Searching for Authenticity | Rustic Architecture in America 1877-1940

In publishing, no less than investing, timing can be everything. Consider how this book, intended as an architectural history, has since morphed into an inspiration. But two months before its release, Grand Canyon Lodge burned at the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. 

In keeping with Edward Ford’s subject, authenticity, no doubt it should be restored. Yes, the lodge was built on the edge of wilderness, but what a grand introduction to the park it made.

Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, Ford claims to have put ten years into this book. I would venture it was far more. Books this definitive are extremely rare, appearing but once or twice in a generation and leaving their mark on the literature for years to come.

Certainly, there is nothing else like it for the national parks—some wonderful coffee table books and guides, perhaps, but not a volume this painstakingly detailed. Some 40 buildings in all are represented, literally recreated from their foundations up. Scores of full-color drawings, renderings, and paintings illustrate the most famous lodges and cabins from the inside out.

Ford details another important idea: he traces their design origins to the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, where the wealthy discovered the romance of rusticity, surrounded by an abundance of wood and stone. Switzerland was important, but not the only inspiration for grand lodges made of logs and finished wood.

Not that Professor Ford isn’t critical of some of those buildings, and at times all of them, considering the history of the national parks. He obviously has read widely in the so-called New Western History, anchored by Stanford University’s Richard White and Wisconsin’s William Cronon. Oh, those rapacious capitalists, they write! Nor can Professor Ford resist their drumbeat. “The unneeded railroads needed markets,” he agrees. “Tourism beckoned, and the desire for an escape from civilization, however short, provided a much-needed market. Those suffering from the malaise of over-civilization had to be seduced by mass marketing, and rustic architecture was the tool. The architecture was as much the product of capitalist greed as of existential angst.”

Of course, that is what Ford is supposed to say if he wants to sell his book to academics. Fortunately, they are not his audience. His research stands far above that litany of copycats who find nothing to like in the historical record but guilt. Even when he succumbs, his subject steers him back to honesty. What if the American people wanted to be “seduced?” What if the mass marketing, so-called, inspired Easterners to take action for the protection of the American West? Certainly, the railroads were instrumental in establishing the parks. Read the congressional debates. Congress wasn’t funding parks, let alone contributing to their infrastructure. The bulk of that job fell to the railroads.

Did they make money? Not much, at least, not on the parks. Nor did they make much carrying passengers period, still Amtrak’s lament today. The Big Money was in mail, express, and freight, and yes, for that the railroads were needed precisely when they were built. As of 1850 and 1859 respectively, California and Oregon were states. No way was Abraham Lincoln going to leave them isolated just because the Confederacy thought transcontinental railroads were “early.”

The point remains. Before the automobile, it was virtually impossible to make a profit from a season 90 days long. The rest of the year the lodges and cabins stood empty, and, should the season be cut short by snow or forest fires (generally both), its end came far sooner than that.

And what is wrong with making money? Adjusted for inflation, the railroads spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the national parks. Just imagine what it would cost to build Old Faithful Inn today: $100 million? $200 million? True, the railroads could have lodged visitors in tents. The National Park Service, too, could have put up shelters. The railroads instead set the example for both visitors and managers, fashioning buildings that still take our breath away with their elegance and design.

Pride explains that level of commitment, not greed. This book in fact drips with pride. To be sure, what have the airlines left us? Or the trucking industry? These days, corporations will name a stadium—after themselves, that is—and turn everything public into a giant billboard. But build a national park from scratch? Only the railroads have ever done that.

Consequently, whenever Ford strays from pride, the truth gets him back on track (no pun intended). He’s right; our forebears could have done better, but so can that be said of us. Meanwhile, “the architectural results,” Ford concludes, “remain significant. It is an architecture that, then and now, evokes a variety of reactions—nostalgia, awe, romantic allusion, and empathy with nature itself. Like any architectural style it contains some kitsch, some masterpieces, and a great deal that falls between. There is just below the surface the troubling consequences of the processes that produced it, that the architecture was achieved at a cultural, economic, and ecological price. But at its best it produced something truly original, something true to the best impulses of those who wished to experience it, if not necessarily always to those who built it.”

Now that is an assessment we all can applaud. Everything has an ecological price, which, by itself, is no reason not to strive for a masterpiece. Make no mistake that railroad executives also put pride ahead of self, and lamented, as have historians, that a changing America pushed wildlife, natural beauty, and Indigenous peoples aside. At least they tried to make amends, which is more than can be said of the majority of industries at the time. And there you have the rest of the story, as the late broadcaster Paul Harvey used to say.

Professor Ford is to be congratulated for making a complex subject sing. The national parks may not be the perfect venue for assessing what the country needs, but they sure beat harping on failure, now to forget what  these buildings did—and do—for the American spirit. I will take all of it, including the kitsch. And I do hope that Grand Canyon Lodge is the last building we lose—and that we live to see it rise again.

Alfred Runte is at home writing about railroads and the national parks, having researched the topic for 50 years. His books include Trains of Discovery: Railroads and the Legacy of Our National Parks, and National Parks: The American Experience, each in a fifth edition.