I often read things from people from Canada or the USA, where for example a building from 1850 is old – what is your personal opinion? What do you consider old? What are the oldest buildings in your hometown or state?

50 comments

  2. Old is in reference to the other buildings and structures in the area. 1800s is old for a country that was established (as it’s current form) in the 1700s.

    But compared to countries that was established millennia ago, it’s not that old.

  3. Living in Chicago, anything late 1800’s to early 1900’s as there was the great fire that burned Chicago down to the ground

  4. I don’t know exactly where I’d put the cutoff but 100 years is for sure in “old” territory to me

  5. In Michigan, anything older then 1850 is for sure considered old and will generally have some type of historical significance or accidentally have been saved by someone putting vinyl siding on a log cabin in a rural area

    A lot of very old building in urban areas were destroyed during post-world war two urban renewal or in the case of my hometown, burned down in one 3 major fires between 1860s and 1910s

    Structures like Fort Michilimackinac and Fort Mackinac are very unique in terms of still standing. Fort Mackinac really only still exists because it was used as active US military bases until the 1890s and the state park movement was heating up when the federal government transferred the property to the state of Michigan

  6. There are old forts from the 1700’s in East Tennessee.

    I consider buildings 125 years or more old. Once you can’t easily retrofit them for economical habitation they are old to me.

  7. As the saying goes, in the U.S., a hundred years is pretty old for a building. In Europe, a hundred miles is pretty far to travel.

  8. I personally consider any building old if it was built primarily before WW2. After WW2, the suburbs and the automobile changed urban planning forever, with mostly negative consequences such as white flight, economic stagnation, and the decline of the city core. Luckily New Urbanism has helped put alternative development patterns on the map.

    For what it’s worth, modern real estate development in the US is a fucking vicious cycle of greed and emphasis on short-term gain over any genuine growth and longevity.

  9. The oldest surviving building at Texas A&M University is Nagle Hall, built in 1909.

  15. Around here, anything older than 1906 is old. Santa Rosa suffered the most structural damage of any SFBA city from the actual earthquake in 1906. SF probably lost more due to the subsequent fires, but it is pretty rare to find a building older than that in Santa Rosa.

  16. It’s all relative. Are we talking about for our area? For the world? In the universe? News flash. The oldest castle in Germany isn’t old compared to what is old in say, Egypt.

    Oldest building in my state is a house built by a Finish immigrant circa 1640.

  17. My house was built in 1770 – but oldest home in my state was built in 1641.

    We dont have a lot of buildings older than that. There weren’t established masons or establish quarries so no stone buildings. We had so much wood in this country and old dry wood burns so lots of the oldest building burned.

    There are some Native American structures from like 700 AD.

  18. Varies depending on the region – in places where there’s a great demand for space and buildings are frequently demolished and constructed, something fifty to a hundred years old is ‘old’. Think Southern California or New York City.

    In historical districts of older cities, there are preserved buildings two hundred and fifty years old or older, and something a hundred years old isn’t especially notable.

  19. The farther west you go the more recent the date would get. I’m in AZ and I think the oldest standing structures are late 1800’s, like 1890’s late. Somewhere like Boston nobody would bat an eye at a building that ~~old~~ new, they’ve got stuff going back to the mid 1600’s.

    So personally I’d consider 1850’s mighty old, but a new englander may disagree.

  20. I grew up in a house built in the 1700s. That’s pretty old I guess. There’s a handful of buildings still around from the 1600-1700s, but there’s not a whole lot older than that still around.

  22. Anything eighteenth century is considered quite old. Most of our cities were founded in the late 19th – early 20th century and have no buildings older than that. Many cities are post-WWII or saw major post-war expansion, so even 1940s or earlier neighborhoods can be be rare. The neighborhood I live in is considered “established” because it was carved out of the forest in 1999 – my 20-year-old house isn’t really _old_, but it’s considerably older than many of the brand new developments surrounding it. It’s quite possible in my city to buy a new construction house in a neighborhood that literally doesn’t exist yet when you sign the papers.

