Pens, Trots And Symmetry

The names in New Orleans are as colorful as the city itself - shotguns,

camel backs, double galleries,

villas and Creole cottages.

Even the homes that date

back to the early 1800s had

one modern convenience not

readily available in the Ozarks:

Milled lumber.

“Here, you had an ax and

some other basic tools, you

got your property, and you

started cutting down trees,”

says Marie Demeroukas,

photo archivist and research

librarian at the Shiloh

Museum in Springdale. “The

only way to build a house was

to start shaping those trees

into logs.” Neither did the log

structures built in Northwest

Arkansas in the 19th century

vary widely in design, she

says.

“The style and construction

techniques traveled across the

upland South into the Ozarks,”

she explains. “The way things

were built came from certain

traditions and skills they

learned as kids.” Demeroukas has spent a

lot of time with her nose

buried in the museum’s half

a million historic photos and

studying Ozark vernacular

architecture for an exhibit

titled “Single Pens, Saddlebags

and Dogtrots.” Although the

names are as colorful as their

New Orleans counterparts,

the homes really came in only

one design, repeated to make

it bigger.

“The mindset was that a log

home looked a certain way.

That’s what a house looked

like, and that’s what you

built,” she says. “You didn’t try

anything different because you

might stand out, and besides,

this was tried and true.”

Shiloh Museum looks at log homes of the 1800s

According to Demeroukas’ research - primarily using Jean Sizemore’s “Ozark Vernacular Houses: A Study of Rural Homeplaces in the Arkansas Ozarks, 1830-1930” - log homes came in four basic designs:

◊Single pen - Four walls and a roof, Demeroukas describes, with a chimney on the gable end.

◊Double pen - Two single pens set next to each other, with chimneys on both gable ends. “Very symmetrical,” she says.

◊Saddlebags - Just like a double pen but with one chimney in the middle, “on the spine,” she says.

◊Dog trots - Two single pens with a breezeway in between.

“They were units, essentially,” Demeroukas says.

“If you wanted another room, you just added on another ‘pen.’

“The most amazing thing about the photos is how many showed families posed outin front in all their finery - in front of the simplest of structures, but so proud. They wanted to be photographed in front of their home.”

The exhibit, which alsolooks at life in 19th century log homes, is exactly the kind Demeroukas loves best.

“I love the technical part, and I get to indulge my love of learning that sort of thing.”