Garrison (Architecture)

A garrison, in architecture, is a style of house typically two stories tall with the second story overhanging the front, ornamented traditionally with four carved drops shaped like pineapples, strawberries, or acorns beneath the overhang, and usually built with an exterior chimney at one end. Older examples have casement windows with small panes, while later versions use double hung windows, and second story windows are often smaller than those on the first floor, with dormers sometimes breaking through the cornice line. The style takes its name from the military sense of garrison, since these fortified houses were built in almost all New England towns and were especially common in the frontier towns of Maine and New Hampshire, used in peacetime as one family dwellings but built strongly enough to shelter several families during attacks. Construction typically used log walls or thick planks with a timber frame, a method called plank frame construction or simply a plank house.