    The more historic US cities – Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago – might have some seventeenth-century buildings; by American standards those are _ancient_. The only sixteenth-century European-built buildings still standing in the US are in Puerto Rico.

    Of course we also have the pre-Columbian buildings like the Mesa Verde Cliff Palace, which are hundreds of years older, but these are heritage or archaeological sites, not still-functioning buildings.

  23. Besides the east coast, there weren’t any buildings before the ~1850s. So that’s about the oldest you can get.

  24. Pre-1900’s is old, pre-1800’s is very old, pre-1700’s lands you a spot among the oldest remaining colonial buildings in the country. Pre-1600’s is exclusively surviving Native American structures.

  25. We have a street in my city that is the oldest, continuous residential street in the US. Houses on the block were built starting in 1703, and someone has lived on the street for the last 319 years.

    We do also have a log cabin that was build by Swedish settlers sometime in the 1640s. It’s a museum now. There’s a number of other still intact buildings in my area from the second half of the 1600s, but I’m also right on the east coast and many people from Europe settled in this area.

  26. Pennsylvania has a multiple buildings still standing from the 1600s and 1700s, with our oldest being dated to 1640.

    The real problem with the age of buildings is the definition. A lot of our oldest, still standing buildings are built by tribes indigenous to the U.S. and are often religious sites and/or preservation sites. They’re often not places to be used as buildings for standard living now.

  27. The oldest buildings in CA date back to the 18th century, but thing is for every 1 real historic spanish colonial-style building there’s got to be several hundred modern ones that took that aesthetic; where I grew up it was probably the 3rd most common aesthetic for homes behind mid-century moderns and craftsmans, and the most common aesthetic for public buildings. So, nothing in the area looks older than WWII at first glance, which leaves me easily impressed by obviously historic architecture

  28. My house is old.. built in 1894

    I mean, that’s probably older than most buildings in Germany, no?

  29. The oldest documented (those with written records) structures in San Antonio are the missions. They date from the early 1700’s to the early 1800’s.

    So, that’s pretty old for the US.

    But, there are prehistoric structures in neighboring states in both the US and Mexico. So, a couple hundred years are nothing compared to a couple of thousand.

  30. As a west coast denizen I view my area as young, both in western and geologic terms.

  31. For buildings, the oldest in my state are probably the surviving missions which were built in the late 1700s and early 1800s, back when this land was still Mexico. However, I wouldn’t just focus on buildings. I grew up in a part of California that was and still is inhabited by the Mi Wok. Everyday on my way to school I would drive by grinding rocks that were thousands of years old, and more or less in use up until the present. Here in San Diego, my kids have also had that experience on Kumeyaay land. If you look outside of buildings, there exists some pretty old human creations even in the US.

  32. The oldest building in my county was built in 1818, so here anything older than 1900 is old

  33. Personally I’d consider anything built before our civil war (1860) as relatively “old.” It was after the civil war that industry and the cities experienced explosive growth, so there seem to be way fewer buildings still around from that time period than the gilded age which followed. Much of the modern US has also been torn down and rebuilt since the Second World War, as our population doubled and we undertook bold experiments with highways, suburbs, car culture, and urban renewal. The oldest building in my town was built in 1717, which is considered quite old but not enough to draw visitors or get made into a museum, necessarily.

  34. Old in America would be structures built during colonial times, or something older would have to be Native American like Puebloan

  35. From my midwest perspective, I would consider anything built before 1950’s old, and anything built before 1900 *really* old.

  37. In New England old would be late 1600s or early 1700s.

    Our friends house down in NH has parts that were the original farmhouse from the 1650s. His town is celebrating the 400th year from their settlement next year.

    I drive by graveyards on my way to work that are family plots that date to the 1700s, that’s old for us.

    That said I have been to Native American sites on the Midwest that date to 200 BC. That is quite old even by old world standards.

