Look at the history of the two countries, one near neutral and the other forever at war or some kind of turmoil. It is know that buildings locally were taken down and moved for fear of raiding, plundering and just plain mayhem, one example I know of, a barn moved from the coast to a more inland site to avoid the threat from the British around 1812. On my property there is a story passed on about the family that settled here, there is still lilac, apple trees, house cellar and other stone remnants on my blueberry fields. The family wanted to get as far from the coast as possible, he was in the navy during the revolution. I can just see the coast from the top of my roof.

"In America, a frame is a thing of pure utility" Yes, I would agree. In addition they had a different setting to deal with and perhaps did not have the time to perform time consuming "....is hewn to very precise dimensions" type of joinery. I am suggesting they didn't have a choice, to make pretty, it was a utility thing and necessary.

Good observation, Tim,

This harsh reality of life certainly must have played a major role in developments along the east coast.

Then add on top of that as settlement moved further west, Indian raids. Some of my own ancestors were involved in the so-called 'Hochstetler Massacre' when Indians raided an Amish settlement in the 1750s

Indiana (the land of the Indians) had a pretty violent early history, right up until the time of the Civil War. Where I live, there was once something like 14 Indian villages within a few miles that were burned to the ground by the army (actually the Indian trouble here was a part of the war of 1812)
Like you can find remnants of the early settlements around you, we can still find remnants of the Indian cabins (oddly enough, built by the US government for them) in fields around us.

Your story reminded my of my travels in the Jura mountains in the northwest of the Canton of Bern. There, on top of the mountains, I could see many ruins of Mennonite and Amish farms that had been abandoned centuries earlier. There were stone foundations, old dry stone walls marking the old boundaries, and wild apple trees that had sprung up from the orchards kept by the Mennonites (In the Jura, Amish and Mennonites were known for their fruit and their good wine). These were all abandoned over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries when the people were given the opportunity to come to America. This was meaningful to me, because some of those ruins were the ruins of the places my own ancestors lived.

In Indiana, settlement was very -rugged- People had to do a lot of work to make a home. Forests needed to be cleared, swamps drained, and then houses and barns built.
Like you said, the crude nature of the timber they would use was necessary. They didn't have the time to make them nice, and it wasn't necessary. Thankfully for them, someone had devised a layout method that worked perfectly in this situation.
Also they didn't have tools. A Swiss carpenters shop might have had over 100 different planes for various tasks, a dozen or so axes, and a collection of chisels, augers, and other tools. Having been in an old carpenters shop, the sheer number of tools is astounding. But on the frontier, you just didn't have this. A guy might show up with 2 axes, a hammer, and a chisel, and that's it.

Buildings, settlers buildings in particular tend to reflect the environment in which they were built. Where I grew up in Saskatchewan the first houses and out buildings were very crude and hastilly built. Not a big surprise being that to get the 160 acre plot they also had to break and clear 10 acres of land, and probably even dig a well in that first summer. So, most of the abandoned buildings on farm sites of that era are poorly fitted spruce or poplar log buildings. Their second house was usually stick framed, insulated with wood chips. Houses from the Eatons Catalogue were a common thing in parts of the country.

On the eastern side of this continent there are many old barns. Mostly cut with square rule, and by carpenters this shows a more settled culture by comparison. Many of the traditional building styles in Europe(wood or otherwise) show another degree of this, but again with flair from their own culture and local materials incorporated.

Hi Leslie, interestingly, here I see old barns being scribed and very little square rule, it is the church and community buildings that are square ruled. This leads me to think builders from out of the area came in under contract to build town/public buildings. The farmer was still doing his way.

Or perhaps, Tim, similarly
The public buildings/town buildings were built by professional carpenters, based in town or a nearby city, While the barns and many houses may have been built by the farmers themselves.

That's a very common situation in Europe. You see, for example, drastically different building going on at the same time in the cities of Bern, Thun, etc. while just a stone's throw away out in the countryside farmers and rural carpenters build things in ways that had been abandoned sometimes centuries earlier in the cities. Then at the same time, the rural villages might hire a city carpenter to build a new roof for the church, or a granary, etc. and these often stand out as vastly different from other rural forms.
You actually still have this situation today, where sometimes the rural carpenters are still building things in very old ways, while some wealthy farmer might hire a crew from the city to build a sleek new engineered timber structure or steel building.