{"id":3605,"date":"2019-11-01T00:32:53","date_gmt":"2019-11-01T00:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/?p=3605"},"modified":"2019-11-01T00:32:53","modified_gmt":"2019-11-01T00:32:53","slug":"the-german-american-zweiturhaus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/the-german-american-zweiturhaus\/","title":{"rendered":"The German-American Zweit\u00fcrhaus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Domer<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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Why does that house have two front doors?<\/strong><\/em><\/h1>\n

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\u00a0<\/strong>One little-known feature which gives the Lovettsville area a distinctive Germanic flavor, is the presence of a number of two-door houses \u2013 that is, two front doors \u2013 which are representative of the thousand-year old tradition of the German Two-Door House (Zweit\u00fcrhaus<\/em>).<\/p>\n

In 1985-86, an architectural historian was researching German houses while doing graduate work at George Washington University.\u00a0 After discovering that Lovettsville was a German-American town, the student, Dennis Domer, came out to conduct a survey to locate houses in this area with distinctive German architecture.\u00a0 He was assisted in finding these houses by local residents Eliza Myers and Susanne George.<\/p>\n

Domer\u2019s particular interest was the Zweit\u00fcrhaus<\/em>, the \u201cGerman Two-Door House,\u201d which he and others have documented as going back over a thousand years in the Germanic areas of Europe. Domer located ten such houses in the Lovettsville\/German Settlement area, and he went back and wrote a graduate paper which featured eight of the Lovettsville-area homes he had found.[i]<\/a>\u00a0He identified these houses by the name of the family which owned the house at that time.<\/p>\n

Just recently, a visiting relative asked me: \u00a0\u201cWhy does your house have two-front doors?\u201d\u00a0 He could see that the house is not a duplex, and therefore the two front doors caught his attention.\u00a0 In driving around this area \u2013 in Frederick, Maryland, for example \u2013 one will see many residential buildings with two doors in front, but these are duplexes, with two separate dwelling units.<\/p>\n

The distinctive German-American two-door house is a one-family dwelling, a symmetrical building with two rooms in front, and usually a front porch, and two sleeping rooms upstairs. (Architects call the design a \u201cdouble-pen I-house.\u201d) Many of those that are still found today have a kitchen attached to the rear, as well as other additions; in the “Harding house,” the kitchen is a side addition.<\/p>\n

\""Harding<\/a>
“Harding house” on Mountain Road. \u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\""Harding<\/a>
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No matter what the various styles, the basic German two-door house has two front rooms: a formal parlor on one side (the \u201cgute Stube<\/em>\u201d), and an informal family living space on the other.\u00a0 The \u201cgute Stube\u201d was used to receive guests, or for formal occasions such as weddings and funerals; the other room was used for everyday living and eating.<\/p>\n

Domer says that many of these houses can be found in Pennsylvania, dating from the first period of German settlement there, and there is still a high concentration \u00a0in the Lancaster area. As these German-Americans moved south into Maryland and Virginia, they built these types of houses there, and so they are frequently found in western Maryland and what he calls \u201cnorthern Virginia,\u201d by which he means Loudoun County.<\/p>\n

The 19th<\/sup> century wave of German immigrants who settled in the Midwest also built the two-door house, and Domer cites examples in Kansas, Missouri, Texas, and other states.<\/p>\n

He traces the two-door house back to the combined dwelling house and animal stall\u2014sometimes called a \u201chousebarn\u201d\u00a0 or Wohnstallhaus —<\/em> which existed in every Germanic area of Europe in the first millennium.\u00a0 At first there were separate entrances to the animal stalls and the dwelling portion of these large houses.\u00a0 Many variations of this house-barn structure developed over the centuries, and they often displayed lavish decoration and superb workmanship.\u00a0 They were found in urban as well as rural areas. Over time, barns for animals were separated from the dwellings for humans, and in America, German immigrants seldom had barns and dwelling houses combined; yet they retained the two-front-door style.<\/p>\n

The first example that Domer provides from the Lovettsville area is the \u201cWenner house\u201d on East Pennsylvania Avenue (now hosting the Back Street Brews coffee shop and the Painted Pig gift shop). He describes his visit to this house, then owned by \u201cSkeeter\u201d and Ruth Wenner:<\/p>\n

When I approached the Wenner house for the first time, I knocked on the right front door. Mrs. Wenner answered by opening the left front door. After some introductions she invited me into a parlor decorated with the family pictures, souvenirs from vacations, fancy cups and saucers behind well cared for cabinets. It is a very formal, clean setting, and this parlor did not look lived in. This is Mrs. Wenner’s gute Stube <\/em>that is only used to receive guests or for large formal occasions such as weddings and funerals. The gute Stube <\/em>is still a tradition among older people in Germany, and many Americans have experienced the use of a good parlor in their own families\u2026. \u00a0After I became better acquainted with Mrs. Wenner, she invited me into the right parlor which is very informal. This is the TV room, the room where the invalid child sleeps, where Mr. Wenner keeps his most important treasures.<\/p>\n

