The most prominent concern of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks is the tory of the founding, the rise, and the fall of a community, in this case, of Stay More, Arkansas. The narrator, an architectural historian, apparently wants his story to focus on a history of Stay More's vernacular architecture. He begins each of the chapters with an illustration of one of Stay More's buildings but quickly digresses into telling the stories about the people who founded and lived in Stay More, primarily the brothers Jacob and Noah Ingledew and their male descendants.

The heart of the male Ingledew story is generation — their acts of making love, families, and dwellings — and, ultimately, decline, until there is only one male Ingledew living, and he will have no offspring. This attention to generation and decline reflects an elemental human concern with the experience of time...