Yard [archaic]

Yard: [archaic] A layout-like display that may or may not include a model train.

Usage: My yard includes a model of the town where I grew-up.

Source: ‘Yard’ is an archaic word that predates electric model railroad layouts, but whose roots are not yet well established. Adolph F. Frank, in his 1981 book, Animated Scale Models Handbook, implies that ‘yard’ might derive from the term ‘Christmas tree yard’:

When I was a small boy, it was customary for families to have a "Putz" or Nativity scene as part of their Christmas decorations, which were usually found under the Christmas tree. Many of these families were descendants of old European craftsmen who made ornate and elaborate displays. I'm speaking of a time in our industrial history when a large portion of the labor force was extremely skilled with their hands. They were artistic types - machinists, pattern makers, finish carpenters and other artisans - who being fine craftsmen, seemed to delight in outdoing one another in making these displays. As a result, the Nativity scene slowly became just one part of a much larger display, commonly called the Christmas tree yard. In this yard was found anything from a model of the family home to a model of the entire village in which they lived.

As I grew older, in the late '20s and early '30s, the electric train came into prominence and was added to the display or yard. Automobile dealers took their entire display rooms and built large villages with waterfalls, as well as working trains and automobiles. I was immensely intrigued by these elaborate displays.

Mr. Frank might be the Adolph F. Frank who was born in Pennsylvania in 1918, and enlisted in the US Army on 15 Oct 1942, and if so, the dates stated in the quote, along with the date of birth and enlistment, suggest the term ‘yard’ was in use in the 1920s, and maybe the 1910s. Further research and citations are required.

Laurence T. Gieringer in his article 35-Year Old Model City, that appeared in the January / February 1938 issue of Lionel’s The Model Builder, uses ‘yard’ in a casual manner which suggests it might have been a well-known term to the magazine’s readers, although since it’s bracketed by ‘’ it might have been verging on archaic by that time:

“Ninety percent of the material that has gone into my little ‘yard’ has been discarded by someone and includes old tin cans, worn-out sunscreens, old bed sheets, old doors, cheese boxes and cigar boxes,” Gieringer explained.

Mr. Frank concludes his book by noting that by 1981 a model train is more-or-less a given for any layout:

Undoubtedly, you have noticed that I have not discussed the field of model railroading. I did this on purpose, for there have been volumes written on the subject, and anything I could write would be anticlimactic. There is, however, one thing certain: no layout or display would be complete without a model train.

from The Dictionary of Non-Existent Model Railroad Terms, 2nd ed., 1999.

Laurence Gieringer’s unacknowledged articles?

MB Mar/Apr '38; He could have been me had I been born earlier

I was wandering through some back issues of Lionel’s The Model Builder magazine, and in the January / February 1938 issue I came across this statement in an article called Contest Winners, which obviously was an announcement of who won a recent model building contest sponsored by the magazine:

Second prize was awarded to Laurence T. Gieringer of 340 North Ninth street, Reading, Pennsylvania. Pictures of the second prize winning railroad, and of the business street for which the award was made, are shown on another page in this issue.

Where was that page? I think they are actually referring to two articles in that issue. The first is 35-Year Old Model City, which has an interview with Mr. Gieringer, discusses his railroad (which was later to be known as the famous Roadside America), and presents many pictures of his work. In my earlier post about Mr. Gieringer and Roadside America I listed this article as being written by him, but it may have been written by a magazine staffer as no author is listed in either the table of contents or article.

The second article, which I think is the page referred to in the phrase, the business street for which the award was made, is Building A Model City. Again, no author byline is attached, and to make matters more mysterious, there’s no mention of Mr. Gieringer in the story. Although, the article is the beginning of a series about modelling buildings along a business street, and the models and techniques look like Mr. Gieringer’s. And then there’s the similarity in titles between the two articles. And then there’s the materials: they’re in the folk tradition, and consistent with Mr. Gieringer’s approach:

The materials, with the exception of a sheet of Masonite, are to be picked up around the house or office. They are cardboard of various thicknesses, a cigar box or two, sides and end of an apple box, common iron wire, a 1” plant [sic] [JDL: I think they meant ‘plank’] of white pine, cypress or other soft wood, some scraps of cellophane, tracing paper and few green bottters [sic] [JDL: from the article’s text it looks like they meant ‘blotters’].