  38. I grew up in an old farmhouse built in 1865. The town had several places that were stops on the Underground Railroad. The High School was first laid down in 1826. Occasionally we still find cannonballs along the Lake Ontario shoreline from the War of 1812. I have *seen* Native petroglyph that are hundreds if not a thousand years old. We also occasionally dig up and randomly find old arrowheads.

    Old is old everywhere. It is merely arrogance that breeds the idea that the US has very little “old” historical artifacts. It even has a factor of prejudice as the idea that the Americans have no history is a 250 year old propaganda jab from the time of King George III and the general refusal to acknowledge American culture as…..well culture… is almost a tradition across the globe. It’ incredibly annoying when other nations try to say their culture, and thus society, is superior to our own due to a link to people from the past that might not even be the same ethnic group as those they are trying to with, looking at you Iran.

  40. Locally, anything from around 1900 ish, since that’s about how old most of the oldest buildings in my county are.

  41. It’s funny. I used to live in Charleston, SC which maintains a historic downtown where most of the houses and buildings were built in the 1700’s. Some of the oldest standing structures in our country and it’s a huge tourist attraction. Recently went to Scotland and stayed with some relatives in their simple, unremarkable farmhouse. It’s older then every building in Charleston. No one looks twice.

  42. I live in CT, we were settled by Europeans very early compared to the rest of the country. Our oldest buildings are from the 1600s. I consider anything 100 years or older “old” but I really divide that into a few categories.

    When referring to buildings I consider anything before say….. 1830 “old”. Anything post 1830 I will say “older” because it’s not old old, you can get much older, but nobody would call it new either. Anything older than maybe the 1730s I will call “very old”. Generally anything from 1900 on I will just give the date it was built, “house from the 30s” or “it was built in the 60s” or something.

    This also has to do with typical building construction. These are kind of natural delineations of building styles. Buildings became more regonizably modern in the 1830s here, so that’s where that date comes from. Often a house earlier than that will be smaller, lower ceilings, smaller windows, different fireplace, etc.

    My house was built about 1876. It’s a big mishmosh of different eras, as a lot was changing at the time. Our house isn’t actually balloon framed, that took longer to catch on on the east coast. The framing is sawn, not hand hewn, but it’s plainly evident that it was from trees (ie some beams you can see indent a bit from where the tree curved, not perfectly straight and even like you’d see today). Our basement actually has two supports that are just actual trees, not even sawn at all, just bark removed. But our house was originally heated by stoves or a furnace, we don’t have a fireplace. It would have been embarrassing to hear your home that way then, only the poor used fireplaces for heat lol. So it’s just a weird conglomeration of eras. But I refer to it as “older”, not “old”, because it’s definitely not new, but it’s not old old either.

  43. In my part of the country, anything from the 1600s is seen as ancient.

    There’s a Quaker meeting house in Flushing, NY that was built in 1694. Needless to say, it has all kinds of protections on it.

  44. Basically anything pre 1900 but it also depends on where in the US. Here in Minnesota, it’s very rare to find a building older than the 1870s and most of those are farm houses. So pre-1920s building are old. In New England however there are buildings from the 1600s and 1700s.

  47. The oldest buildings in my state are from the 9th century. What I consider to be old depends on the context

  48. Mesa Verde Cliff Palace is located in Mesa Verde National Park, in Mesa Verde, Colorado. Estimated to have been built around the 1190s. That’s one of the oldest structures here. Otherwise old is mostly late 1800 to early 1900. They’re aren’t many left because they were made of wood, which burns easily. Stone and brick last longer.

  49. I have a church that was built in 1902, but it wasn’t built here. It was shipped from somewhere else. Most of the buildings and houses nearby were built in the late 1950s. The only thing here before that was a Navy base, which later became an Air Force base and is now a Space Force base.

  50. There’s a fort In St Augustine, FL that’s from the 1500’s, I consider that old AF

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