\""Wenner<\/a>
“Wenner house” on East Pennsylvania Avenue and floor plans as drawn by Dennis Domer and Adena Landry.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"Domer<\/a><\/p>\n

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Former Mayor Elaine Walker once described hosting a group of German exchange students from Loudoun\u2019s sister county in Germany, and how the students were spontaneously attracted to the Wenner house as representing Germanic style.<\/p>\n

Domer also used the \u201cFowler house\u201d (on Lovettsville Road, near the former community of Hoysville), as an example:<\/p>\n

The specialness of the parlor may also be signaled by the architectural details themselves.\u00a0 In the Fowler house the hearth surround in the right parlor is marbled, and the window and door trim is more ornate than in the left parlor. The outside entry to this right room is closed off as is the inside entry most of the year.<\/p>\n

\"Domer<\/a><\/p>\n

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\""Fowler<\/a><\/p>\n

“Fowler House” on Lovettsville Road.\u00a0 Photo: Ed Spannaus<\/p>\n

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As regards building materials, Domer says that of the 20 to 25 two-door houses he has studied in various parts of the United States, most are frame or log houses (and the log houses are all in Virginia).\u00a0 Only three were built of stone \u2013 one of these being the \u201cSmothers house\u201d in Knoxville, Maryland, just across the Potomac from Lovettsville.\u00a0 Only one of these was all brick:\u00a0 the \u201cBailey house\u201d on East Broad Way.<\/p>\n

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\""Smothers<\/a>
“Smothers house” In Knoxville MD, as it appeared in 2010.\u00a0 Photo: Ed Spannaus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\""Bailey<\/a>
“Bailey house” (now Spannaus) on East Broad Way<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The Wenner house in Lovettsville, and one other that Domer found in Missouri, were constructed with brick nogging \u2013 a form of half-timbering.\u00a0 Shown is the\u00a0brick nogging which was exposed during renovation of Wenner house in 2017<\/p>\n

\"Wenner<\/a>
Brick nogging on exposed wall in Wenner House, now Back Street Brews<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The significance of the\u00a0Zweit\u00fcrhaus<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Domer points out that the German Zweit\u00fcrhaus<\/em> was built by a wide variety of Germans who emigrated from different parts of Germany and settled in different parts of the United States. \u201cThe two-door house was so familiar to these Germans that they could adapt it to almost any environment without great difficulty,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cGerman-Americans obviously cherished this house,\u201d Domer wrote, \u201cfor they built it from the 18th<\/sup> century well into the 20th<\/sup> century.\u201d\u00a0 He identified its importance as follows:<\/p>\n

For them, the Wohnstallhaus<\/em> was symbolic of success in Germany, and as a landless people with very little individual freedom, they aspired to this housebarn for generations.\u00a0 For them the Zweit\u00fcrhaus, <\/em>a child of the Wohnstallhaus<\/em>, represented the success in America attained by new middle class citizens in a promising land where there was great individual freedom.\u00a0 The house represented opportunities achieved that were never possible for them in Germany.<\/p>\n

Many explanations have been offered for the development of the Zweit\u00fcrhaus <\/em>in America, but Domer \u2013 not surprisingly — offers his own:<\/p>\n

My explanation of the two-doors is historical. It was a well-known pattern in Germany, and one that many Germans adapted for American environments when they had the resources to build a house. They could have picked a one-door house, and that would have been understandable. Instead they picked a two-door model that they remembered in Germany and saw among their German compatriots\u2026.<\/p>\n

Domer notes that this distinctive style is now disappearing:<\/p>\n

None of the current occupants would build this two-door house type today, and this is strong evidence for the discontinuance of the Zweit\u00fcrhaus <\/em>as a viable house in the future.\u00a0 It will probably never be built again in America, and in this sense it will join many other extinct folk houses on our American landscape.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/em>[i]<\/a> Domer\u2019s graduate paper, a copy of which is in the library of the Lovettsville Museum, is entitled The German-American Zweit\u00fcrhaus. <\/em>It was later expanded into an article in a scholarly journal. See<\/em> Domer, Dennis, \u00a0\u201cGenesis Theories of the German-American Two-Door House,\u201d Material Culture<\/a><\/em>, Vol. 26 (1994), No. 1.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

–Written by Edward Spannaus, with help from Dennis Domer, and from the late Dot Rickard who helped me identify the locations of a number of these houses; and also Ingrid Fowler, Gene Theroux,\u00a0 John Rickard, Carl Horton, Maureen Morris, Denise Berg, and Judy Fox.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"Householder<\/a>
Adam Householder house on Bruce Court, off of Householder Road. The center section, with the two front doors, is the oldest part of the house, believed to have been built in the 1770s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Why does that house have two front doors?   \u00a0One little-known feature which gives the Lovettsville area a distinctive Germanic flavor, is the presence of a number of two-door…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3609,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3605"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3634,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3605\/revisions\/3634"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}