Gothic
Revival Style By Peter Barr There are relatively few Gothic Revival houses in Adrian, just as in the rest of Michigan—due at least in part to the fact that the inventors of the style promoted it as an antidote to urbanization and industrialization. Apparently such romantic notions held little attraction within the context of the American frontier, where the order of the Greek Revival and Italianate styles predominated. Moreover, the earliest examples of the style in America were constructed of stone—a material not readily available in the Midwest. Another reason that the Gothic Revival is relatively scarce is that the complex patterns of wood on most Carpenter Gothic Revival homes depended on the availability of inexpensive nails used in “balloon-frame” construction. Balloon-frame construction is a light, flexible and tough method of building invented in 1833 by Augustine Taylor for the construction of a church near Chicago. It saves in labor costs by using relatively small, milled boards (2 x 4s, 2 x 6s, etc.) that carpenters can handle without a team of laborers, and that were held close to one another with nails. The technique was dubbed balloon-frame construction because old-fashioned joiners condemned these new structures, claiming (incorrectly) that they would blow away like a balloon in a high wind. So even after inexpensive wire nails became available at mid-century, which made this building technique practical, many homes continued to be built using the joiner’s traditional mortise-and-tenon techniques. The Gothic Revival style first appeared in England in the third quarter of the 18th century when Horace Walpole redesigned his country house outside of London as a Gothic fortress that he called Strawberry Hill. In America, the earliest fully developed domestic example was Alexander Jackson Davis’s 1832 Glen Ellen, in Baltimore, Maryland, a castle-like structure that Robert Gilmor III commissioned after visiting Europe. Subsequently Davis’s friend Andrew Jackson Downing helped to popularize the style in America by publishing two widely read books that included architectural plans and elevation drawings in the Gothic Revival style: Cottage Residences in 1842 and The Architecture of Country Houses in 1850. The structures that these books inspired in Adrian were primarily built of wood and might be described more accurately as Cottage Gothic, Carpenter’s Gothic, or the Pointed Style. Their most prominent features are decoratively carved “gingerbread” verge boards (also called bargeboards) which hang below the eaves of the roof. Such carvings were made possible at mid-century by the newly invented steam-powered scroll saw. Also central to the style were the steeply pointed "wall dormers" that emphasize the verticality of the structure by extending from the building’s main exterior with one continuous surface up to the attic level. On some homes, windows are decorated with pointed hood moldings (also called drip moldings or label moldings) and on other homes vertical board-and-batten siding has been applied to emphasize the verticality of the structure. Pointed-arch windows and doors appear in Adrian only in churches, such as St. John’s Lutheran Church, which was built in 1862 (stained glass added in 1914) and a few commercial buildings. However, these “lancet” openings can be found on some Gothic Revival style homes in surrounding villages, including Manchester and Saline. Adrian has two distinctly different types of Gothic Revival style homes. The first and most common has a series of relatively small upside-down-V-shaped “wall dormers” that break up the line of an otherwise horizontal (sometimes Mansard) roof. The second has the short side of the building facing forward so that its relatively large, steeply pitched gable spans the building’s entire facade. The only example of this latter style is the Damon-Ash House at 456 State Street, which was built in 1855 as a Greek Revival home and then was redecorated in the Gothic Revival style in the 20th century. At the turn of the century, Gothic-Revival scrollwork carvings, steeply-pitched roofs and balloon-frame construction began to appear on Queen Anne style homes and on homes that combine an eclectic mix of styles, as is the case of the 1890 Kaiser-Robins House at 627 North Main Street, whose Gothic Revival features were combined with a Second Empire Mansard roof.
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