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Cultural Veneer: Decorative Plastering in Utah's Sanpete Valley
Cultural Veneer: Decorative Plastering in Utah's Sanpete Valley
BY THOMAS CARTER
William H. Ranlett The Architect (1847)
BEFITTING ITS SAINTLY PROVENANCE, Mormon nineteenth-century domestic architecture in the West has often been characterized as austere and spartan. Some new evidence, however, must be considered before discussion is closed on the subject of a Latter-day Saint architectural style. A case in point is the decorative plastering tradition found in the Sanpete Valley of central Utah. This plastering is not extravagant but nevertheless suggests a pretentiousness that has been consistently overlooked. Indeed, the fact that this decorative touch has gone generally unnoticed is in itself a compliment to the genius at work here; for success in this type of plastering from the outset was measured in the inconspicuous nature of the finished product.
Plasterers in the Sanpete Valley during the second half of the nineteenth century joined in a design conspiracy to make one substance, judged inferior, look like another that would be visually pleasing and socially acceptable. In normal practice such plastering was used to make adobe or randomly laid stone appear to be brick or skillfully worked masonry. This was a purely deceptive activity, and properly executed the resulting plaster veneer was intended to go unheeded by passers-by. A good bricking, as this decorative technique is often called, could transform an adobe house quickly into "brick," the owner enjoying the status of brick at the price of adobe. Such duplicity cannot be viewed as merely eccentric behavior, for the widespread occurrence of this technique through the Sanpete Valley and in many other parts of central and southern Utah clearly establishes its legitimacy. One nineteenthcentury observer in Utah Valley reported adobe cottages "painted of a brick color, with the joints laid off in white paint." Similar examples have been recorded in Salt Lake, Utah, and Sevier counties. Paragonah in Iron County is particularly rich in homes veneered as stone. Bricking becomes a clue to the historian that many early Utah builders held certain materials, like brick, above the more common adobe and that these Utah pioneers, despite their harsh frontier life, were extremely concerned about the look of their homes. Plastering over adobe did perform a utilitarian service by shielding the sun-dried clay from the dissolving effects of wind and rain. Yet, stone, relatively immune to climate, was also plastered in this manner. Aesthetic as well as practical motives stirred the pioneer folk architect.
Arriving in the Sanpete Valley after 1849, Mormon colonists found native materials in abundance to satisfy their building needs. Timber was available in adjacent canyons, but log buildings were frowned upon by the LDS church leadership. President Brigham Young's aversion to log construction is oft-quoted: "Log buildings do not make a sightly city, we should like to see buildings that are ornamental and pleasing to the eye, as well as comodious." Sawmills were in operation by the early 1850s in the Sanpete Valley, but the lumber produced generally went into furnishing houses with rafters, doors, floors, windows, and furniture. Frame houses did not surface in sizable numbers here until the 1880s. Masonry dominated the domestic building scene during the first quarter of settlement.
Like the Mormon religion itself, Sanpete Valley colonists were "gathered" from diverse regional and national origins. Most residents, whether they came from New England, the South, England, Wales, or the Scandinavian countries, arrived having a general acquaintance with fired or burned brick construction. In Sanpete the extant architectural record indicates that when suitable clay was obtainable the settlers relied primarily on brick for house building. Sun-dried adobe bricks and stone were employed in those communities lacking brick quality clay. On the western side of the valley (fig. 2) where fireable clay was available, small kilns and brickyards were quickly established. Moroni, Fountain Green, and Wales contain many brick homes from the 1860s and 1870s, with adobe in a clear minority and only a rare instance of stone. Eastern slope settlements, however, did not fare so well as a burning grade clay was not located until the late nineteenth century. During the first decades of settlement, residents of Manti, Ephraim, Spring City, and Mount
Pleasant relied principally on a cream-colored limestone found in the nearby foothills and an adobe shaped from clay excavated from individual building sites. Though convenient, stone and adobe posed serious aesthetic problems for the folk builder, for by nature they contradicted certain prevailing ideas about architectural style.
Along with the essential pioneering tools, Sanpete colonists brought to the valley deeply held cultural ideas about how things should be done and about how things should look. Customary practice was the most dramatic influence on local building design. Newcomers to Utah held particular tastes in house appearance, and in nineteenth-century America such tastes were largely structured on a Georgian stylistic model. Georgian architectural thinking was introduced into the United States from England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, gaining ascendancy about the time of the American Revolution. More than simply a fleetingly popular style, the Georgian model significantly restructured the way people perceived architecture.
Based on a Renaissance fascination with the harmonic proportions of classical design, Georgian architecture replaced the organic irregularities Of the Medieval world with orderly propriety. Architectural historian Hugh Morrison describes the Georgian style as "essentially a formal style. House shapes themselves became simple and regular geometric figures, no longer expressive of the accidents of internal asymmetries or evolutionary growth."
Smoothly surfaced exteriors with rigidly symmetrical facades became trademarks of the Georgian house, with architects devoting "considerable attention to the texture of wall surfaces, often treating them artificially (from the standpoint of the material employed) to gain desired effects of pattern or composition." Imposing geometric order on the peculiarities of nature, the Georgian aesthetic transcended its colonial identity and figured prominently in subsequent architectural styles of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Georgian canons remained popular with country builders well into the 1880s, and it was this aesthetic — based on artificiality and symmetry — that formed the design theory that wended its way into the Sanpete Valley after midcentury. The Mormon settlers arrived with particular ideas about how they would treat the building materials found at their disposal.
