[Home] [Next]
By Jane Pieplow as featured in Volume 11 of In Focus.
In preparation for
writing this article, I have driven slowly down nearly every street in
Fallon, at the risk of being reported to the police as a suspicious person
"casing the neighborhood," checking houses off my checklist. Let’s
see . . . Foursquare? "Yes." Concrete Block? "Yes."
Tudor? Check "Yes" for that too. Victorian? "Yes."
Bungalow? "Yes." What in the world have I been doing? Taking
inventory of the architectural styles of some of Fallon’s homes!
It’s quite easy to not see what is around us
everyday, to take our surroundings for granted, especially when we have
driven by, walked past and lived in the same homes for years. My hope is
that this article will lead you to a new recognition of some of Fallon’s
older architectural styles and will encourage you to look with new
appreciation at some of the city’s homes.
At the end of the 19th century, the community that was
to become Fallon grew from a few buildings on Mike and Elisa Fallon’s
ranch (at the crossroads of Williams and Maine) into a bustling commerce
center whose main purpose was to provide goods and services to support the
increasing numbers of ranchers and homesteaders coming to farm on the
Newlands Project. Unlike cities that grew in conjunction with silver and
gold strikes or had a large number of lumber barons or railroad magnates,
Fallon’s beginnings were modest as there were relatively few people in
town rich enough to build the grand homes seen in some other American
cities. (R.L Douglass was an exception. His "city" home, begun
in 1904 and now known as the "1906 House Bed and Breakfast," is
the only large, elaborate Victorian home in Fallon.)
Folk Architecture
The fact that Fallon wasn’t filled with legions of
the rich and famous doesn’t mean that its architecture is unvaried and
boring. The first settlers to our area built the true folk architecture,
whose essence is its sense of place. Think of log cabins in the midwest,
sod houses on the prairies, salt boxes and Cape Cods in New England, adobe
dwellings in the southwest and dog-trot houses in the hills of Kentucky.
Folk architecture is based on traditional practices that have persisted
over time in a specific region or locality, passed along through
generations: father-to-son, master-to-apprentice, neighbor-to-neighbor.
Its "architect" is a community rather than an individual. A few
examples of this early type of architecture survive here in the form of
adobe buildings and in some of the building styles immigrants brought with
them from their birth countries.
Popular Architecture
The most common form of residential construction
building styles in the older sections of Fallon could be labeled
"popular architecture." Unlike folk buildings, these common
houses can often be traced to an individual source and a particular time.
Popular architecture is transmitted by mass communication, like
architectural planbooks, and may have very broad geographical circulation.
Any particular form may end as suddenly as it began when some other form
supersedes it and becomes the new style craze.
Defined not so much by a high-style label but by their
basic shape, or massing, two of these common house designs can be
described simply as L-shaped or T-shaped. The L-shaped house consists of a
gable and an ell while the T-shaped house uses two cross gables to create
the plan.
Houses like these proliferated in the American
landscape after the Civil War. They were simplified versions of houses
shown in architectural pattern and plan books, whose publication began in
the 1850s with those of A. J. Downing and Calvert Vaux. In the post-Civil
War decades, catalogs of architectural plans flooded the market, fed by a
voracious demand for single-family, middle-class housing. These
picturesque designs, though they looked intriguingly complex, were in fact
quite standardized. Thus they were easily and widely copied, often with
minor variations, by local builders. Not surprisingly, one can expect to
find such houses in areas settled from about 1885 to 1910 or so.
