Giles, Janice Holt and Henry, Log House

The Janice Holt Giles and Henry Giles House (AD-15) in Adair County, Kentucky, meets National Register eligibility criterion B-a building associated with the life of a significant person. Because the house was built in 1958 and moved in 1967, its significance is justified so the property meets criteria considerations B and G. Janice Holt Giles was a writer of historical fiction dealing with pioneer Kentucky and with westward migration in America occurring in the late 18th and 19th centuries. She also wrote fiction and non-fiction about rural northern Adair County, her husband Henry's home, which became her home for the last 30 years of her life. Whether it was words or logs, she stitched together "facts" of the past to create a new-old story. The Area of Significance in which Janice Holt Giles made substantial contributions is literature. Because Janice Holt Giles is a writer of relatively recent vintage, the scholarly work is also new. This nomination makes additional efforts to clarify that scholarly appraisal of her work.

Giles was born in 1905 in Altus, Arkansas, and grew up in Arkansas and Oklahoma where her parents taught school in the old Choctaw nation. After a first marriage that ended in divorce in 1939, Giles moved to Kentucky with her only child Elizabeth. When her father died, she returned to Arkansas but moved back to Kentucky in 1941 when she became secretary to the dean of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Giles met husband-to-be Henry Giles on a bus trip from Kentucky to Texas in 1943. The couple was married in 1945. After World War II, Giles continued to work for the Presbyterian seminary but also began writing. In 1949, the year Giles and her husband moved from Louisville to a small farm in Adair County, her first novel The Enduring Hills (1950) was accepted for publication and along with two other novels-- Miss Willie (1951) and Tara's Healing (1952)--made up the Piney Ridge Trilogy. These three works drew on the people and culture of Giles' new home in south-central Kentucky. Giles wrote four novels dealing with early Kentucky history--The Kentuckians (1953), Hannah Fowler (1956), The Believers (1957), and The Land Beyond the Mountains (1958). After 1958, novels such as Johnny Osage (1960), Savanna (1961), Voyage to Santa Fe (1962), and Six-Horse Hitch (1969) dealt with the American frontier of Arkansas, Oklahoma and beyond.

In 1957-58, Giles and her husband purchased several old log structures to use in building a house on 70 acres in Spout Springs Hollow, just below the ridge where they had lived on two other farms. They moved into the house in August 1958 and in A Little Better than Plumb (1963) described the experience of building the house. In 1967 the house was moved 1,200 feet because of the construction of a flood control dam on the upper Green River. This relocation was recounted in the couple's Around Our House (1971).

Giles wrote 24 books, several of which were co-authored by her husband Henry. More than half of her works were written at the log house. She died in 1979 and is buried in Caldwell Chapel Cemetery near her home in Adair County (The Kentucky Encyclopedia--a comprehensive reference work about the people, places, things, and events of the state--p. 374; Guide to Janice Holt Giles Collection, chronology pp.).

Before building the log house, Giles and her husband lived principally on two nearby ridge farms, where she wrote such books as 40 Acres and No Mule (1952), a non-fiction account of her new life at a small, hardscrabble farm where she learned about the people and their customs in the neighborhood, and The Plum Thicket (1954), a provocative, fictionalized reminiscence of her grandparents' home in Arkansas (Guide to Janice Holt Giles Collection, chronology pp. The Plum Thicket, Foreword)

Although the Gileses lived on the 40-acre parcel and a larger 106-acre farm known as the Felix Price place for about eight years, these properties are not being nominated because they were looked on as temporary way stations to the permanent log home the author always wanted (Around Our House, pp. 20-23). It was Giles' love of the past that drew her both to log buildings and to writing about Kentucky's and America's frontier history.

Early in her career, Giles drew up a master plan which she discussed with her editor and agent. She explained that:
the continental destiny of the United States had long intrigued me and in a series of novels, some ten or twelve in number I thought, I could trace the westward expansion of our country in such a way as to make history more interesting for the general reader, and hopefully, more useful to the students of American history. The two greatest acts of American history, once the Revolutionary War made us a nation, have been the Civil War and the opening of the West. They are the only truly romantic periods of American history. I wanted to deal with the opening of the West in such a way as to make it vivid, real, dramatic and so authentic it could be taught as history.

