What is a Jenny Lind house?

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

The type of ‘boxed house’ shown here, made out of a board and batten style construction, can be found from southwestern Pennsylvania down through Alabama. Why are they called ‘Jenny Lind houses’? And who was Jenny Lind?

There seems to be uncertainty about where this term originated. The eWV Encyclopedia entry for ‘Jenny Lind House,’ for example, goes into great detail about the construction of these buildings, but is silent about where the term itself comes from.

Likewise, a Society of Architectural Historians piece on coal country only mentions in passing that these structures “were known as Jenny Lind houses, a regional term whose exact meaning has been somewhat obscured over the years.”

Author Mary Lee Settle (1918-2005), a Charleston, WV native, in her novel Addie, shines a bit more light on where the name might have come from:

“They had lived in one of those board and batten houses, with inch-thick walls, three or four rooms, and a front stoop. Later, when the coal companies built housing for their miners, such dwellings were called ‘Jenny Lind houses’ after the cheap method of building used at the Jenny Lind mine in Colorado (near Downieville). But they had long been built that way in West Virginia. The farmers used board and batten to cover the logs of their cabins as a sign that they were moving up in the world. The next stage toward gentility was broad clapboard, overlapping and painted white.”

Settle still doesn’t explain why the term “Jenny Lind” made sense to either coal company owners or employees to apply to cheap board and batten dwellings. For that we have to answer who Jenny Lind was, and how she impacted Appalachian culture.

The Swedish soprano Jenny Lind (1820-1887), often known as the “Swedish Nightingale”, was one of the most highly regarded singers of the 19th century.

At the height of her fame she was persuaded by the showman P. T. Barnum to undertake a long tour of the United States. The tour began in September 1850 and continued to May 1852. And part of that tour involved a steamship route from New Orleans, up the Mississippi, then veering off east on the Ohio River, stopping in Louisville, Cincinnati, and a bit further on, Pittsburgh.

One thing to note about Lind’s extended trip into the American heartland is that, in addition to playing the major concert halls (she gave 3 recitals in Louisville, 5 in Cincinnati in April 1851), she was more than willing to stop by the more humble venues en route. The historical database marker for a Young’s Inn in West Point, KY tells us that “Jenny Lind stopped here briefly in 1851 and sang from inn steps.” And again, at the Stage Coach Inn in Guthrie, KY: “Legend states that Andrew Jackson, Jenny Lind, and Jesse James were patrons.” Like a savvy politician, she knew how to mix and mingle with multiple classes of society. Her ways would have been known to many.

P. T. Barnum’s unprecedented media campaign to promote Jenny Lind’s American tour included extensive press coverage of her moral character as well as her singing abilities, poetry contests, and the sale of a wide range of Lind memorabilia. The newspapers of the day bellyached about the excessive consumerism of it all.

“The victim is first taken with a whistling of Jenny Lind airs,” sniffed the Alexandria [VA] Gazette in a piece titled “The Lindomania” from September 21, 1850. “This goes on for some time, until the mouth become arid and parched to such an extent that the whistling is stopped. When this takes place, the patient rushes to a Bar Room and calls for a Jenny Lind Cock-Tail, with which he moistens his mouth, and forthwith goes to whistling Jenny Lind tunes again.

“This drying and moistening process is repeated until the Cock-Tails begin to operate, and then the unfortunate man may be considered as lost. He rushes to a Hat Store and buys a Jenny Lind hat, and then to a Clothing Bazaar, at which he calls loudly for a Jenny Lind coat, a pair of Jenny Lind pants, and a Jenny Lind shirt.

“Accoutred in these, he rushes to his home and, saluting his wife, as his dearest Jenny Lind, he begs that she will produce for dinner a Jenny Lind steak, to be topped off with champagne of the Jenny Lind brand, and cheese made from Jenny Lind milk, taken from Jenny Lind cows.”

Lindomania. It produced an absurd quantity of quickly made, cheap, mass produced fan memorabilia. Just to take one state as an example, newspapers throughout Virginia advertised:

• Jenny Lind song sheets
• Jenny Lind bridle buckles
• Jenny Lind velvet fringes
• Jenny Lind perfume cushions
• Jenny Lind collars & cuffs
• Jenny Lind pomade
• Jenny Lind neckties
• Jenny Lind handkerchiefs
• Jenny Lind “gips, steel, mettle and silk buttons”
• Jenny Lind extract for your toilet
• Jenny Lind lustres
• Jenny Lind bonnets
• Jenny Lind braid
• Jenny Lind flour
• Jenny Lind boots
• Jenny Lind “coats & caps for the children”

So our first hint of the connection to the coal company camp house nickname: quickly made, cheap, mass produced.

Recently established Kentucky coal companies were in the midst of building out their first coal company towns near Prestonsburg right around the time Lind came through. Prestonsburg had become an established commercial and mining center on the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River during the 1830s and 1840s, and Peach Orchard, the first coal company town, got underway in 1849. Peach Orchard’s owners, Great Western Mining and Manufacturing Company, were Cincinnati capitalists, and some or all of their management most likely would have made a point to see Jenny Lind in her Cincinnati performances.

By 1852, one year after Lind had passed through the region, Peach Orchard’s housing consisted of 40 new units.

Now, the second hint we have of a connection between Jenny Lind and the humble coal company camp house is the manner in which Lind lived as she traveled.

Back in New York City, in 1850, one William Allen Butler, a well thought of, well connected lawyer, author and poet, wrote (anonymously) “Barnum’s Parnassus (a parnassus is ‘a collection of poems’) ,” which included this graph from a poem in the book:

First of all then my expenses and a suite of two and twenty 

Who must board at first rate houses where everything is plenty 

For myself a stylish mansion or a neat suburban villa 

With a coach and four in hand and a service all of siller [silver]

And a pony for my riding to be warranted in wind 

As sure as your name’s Barnum and mine is Jenny Lind 

—THE MANAGER AND THE NIGHTINGALE, BEING A VOICE FROM THE Ho(l)MES OF THE POETS

Cincinnati’s Burnet House, shown here, is just one of the places Lind stayed on her 1851 tour through the Ohio River region. She took to the river in the most modern of steamboats, and stayed in newly built, first rank hotels en route.

Where’s all this leave us? Well, the historical record is silent on who came up with the nickname “Jenny Lind” for coal company housing. But the average resident of an 1851 coal company house, being both familiar with the deluge of tour memorabilia AND having heard that Jenny Lind insisted on being kept in opulent housing on her American tour, could well have nicknamed coal company houses “Jenny Linds” tongue in cheek.

Hey, everything else that could have had a ‘Jenny Lind’ sticker thrown on it had. And, secondly, this was exactly the type of house Lind NEVER would have allowed herself to live in.

Related posts on coal company life:

Had to furnish my own horse; bought one from the coal company(Opens in a new browser tab)

Women, booze, dice and cards(Opens in a new browser tab)

Westmoreland Coal’s Appalachian Connection(Opens in a new browser tab)