The Buckridge Ranch House, near

Point Arena, California Point Arena, formerly known as Punta Arena ( Spanish for "Sandy Point") is a small coastal city in Mendocino County, California, United States. Point Arena is located west of Hopland, at an elevation of . The population was 460 at the 2020 ce ...

, was built in 1869. It was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

in 1990. It is located on the

Garcia River The Garcia River is a river on the northern coast of California, in southern Mendocino County. The river's watershed covers and its mainstem is long. The watershed receives of precipitation per year near the coast and inland. The watershed's ...

near Buckridge Road, about from Point Arena. It is an

I-house The I-house is a vernacular architecture, vernacular house type, popular in the United States from the colonial period onward. The I-house was so named in the 1930s by Fred Kniffen, a cultural geographer at Louisiana State University who was a sp ...

, apparently two rooms wide and one room deep. With Its significance is stated in the National Register nomination:

The Buckridge Ranch House is an excellent example of a building form that first arrived in the United States with English settlers in the seventeenth century and continued to be built in one guise or another for over 2OO years. This kind of building, called an I—house, has a rectangular form, two stories with two rooms on each, and a symmetrical facade. A side—facing gable roof is usually present. In the Virginia and the Carolinas a full—width front porch became a common feature. I—houses, like other early vernacular building types, used design principles that were of proven utility and were passed from builder to builder by word of mouth. The builder of the Buckridge Ranch House was probably not trying to design a house similar to those popular in the American Southeast. That was an unintended result of an effort to construct a simple, functional residence. The building displays all the characteristics of a
Tidewater Tidewater may refer to: * Tidewater (region), a geographic area of southeast Virginia, southern Maryland, and northeast North Carolina. ** Tidewater accent, an accent of American English associated with the Tidewater region of Virginia * Tidewater ...
I-house (form, height, fenestration, roof, and porch) in an unusually pure example. The
board-and-batten A batten is most commonly a strip of solid material, historically wood but can also be of plastic, metal, or fiberglass. Battens are variously used in construction, sailing, and other fields. In the lighting industry, battens refer to linea ...
siding is typical of the early settlement of California, while the log porch supports add a rustic note. It is the only unadorned I—house in the Point Arena area.

References

I-houses National Register of Historic Places in Mendocino County, California Buildings and structures completed in 1869 {{California-NRHP-stub