George Franklin Barber

George Franklin Barber (1854-1915) was one of the most prolific American architects of the late Victorian period. If success can be measured in number of buildings constructed per his designs, Barber must also be considered one of the most popular architects of the era.

Unlike most architects, Barber only rarely accepted commissions from individual clients. Instead, the bulk of his business followed the "catalog architecture" model popularized by earlier architects such as Palliser, Palliser & Co. Barber's great innovation was his willingness to personalize his designs for individual clients at moderate cost. As he wrote in his "Cottage Souvenir No. 2", "Write to us concerning any changes wanted in plans, and keep writing till you get what you want. Don't be afraid of writing too often. We are not easily offended." He sold construction plans by mail in the thousands, certainly, and perhaps as many as 20,000. The actual records of these sales no longer exist, and the fact that Barber modified plans on an individual basis makes positive identification of many but the most elaborate and distinctive examples of houses built from his plans very difficult. Nevertheless, thousands of houses built from plans sent through the mail from Barber's Knoxville office have been identified.

Barber was born at Dekalb, Illinois and grew up on a farm near Marmaton, Kansas. His early education seems to have been interrupted by the Bleeding Kansas unrest and the Civil War, and it is now generally assumed that his knowledge of architecture was absorbed from books. Barber is known to have purchased a number of books from booksellers A. J. Bicknell and Co., publishers of titles on building and its technical aspects, and owned a copy of "Palliser's American Cottage Homes". By the mid 1880s he was back in Dekalb working as an architect with the firm of Barber and Boardman, Contractors and Builders. Barber's "The Cottage Souvenir, Eighteen Engravings of Houses Ranging in Price from $900.00 to $8000.00 in Wood, Brick and Stone, Artistically Combined", published in Dekalb in 1887 or early 1888, was more a form of advertising rather than a product published for sale, printed on punched card stock and tied together with a piece of yarn. In 1888, Barber left Illinois and settled in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Available biographical information leaves some questions unanswered. In Knoxville, Barber met J.C. White, a real estate developer who later became his business manager. Many Barber-designed houses (including his own) were built in Knoxville suburbs at about that time, especially in the area centered around Washington Avenue on land owned by White's company, and may have provided the funds for an aggressive advertising campaign. Barber was soon promoting mail-order house plans in popular magazines. His business rapidly increased after the December 1890 publication of his "Cottage Souvenir No. 2, A Repository of Artistic Cottage Architecture and Miscellaneous Designs", a book of 59 house designs (plus a chapel, and church, several barns, storefronts, summer houses, and architectural details), which sold for $2.00 in paperback and $2.75 in hardcover.

Barber continued to publish illustrated catalogs, and in 1895 he launched a monthly magazine called American Homes. Orders poured in from all over the United States and from countries as far away as China and South Africa. By 1900 the company employed 30 draftsmen to hand-copy more than 800 designs, and 20 secretaries were kept busy answering the mail.

Several authorities have written that George Barber was the first to sell prefabricated houses in crates, but there is no evidence that he was actually engaged in manufacturing. It is certainly true that manufactured windows, doors, staircases and other components were routinely shipped by rail to lumber yards and contractors, and that a number of millwork companies advertised in Barber's magazine, but it is unclear whether entire houses were sold as kits by anyone prior to 1900. More than likely, Barber's business did not much cross the line between "catalog architecture" and "mail-order houses" such as were later available from Sears Roebuck & Co. or Aladdin as precut "kits". One notable and well-publicized exception, which is the origin of much of this confusion, was the Jeremiah Nunan Mansion in Jacksonville, Oregon, famously shipped from Knoxville in 1892 precut, packed "with drapes, carpet, plumbing, lights" into fourteen boxcars. Barber's own statements seem to discount the speculation that he was involved in prefabrication. "Knowing as I do," he wrote, "that my working drawings, when they leave the office, go out of reach of my personal supervision, I have taken special pains to make everything plain and easily understood by mechanics generally. Every detail that goes from this office is full size and drawn by hand (not printed). Everything requiring it has a detail given, and they are all ready to be pricked off on the material for working out."

The mail-order architectural practice of Barber's company, decreasing in popularity, ceased by 1908, as the firm was increasingly occupied by local construction. Unlike his father, son Charles Irving Barber formally studied architecture, returning from The University of Pennsylvania in 1910. George Barber died in 1915. Charles entered into a more conventional architectural practice, co-founding the firm of [http://www.bma1915.com Barber & McMurry Architects] with partner Benjamin Franklin McMurry, Sr. that same year.

George Franklin Barber is generally credited with establishing the architectural formula we now called the Queen Anne Style. The term Queen Anne came from England, where in the 1870s architect Richard Norman Shaw combined free-form composition with classical detail. Shaw combined elements spanning 150 years of English history, and Britain's Queen Anne (ruled 1702-1714) was more or less at the center of this epoch. By 1883 the label had stuck. Writing for Harper's Magazine, cultural critic Montgomery Schuyler noted:

"Queen Anne is a comprehensive name which has been made to cover a multitude of incongruities, including, indeed, the bulk of recent work which otherwise defies classification, and there is a convenient vagueness about the term which fits it for that use."

So much, then, for the defining label. Strangely, however, American architects paid little attention to Shaw's actual work, which looked genuinely old and English. Instead they adopted his general concept of free-form composition with classical detail, or any detail for that matter. Architects took full advantage of balloon frame construction to expand the house in every direction. They took special care to be certain that elevations were asymmetrical and unbalanced. Little second-story balconies were often tucked into the walls or thrust boldly forward as overhanging projections.

Of all the features that distinguish the Queen Anne Style in America, the most easily recognized is the tower, a cylindrical or polygonal structure topped with a conical "candle snuffer." If a tower materializes from a wall without touching the ground, it is called a turret. This feature was not one of Norman Shaw's legacies, so the first use of this element is something of a mystery. It is certain, however, that George Barber included towers and turrets in many of his published designs.

Towers were common in Europe during the pre-Gothic Romanesque period, roughly 800 to 1200 A.D. George Barber used the term Romanesque to characterize some of his work, so it appears that he simply added towers and turrets to the prevailing Queen Anne repertoire, and others followed his lead.

In any case, the great delight of the Queen Anne mode was that almost anything could be fitted under its expansive umbrella. The only rule of proportion and decoration was that there were no overriding rules. Balance was in the eye of the designer, and George Barber was not overly modest about his skill on this matter, describing Geo. F. Barber and Co. as being "between you and a hideous monstrosity." With this as his limitation, George Franklin Barber was able to design 800 different houses. As built examples indisputably number in the thousands, this immodesty evidently was not unfounded.