In a dissertation on Mormon folk building, Leon S. Pitman has expertly traced the origins of Mormon adobecraft to the southwestern United States. Adobe technology was carried to Utah from New Mexico and California by members of the Mormon Battalion at the close of the Mexican War. Although the concept of sun-dried bricks had not been practicable in the damp East, the process involved in making adobes was close enough to brick that handling it required no significant retooling on the builder's part. For conventional brick, a drying step was necessary before firing in order to reduce the chance of cracking and explosion. For adobes, the pioneers found that the last step in brickmaking, burning, was simply discarded. If the settlers quickly learned to deal effectively with adobe, it never achieved status as a building material comparable to that of brick or stone. Adobes are coarse in texture with the surface often laced with small stones and straw and with a quite dismal grayish-brown coloring. Such earthy composition was viewed as inferior in quality. An adobe wall could be spruced up by laying it in a fancy bonding pattern, but covering it with a coat of plaster was a more common remedy for its bleak, almost muddy, appearance.
The plaster used in the Sanpete Valley during the early years was the lime-sand variety. 14 Hard limestone (called blue limestone locally) was hauled from the canyons and burned in kilns. Each Sanpete community had its own lime kilns. Kiln-firing reduced the limestone to small chinks of quicklime. A large hole was then dug near the building site and the quicklime was mixed with water, a process called slaking. Slaked lime was a creamy mixture that was thickened with sand to produce plaster. This lime-sand plaster, often simply called mud in Sanpete, was then applied directly to the adobe wall. The bond was achieved without lath and was strong enough to endure on many houses into the present day. Most early examples can be found with only one thin coat of plaster. Several older homes, however, are covered with two coats; a smooth fine layer conceals a coarse undercoat that is darker and roughly formed (often with horsehair added). The finished plaster veneer could be allowed to dry a light brown color, or could be marked off to simulate brick or stone.
Opting for the decorative style, the plasterer first let the veneer set up so as to be firm but still workable. Choosing either a brick or stone pattern, the grid was first laid off straight with a chalkline. The plaster was then scored to approximate the desired material with a jointing tool. Against the light plaster background the fake brick courses were often highlighted with a red brick dye to emphasize the decorative pattern (fig. 3). In several examples (figs. 1 and 4) the plaster itself was colored red and then scored like brick. When the lines were accented with white the technique produced a very close copy of red brick. One house, dating from the early twentieth century, features black lines painted over a red veneer (fig. 5). The Severine Jensen house in Spring City (fig. 6) sports a brightly whitewashed veneer with an overlay of red bricking.
Plasterers also found expression in simulated stone. The stonework found in the Sanpete Valley is of an overall high quality. The mason's goal lay in chiseling out fine square blocks that could be stacked in evenly rising courses. Wall composition stressed geometric stability. The best stonework in the valley is found on the Manti Temple and the Jens P. Carlson house (fig. 7) in Spring City. Clever plasterers easily copied such stonework on veneered adobe houses (fig. 8). Scored lines were again colored to add emphasis (fig. 9). The facsimile even was given the heavy cornerstones, or quoins, so popular on stone buildings (fig. 10).
Stone itself was sometimes given a plaster veneer. Not all residents could afford the luxury of a skilled mason yet still wanted a stone house. In several cases, a hastily thrown-together stone wall of rubble, coursed rubble, or random ashlar was elevated to respectability with the application of a plaster veneer. The Jacob Johnson house in Spring City and the Hans A. Hansen house in Ephraim (fig. 11) were both plastered to give the external appearance of expertly cut stone. These stone houses were made to look like stone houses should look.
Decorative plastering remained a viable construction possibility in the Sanpete Valley from the 1860s to about 1915. In most cases the decorative veneer was applied at the time of original house construction. The technique was known to the early settlers of the valley and clearly has a long history. In England during the 1780-1850 period stuccoed (plastered) houses were covered with a "mesh of punctiliously incised lines" to suggest stone. Plastering was regularly practiced during the same period in Scandinavia. In Denmark and southern Sweden where sun-dried brick (lertegel) was used for the filling in of half-timbered houses, plastering was necessary to protect against the wet climate. When burned-brick houses 'became fashionable during the mid-nineteenth century, the walls of the older half-timbered structures were often repainted to imitate the new material. New England examples have been recorded, and Hugh Morrison calls attention to the practice in eastern cities:
Although Morrison cannot condone such fraudulent activity, his statement does indicate that the plastering technique enjoyed a certain popularity. House pattern books and carpenters' manuals of the period, several of which could have easily been found in Utah, also mention bricking.
In The Architectural Instructor, 1856, Minard Lefever denounced the purposeful imitation of natural materials but acknowledged that "for the sake of economy, houses of coarse brick, rubble stone, or lath walls, are often stuccoed, and marked off and tinted to represent stone." Samuel B. Reed's 1878 House Plans for Everybody advocated decorative plastering, outlined the procedure, and dignified the process by allowing that it produced a "pleasing effect." Mormon architects had successfully employed such a bricking technique when building their first temple in Kirtland, Ohio, in the 1830s, and many of Salt Lake City's early homes, including the William T. Staines house (later called the Devereaux house), sported fabricated exterior surfaces.
Decorative plastering was not found on all adobe houses in Utah, of course. Many adobe structures were not plastered, and a large number remain unsheathed even today. Yet, this plaster brick or stone veneer is encountered with enough frequency to betray a surprising streak of vanity in the spartan Mormon character.
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