Eugene Platt, Eugene Platt is a poet, novelist and James Island Public Service District Commissioner.
Some of the lovely, unique houses featured here are shining examples of painstaking restoration; others are wasting toward oblivion. Indeed, a hope of the authors is that the book’s images will educate as well as delight and help the process promote a finer application of the Southern heritage.
The Birmingham News
Visionaries Team up to Preserve Images of a Facing Alabama By Elma Bell, News Staff writer
Get an outstanding photographer, an architectural historian and an educator with exceptional vision involved together in creating a book that takes a look at the real Alabama heritage, and you have a winner
Silent in the Land, a collection of photography and essays about homes in rural and small town Alabama, is perhaps best described as a book with heart. Chip Cooper, director of photography at the University of Alabama, Robert Gamble, architectural historian with the Alabama Historical Commission, and Dr. Harry Knopke, vice president for Student Affairs at the University of Alabama, each had a special reason for creating the book.
“I grew up in Huntsville and saw it go from a town of less than 100,000 people to a big city,” Cooper says. “Like most families, our family went for Sunday drives out in the country, and as Huntsville began growing what was called urban renewal kept spreading farther and farther out of town.”
“The old places we enjoyed seeing on our drives were disappearing, and I realized later this was happening all across the state. It seemed to me those places kept calling out for a champion to speak out for them”
Cooper took the first step with his book Alabama Memories, but doing the photographs for that book just further convinced him that more action was needed. He mentioned his idea for a book focusing on disappearing landmarks to Gamble, a voice long crying in the wilderness about the urgency of saving Alabama’s landmarks, and sparks began to fly.
“We decided to do a book with a multiple focus,” Gamble says. “The focus would be not just on endangered houses, but on those that have been maintained lovingly by the same family through the years and on recent restorations, as well.”
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They envisioned a book that would give a look at the great diversity of 19th century architecture in Alabama, not just the white-columned mansion, but the dogtrot and shotgun houses and log cabins, as well. Unfortunately, they had trouble finding people who shared their vision and also had the means for making the book happen.
“The idea for the book just set dead in the water, until Chip carried it to Harry Knopke,” Gamble says. “Harry seized on it as a wonderful way to raise money for the endowment of the University’s division of student affairs, while spreading the word about Alabama’s rural and small town heritage.”
Knopke says he had another reason for jumping on the project. “I’m also on the faculty of our medical college, and my duties included counseling our young doctors,” he says. “A lot of them start their practice in small towns. The human aspect of Silent in the Land—what it was like to grow up in one of these houses, what it takes to maintain them, all the feelings of small town living—those are things it’s helpful for our young doctors to have a feeling for.”
Knopke calls the book a triumvirate, and it is that. Under the three men’s collaboration, Silent in the Land grew from just a book into the Alabama Heritage 1994 Calendar and into an accompanying exhibition of photographs which hangs in the State Capitol through April before moving to Huntsville and then Birmingham.
Cooper’s photographs range from sweeping vistas of fine old mansions to views of wonderful old homeplaces to tale-telling details of weathered siding and long ago fences. Each one needs to be lingered over.
Gamble gives his usual astute architectural interpretation of each house, and Knopke writes an essay about each, managing to include quotes from old letters and diaries of people who lived in them, along with quotes from some who lived in the houses all their lives and still are holding on to them the best they can. Because, as one owner explained, “It’s just awful not to hang on to some of the old.”
Historic Preservation Magazine
With photography and text, Silent in the Land evokes a Southern agrarian culture of which little remains but echoes and glimpses. The photographs of decay are so wonderful they can lull us into an acceptance of destruction on aesthetic grounds.
Eugene Platt, Novelist and Poet, The Post and Courier, Charleston, SC
Silent in the Land aptly can be termed a coffee-table book—and it’s a gorgeous one at that.
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Ellen Dugan, Curator of Photography, Atlanta High Museum of Art
Your mastery of color is impressive but it’s the feeling of muted plaintiveness in your work which lingers and resonates long after viewing. Somehow you’ve managed to avoid the pathetic clichés and have come up with a fresh and penetrating vision of the South and its architecture that is indeed exciting.
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Montgomery Advertiser
As we view Chip Cooper’s Silent in the Land photographs we’re unaware of the act of the photographer. The images are misleadingly simple. Mr. Cooper avoids complex configurations and extravagant angles, preferring †ø let the beauty of each scene speak for itself as sensitive enough to the natural beauty that he wisely chooses not to interfere with it.
