Folk Victorian

Folk Victorian houses are simple folk house shapes, such as a front-gabled house, an L-shaped gabled house or a one-story cottage, with Victorian trim added. Most of the ornament is on the porch: turned posts, spindlework (rows of small lathe-turned spindles) under the porch roof, and brackets cut with a jigsaw or scroll saw. Gables may carry decorative trim boards. A typical example has two stories, clapboard walls and a one-story front porch.

Examples listed on the National Register of Historic Places include the James B. Carden House near Summersville, West Virginia (1885), a two-story T-shaped house with a two-story porch across its front, and the Lost Creek Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Depot in Lost Creek, West Virginia (1892), a frame building with board-and-batten siding. Queen Anne houses of the same years have towers, wraparound porches and several wall materials; Folk Victorian houses have regular plans, one wall material and ornament concentrated on the porch and gables.

Folk Victorian has no single originator. It grew out of the plain gabled houses that local carpenters had built across the United States through the 19th century. Industrial production changed these houses after about 1870. Railroads carried mill-cut lumber and machine-made trim to small towns, and planing mills with power saws and lathes produced brackets, spindles and porch posts at low cost. Builders added these parts to familiar house shapes, borrowing details from the Italianate and Queen Anne styles.

Houses of this kind were built in towns and on farms across the country from about 1870 to 1910, including in the West, where settlers needed houses that could be built quickly from lightweight lumber. Railroad buildings used the same approach, as at the Lost Creek depot of 1892, which in 1923 was the largest cattle shipping point east of the Mississippi River. After about 1910 most builders of modest houses moved to bungalows and other plainer designs, though isolated Folk Victorian houses were built into the 1930s.