I proposed to create several families to carry the generations forward, as happened in real life and history, until the nation was spanned and the United States stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from one ocean to the other (Around Our House, pp. 8-9).

Giles succeeded in this plan, completing a total of nine historical novels. By the time she had finished Six-Horse Hitch, she had indeed taken her cast of characters from coast to coast.

"Her commitment to historical accuracy in her novels is revealed through her own voluminous shorthand and typewritten notes resulting from the reading of numerous diaries, narratives, and journals in libraries and archives across the state. She also spent many hours examining microfilms of the Draper collection, which contained depositions and original stories of early Kentucky settlers, and she relied heavily on the bibliography and doctoral dissertation of Charles G. Talbert's The Life and Times of Benjamin Logan," writes Giles scholar Dianne Watkins (Hannah Fowler, Foreword). Logan was an important Kentucky frontiersman, soldier and legislator (The Kentucky Encyclopedia, pp. 566-567).

Watkins, whose critical biography of Janice Holt Giles will be published in 1998 by the University Press of Kentucky, is the editor of Hello Janice: The Wartime Letters of Henry Giles. She is the former education curator of the Kentucky Museum at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green where Giles' papers are housed (Wade Hall interview, 6/26/1997--Hall, professor emeritus of English at Bellarmine College in Louisville, is an authority on Kentucky literature)

"At this point, Giles began her career as a historical novelist...she has a knack for telling a story, portrays her characters well, excels in depicting the life of the times, and is historically accurate," said William S. Ward (A Literary History of Kentucky, p. 274). Ward, who died in the early 1990s, was chairman of the English department at the University of Kentucky (Wade Hall interview, 6/26/1997). His A Literary History of Kentucky is the definitive study of the state's literature (The Kentucky Encyclopedia. P 562)."

To Joan McGrath, it is Giles' regional focus that makes her writing memorable. "It is impossible to think of Janice Holt Giles's work without envisioning her own particular part of the world. A regional writer in the best sense, her novels project the spirit of the pioneers who first tamed the rugged forest country of Kentucky and the westward wilderness," McGrath said. "Giles is a writer who knows her subject and her setting absolutely (Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers, pp. 270-271)."

Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers list more than 400 authors from popular romance novelists such as Barbara Cartland to Pulitzer Prize winners such as Robert Penn Warren "who have employed historical settings in their work (Guide to Reference Books, p. 501)."

Historian Thomas D. Clark, of Lexington, Kentucky, who has read Giles' books "with great interest," feels that the author "became attuned to the land and folk mores of her section of Kentucky. She had a remarkable ability to get inside the soul of both the land and its occupants. In this sense, and particularly this sense, she made an important contribution to an understanding of a part of Kentucky which has not always fared as perhaps it should in the historical writings about the state (Thomas D. Clark letter, 2/16/1997)." Run Me a River, a novel about steamboating on the Green River during the Civil War, and The Believers, a novel set in the early South Union Shaker colony in Logan County, are two works that shed light on parts of Kentucky often overlooked in historical writings.

Clark, Historian Laureate of Kentucky, is the author of many books on Southern and American history. While at the University of Kentucky, where he chaired the history department, he started the university's Special Collections library. He was also the principal figure behind the founding of the state archives in Frankfort. He served as managing editor of the Journal of Southern History for four years and was chief editor of two multi-volume publications, Travels in the Old South and Travels in the New South "His works...reveal a universality that has made him not a regional specialist but an American historian of the first rank." He has also taught at Harvard, Duke, Chicago, Stanford and Indiana (The Kentucky Encyclopedia, pp. 196-197).

Betty Layman Receveur, of Louisville, author of such works as Sable Flanagan and Oh, Kentucky!, thinks Giles has been "a seminal influence on a great many of us who came later. I think she was one who pulled me to historical fiction--an early influence on my efforts as a writer. I was reading her before I was a published writer. I have had people compare my books favorably to hers and I was very pleased. I remember one person saying to me, 'I was so glad to find your books because you continue in that tradition (Betty Layman Receveur interview, 2/13/1997)."

