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)

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Keywords

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