| Notes: Minor shelf wear, binding tight, pages clean and unmarked. "East Tennessee is a crucial area for subsequent westward migration in the Upland South, and John Morgan's fine study of one of the region's major material artifacts is of noteworthy significance to scholars seeking to understand Anglo-American folk culture. His conclusions command respect because they are based upon careful and abundant field observations. —Terry G. Jordan, University of Texas at Austin "I am deeply impressed by the observational powers of the writer and the manner in which the data are used. I have no hesitation in pronouncing the book as one of the best two American treatises on a regional log house." —Fred Kniffen, Louisiana State University Log house construction exerts an almost mystical appeal in the American imagination. As the dominant type of dwelling in the Upland South during much of the nineteenth century, the log house has been the subject of an abundant literature. Until now, however, little effort has been made to understand the processes responsible for the persistence and then the decline of this style of domestic construction. East Tennessee played a pivotal role in the westward diffusion of American cultural traditions. Through the study of log and other dwellings still extant in several East Tennessee counties, and by an analysis of 927 remaining houses constructed in Blount County before 1905, John Morgan illuminates factors of major importance across a much wider nineteenth-century frontier. The Log House in East Tennessee argues that the introduction of portable sawmills, commercial lumbering activity, technical innovations such as balloon framing and "box" construction, and the coming of the railroads acted in concert to eclipse log home building. Surprisingly, relative affluence, the changing agricultural economy, and the social stigma of living in a log house played less important roles in this shift. Such findings, fully documented, call into question commonly accepted generalizations about the Upland South's early cultural landscape. This work concisely lays the groundwork for future scholarship on the region. The Author: John Morgan is assistant professor of geography at Emory and Henry College, Virginia. |