Giles' books sold well and continue to do so almost 20 years after her death. The University Press of Kentucky has reissued many of her titles and collectors seek earlier editions in second-hand book shops. Larry Dean, the owner of Legacy Books in Louisville and an antiquarian book dealer since 1970, often receives requests from customers for Giles' books (Larry Dean interview, 10/22/1996).
The author pointed out that in 1970, 17 years after publication. The Kentuckians, about the Western pioneers of the 1770s, was still in print and its total sales have been 342,902." .

The Land Beyond the Mountains, a novel about the Kentucky statehood conventions and General James Wilkinson's treasonable efforts to put Kentucky into the Spanish empire, was a Family Book Club selection "and my unbroken record of book clubs remained unbroken. The book had a decent final sale, in all editions, of 190,281 and it is today in its seventh printing," Giles proudly noted some years after its initial publication.

Johnny Osage, a novel that looks at the Osage Indian culture of Arkansas and Oklahoma, sold 503,000 copies. "...The Believers has outpaced Johnny Osage, but not by much, only some 20,000 copies," she added, making it the best sale--counting all editions, including book clubs--of any book she had ever written. Another southwestern novel, Savanna, was chosen for the "book club system and it had a nice sale of 325,598 copies altogether." Voyage to Santa Fe, which focuses on the long journey from Three Forks in Indian Territory to the far Southwest, was "again a Beecroft book club selection and outsold Savanna by almost 50,000 copies. It had a remarkable sale of 325,598 hardcover copies," the author pointed out (Around Our House, pp. 42, 217, 231, 246-247).

Despite such impressive figures, the realization that she was writing for a general audience rather than a strictly literary one hurt the author's pride. After finishing Hannah Fowler in the mid-1950s and acknowledging that "writing is the most important fact of my life," she had reservations about her profession (Around Our House, p. 93). "I have done a very beautiful book and I know it, but at what a cost!... I am depressed about it, not only because it is in a field that has no critical respect, historical fiction, but because as written by a woman, the book will gain still less critical respect. It is difficult to pay this kind of price for good writing which will not fall in the field of literature (Around Our House, p. 107)."

And yet through the years, Giles' work has been taken seriously by critics.

Reviewing Hannah Fowler in 1956, Charlotte Capers wrote in The New York Times, "Devotees of early Americana will be fascinated with accounts of life in the Kentucky country in the days of Daniel Boone (Book Review Digest 1956, p. 361)." Speaking of the marriage between Hannah Fowler and her mate Tice, another observer noted more than 30 years later that in "Giles's hands this oddly arranged marriage of convenience becomes one of the deepest and most touching if most understated, love stories of the frontier (Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers, pp. 270-271)."

Of The Land Beyond the Mountains, John Clagett in Saturday Review said, "Characterization is excellent, and the background and flavor of the times are given with an intriguing mixture of feminine sensitivity and male saltiness. (It) is an entertaining book, as well as a historically valid statement of the author's faith in the essential decency and worth of man (Book Review Digest 1959, p. 406)."
Despite the encouragement of her long-time publisher Houghton Mifflin, Giles tended to underestimate her considerable talents and her respected medium. "I am not an intellectual. I realize I shall become known, with some contempt perhaps, as a writer of historical novels and dismissed. But I choose this anyway, for I love history and I know I can do this kind of novel well... (Around Our House, pp. 145-146)."

Yet it was the author's faithfulness to the past that was bringing her fame. "A novelist doesn't have to be entirely authentic with his facts. He can take a good deal of leeway, but I never have. I never have felt it necessary," she said (A Little Better than Plumb, pp. 169-170).

Readable, adventurous, and factual, her historical works had caught the attention of the educational world as a promising learning tool. In the mid-1960s, the Paperback Library bought her entire historical series, putting it within reach of small libraries such as school libraries with small budgets. "I learned for the first time that most high schools across the entire country made use of this historical series, usually in the third year, when American history was required as a study," she said.

