Melrose Spotlight: the Folk Victorian building style

Here we see 58, 62, 66, and 68 East Foster Street, and 153, 157, 159, and 163 Linwood Avenue. The Foster Street houses were built by 1889, and the Linwood Ave houses were there by 1903. These are simple gable-end homes. You can find hundreds of homes like them in almost every corner of Melrose; in fact, there’s a good chance that you are reading this post in a similar house right now.

What style would you call them? Some call simple dwellings of the 19^th century “folk Victorian,” and there is a vernacular element here. Houses like these had been built in Melrose for years, and you could be excused for dating them to an earlier time period. Take a look, for example, at 153 Linwood Avenue, at the right side of the second streetscape; with its weighty pediment and columns, it would fit in well with the Greek Revival houses on Cottage Street—yet it is some 70 years younger. In terms of aesthetic values, these houses are traditional.

Yet if you ripped open their walls (and please don’t), you would find the Industrial Revolution. Since the 17^th century, houses in Melrose had been timber-framed, meaning that every structural element was made of wood and fastened together in hand-carved mortice and tenon joints. That made housebuilding a form of highly skilled labor that required long apprenticeship.

By 1875, industrial production techniques had transformed housebuilding, and houses were now balloon-framed. At sawmills, old growth trees could be quickly and precisely cut into standard sizes, some of them up to two stories long. These wooden members could then be hammered together using thousands of machine-made nails, which were now a cheap commodity. Houses could be built in days or weeks instead of months, causing a drop in housing prices. In response, developers parceled out land in narrow strips near the rail stations, leaving just enough frontage for a narrow, gable-end house and a driveway, maximizing their return on investment.

When we hear “Victorian Melrose,” we might think of the city’s ostentatious estates; yet it was the hundreds of balloon-framed, industrially produced houses that truly made the Victorian city work.