I’m going to speculate that that article, as well as the others in the series, was either written by Mr. Gieringer, or ghost written about his work by a staffer at the magazine. The article states what’s in the series:

Buildings to be pictured and described in this series will include 

 a corner drug store; 

 stone cathedral; 

 bank and office building; 

 apartment hotel;

 movie theatre with roof tanks and air conditioning apparatus; 

 hat store with upper floors given over to a ladies’ ready-to-wear shop and an artist’s loft studio; 

 a building housing a double store with modern, recessed show windows and a gas station.

Building A Model City covers the corner drug store project. Here’s where the others were published - well, at least the ones that I can verify so far:

1938

Jan / Feb: Building a Model City (describes how to build a corner drug store)

Mar / Apr: Model Stone Church

May / Jun: Bank Building for the Model City

Jul / Aug: Miniature Apartment Hotel

Oct:       Constructing a Model Theatre

I haven’t yet found either the hat store (although I see a picture of it in the Constructing a Model Theatre article) or the double store with gas station, but this table of contents entry, Three Stores Under One Roof, in the Nov / Dec 1938 issue looks promising. The problem is the article itself appears to be missing from the archive - the archive’s maintainers inform me that the pages are missing because they were damaged or missing from the original they scanned. 

I’ll update the list when I find out more; however, I think it’s clear that we’re seeing a number of classic Laurence Gieringer projects that possibly haven’t been identified as such. And what if they weren’t by him? They’re still a fascinating look into model construction techniques circa the late 1930s built before the introduction of widely available specialized model making materials.

Laurence Gieringer, Model Structure Pioneer

Some Gieringer models; Snippet from Model Builder Jan/Feb '38

The pandemic rolls on and continues to inflict a wide range of changes on society well beyond the horrible toll of human suffering and death. Even something as innocuous as Roadside America has fallen victim. 

In November 2020 Roadside America in Pennsylvania closed its doors for good, and its owners announced they were auctioning off everything, miniatures and all. The owners had been looking for a buyer for a couple of years prior to its closing, but pandemic restrictions eventually finished it off, ending an 85 year run. Reports indicate the January 2021 auction was a great success, but a bittersweet one for the owners, who are relatives of Roadside America’s founder, Laurence Gieringer.

It’s weird how I found out about this. I was reading my way through a stack of Railroad Model Craftsmans from 1997, and in December’s Collector consist …column Keith Wills had an interesting story about Roadside America, its founder, and how after 50 years of wanting to visit the place he eventually did. After reading the column I was off to the internet to find out more about Roadside America, and that’s when I learnt of its recent closing.

But what really grabbed me in that column was the story of how Mr. Gieringer got interested in miniature buildings and layouts. It seemed that he followed the path from folk art miniature builder to serious hobbyist. It was the discussion of Mr. Gieringer’s roots that helped make this clear to me. Here’s what Wills has to say,

Laurence Gieringer started creating model buildings as a boy by carving and cutting wood. As carpenter and painter, his skills gave him freedom to develop his hobby further, often inspired by actual buildings in the area where he lived. Not having formal training, he settled on three-eights inch scale in which to make them.

Laurence built everything from wood, found and given, particularly important during the Depression. If one were to upend a building, one might see pieces of old yardsticks and other found materials. He was given a shipment of furniture considered unsalable, and the wood in it ended cut up into miniature buildings. He handmade parts en masse, spending time turning out roofing shingles, framed windows and railings for future use. His approach to modelling was decades in advance of his time. When most hobbyists in scale or tinplate were content to have lithographed cardboard, wood-braced buildings on their layouts, Gieringer was constructing his with lapped siding, individually shingled roofs, framed windows; not printed, and laboriously made faux stained glass. Many of his buildings have interiors and reveal an attention to detail missing from that era, not to be found until recent decades.

