Gamble House, Pasadena, California (1908)
One of the things I love about the Craftsman style is how middle-class and democratic it was. You could build an amazing Greene & Greene house in California, if you had the money, but if you weren’t the owner of Proctor and Gamble, you could also get a plan book from a building company and pick out a quality, affordable bungalow for your family home.
This ad for Riverside Brick & Manufacturing Company comes from the Hattiesburg American, March 2, 1925 issue. It touts the durability and fire-resistance of brick, but uses as a sales point an image of a bungalow and a reference to a “5-room Modern Bungalow.”
Interested buyers could pick up “Two Wonderful Plan Books” at Riverside’s high-rise Ross Building in downtown Hattiesburg. When I googled “Ideal Brick Hollow Wall,” I found this full-page ad in the January 1922 edition of the American Builder, which, in addition to warning the reader about staying hip to the times, also offers to send a plan book, “Brick for the Average Man’s Home.” Google this title, and you will find that Dover has helpfully republished it as Small Brick Houses of the Twenties, which you could get on your Kindle, if you want.
Continuing to search for what exactly an “Ideal Brick Hollow Wall” is, I found a helpful two-page explanation, with illustrations in a November, 1921 issue of Concrete Products.
You never know where a little newspaper ad will lead you! Next week, we’ll look at another Hattiesburg outfit offering plan books, the Gordon-Van Tine lumber company.
Categories: Architectural Research, Hattiesburg
Preservation in Mississippi 
There are many Bungalow homes out on North Main Hattiesburg that are in the Hercules contaminated aquifer area and probably will be demolished. Not much standing. at Hercules except the two smokestacks.
If you get out that way, check out the Dr. Bethea house. Far from the Bungalow style, but impressive.Too bad someone can’t salvage it. I have heard that local architectural salvage contractor Eddie McMullan has passed away. Does anyone have any information on architect (CC) Herrin? My father told me that he was the architect that my grandfather employed to build his new Burkett Sheet Metal Works building on Newman Street. Shortly after moving into the new shop, the Depression hit hard and he lost it to Thad Fowler. He then moved back across the RR track to the Weems building that he had previously occupied. As a kid working in the shop, I always was in awe of the Thad Fowler building on my way on break to the Seale-Lily Ice Cream parlor on Main.
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