From craft to industry: The building process in North Carolina in the nineteenth century

For all the advances made in the study of material culture in recent years, relatively little is known about the process of building in America. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the changes in the manner in which buildings were designed, materials manufactured, and labor organized in North Carolina in the nineteenth century. Building in antebellum North Carolina, a poor agrarian state with little industry and few cities, followed traditional labor-intensive, low-volume, specialized, custom work. The client often worked closely with the builder in determining the design and gathering the raw materials. The principal building materials were fabricated by skilled craftsmen primarily with hand tools. No one in the building trades nor anyone outside them sought to undertake the construction of buildings as a speculative venture. There was no market for it. Capital invested in building by the client was for specific individual needs--a new house, expansion of a shop, or construction of a public building. With the expansion of towns and railroads in the post war period, the demand for new building forced the building trades in North Carolina to adopt new technological innovations that would save both time and money. Many of the old craft methods of specialized custom work which involved the piecework fabrication of materials during construction proved too laborious and slow. Faced with an overwhelming demand for new construction and chronic shortages of skilled labor, builders organized factory methods of mass production in the manufacture of building materials and developed new construction practices which steadily reduced the reliance upon skilled craftsmen. Carpentry shops and brick yards gradually became dependent upon machines which could replace much of the work previously done by hand. This new system of industrialized building disrupted traditional building patterns. New methods of supply and construction occurred first in urban areas where there was a growing demand for speculative housing and gradually spread into the smaller towns and countryside with the improvement of transportation. The enticing cheapness and ease with which mill-produced building materials could be obtained led many farmers and local builders to abandon traditional building practices. By the end of the nineteenth century the new building methods had penetrated even the most remote areas of the state.