Homesteads and bungalows: African American architecture in Langston, Oklahoma
Date
1994
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Vernacular architecture studies frequently attempt to answer questions of class and ethnicity by documenting local building traditions. This research is motivated by the paradigm that asserts architecture communicates for a past culture. When closely analyzed, houses generate new perspectives into the ways people lived day-to-day. In particular, scholars examine structures lived in or built by African Americans to recover intricacies and meanings of daily life. ☐ This thesis focuses on the domestic architecture of Langston, Oklahoma and how the people of Langston define that architecture. In 1889 the Unassigned Lands of Indian Territory, now central Oklahoma, were opened to settlement. African Americans founded the town of Langston as "the only distinctively Negro city in America." The first structures erected in Langston were dugouts or cellars. As circumstances allowed, residents constructed one-room log houses and two-room frame houses. Interviews with longtime residents reveal that the majority of people lived in one-room log houses while frame houses for wealthier settlers were the exception. ☐ By 1915, all new houses built in Langston consisted of modest bungalows with a gable entrance. This transition to a bungalow occurred throughout the rural South during the first half of the twentieth century. Even with the building of newer bungalows, homesteads continued to be occupied and altered well into the 1970s. Oral histories detail subtle changes enacted upon the landscape by Langston residents. These accounts of life within a house illuminate the larger life of the community outside the home. ☐ Focusing on activities that surrounded the house such as entertaining and quilting places active people at the center of discussion. Through the history of houses and households, the impetus for change in material life and a picture of daily life in a small African American town emerge. The juxtaposition of oral history and architectural history uncovers the diversity of people's experiences on the much mythologized Western frontier. This broadens the discussion of settlement in the West and within the African American town of Langston, Oklahoma and begins to describe the substantial meaning houses hold for the people and history of Langston.