Understanding Home-Making and Urban Landscape Creation in Montgomery, Alabama
Author(s): Sunshine Thomas
Year: 2020
Summary
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
During the summer of 2018 an architectural survey of African American communities around downtown Montgomery, Alabama was conducted. This urban environment was built between 1870 and 1950, and home construction correspondingly progresses from late Victorian, to bungalows, and then to ranch-style homes. Shotgun houses represent a persistent small-house form over time. However, the landscape also includes two-room wood frame homes oriented parallel to the street. The presence of parallel oriented homes in urban African American neighborhoods counters the historical expectation that these forms are predominantly rural white vernacular traditions. This paper examines the neighborhood distribution and construction dates of these homes and explores possible factors in choosing parallel oriented two-room home construction over the commonly recognized urban shotgun.
Cite this Record
Understanding Home-Making and Urban Landscape Creation in Montgomery, Alabama. Sunshine Thomas. 2020 ( tDAR id: 457112)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
General
African American communities
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double-pen houses
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Landscape use
Geographic Keywords
United States of America
Temporal Keywords
1870-1950
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 831