Colonial Plymouth recreated
Courtesy of comcast.net/ahistory
There were no European settlements between Florida and Nova Scotia in the early 17th Century, so the English colonists were on the frontier as soon they stepped on land in Virginia or New England. The first homes they built had to be frontier homes. They didn't have time for anything better.
NOTE--The Separatists (Pilgrims) at Plymouth settled in an abandoned village--the people had recently died from a disease caught from European fishermen who had come ashore to trade--but there was no housing. The colonists had to build their own. What with having to grow crops for winter and lots of colonists getting sick and dying, they only managed to get up seven houses the first winter, two of which may have been for meetings and storage.
The colonists built what they had lived in before they left England, thick-beamed frame houses onto which long and thin clapboards were attached in horizontal rows. The clapboards were put on bottom-to-top and all of the boards above the first one overlapped the top of the board below it. This directed rain down the outside of the house, not inside.
Collecting enough stone in Virginia or Massachusetts to put down a base for a house to be built was impractical and they couldn't make cement, so the colonists built post-in-the-ground buildings. The four corners of a square or rectangular building were set down into the ground. The frame of the house was built onto and between the corner posts.
A wooden floor above the ground would come later. Planks did not idly cover the sloping roof. Instead, bundles of reeds or thatch were tied to the crossbars in the frame between the roof line and the ridge line, the highest point of the roof. Bundles were laid across the crossbars, starting at the bottom and working up to the top. This kept out the rain because water naturally dripped along the straws down toward the eave. Bundles were laid two layers thick if there was a sufficient amount on hand.
Inside the one room home, on the inside of the clapboard walls, a framework covered all four walls of the room, except for the doorway. Straight and thin tree branches had been set up and down between the floor and top of the wall. They were a hand length apart. There were also three widely spaced rows of tree branches in horizontal lines going across. Once all of the latticework had been put in place and didn't fall down, a special mud was plastered between the vertical branches. (The mud had clay and grass mixed into it.) Once the spaces between the branches had been completely filled in, another thick layer of the mud was put on and covered up the 'wattle' framework against the walls so none of it could be seen. The room had thick walls above the dirt floor.
The first houses in Virginia and New England were wooden huts with modest insulation. There was no glass for windows, only paper soaked in oil so it would hang straight and not tear easily. It was imagined that oiled paper kept heat inside a one room home. Most houses did not have windows. Fireplaces were not made of bricks or stone, but of logs covered in plaster so they wouldn't easily catch fire. The first houses were cold, dark, and drafty, but any shelter from the weather and any protection from warriors and wild animals was better than none.
NOTE--The Dutch were the master bricklayers of Europe. New Amsterdam had its share of wooden buildings, but also had tall and narrow brick buildings not too different from Old Amsterdam.
Growth in the colonies increased in the 1630s. Not as many people died soon after they came ashore (within three years) and thousands of Congregationalists migrated from England to Massachusetts Bay. The combined population of the tobacco colonies and New England colonies was five thousand men and a few women in 1630. This grew to eighteen thousand men and seven thousand women by 1640. Those numbers doubled in the next ten years and tripled in the thirty years after that.
People could not live on top of each other and they had to have land to farm, if they wanted to eat. When a farmer or planter died, splitting the family estate among sons would hurt the chances of the sons succeeding. The land and home were given to the eldest son and younger sons had to make do.
In Virginia, people looking for new land went up a deepwater river. When they found good land that wasn't occupied, they made a deal with the nearest village to live on it and petitioned the House of Burgesses for ownership. In New England, groups of men from a large congregation that needed a second church looked for land, negotiated a deal with nearby clan elders when they found it, and then petitioned a legislature for the land.
However the land was acquired, the new settlers built frame and clapboard homes from whatever trees were nearby and could be harvested. It was what they knew to do. They built up a defensive wall around their settlement, built a blockhouse inside the palisade or one at each corner, and then built one room, post-in-the-ground houses inside the walls. They farmed outside the walls.
Pioneers left home in winter on horseback or on foot to get where they were going by early spring. They had to clear land and plant crops so they could eat next winter, while at the same time they had to build the fort and their homes. They didn't have time or resources to build nice homes. A roof, four walls, a door, and a hearth was what they got. Having enough food to eat and surviving next winter were very important. New England homes faced southeast for best exposure to the sun. Virginia homes face north to escape the summer sun.
NOTE--Some people didn't build a home. They dug a hole in the ground and lined it with wood. It was quicker and took less labor, but wasn't as nice and had problems in wet weather.
The first houses were not intended to last a long time nor was much labor spent on improving them. They were make-do homes that had to last for a few years while the farm became successful. Then a new home could be built, a better home with more than one room. Long in the future, when the farm had become very successful, a fine home could be built and the second home be given to the oldest son or a plantation manager.
