Woodward's Country Homes — A Closer Reading

A Catalog of Needs, Not Styles

The table of contents lists thirty-one designs plus a chapter on balloon frames. The range is striking: a laborer’s cottage, a gardener’s cottage, a farm cottage, a model cottage, a suburban cottage, a regular country house, a rural church, a school house, an ice house, fences, gates, and several stables and carriage houses. Each design is numbered and titled with a practical descriptor—no romantic names like “Villa Rosa.” The authors treat architecture as a set of functional problems: how to house a laborer cheaply, how to stable horses, how to ventilate a schoolroom. The school house design at Irvington, for instance, includes a “large tank, supplied from the roof” and an “outside cistern” for cool drinking water, which the authors claim “renders the use of ice unnecessary in summer.” Such details reveal a preoccupation with health and efficiency over mere appearance.

Moral Arguments in Practical Prose

Though the book is a pattern book, it occasionally shifts into a persuasive, almost moralizing register. In the school house section, the authors argue that “school architecture has a meaning in it” and that “shabby school-houses induce slovenly habits.” They quote a recent writer at length on the duty of teachers and parents to ensure that “the circumstances under which children study are such as shall leave a happy impression upon their minds.” This passage, embedded in a design description, is the book’s most explicit statement of a belief that runs beneath many of its plans: that well-built structures shape character. The voice here is earnest and reform-minded, a departure from the usual terse instructions. The authors also note the school’s location “on the Hudson, some twenty-five miles above the city of New York,” a place “made famous by the pen and residence of Washington Irving,” linking their practical work to a broader cultural landscape.

Pace and Variation: From Blueprint to Persuasion

The book’s narrative voice shifts noticeably between sections. In the introduction and the school house description, the prose is expansive and argumentative, with sentences that run to fifty words or more. But in most design entries, the language contracts into a clipped, informational style: “This design was prepared for erection in the vicinity of Goshen, Orange Co., N. Y., and the accommodation limited to a price not exceeding ——.” The blank for price is telling—it suggests a template, a plan adaptable to a client’s budget. The authors often specify dimensions, materials, and costs in a few lines, then move on. The balloon frame chapter, which closes the book, is similarly terse. This alternation between persuasive essay and technical specification gives the book an uneven rhythm: the reader moves from a plea for architectural reform to a list of lumber sizes. The effect is that of a manual written by advocates who must also be builders.

Readers should approach Woodward's Country Homes as a period document of the American rural-improvement movement, not as a modern building guide. The plans are schematic, often lacking full dimensions or structural details, and the authors assume a level of craft knowledge that may be unfamiliar today. But the book rewards attention to its incidental arguments—about health, education, and the moral influence of architecture—which are as much a part of its content as the floor plans. The blank price in Design No. 19 is a reminder that these were working documents, meant to be adapted, not followed literally.

There’s something about old pattern books that feels like a quiet conversation with the past—how a simple cottage could carry so much hope for a better life. That same gentle earnestness lingers in the Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts — Context and Discussion, as if both authors believed beauty could slowly shape us, almost without notice. It stayed with me long after I closed it.