotional
appeal of the heroic, adventur-
ous, remote, or idealized) has drawn
other architectural forms such
as water-powered gristmills and covered
bridges, and more recently
opera houses and log buildings, into its
camp. American printmak-
ers, such as the Currier and Ives
company, profited from a current of
romance, nostalgia, and sentiment from
the 1840s into the twen-
tieth century. Their lithographs
reflected a yearning for the "old
homestead," the rural countryside,
from which so many members of
the newly urbanized, industrialized
society had recently departed.3
Donald A. Hutslar is Curator of History,
the Ohio Historical Society.
1. Ohio Crop Reporting Service, United
States Department of Agriculture, Ohio
Agricultural Statistics, 1977 (Columbus, June, 1978), 6.
2. For professional literature on the
subject, see Mildred F. Schmertz, "Upgrading
Barns to be Inhabited by People," Architectural
Record, 115 (June, 1974), 117-22.
3. The allure of cultural artifacts
often becomes difficult to explain even in terms
of romance or nostalgia. For example,
can the present interest in Ohio canals be
classified as "roomantic hydraulic
engineering"? What are the artifacts? Canal beds,
aquaducts, and bridges have been
proposed for the National Register of Historic
Places, but the most important relics,
the original canal boats, no longer exist. A