Carson Michaelis
E111 → Reconstructing the South
Fall 2023Elective Course - ‘Reconstructing the South’
University of Texas at Austin
Professor Bryan Norwood
The following are a series of mappings created for an elective course examining a catalocue of the Southern Architect and Building News. These articles give us a small glimpse into the architecture and building world during the time of Southern Reconstruction.
Total:
Period 1: Early Years, 1892
Period 2: Mid-War, 1917
Period 3: Late Years, 1921
Mapping the Reach of the SABN
Tucked between the final essay and the ad-filled back pages of most copies of the Southern Architecture and Building News is a section sometimes titled the “Building and Construction Department”, and other times “Building Notes”. The section contains a list of inquiries targeted at the readers of the SABN , be they either engineers, architects, or builders. The listings each contain some details on buildings either in the process of being built or which are soon to be built. Through the act of mapping the information contained in this section, we can better track the range of southern architecture throughout the lifetime of SABN, and understand where those who desired southern architecture were through the decades that the journal was in publication.
Each of the maps below follows a simple logic. Three separate time periods of the journal were first identified. The first is in 1892, containing the earliest digitized copies of the journal. The second time period is in 1917, reflecting the state of the journal and American building during the war. Lastly is 1921, the final complete year before the section was removed from the journal (after which it only remained in print for a few more years). In each of these three time periods, three journals were selected, from which the entirety of the section was digitized and mapped, including any available information about the town to be built in, the cost, and the type of building. The types were classified into five broad categories: residential, churches, industrial, civic, and commercial. After gathering the information and making the maps, another set including the totals between each set of data was included, and is shown first in the set below.
While the goal of these maps is the ability to use them to augment other theses proposed based on research coming out of the SABN , and even with such a small sample from the available information, there are already some interesting things that can be seen in the patterns of information scraped.
One is the change in range of those making inquiries in the journal between the first and latter two periods. Looking at the total inquiries per state in Map 10, versus those in Maps 18 or 26, individuals looking for southern builders through the SABN changed drastically from the earlier years, in which people from above the 36° 30’ parallel (Southern border of Virginia and Kentucky) seemed to also have interest in recruiting through the journal, while in the years after there seemed to be a shift of interest towards the ‘core’ of the south.
Also reflected in these maps is the change in the method of inclusion in the journal. In the early volumes we can see Missouri with a far higher than average number of entries, which skews some of the graphics. This is because at this time the journal was allowing what seems to be unfiltered entrances into the section, which meant one supporter from St. Louis was writing in with nearly every building opportunity in town for each issue in the year. As the journal developed and grew though, there seems to be better curation of which entries to include.
Other small points of interest would be the shift towards an inclusion of Florida in the image of the south, the demand for Southern industry in Quebec, likely because it is the province in which cotton plantations existed in Canada. Also interesting is the presence of money in Virginia, most noticeable in Maps 25 and 26, and the vast majority of civic inquiries staying within the south.
At the risk of extrapolating any more naive conclusions from the small set of data and limited context, I will conclude with some of the un-mappable statistics. The total number of inquiries mapped was 1,253. From this, 52% were from period 1, 30% from period 2, and 18% from period 3. This seems to track with a general decline in interest in including these types of inquiries in the journal, as soon after the year with only 18% of the original number of entries, publication of the journal stopped. The few years after, there were only a handful of entries in each issue, but each received a larger writeup. It may be of interest for somebody to trace the new forms of hiring that may have developed and replaced this one at the time, if the rich were simply more willing to recruit locally, or if the prevalence of more architects meant one did not have to search as hard for help in building.
In period 1, there were 648 entries; of which 63% were residential, 4% industrial, 18% commercial, 8% civic, and 7% churches. In period 2, there were 370; of which 34% were residential, 2% industrial, 16% commercial, 33% civic, and 15% churches. In period 3, there were 235 entries; of which 14% were residential, 2% industrial, 32% commercial, 32% civic, and 20% churches.
Overall, I think that this data and the maps can be a helpful tool in understanding the scope of both Southern architecture, as well as the interest in Southern architecture. There is potential in these issues as well to grow the number of entries tracked to create a much more whole understanding of the scope of influence that the Atlanta-based journal had over time. Given more time it would have been lovely to both include more issues in the dataset, as well as to iterate graphically on the maps (it was my first time using q-gis in this way so I have learned a lot but now realize some early workflow mistakes which were made).