house plans

Barber was born at Dekalb, Illinois and grew up on a farm in Kansas. His early education seems to have been interrupted by the Bleeding Kansas unrest, and it is now generally assumed that his knowledge of architecture was absorbed from books. By the mid 1880s he was back in Dekalb working as a residential builder. In 1888, Barber left Illinois and settled in Knoxville, Tennessee. Just prior to this move he published the Cottage Souvenir, a set of 18 house plans printed on punched card stock and tied together with a piece of yarn. This was apparently a form of advertising rather than a product published for sale.

The best biographical information available leaves many questions unanswered. Barber apparently met J.C. White, a real estate developer who later became his business manager. Many Barber-designed houses were built in Knoxville suburbs at about that time, and may have provided the funds for an aggressive advertising campaign. Barber was soon promoting mail-order house plans in popular magazines. A rapid increase in his business occurred in 1892 with the Cottage Souvenir #2, a book of 61 designs that sold for $2.00 in paperback and $2.75 in hardcover.

Barber continued to publish illustrated catalogs, and in 1895 he launched a monthly magazine called American Homes. Orders poured in from all over the United States and from countries as far away as China and South Africa. By 1900 the company employed 30 draftsmen to hand-copy more than 800 designs, and 20 secretaries were kept busy answering the mail.

Several authorities have written that George Barber was the first to sell prefabricated houses in crates, but others who have researched Barber's work say there is no evidence that he was actually engaged in manufacturing. It is certainly true that manufactured windows, doors, staircases and other components were routinely shipped by rail to lumber yards and contractors, and that a number of millwork companies advertised in Barber's magazine. What is not clear is whether entire houses were sold as kits until after 1900. Barber's own statements seem to disprove the assumption that he was involved in prefabrication.

"Knowing as I do," he wrote, "that my working drawings, when they leave the office, go out of reach of my personal supervision, I have taken special pains to make everything plain and easily understood by mechanics generally. Every detail that goes from this office is full size and drawn by hand, not printed. Everything requiring it has a detail given, and they are all ready to be pricked off on the material for working out."

It has been estimated that as many as 20,000 sets of plans were mailed from Barber's office over the course of two decades. It is not clear when the business ceased operation, but Barber died in 1915. His son Charles, who unlike his father was college trained, entered into a more conventional architectural practice, co-founding the firm of Barber & McMurry Architects with partner Benjamin Franklin McMurry, Sr. that same year.

George Franklin Barber is generally credited with establishing the architectural formula we now called the Queen Anne Style. The term Queen Anne came from England, where in the 1870s an architect named Richard Norman Shaw combined free-form composition with classical detail. Shaw combined elements spanning 150 years of English history, and Britain's Queen Anne (ruled 1702-1714) was more or less at the center of this epoch. By 1883 the label had stuck. Writing for Harper's Magazine, cultural critic Montgomery Schuyler noted:

"Queen Anne is a comprehensive name which has been made to cover a multitude of incongruities, including, indeed, the bulk of recent work which otherwise defies classification, and there is a convenient vagueness about the term which fits it for that use."

So much for the defining label. Strangely, however, American architects paid little attention to Shaw's actual work, which looked genuinely old and English. Instead they adopted his general concept of free-form composition with classical detail, or any detail for that matter. Architects took full advantage of balloon frame construction to expand the house in every direction. They took special care to be certain that elevations were asymmetrical and unbalanced. Little second-story balconies were either tucked into the walls or thrust boldly forward as overhanging projections.

Of all the features that distinguish the Queen Anee Style in America, the most easily recognized is the tower, a cylindrical or polygonal structure topped with a conical "candle snuffer." If a tower materializes from a wall without touching the ground, it's called a turret. This feature was not one of Norman Shaw's legacies, so the first use of this element is something of a mystery. It is certain, however, that George Barber included towers and turrets in many of his published designs.

Towers were common in Europe during the pre-Gothic Romanesque period, roughly 800 to 1200 A.D. George Barber used the term Romanesque to characterize some of his work, so it appears that he simply added towers and turrets to the prevailing Queen Anne repertoire, and others followed his lead.

In any case, the great delight of the Queen Anne mode was that almost anything could be fitted under its expansive umbrella. The only rule of proportion and decoration were that there were no rules. That's how George Franklin Barber was able to design 800 different houses.