"The series provided excellent supplementary reading, for I never falsified history. My research was so accurate that even the weather could be depended on to be precise as described in any given month, or even on any given day (Around Our House, p. 296)."
If Giles' writing focused on history, her domestic proclivities were also tied to the romantic past. In the 1950s, after living on two ridge farms and having her fill of feeding livestock and tending tobacco, Giles began to long anew for "the two things I had had a yearning for most of my life, a log house and a body of water.

"I was born with one foot in the past and a log house is to me the most beautiful structure man ever built. I never saw one that I didn't envy the owner and wanted to pick it up and bring it home with me. For years I had hoped that someday we could build one ourselves. The time seemed approaching (A Little Better than Plumb, p. 15)."

But first, the couple had to find some land with a stream running through it. They purchased 70 acres on Spout Springs Branch which flows into Green River. "I have used this branch in many books, The Enduring Hills, Miss Willie, and others, but perhaps most notably in Land Beyond the Mountains where my imagination harnessed it to a mill wheel, dammed it to make a millpond in which tragedy occurred. I never weary of it and I count it one of the blessings of my life that any hour of the day I can look out the windows and watch its waters race by (A Little Better than Plumb, pp. 43-44)."

Writing in a Campbellsville (Ky.) News-Journal column in the 1950s, Giles emphasized that the house of her dreams "must be a log house, for this is a country of hills and woods and beautiful trees. The first homes in this land of Kentucky were of logs. They somehow are peculiarly a Kentucky-type house (Around Our House, p. 25)."

In August 1957, the couple began to draw up "tentative plans for the house we meant to build and to look about us for the sets of old logs we would need (A Little Better than Plumb, p. 45)."

Giles had an affinity for old logs and their history. "I wished, many times, looking at these old log houses that I hadn't been so imaginative. The life they had once pulsed with pressed in hard on me and I was continually being hurt by their abandonment. I never looked at one without thinking about the births and deaths, the laughter and tears, the griefs and joys the old log walls had witnessed. Touching a pale, ancient log, feeling it solid beneath my hand, I sensed its contact with life, its mute testimony. It has survived, in most instances, the human hands that had hewed it."

The couple finally came up with a 1-1/2-story, T-shaped house with logs notched at the ends and laid in an overlapping and interlocking pattern. The goal was "a lovely, charming, rambling old log house right under the sycamores on the banks of Spout Springs Branch (A Little Better than Plumb, pp. 18, 77, 112-113)."

They found a log fishing camp that had originally been an African-American church in Taylor County before being moved to a Green River site. It would become the couple's living room. Other logs came from nearby houses and barns. Mortar was used for thinking "I learned a strange thing when our house was finished and we had moved into it. Logs a hundred and fifty years old are still alive. They aren't dead. They are a little restless and they move slightly and they speak... To me they are friendly sounds as if the logs were putting their heads together and talking over old times, exchanging reminiscences, brooding over us perhaps...."

While gathering logs, they recycled fieldstone chimneys in the neighborhood to make their own chimney. Ax-marked beams in the kitchen were also salvaged from an earlier building. The middle board-and-batten section of the house was constructed of lumber cut from the Gileses' land (A Little Better than Plumb, pp. 65-68, 77, 104, 111)


"But I don't want a new house. It would have no echoes of life in its walls," Giles said. "I suppose I simply like old things--old homes, old furniture and, in many ways, old people. Life has mellowed them all."

Even though Giles had strong sentiments about antiquities, the long-awaited domicile wasn't to be a complete return to pioneer days. Modern conveniences such as bathrooms and an up-to-date kitchen weren't shunned--not after eight years in homes with no running water (Around Our House, pp. 23, 213).

The three builders were Henry Giles, his cousin Edgar Giles and neighbor Joe Spires (A Little Better than Plumb, p. 101). While the house was under construction, the couple temporarily lived in a farmhouse on the site which was later dismantled and Giles' grandsons came for their annual summer visit in the midst of all the confusion (Around Our House, p. 212).

