"Does anyone make 25/28mm Lexington Concord buildings?" Topic

I asked this a couple years ago, and was given recommendations for ACW log cabins. Not quite the same thing!

They did have a rather unique appearance, and pictures are readily available.

At the time, for a Trenton project, I scanned the Dover New England Village card set and printed them out at +25%. Meh… My printer did it kind of wishy washy and I do not have access to it any more.

Anything would be nice. Plastic, resin, laser cut, PDF, card, paper, etc.

Ok, I thought the architecture of the New England area was similar to Europe. If not I would have thought that JR Miniatures or Miniature Building Authority would have made useful buildings in 25mm.

Seems like decades ago, Gallia and Gemedco made buildings for the 1700s.

Grand Manner;

Hartwell Tavern – link

Guilford Courthouse – link

Many more – link

Tony

New England has lovely things like Salt Box houses and such. Not so much like Europe.

Growing up a couple of mile from there, I can say the Hartwell Tavern in the link above from Tony is nice. Hobby Bunker in Malden, MA has some resin type buildings that work. I have one painted up I can show you next time I'm up in the wilds of Luzerne County.

Go for clapboard stuff. Grand Manner is one source. The Perry Farmhouse could be used in a pinch.

Eric

Go to your local train hobby store. "S" scale is perfect for 28 mm and "O" scale is pretty close, depending if you don't mind a bit bigger building. There are hundreds of kits and pre-made buildings to choose from. Stay away from HO because the doors and windows will look silly. Bring a couple of figures with you, to judge how they look in relationship to the structure. Just as in wargames figures the various makers all have their own idea of scale.

Plasticville O scale is near perfect. You can get the Church (which is right out of NE) and plenty of other kits to make simple clapboard houses. Loads of farm houses also.

You've been doing this a long time, so think in terms of kitbashing. Switching a few walls, or a roof, or extending a barn should be easy enough to do. Besides it's fun to do.

And they are usually much cheaper than resin.

Ouch! Those GM buildings are nice, and pricey!

DAF;
It's okay. John's got money to "burn", since he works for an Energy Company…

Eric

Since I did not win the lotto, I can't get the GM tavern. My better half would have my hide!

Ouch! Those GM buildings are nice, and pricey!

Ouch, indeed!
And that's unpainted!
I wonder if their market strategy is "Sell one, and it pays for itself! Two and we are in the clover!"

I made a few buildings myself with foamcore and vacuuform clapboard siding. That's more in my price range.

Fiddler's Green has lots of paper New England buildings. They also do a lot of old English stuff.

These are nominally H0 but work well with 1/72 figures; you could scale them up or use them 'as is' for eye candy
link

The Dover paper villages are great. I've got the Irish village that I blew up (on the xerox, not with Semtex) and used as templates for cardboard structures. Dover has a few books of colonial and early American buildings that could work. They did one of the living history museum Where I worked in my younger days- I'd like to get that for old times sake.

Most of those building models suggested strike me as either too obviously from the Mid-Atlantic South -- e.g. Grand manor's "Guilford Courthouse" & Mini-Building Authority's "Shenandoah House" -- or, are more likely than not derived from architecture of late 18th Cent. or early 19th Cent. in the South. Their "Tavern" is to my eye based very much upon the front facade of the "Raleigh Tavern" at Colonial Williamsburg!!

Of course, that kind of marketing makes perfect sense from a manufacturer's point of view -- "bang for the buck" -- i.e., making such buildings that will support sales in both the AmRev AND the ACW using the same model. Structures appropriate to grace AmRev game-table battlefields, if not too obviously of an architectural style that post-dated 1763, would of course ALSO be plausible in the various F&IWs of the early 1700s (up to THE F&IW of 1754-63), but…

But there were actually architectural stylistic differences between Colonial Virginia and the Carolinas, and Colonial New England. "Southern Colonial" was characterized by houses built on the "hall & parlor" and "central-passage" plans. These house-types, several good examples of which can be found at Colonial Williamsburg, permitted opening the homes up in summer months to get air-flow through the building for cooling. They usually had their fireplaces with their related chimneys placed on the gable-ends of the house.

In addition, Mini-Building Authority's "Granny's Cabin" would not be built up off the ground like that if built in New England, with its cold winters. You wouldn't keep it heated with the Canadian/Arctic air whistling under the floor boards!! However, it would be alright for your games when fighting Greene's campaign in the South.

The "Saltbox" house evolved in New England from ca. 1650 -- most likely as a quick and cheap way to add more space for expanding families by adding a lean-to at the rear of the house. The two-story slab-front and the central chimney block were traditional, like with Daniel Comstock's Homestead built c. 1739 out in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut.

When the characteristic low-ceilinged "lean-to" was added to the north side of a south-facing house, it had the added advantage of presenting a short wall with few windows towards those "cool breezes" coming down from Canada in winter, while the two-story front of the house with more windows had a warmer southern exposure. To further insulate the home, the kitchen was often moved into the lean-to addition, and an attic placed in the new crawl-space over the addition (to make a sort of air-buffer and add storage). One quirk of such houses was the the clap-boards of the former exterior at the back of the house were often left in place (as added insulation?). The style remained popular in New England into at least the 1890s.

You asked about Lexington & Concord? The Grand Manner "Hartwell Tavern" main building is a New England Saltbox, built ca. the 1730s and located in Lincoln, MA, about halfway between Lexington Green & North Bridge. The view I am seeing on GM's website of their model of the main building is actually the back of the house, not the front. The newer addition (the second building of their set) was added sometime ca. the 1750s, and is a "Dutch" Gambrel. As a stand-alone it would sit okay IMO in a game set in "Dutch" country --- in the Hudson Valley --- but obviously "Yankees" were not above building in other styles in Massachusetts by the mid-1700s.

Then again, as the Reverend Rosenkrantz said in his sermon in Drums Along the Mohawk: "Oh, Almighty God, hear us, we beseech Thee, and bring succor and guidance to those we are about to bring to Your divine notice. First we are thinking of Mary Walaber. She is only 16 years old, but she is keeping company with a soldier from Fort Dayton. He's a Massachusetts man Lord, and Thou knowest no good can come of that!!"

There is Renedra's "North American Cabin or Farmhouse, 1750-1900," and although it is "loosely based on Meade's headquarters during the battle of Gettysburg in 1863," you could compare it to the "John Neilson Farmhouse" on the Saratoga Battlefield (1777). If you cut the wide end off and did some kit-bashing to the far wall, leaving only a smaller house and its porch, you'd have a pretty fair approximation of that small one-room Up-state New York farmhouse…

Renedra's also just coming out with a No. American church which if painted a stark, clean, white would not be out of place in New England…