19th century Western town layout: myth vs reality
From Cyburbian Maister: I watched a popular western called “3:10 at Yuma" last night. One of the special features included on the disc was a segment about some of the movie production concerns. An important element of just about any film is set design, and during an interview one of the set designers spoke about how the ‘town’ set was designed. As most of us are aware, “the West” is a body of myths and legends that have been perpetuated and built upon throughout the years via popular literature and films. It occurred to me while watching this segment that many of my (and probably many others’) conceptions about the stereotypical historic western town layout are based upon movie sets. Movie sets, however, are designed around considerations such as providing adequate camera and crew accessibility to areas or visual lanes for shot setups, which may have little bearing on the realities of how 19th century western towns were actually built.
Every western ever made features a saloon complete with swinging doors in the center of town, and nearby is inevitably a two story hotel (complete with second story railing through which a gunman must inevitably break as he is shot and falls). A bank, a dry goods store, jail, post office, feed store, land office, and rail depot are other typical fixtures found on screen. Almost never see houses 'downtown'! Western studio towns usually depict a single strip, with facades of the aforementioned buildings having zero-foot side setbacks on either side of a dirt road. While measurements are not available to me, my impression is that the central dirt road right-of-way often appears in westerns to be quite wide by modern day standards - perhaps 120 feet from façade to façade. Wooden structures dominate, however, the town bank and the jail are usually depicted as brick buildings.
How much historic reality is reflected in Hollywood frontier town design? There must necessarily be some kernel of truth to their depiction of the built environment unique to that time and region, or early audiences (westerns were among the first type of films ever produced and in the early days often employed actual ‘cowboys’) would never have connected with the films. But given the ephemeral nature of many western communities that developed around some resource extraction like mining it seems unlikely to me that there would be as many permanent structures as we seem to see. What economic realities, for instance would be involved in constructing a two story brick building in an area not particularly near brick yards? Were brick yards fairly common out west in that era?
Perhaps some of the planners around here that live, work, or have spent time Out West could provide this hopeless easterner with a clearer picture of where reality ends on screen and the stereotypical myths surrounding 19th century western towns begins.
Most of the military outposts were located separate from the town site, and the military did not generally engage in platting communities. The influence thay had may be more on things like military roads (which often followed earlier "Indian trails"), or patronage of military personnel as a factor in teh community's growth.
Mining towns are particularly interesting to me. Many of these are located in steep, narrow valleys. There are often few roads, and these are not laid out in a grid, but meander along a river or ridge or other feature. It is not uncommon to find mine shafts in backyards. The buildings are a mix of log or frame shacks, small victorians, false front commercial buildings, barns or other outbuildings, and an occassional brick building. Metal roofing and siding were not uncommon. Larger mining structures are typically a little further from town.
Some places to check out are Bodie, California, and St. Elmo and Victor, in Colorado.
Towns on the plains tend to be your railroad communities, laid out in a grid as otterpop described.
There is a great book on communies in the West - True West - that describes the unique aspects of physical aspects of community development in the West.
As far as fort towns, it depends on what kind of fort it was. Trading forts, like Fort Benton, MT, developed like riverside cities. The fort was surrounded by walls and the town grew up outside of it. Military forts, usually did not have walls (despite what you see in Westerns). and were places outside of towns, remaining separate from the towns. The town usually grew and included the fort (Fort Missoula, for example). But most forts were moved or just died and often were recontructed as a historical site (Fort Bridger and Fort Hall). Fort Bridger was a stop on the California and Oregon trails. There is a town called Fort Bridger but it grew up as a supply site for the Mormon migration in the 1840s and 1850s.
I cannot discuss the Spanish influence very well. I am most familiar with the Anglo Western development, especially mining towns and cow towns.
I think Otterpop covered pretty much anything I had to add. Except this:
I recently finished a bunch of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books with my kids (Little House on the Prairie, etc.) and the second to last in the series, Little Town on the Prairie, is set in South Dakota in the railroad town of De Smet. The family moves there as it is being built and there is a great description of what this process looks and feels like over the months that they live in a small shanty there. Later they move to a claim outside of town.
Even at the end of the previous book, The House at Plum Creek, Pa takes a job as the man who pays the workers building another railroad settlement and they almost string him up on payday.
Anyway, very good descriptions of what building a railroad town in the West was like at that time. A town full of rough men building hard, playing hard. The small owner speculators (including Pa) who build homes or commercial spaces and wait for new arrivals and buyers. The rush of people moving to the new town and the stampede to stake claims (and claim jumpers who kill a man to take his plot). Although fictionalized to some extent, these books were based on her real experiences as a girl growing up in these places, so I think we can take much of this as pretty accurate accounts of the times. And the writing gets better as you progress through the books. I found the first ones a little tedious.
Most Oklahoma towns that were settled in the land runs were pre-surveyed into blocks based on sections of Township and Range. Many went from 0 to upwards of 5,000 population literally in one day, and then remained tent cities until the local branch of the General Land Office could file all claims and the locals could explore their local resources for solid building materials. Still, a lot of people lived in tents for years afterward, even in Oklahoma City, which was settled by over 10,000 people in the first 48 hours of The Land Run (capital letters = April 22, 1889 land run for unassigned central Indian Territory lands).