"The fall rains were coming on, now, and we were hurrying to get the roof on. Under a roof, much inside work could continue through the winter. Mister G.'s (Giles'] father had finished riving out the ten thousand single boards and they had been trucked down to the house where they were stacked in a shed. Now came more advice. 'You . have to put a board roof on in the dark of the moon." The complications that ensued as the builders tried to sidestep the folk tradition are summed up in Giles' words: "... if the moon causes the tides there is no good reason why it shouldn't make shingle boards curl...If it took all winter it would just have to take all winter. There was no use battling the power of the moon (A Little Better than Plumb pp. 138, 149)."

The first work that Giles wrote in the new log house was Johnny Osage "So far as I know, Johnny Osage was the first book outside of textbook histories to deal with [the Osage) Indian wars, and much more immediately and fully at that," she said. But the book was written during the couple's first winter in their new log home before it was insulated and without central heat. Moreover, the author was not well that winter.

"I remember writing Johnny Osage in great physical discomfort, my legs wrapped in a blanket, a small electric heater at my feet, and my hands so cold I could barely type. This did not affect the writing, nor did it turn me against my home," she said. "Occasionally self-pity got the best of me and I wrote with tears running down my cheeks--but I wrote and wrote and wrote (Around Our House, pp. 231-232)."

It was in her long sought-after house at Spout Springs where she struggled against the elements and sickness that Giles produced such descriptive passages as:

A few families of white settlers battered at the gates and were admitted and given shelter. There was a stir of excitement just as the sun went down when Etienne Vaugine came paddling a pirogue around the bend of the Poteau River with several rafts of Osages trying to intercept him. They could see the halfbreed hunter bent over his paddle looking back over his shoulder, desperately trying to outrun the Indians. Bradford ordered the matches lit again and the six-pounders swiveled to cover the man. The Osages yelled and shrieked contemptuously but they gave over the chase (Johnny Osage, p/92).

The success of the book enabled the Gileses to install proper insulation and a good heating system. And perhaps most importantly, the novel "won me my first truly national and international fame," Giles reflected (Around Our House, pp. 231-232)

"Johnny Osage is historical fiction of a high order of excellence--reminiscent, indeed, of Conrad Richter's (critically acclaimed American historical novelist] novels," wrote V.P. Hass in the Chicago Sunday Tribune (Book Review Digest 1960, pp. 526527).

As early as 1961 when the Gileses were putting the finishing touches on the house, they began to hear news about a proposed dam on the Green River. Before long they realized their new home was in jeopardy (A Little Better than Plumb, pp. 255-265). Some six years later, the 75-ton house was moved to safety 1,200 feet up the hollow.

Before the house could be moved, the chimney had to be dismantled, the pump room removed and a few close trees cleared (Around Our House, p. 314).

Sept. 14, 1967, was moving day. "The log house at Spout Springs, made famous throughout the world by the book A Little Better than Plumb, has a new location, the Adair County News reported. "Janice and Henry Giles, who co-authored the book about the trials and tribulations they had in locating the ancient logs from which to construct the eight-room log house, and then the actual construction, were just too attached to it to either move away from it or tear it down... When the house had completed its journey...the chinking between the logs was not even cracked... The actual journey had only taken about an hour and a half."

At its former location, the house faced east and sat beside a creek. At its new site, it faces southeast and is situated about 15 yards from an enlarged pond.

After the move, Janice Giles noted with relief that the location couldn't be better. "Artistically the house is in its exact position. The length of it runs with the hollow and the length of the hills. The mass of the house is precisely where it should be, and the trees in the background soften the whole site beautifully. Actually, in its present location the house is much more beautiful and I couldn't be happier about it," she said (Around Our House, pp. 328-331)

Just as Giles' fans from near and far used to appear on her doorstep, eager to see the log house after its construction (Around Our House, pp. 247-248), it is hoped that readers of her works in the years to come will want to visit her home at Spout Springs The Janice Holt Giles Society aims to turn the log building--a symbol of her writing and love of history--into a literary/educational center which will allow visitors to learn about her life.