Edwards returns to a comparative question Charles Peterson raised in the 1930s: why the settlers' houses of the Illinois Country, Lower Louisiana and Saint Domingue turned out as differently as they did. Standing structures, measured drawings, colonial descriptions and field survey are tested against theories of preadaptation, founder's effect and cultural syncretism. Cap Haitien supplies the longest sequence, from earthfast posts and thatch through timber frame, rubble and masonry, rebuilt after each earthquake and each sacking. The le Conte plantation house near Milot joins French roof carpentry to a tripartite plan inherited from Spanish Hispaniola. The broad living gallery, Edwards argues, entered Caribbean building from the vernacular traditions of the Guinea coast, carried by the many African builders who raised the colony's towns and estates. In Louisiana, an obsolete mud-and-post walling revived on the frontier because enslaved and free craftsmen of colour already knew it. What emerged from such borrowing was Creole, no longer Gallic.