Four major factors contributed to the origin of balloon frame construction in the midwestern United States from the 1830s through the 1890s. First, steam-powered saws milled standardized dimension lumber from an abundant supply of timber in the pineries of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. Second, industries in the eastern states supplied kegs of cut iron nails at reasonable costs. Third, water and overland transportation systems enabled shipment of these essential materials to places in the region where the building of commercial and domestic structures proceeded at a rapid pace. Finally, local carpenters, already familiar with labor saving approaches to building with wood, nailed together standard-sized members of structures to assemble sturdy lightweight frames. By the mid-1840s the varied results of their labors became identified as balloon frame construction.1 Before scholarship in vernacular architectural studies informed discussions of the development of balloon frame construction, Sigfried Giedion traced the origins of the building method to the work of one man, George Washington Snow.2 In the 1941 edition of Space, Time, and Architecture, Giedion claimed that Snow's invention "must have seemed utterly revolutionary to carpenters."3 He traced his inventor-hero's pedigree to the Mayflower, described him as "a rather restless spirit" with a "pioneer temperament," a "jack-of-all-trades," and added that a portrait of the man from a family album revealed "a face at once full of puritan energy and of human sensitivity."4 Walker Field reexamined the origins of balloon frame construction in 1965 and concluded that a practical carpenter, Augustine Deodat Taylor, was the inventor of the framing system, evaluating it