This story appeared in the Spring 2020 Letters & Science magazine.
Anna Andrzejewski likes to joke that her family hates driving on the interstate with her, because she’s always slowing down to look at buildings.
But there’s a good reason Andrzejewski tends to drift into the slow lane. The professor of art history has based her career on studying vernacular architecture, a term that has lately come to refer to the ways in which buildings designed by ordinary people intersect with our daily lives.
“One of the things that’s always really interested me is how people use architecture as a way to organize themselves and make community,” explains Andrzejewski, who also serves as director of the UW’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment.
In a world of buildings, Andrzejewski sees research possibilities virtually everywhere. That explains why she’s currently splitting her time between an examination of post-World War II retirement communities in south Florida, where buildings have been hyper-engineered to withstand the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and chronicling 19th-century farmsteads on the windy plains of North Dakota.
“I’ve always sort of arrived at what to study almost by accident,” she says.
But once she arrives, she digs in. Beginning in 2017, Andrzejewski began spending her summers leading teams of graduate students onto the grassy tundra of west central North Dakota, there to study the stone and earth buildings built by Eastern European immigrants (such as Germans from Russia and German-Hungarians) who settled the area in the latter part of the 19th century. Stark County, located about 30 minutes outside Roosevelt National Park, is a landscape in transition, encroached on all sides by oil companies and commercial agriculture interests.
As they work to document the last vestiges of the historical record of these immigrant populations and the way they lived, Andrzejewski and her students (Art History Ph.D. students Laura Grotjan and Travis Olson and Geography Ph.D. candidate Carly Griffith) can hear the clock ticking.
“The buildings that we’re looking at out there are being plowed under at an astonishing rate,” she says. “They’re just disappearing every time we go out there. When we were out there last summer, there was a farmer who said, ‘Oh, you want to look at that one? Better go today, because I’m plowing it under tomorrow.’”
Through creating measured drawings, taking photographs, collecting oral histories and publishing e-books, Andrzejewski and her students have examined and chronicled the ways in which the settlers built their farmsteads, using the materials they knew and what was available to them at the time. In the process, they’ve discovered the ways in which the settlers gradually acclimated to their new environment.
“We saw very quickly how, within a generation or two, they started Americanizing their houses in various ways—through furniture or trim that they would get from town,” Andrzejewski says. “You start to see how the stone structures are being replaced with more modern houses, Sears kit houses for example. You can literally read the process of what we would call Americanization on the frontier.”
The team also found more than just German-Russians and German-Hungarians on the plains. Different architectural forms and layouts—houses that also doubled as barns and bright paint colors on the interior and exterior of the structures—served as evidence that other ethnic groups, such as Estonians and Ukrainians, had settled and blended there.
As a devotee of public scholarship, Andrzejewski is deeply committed to demonstrating the value of these settlements to the world. Assuming she can keep landing grants to support the work—and the state of North Dakota just awarded her another $20,000 to fund another summer of work—she thinks she and her students have perhaps five more years to study the farmsteads.
“There aren’t that many landscapes of these particular European settlement groups within the boundaries of the continental United States and their stories need to be recorded in the face of threats to it,” she says. “It’s a case of getting out there and doing the kind of work we do to preserve the history before it’s gone.”
The structures Andrzejewsi’s team are studying in North Dakota are constructed with materials the Eastern European immigrants had used in their homelands.