The part of the research for The Food Axis that I found most intriguing and unfamiliar came from women’s records of homesteading on the frontier.When households traveled from settled parts of the United States into the interior, just about the first thing women had to do was manage to feed their families. If they were lucky enough to arrive at a town where some houses had already been constructed, the family might move into a shelter to cook its first meal. With yet more luck there would be a fireplace available in which to build the fire and start preparing some bread or a stew. Many families brought a cook stove on their Conestoga wagon as they crossed the prairies.Women described what it was like to prepare meals under these frontier conditions: when they arrived at their intended location, they would shift the cook stove off the wagon and heat it up to cook a meal out of doors. Some households lived in a tent or under a casually created shelter of branches and cooked like this for weeks or months if the weather allowed.We can see how food preparation tools and practices generated houses for these frontier women: houses were literally constructed around the cook stove.I hope that historians and architects will come to think about the evolution and development of American domestic architecture more as the product of people living in houses, than as the product of architects and designers producing stylish surroundings.Houses are always works in progress, as dwellers relocate uses inside and outside the house. In this book I have focused on the way that changes in people’s preferred modes of food storage, preservation, preparation, and the serving of meals acted as agents of change for the design of houses and their nearby landscapes.The Food Axis shows how the addition of new utilities systems encouraged owners to add new appliances and required the adjustment of old locations for food. Walls were moved or added, wings or ells attached to small houses to make them accommodate new needs. Over the long-term, slowly, the spaces in American houses evolved as dwellers' desires and needs regarding food shifted over time, resulting in major changes in the way domestic space was and is still being shaped.Other domestic activities such as sleeping or socializing could be traced through the reports of users and the adjustments made to the physical fabric of houses. And they would yield comparable insights into the way house plans have been adjusted over the long-term to meet the needs of dwellers. Architects’ designs, ambitious aesthetically, still fit within the culturally accepted parameters established by these slow processes of change.