Art & Antiques
Mark Mayfield, editor in chief
Silent in the Land is quite simply one of the most poignant, elegant, and important books on architecture—Southern and otherwise—that I’ve seen. I thought your Alabama Memories book was extremely compelling. But I believe, with Silent in the Land you’ve raised your standards to an even higher level. I think you should know that I consider your work as good or better than anyone else out there. You have an uncommon eloquence with a camera.
Gay Talese, writer
Dazzling as the dawn in Alabama in early Spring.
Atlanta Journal Constitution
Silent in the Land images are a vibrant group of color photographs portraying a dichotomy between inhabited and abandoned structures. Some of the buildings have been passed on from generation to generation and still exist in their original condition. Their open doors, rocking chairs and lighted windows form an inviting scene and suggest that time has stood still. Although the photographs are of Alabama structures, their subjects are universal.
Harper Lee, author, To Kill a Mockingbird
Silent in the Land is a visual feast. With photography and text it evokes a Southern agrarian culture of which little remains but echoes and glimpses—heard in the reminiscences of the very old, seen in the dwelling-places of their ancestors. In the antebellum structures alone is a testament of especial poignancy: many of them were the work of black craftsmen—gifted woodcarvers, stonemasons, carpenters—who, while serving their masters, built their own monuments. What is left must be preserved.
Michael Carlton, executive editor, Southern Living Magazine
The homes and rich architectural details in the book will be of interest to historians and to all of us who feel the nostalgia for a time when the roadways were dirt, not concrete; when the sky was washed in blue, not sulfur; and when a bird’s call was the only wake-up we needed.
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University of Alabama News Release
New Book Highlights Old South Architecture As It Really Was
Imagine, for a moment, a typical Southern antebellum home.
Did you think of a columned mansion?
Despite time-honored stereotypes, the “typical” antebellum Southern home wasn’t a mansion. ON the contrary, the rich diversity of the 19th century Southern architecture is the theme of a new book that is the joint effort of an architectural historian, a university professor and an accomplished photographer.
Silent in the Land is a collection of photographs and essays of Southern architecture, not only the signature mansion, but more common abodes—“dog-trot” houses, urban shotgun houses, log homes and the dwellings of tenant farmers and slaves.
“Silent in the Land is a visual feast,” says Alabama novelist Harper Lee, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
With photography and text it evokes a Southern agrarian culture of which little remains but echoes and glimpses—hard in the reminiscences of the very old, seen in the dwelling-places of their ancestors,” she said in a cover endorsement.
“This is a story abut the South and its people, told through images of houses that were built in Alabama as the region was settled and develop,” said Dr. Harry Knopke, the book’s essayist and vice president for student affairs at the University of Alabama.
“It is a book about the people who shaped our buildings, and it is about the ways these buildings have shaped us, the ways we live, and the ways we relate to one another,” added Knopke.
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Illustrated with the photographic art of Chip Cooper, chief photographer at the University, the book offers poignant images that are disappearing daily with the passage of time.
“The people who lived in these homes—their pleasures and their sufferings and there day-to-day rhythms—are in many cases long forgotten, but the homes they built in harmony with their surroundings will lives as log as these images speak to those who pause over them,” said Cooper.
“People tend to think in terms of extremes—that people either lived in homes with white columns or they lived in log cabins,” said Robert Gamble, coauthor and senior architectural historian wit the Alabama Historical Commission.
“We’re trying to show that there was an array of rich 19th century rural architecture out there. It very graphically reflects our social history—the styles that were brought in from the old South and even from Europe and the styles that developed here which reflected climate and geography.”
The book also looks at the current condition of many of these homes that dot the Alabama landscape. Not reserved simply for ideally preserved plantation specimens, the book shows houses on their way out that can’t be saved; houses that have been maintained and restored; and houses that are prospects for salvation.
“Part of our message in the book is that these homes are very threatened and very endangered, and that we need to preserve them before they are gone forever,” added Gamble, nothing that one of the structures has been destroyed even since the book began.
The book features 60 houses in 150 color photographs, including full views, as well as fine details captures by the photographer—from weathered molding to the stained glass in a foyer. Knopke’s heartfelt essays chronicle people who lived in these homes a century ago and those who live in them now. Gamble provides architectural interpretation for each home.
Homes featured hail from Madison County in the North to Baldwin County in the South and range from 1830s plantation mansions to turn-of-the-century shotgun houses in Selma, typified by one’s ability to see straight through the front door to the back.
“In the 1860s, most blacks and whites in the South still lived in log house, not in mansion,” Gamble said. “And the dog-trot houses, which featured a breezeway-like hall through it, was a lot more common than the mansion.”
Though the book features Alabama homes, Gamble said many of the house types depicted can be found throughout the rural South.
“This book portrays a larger South beyond Alabama,” he said. “People all over the region will see echoes of their own past.”
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