Logan, 1968: A Reminiscence

Western Folklore, Fall 2002 by Cattermole-Tally, Frances

The recent meeting of the California Folklore Society at Utah State University, the first time in its 61-year history that it has assembled outside the Golden State, causes me to reflect on another meeting held in the same location 34 years earlier.

Once upon a time the Utah Folklore Society joined with the American Folklore Society for a regional meeting designed to consider material culture and customs exclusively. The meeting was organized by Austin E. Fife of Utah State University at Logan, his wife, Alta, Henry Classic and Jan Harold Brunvand. The Fifes were experts on cowboy songs and material culture, especially that of the Rocky Mountain West. Glassie was interested in folk architecture and was on the American Folklore Society's folklife committee. Brunvand was newly a professor at the University of Utah. The conference was held in Logan, July 26 and 27, 1968, and it followed an intensive week-long course entitled "American Folk Cultures and Their Crafts" that had been taught by Austin Fife and Henry Classic. In conjunction with the course and the conference was an exhibit of "American Folk Arts and Folk Life" in the Merrill Art Gallery and the Special Collections Library of the University. The exhibit consisted mainly of photographs and artifacts with explanatory labels. Austin Fife also wrote a short description of the exhibit, including not only reproductions of the photographs but also texts from some of the placards that accompanied the thirty-some components of the exhibition. He took this opportunity to introduce what were, at that time, the little known fields of Folklife and Folk Art by calling attention to the objects of material culture and their uses, such as woodsman's tools-axes for felling trees and spuds for stripping bark-and house types from dugouts to rock houses with their fences, often of barbed wire, and the mailboxes which connected them to society. Fife pointed out the stereotype of the old West that still exists in popular belief aided by the mass media. As an example he mentioned the Landor Hotel in Wyoming with its "Western" furniture utilizing cowhide, Indian-woven fabric and native wood. Fife also described the braiding of horsehair to make hackamores, hatbands and lariats as well as the braiding of human hair, which was at one time made into jewelry. He commented on gravestones and gravestone rubbings. He mentioned the use of native plants as folk remedies, an old practice but one that continues into the twenty-first century. The preceding topics were rarely, if ever, dealt with by folklorists at this time. In contrast, Fife himself had devoted articles to them before and after the exhibition, several of which were reprinted in Exploring Western Americana (1988).

According to Henry Classic the conference at Logan was the first meeting in the United States to have its range defined by material and social tradition. In 1969 a report of the conference was published in a paperback, Forms on the Frontier, Folklife and Folk Arts in the United States, edited by Austin and Alta Fife and Henry Classic. Partly because of a limited press run this volume is less well known today than it warrants. In editing the presentations Classic decided that the papers were more or less evenly distributed between the field of material folk culture and the field of custom and belief. He then divided material culture into two sections, the first, Architecture; the second, Arts and Crafts. Similarly, he separated Folk Custom and Belief; first, Medicine and Recipes, second, Folk Life, Customs and Ethnic Groups. The volume consists of twelve abstracts and six full copies of all the papers that were read (as well as a plethora of footnotes).

Four of the five presentations under "architecture" are abstracts. The first is "The Impact of the Georgian Form on American Folk Housing" by Henry H. Glassie, who at that time was the state folklorist of Pennsylvania, Director of the Ethnic Culture Survey of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum commission as well as editor of Keystone Folklore Quarterly. Glassie explains: "The manifestation of folk ideas is spatially rather than temporally oriented, the ordering of folk things yields regions, just as the ordering of popular things yields periods." For example, he describes how the Georgian form of architecture influenced folk-type houses in the Southern United States until the 1940's (for more on spatial patterning in American folk culture, see Classic 1968).

According to the abstracts Classic's paper was followed at the conference by "Building in Brick in Colonial North America: The Patterned Brick house of West New Jersey" by Roger T. Trindell of the Geography Department, Michigan State University. In his presentation Trindell pointed out that brick construction in the Atlantic seaboard settlements occurred earlier and was much more common than previously thought. He questioned British origins; after examining and comparing techniques and styles he tentatively concluded that French Huguenots may have been the principal fabricators of brick structures in colonial North America.