The Front Porch

by Rebecca Hyde Rowan Public Library

             The front porch, the lawn and the beach are part of our cultural landscape, consuming a lot of time, energy, and money.  As cultural icons, they are synonymous with status and good citizenship (lawn), well-being and pleasure (beach), or civil society (porch). 

            In “The Lawn:  A History of an American Obsession,” Virginia Scott Jenkins asks why Americans have front lawns while people in other countries have front gardens or interior courtyard gardens.  She explores what gardens tell us about American culture and how residential landscape has evolved.

            Apparently, before the Civil War, few Americans had lawns.  Up to the 1850’s, houses in American towns were built close to the street with perhaps a small fenced front garden.  Farmhouses were surrounded by packed dirt, pastures, or gardens.

            When did our notion of residential landscape change and why?  After the Civil War, the single-family house, surrounded by grass, developed and spread throughout the nation.  According to Jenkins, this change was due partially to suburban movements:  expansion of transit lines, models of public parks, adoption of the automobile by the middle-class, the popularity of golf, low-cost mortgages, and funding for highways.  Jenkins adds that the real impetus to the lawn craze was dependent on our ability to grow lawn grasses and on our aesthetic desire to have a lawn:  affordability of tools and grasses plus the adoption by the middle-class of what had been a luxury of the wealthy.

            What is the future of the lawn?  Jenkins examines present ecological problems and possible alternatives in the twenty-first century.   And what is the amount of lawn in the United States?  According to Dean Bill Chameides of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, we have more than forty million acres of lawns.

            “The Beach:  The History of Paradise on Earth,” by Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, looks back to antiquity, when the beach was anything but paradisiacal.  The shore was the limit of the known, and the sea was “the mother of all mysteries.”  The English word “shore” was derived from the Old English “scieran,” meaning to cut or shear:  the shore was “shorn off” by a sea that could rise up and wreck havoc against ships and coastal inhabitants.  In the Middle Ages, Europeans avoided the ocean partially because of the belief that water was connected to plagues.  By the seventeenth century, the beach’s medicinal attractions were rediscovered, and it became a center for upper class social pursuits.  Then with rail travel and the passage of legal holidays, a trip to the coast was available to all classes of people.  We now create artificial beaches, and sometimes find that “the real thing” has become a health hazard, tainted with pollution.  Still, the beach represents for most of us a site of regeneration, relaxation, and recreation. 

            For some relaxation and good conversation, your destination may be the front porch.  “Out on the Porch:  An Evocation in Words and Pictures” is introduced by Reynolds Price, who tells us about a particular porch in Warren County, describing an ordinary day in 1942 when he was nine.  His account gives us “some sense of the role and meaning of a porch in the life of a middle-class Southern family of no more than average complexity, rage or need.”  The book continues with photographs of porches populated by people and furniture along with excerpts from the works of Southern writers.