The roots of settler colonial architecture: Andrew Herscher, ‘Anishinaabe Forests, American Lumber, Settler Balloon Frames’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 84, 4, 2025, pp. 512-526 | settler colonial studies blog

The roots of settler colonial architecture: Andrew Herscher, ‘Anishinaabe Forests, American Lumber, Settler Balloon Frames’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 84, 4, 2025, pp. 512-526

21Nov25

Abstract: The balloon frame is commonly viewed as a nineteenth-century construction innovation that enabled rapid house building across the United States. This article recontextualizes the balloon frame in relation to U.S. settler colonialism. This recontextualization proceeds through an examination of the harvesting of white pine timber on Anishinaabe homelands in Michigan, which provided much of the lumber from which balloon frames were constructed in the nineteenth century, and the use of the balloon frame by squatters and settlers on Anishinaabe and other Native homelands at the same time. The article also addresses the ways in which Anishinaabe communities engaged the lumber industry and the balloon-frame construction that this industry made possible, in both cases to support continuing inhabitation of their homelands. In the context of this historicization, the balloon frame appears as both a colonial technology for the seizure and plunder of Anishinaabe land and an Anishinaabe technology of survivance and sovereignty.

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