UpDate - Vol. 13, No. 35, Page 6
June 23, 1994
Bernard Herman's book receives national award

     Bernard L. Herman, associate professor of art history and
associate director of the Center for Historic Architecture and
Engineering, has been awarded the 1994 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award
for his book The Stolen House.
     Awarded annually by the Vernacular Architecture Forum, an
international organization for scholars of folklife and architecture,
this award recognizes outstanding scholarly work in the field of
vernacular architecture and cultural landscape studies in North
America.
     Published in 1992, The Stolen House is a study of the vernacular
landscape of the middle and lower-class farmers who inhabited the
timber region bordering southern Delaware's Cypress Swamp in the late
18th-century.
     The stolen house of the title was a one-story, single-room, frame
house built by Benjamin Christopher in the early 1780s. In 1812, it
became the center of a court case in which Christopher's orphans
accused their stepfather of having defrauded them by moving the house
to an adjoining piece of land. By combining court documents and
extensive field research, Herman has recaptured what the built
environment meant to the people who moved through it.