Regional differences in architecture between three Missouri towns

Three communities of Green City, Olean, and Craig Missouri offer silent witness to the settlement patterns, economic development, and rise of popular housing in three different regions of the state. The buildings that remain provide tangible links to the past for citizens in each community. They also show how such disparate forces as evolving building technologies, mail-order catalogs, and the changing economic bases of these communities affected the design of local architecture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the most part, the contribution of these buildings to an understanding of the social history of the state and the visual and aesthetic importance of these buildings to today's landscape have not been fully investigated or appreciated.This thesis seeks to develop an understanding of the full range of influences on local Missouri architecture through a study of three communities, all of which were established as a result of the coming of the railroad during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Green City, Olean, and Craig; Missouri were selected because they are representative of hundreds of small rural communities in Missouri.The time period 1880-1930 was chosen because the largest percentage of construction took place during this time period. As a result of the economic conditions set forth by the Great Depression and the gradual decline of the railroad, few buildings were constructed after 1930. During this fifty-year period each community was transformed from wilderness into an ordered, productive agricultural landscape. The dramatic change can be seen in the buildings constructed - from the temporary, hewn-log buildings of the first settlers, to frame buildings, to more substantial brick buildings reflecting the prosperity of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coinciding with the growth and prosperity of the railroad. The thesis will investigate the hypothesis that a majority of the buildings constructed between 1880 and 1930 drew inspiration in design, form, and type from pattern books and mail-order catalogs rather than architects.Department of ArchitectureThesis (M.S.H.P.