White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs

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The White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs was a bi-monthly publication with drawings, photographs, and descriptions of early American architecture, promoting the use of Eastern white pine in building. It began in 1915, faded by World War II, and was revived from 2006 to 2014. Both versions later turned out to include fabrications about fictional New England towns.

The project started as an advertising effort by the White Pine Bureau, a partnership of pine manufacturers from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Idaho. Architect Russell F. Whitehead supervised the series, with Julian Buckly as photographer. In its first decade, the issues mostly pictured exterior details of houses built with white pine, often documenting several buildings from a single village in one issue.

By 1920, Whitehead and his colleague Hubert Ripley had so many unpublished photos that they created a fictional town, Stotham, Massachusetts, to justify using them. The ruse wasn’t discovered until the late 1940s, when a Library of Congress official asked about Stotham and Whitehead explained the deception.

In 1924, the White Pine Bureau ended its advertising campaign. Whitehead continued the series on his own, selling ads to Weyerhauser Forest Products. He broadened the scope to include churches and public buildings, interior views, and millwork details, and extended coverage to the Southern states, where buildings were often framed with Southern pine or Cypress.

In 1932, the Monograph series became a regular feature in Pencil Points, alongside the magazine’s “Comparative Details” on construction methods. The Monographs ended in June 1940.

Many contributors later worked with the Historic American Buildings Survey. The monographs were treasured by architects and historians and were reissued in bound editions several times. In 1987, the National Historical Society began publishing Architectural Treasures of Early America, drawing from the White Pine Monographs and reorganizing the material by region, using many of the original photographs.

In 2006, the Northeastern Lumber Manufacturers Association revived the title for new publications about eastern white pine in construction. In 2011, another hoax was revealed: a 2010 monograph about New Milford, New Hampshire described a thriving Victorian village in the White Mountains, but research showed it was fictitious. The series has not been published since 2014.