Mr. Gieringer’s memorial at findagrave.com seems to confirm Wills’ thoughts,

Laurence T. Gieringer (13 Jun 1893 - 13 Jan 1963)

At the turn of the century, near Reading, Pennsylvania, Laurence Gieringer, age 5, often looked out of his bedroom window at night, gazing toward nearby Neversink Mountain. Crowning the mountain was the Highland Hotel with lights that twinkled and beckoned. To little Laurence, the glittering white building looked like something from a fairy tale, small enough to pick up and carry home. One day, the boy decided to do just that. Leaving the safety of his backyard, he set off through the woods to find the mountain top and the "toy" building. The inevitable happened. Laurence became bewildered, then completely lost. After a frightening night alone in the woods, he was found by anxious searchers the next morning. Despite this experience, the boy was to retain his interest in "toy" houses for the rest of his life. 

Going to work at age 16, Laurence, after a start in the printing trade, became a carpenter and painter, work which he felt gave more scope to his particular talents. Always he continued to work on his hobby of making model buildings. Skillfully, he whittled at blocks of wood, fashioning them to his dream of a miniature village … a church … bridges … a horse-drawn carriage … stables … farmhouses. He knew nothing of drawing to scale, yet arbitrarily established a size of 3/8" to the foot, which he adhered to in all his modeling. 

And Mr. Gieringer’s granddaughter, Dolores Heinsohn, also backs this up in an interview with Penn Live / Patriot-News on how he got started on his life’s work,

“In 1903, when he was about nine years old, him and his brother were chased out of the house, as young boys, because they were underfoot in the kitchen - they were stealing the dough that my great grandmother was baking,” Dolores said. “They climbed up on top of the mountain at Mount Penn, near the [Reading Pagoda]. And they looked over the city of Reading. And they hatched this idea of building miniature buildings.”

As he grew older and honed his skills, Gieringer began to craft everything to scale — 3/8th of an inch to one foot - and continued making models as a hobby on his off hours. It was a hobby that Gieringer would continue for all of his life, Dolores said, and one that he made public following his victory in a Christmas contest published in the Reading Eagle in 1935.

Wills also mentions in his column that Mr. Gieringer published a number of articles in Lionel’s Model Builder magazine in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Several were about how to construct model buildings. This caught my attention. It looks like Mr. Gieringer is the only person I’ve found so far who clearly got started by practicing that old miniature buildings hobby - I dare say folk art - and migrated to the more modern hobby of model railroading, bringing the full force of the skills he had developed and offering them as examples to follow in the pages of a popular model railroading magazine. If you’re a longtime reader here you know I think E. L. Moore also took the folk art to model railroading path, but I don’t have as strong a link, other than his early practice was more characteristic of the folk art sensibility than model railroading. This is all speculation on my part, and with speculation being a foundational principle of the internet, all my ramblings need to be taken with a grain-of-salt :-)

Anyway, Vince did some great work and found a list of Mr. Gieringer’s Model Builder publications (As always though, I take responsibility for the content here, so if you have any issues with or questions about the list, please let me know):

1938

Jan / Feb: 35 Year Old City

1941

Oct: World’s Largest Model Railroad

1945

Jan: How to Make Trees, Part 1

Feb: How to Make Trees, Part 2

Mar: How to Make Foot Bridges

Oct: Down by the Old Grist Mill

Nov: Modern Store Block

Dec: Model Foundry

1946

Jan: Rock Work

Apr: Electric Shop

Sep: Gas Station

Oct: Vacation Whistle Stop

Nov: Down on the Farm

Dec: Old Red Barn

1947

Jan: Chicken on Dutch Rye

Feb: Cart & Wagon Wheels

Mar: Wagon and Chassis

Sep: Express and Huckster Wagons

It isn’t an extensive publication list, but the models he shows, and the techniques he discusses, are high quality, as Keith Wills mentioned.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Gieringer didn’t publish in Model Railroader or Railroad Model Craftsman, but ads in MR indicate he did publish some articles in Toy Trains magazine, which I haven’t yet seen.

It’s another piece in the puzzle about model railroading's roots. The search continues!