Key Principle
The Salt Creek Valley's built environment -- log houses, barns, covered bridges, churches, outbuildings -- constituted a coherent material folk culture rooted in Upland South traditions traceable to the British Isles. When the Monroe Reservoir destroyed this landscape, it erased a tangible record of centuries-old building practices that had persisted into the twentieth century. The few surviving structures on higher ground above the government "take line" became the only physical evidence of what was lost.
Why This Matters
Material culture is the most conservative element of a folk community's identity. Houses, barns, and fences change more slowly than any other feature of the rural landscape. When they are bulldozed and flooded, an entire stratum of cultural evidence vanishes -- evidence that oral history alone cannot fully replace. Mordoh's architectural documentation captures construction techniques (half-dovetail corner notching, chinking with scrap wood, stones, mud, and hog bristles) that encode knowledge transmitted across generations without written instruction.
Good Examples
Double-pen and single-pen log houses: The predominant dwelling forms, classified by Warren Roberts as characteristic Upland South types. Mary Hays preserved framed photographs of her grandfather's original hewn log double-pen house -- rectangular, symmetrical, two rooms downstairs, loft above, rear lean-to for kitchen. These photographs, hung on her bedroom wall, became the primary surviving record of the structure. (Ch. V, pp. 207-209)
Transatlantic transmission: The Cleve Butcher Road farmhouse (c. 1850s, 1.5-story double-pen) is compared with a nearly identical stone structure photographed in Scotland in the 1980s, demonstrating "the transmission of folklore across space and time, in this case folk architectural form." (Ch. V, p. 211)
Barns as disproportionate casualties: Barns were built lower than houses, closer to crop land, placing them more frequently within the government take line. This spatial logic of folk agriculture -- houses on high ground for safety, barns lower for proximity to fields -- became the mechanism of selective cultural destruction. (Ch. V, p. 212)
Covered bridges: Four covered bridges were destroyed in 1964-1965 for the reservoir -- Fairfax (1879), Cutwright (1880), Goodman (1881), and Nancy Jane (1884). An uncovered bridge lasted 10-12 years; a covered one "could last almost indefinitely." (Ch. V, p. 216)
Churches as folk architecture: Rural churches "resembled the homes of inhabitants." The Friendship Separate Baptist log church (c. 1857/1867) had a crude door "like a barn," a barrel stove in the middle, kerosene lamps with tin reflectors, pine floors, and a homemade poplar pulpit. The church was not directly acquired by the government but was effectively made inaccessible when the reservoir flooded its access road -- displacement by infrastructure impact rather than condemnation. Indiana University purchased the log building for a proposed Outdoor Museum, but fifteen years later the museum was never funded and the logs likely rotted beyond repair. (Ch. V, pp. 217-221)
Counterpoints
Not all Salt Creek architecture was purely folk. Elements of popular and academic styles coexisted: Mary Hays's parents built an "elaborate two-story bungalow" near Paynetown in the 1940s. "This folk type of architecture may well have been predominant in the area, due to its rural isolation, but certainly elements of popular and academic culture existed side by side and in conjunction with the folk." (Ch. V, p. 210)
Surviving folk structures face a second wave of erasure -- not by the reservoir but by recreational development. The Cleve Butcher Road farmhouse is now surrounded by expensive modern homes; its lake-view land value "probably dooms the structure to eventual demolition." A barn on the same property, photographed in summer 1984, was razed by December 1984 and replaced with a mass-produced structure sporting a mansard roof. (Ch. V, p. 213)
Key Quotes
"Oh, no, honey, it was all, so many miles, just cleaned out." -- Mary Hays, on the destruction of material culture (Ch. V, p. 205)
"Log barns, as well as log houses, were once common in this area and were constructed in the same way as the early one-room or two-room log houses." (Ch. V, p. 212)
"Barns and outbuildings are even more likely to retain the conservative elements of folk architecture than houses, owing to the strictly functional nature of the structures." (Ch. V, p. 213)
"While the mansard roof is commonly associated with barns in the popular imagination, the gable roof is actually the traditional style of barn roof, as in folk houses, and is an indicator of age in a barn." (Ch. V, p. 213)
"It was an old log church, and, oh, I'd say it probably was about a, 24' by 30', something like that...just one big room." -- Lorene Hays on the Friendship Separate Baptist Church (Ch. V, p. 219)
Sentimental preservation: The double-pen house on Knight Ridge Road retains its original weatherboarding and "is well maintained by its owner (who resides elsewhere) for sentimental reasons" -- demonstrating the deep affective ties between displaced people and the material culture of their former communities. (Ch. V, p. 210)
Rules of Thumb
- Folk architecture persists longest where terrain resists mechanization -- hilly, isolated land preserves older building forms because modernization is impractical there.
- Outbuildings and barns are more reliable repositories of unaltered folk construction than houses, which owners modify to meet changing aesthetic standards.
- When a community's material culture is physically destroyed, family photographs become the primary surviving record -- and those photographs were never systematic.
- The ghost town folk belief (residents claim whole towns are visible beneath the lake at low water) mythologizes the displacement; in reality, the government cleared the lakebed to 540 feet elevation, erasing every trace.
- Replacement structures adopt superficial markers of tradition (mansard "barn" roofs) that have no basis in actual folk practice -- the form is commercial imitation, not cultural continuity.
Related References
- oral-traditions-folklife.md -- Intangible practices (foodways, beliefs, communal labor) that accompanied the material culture documented here
- methodology-reconstruction.md -- How to study a community whose physical traces have been deliberately destroyed
- comparative-displacement.md -- Other cases where folk architecture was dismissed as "primitive" to justify removal