The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1887, page 169 by Various Authors
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s of carved wood, which cross the front under each row of windows. The outer walls are covered with upright, overlapping shingles, not more than two or three inches broad, and rounded at the ends, suggesting the scale armor of ancient times. This covering secures the greatest warmth; and when the shingles have acquired from age that rich burnt-sienna tint which no paint could exactly imitate, the effect is exceedingly beautiful. The lowest story is generally of stone, plastered and whitewashed. The stories are low (seven to eight feet), but the windows are placed side by side, and each room is thoroughly lighted. Such a house is very warm, very durable, and, without any apparent expenditure of ornament, is externally so picturesque that no ornament could improve it.
Many of the dwellings, I was told, could not be built with the present means of the population, at the present prices of labor and material. They date from the palmy days of Appenzell industry, before machinery had reduced the cost of the finer fabrics. Then, one successful manufacturer competed with another in the erection of showy houses, and fifty thousand francs (a large sum for the times) were frequently expended on a single dwelling. The view of a broad Alpine landscape, dotted all over with such beautiful homes, from the little shelf of green hanging on the sides of a rocky gorge and the strips of sunny pasture between the ascending forests, to the very summits of the lower heights and the saddles between them, was something quite new in my experience.
Turning around the point of Vöglisegg, we made for Trogen, one of the two capitals of Outer-Rhoden, which lay before us, across the head of the deep and wild St. Martin's Tobel. (Tobel is an Appenzell word, corresponding precisely to the gulch of California.) My postilion mounted, and the breathed horse trotted merrily along the winding level. One stately house after another, with a clump of fruit-trees on the sheltered side, and a row of blooming hyacinths