P.S. If anyone's ever traveling through central Oklahoma, they should stop in Guthrie, about 30 miles north of Oklahoma City on I-35. It was the first territory and state capital and has, in my opinion, the best preserved full western Victorian downtown in the United States. The entire original incorporated area is a National Historic Landmark.
P.P.S. A lot of times the main streets were incredibly wide so that wagons could circle around without leaving town, especially in cattle towns like Oklahoma City and Abilene, KS.
That is also typical of Mormon-settled or influenced towns. Many Utah towns have incredibly wide streets even though those areas pre-date the Ginormous Beast Vehicle Age. Farmington New Mexico also has this feature in their old downtown for the same reason. Another common feature to Mormon towns were irrigation ditches that ran parallel to the street along the shoulder. The resulting series of tiny driveway bridges to ford this small ditch can look pretty cool in a well-restored Mormon plan streetscape. Very quaint.
Old Street Design
Here in Taylor TX the older streets near downtown were built at 100' wide to accomodate the distance it took a horse to turn around, probably while pulling a wagon or carriage. Cities in other states I have lived in do not seem to have this characteristic.
Found this -
The West the Railroads Made: http://stories.washingtonhistory.org/railroads/
Click on Landscape
Another important factor: Cold Beer Flows West in Refrigerated Cars
http://stories.washingtonhistory.org/Railroads/Machine/ColdBeerFlowsWest.aspx
Other finds include -
The Iron Horse: the impact of the railroads on 19th century American society
16/30 (IV) Colonizing the West: Railroad Towns
http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/E/ironhorse/ironhorse16.htm
social segregation and fortress america in the old west, pretty interesting.
I went to Denver to visit my brother recently and my fiancee and I drove west out of Denver on the interstate (I-40?), and we came across a collection of old-mining towns. Silverplume still is kept as it was in the 1870's(?) complete with the rock-walled 10x10 jailhouse, flimsy wooden structures, and dirt/mud/rock streets. A few miles futher west is Georgetown, a great example of 19th century silver minin boomtown. There are extravangant hotels (the Paris) and a fine colection of stone buildings.
If anybody who is interested in this area, and you're ever in Denver, I would recommend taking a trip out to Silverplume
Scholarly information on Urban Development of the American West
A quick search turned up one resource of interest regarding urban development in the American West.
Reps, John William.
Cities of the American West :a history of frontier urban planning /
Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1979.
xii, 827 p., 32 [i.e. 16] leaves of plates : ill. ; 23 x 27 cm.
ISBN: 0691046484
Very interesting, College Ave here in downtown Appleton, WI is also much wider than all of the rest of the streets in the central Appleton area (100 vs 66 apostrophes), likely for the same reason. The area was first settled and laid out in the late 1830s/early 1840s, with the City of Appleton itself being incorporated after the amalgamation of three prior villages with an area of surrounding unincorporated land in 1857.
Mike
Early mining camps, boom towns and towns in their infancy were typically wooden buildings. The false front seen in so many westerns is a fact - for the same reason your boom town floozy painted her face - to put a false front on an otherwise uninteresting structure. There was constant building and rebuilding. The beams made handy places to hang up the bad people.
Western mining and ranching towns consisted primarily of wooden buildings built close together. As a result, they burned down (and I mean most or all of the town) periodically. Helena burned several times. Which is why the town's fire tower (The Guardian of the Gulch) is a prominent feature in our downtown and its pamplets.
The center of the early towns would have lots of saloons - often very long and narrow buildings. There would be a hotel or hotels, stores, fraternal buildings. A lot of the stuff you do see in westerns. The outhouses were out back. The churches and the school might be located on the edge of town or housed in a building in town (Bannack, for example, had the school downstrairs and the fraternal building upstairs in the same structure.
Houses were located on the main street but typically as you came into or were leaving town. The reasons were because of the dust in the summer and the mud in the spring. And because the good ladies did not want to live cheek-to-jowl with the protitutes, gamblers, drunks, etc.
Western towns were quite more ambitious than shown in westerns. The founders typically platted a grid of streets and blocks, often with no consideration of the terrain. Marysville, MT had platted streets where a goat would have trouble traveling.
It was often the case that the "good people" segegrated themselves from the "bad element". The term "dead line" was a demarcation separating "moral businesses" from "immoral busiensses". The red light district was a real thing. Prostitutes - from bawdy houses to the low-down cribs - were often restricted to particular parts of a community (early zoning). Helena had a prominent bawdy house downtown until the 1970s. And Wallace, ID, had "red light" bars until the 1990s.
For reasons of economy, movie makers make their towns more sparse and smaller than actual western communites. Actual towns had buildings pretty close together. Town lots were often 25 feet wide.
Towns in the West in the 19th century were smoky, smelly, cramped, dirty in the summer and muddy in the spring and winter. In mining camps the stamp mills ran 24-7. The buildings were typically flimsy - miners did not want to spend much time building when they could be digging for gold. The substantial buildings came along after the town had burned a few times and there seemed to be a feeling that the town had permanence.
Railroad towns were often laid out in a T-shape, with the top portion being the street paralleling the raidroad and the straight part being the town's main street.
Mormon communites had their own distinct development pattern, as did Southwestern Spanish towns, which were designed by edicts created by the King of Spain.
There is a kernel of truth to the way real towns were laid out in Westerns, but not a lot. McCabe and Mrs Miller had it pretty much right. Silverado, not at all.