The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [0]
By the Author
The Cherry Pit (1965)
Lightning Bug (1970)
Some Other Place. The Right Place. (1972)
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (1975)
Let Us Build Us a City (1986)
The Cockroaches of Stay More (1989)
The Choiring of the Trees (1991)
Ekaterina (1993)
Butterfly Weed (1996)
When Angels Rest (1998)
Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain) (2002)
With (2004)
The Pitcher Shower (2005)
Farther Along (2008)
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright ©1975 Donald Harington
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by AmazonEncore
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN: 978-1-61218-122-6
To the memory of my father (1905–1977)
and my mother (1905–1983)
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The true basis for any serious study of the art of Architecture still lies in those indigenous, more humble buildings everywhere that are to architecture what folklore is to literature or folk song to music and with which academic architects were seldom concerned.
…These many folk structures are of the soil, natural. Though often slight, their virtue is intimately related to the environment and to the heartlife of the people. Functions are usually truthfully conceived and rendered invariably with natural feeling. Results are often beautiful and always instructive.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
from The Sovereignty of the Individual
Chapter one
We begin with an ending: the last arciform architecture in the Arkansas Ozarks. Years afterward, waking up one morning in his bedroom at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Jacob Ingledew was to remember the home—house, hive, hovel, we should not call it merely “hut”—of Fanshaw. There was, clearly, not a straight line in it, not a corner, not an edge, and Jacob Ingledew was to wake up one morning and stare at the four-cornered ceiling of his bedroom in the governor’s mansion, and think: box! Immediately he would jerk his elbow into his wife Sarah’s ribs, waking her, and declare, “That’s the trouble, Sarey! We’ve done went and boxed ourself in!”
“What?” she was to answer, rousing from good sleep. “You thinkin about them delegates from Washin’ton, hon?” No, he would not have been thinking about the delegates to Washington, but at her mention of them, he was to give over to sleep again in an effort not to think about them, and he was to forget Fanshaw’s home and forget feeling boxed, and go on forever dwelling in boxes of various shapes and sizes.
The home of Fanshaw—our illustration is purely conjectural, based largely on word-of-mouth description; like structures in some of the other illustrations in this study, it no longer exists; Jacob Ingledew moved it, after Fanshaw left, to his backyard, where he used it as a corncrib for several years until it logically fell victim to rot and termites, and disintegrated—looks deceptively small; actually both pens (it was bigeminal, or, to employ the term that we will have frequent recourse to, was an architectural “duple”) were nearly ten feet high and almost thirteen feet in diameter; Fanshaw, who was uncommonly tall for his race, over six feet, was required to stoop only slightly in order to exit his door, while his wife did not have to stoop at all.
Fanshaw was stooping to exit his door when Jacob Ingledew first