A popular description of this three-step process is 'hut, house, and home.'
The romantic image of a young couple, possibly with an infant, going off to live by themselves in the wilderness didn't happen very often. The colonials (second and later generation colonists) didn't want to be cut off from society. They needed other families and friends. They needed neighbors for protection against First Nation warriors who were not always peaceful. The guiding light of a minister helped ease the strain of unending labor. Moving far away from neighbors was not a good idea.
Life in the American wilderness was hard, harsh, and often short. Life in the wilderness ever was. Colonials didn't go off on their own. Land was acquired near an existing community or in a newly arranged community.
The colonists started with a one room hut. It's corner posts were sunk in the ground. They were eight to twelve feet apart. The top of the walls, the roofline, started at six feet off the ground and sloped up to a ridge line that was eight to ten feet higher than that. The room had some sort of fireplace and an entrance that could be closed by a door. Mostly likely the door was made of two panels set back-to-back, with an inside and an outside. If a hammer and nails had been brought, the two panels were nailed together. Tapered square nails with a dull point at one end and a flat head at the other were used. When a nail had been hammered home through the both panels of the door, the pointed end was bent so the nail could not be pried out of the door. The hinges were hand-carved wood and a thick wooden bar was set in hooks across the door at night so it couldn't be opened from the outside.
The fireplace was likely a flat spot on the ground in one corner of the room. Perhaps it had rocks set in clay for a hearth, but more likely it was bare dirt inside a rock perimeter. There was no chimney, just a hole in the roof above the hearth. Stones and clay would be found in time and bricks would be made. (If the local creeks had muddy banks, clay would be found below it.)
A diamond-shaped window might be cut out of a wall, later, points up and down, and points right and left, which helped rain to drain. The window would likely be closed with a shutter and could be locked from the inside. Glazed windows became common in port towns on the coast by the 1650s, but never on the frontier. By the time a glazier set up a local shop, the frontier had moved many miles to the west. An oiled cloth or paper would do until then.
C. A Nothnagle Log House, about 1640
Oldest existing colonial American log home
Gibbstown New Jersey
Courtesy of Adventure Rider
ABOUT LOG CABINS
William Henry Harrison ran for the presidency of the United States in 1840. His opponent, incumbent President Martin Van Buren, claimed Harrison was an old man who would be a bad president. He would just sit in a log cabin and drink hard cider. Log cabins and jugs of hard cider immediately showed up on Harrison campaign posters. They showed he was a common man. Harrison got elected and the log cabin entered American folklore. (Harrison died on his thirty-second day in office.)
Log cabins had been built by Europeans in North America long before the political campaign of 1840. Two hundred and two years before then, New Sweden had been started on the Delaware River just above Delaware Bay and Swedes or Finns built the first one. Log cabins had been built by people in Central and Northeastern Europe for hundreds of years, so it was what the colonists knew to build on the edge of or inside a forest. Log Cabins required fewer trees than frame and clapboard houses, and less labor.
In 1655, New Sweden was captured by the Dutch, who didn't build log cabins. Nine years later, New Netherland was captured by the English, who didn't build log cabins. However, the thousand or so Swedes and Finns in New Sweden hadn't gone back to Scandinavia after New Sweden was first captured, but stayed in lower New Jersey and upper Delaware. Their children and grandchildren built log cabins.
In 1683, Germans arrived in Pennsylvania and started Germantown, then six miles north of Philadelphia. There were trees on hand and they had a tradition of log cabins, so some were built. Lots more cabins were built in southeast Pennsylvania after the turn of the century and the first of fifty thousand migrants from central and eastern Europe began to arrive. They settled on land near where New Sweden had been and built cabins similar to what the Swedes and Finns had built.
Ulster Scots, who were Presbyterians, began to arrive in Philadelphia in 1717. Five thousand of them migrated in the first year and a half. They needed land, but couldn't get Pennsylvania land at a price they were willing to pay. The Ulster Scot tradition of houses included using available stone, in addition to wood on hand. However, when they did find land southwest along the Great Warrior Path, in western Maryland and Virginia, but mostly in the hill country of the Carolinas, they didn't find enough stone. They couldn't build what they knew from home. They found lots of trees, so they built what they had seen in Pennsylvania, log cabins that required fewer trees to build and less labor.
When the children and grandchildren of the Ulster Scots had to find land of their own, they went to Kentucky and Tennessee. They built what they had known at home.
In some cases, a log cabin was not the last home built on a piece of property. When the property was worked successfully, a nicer home was built. If the log cabin was still in good shape, it was given to the eldest son or a plantation manager. If it was in bad shape, it became a chicken coop or an animal shed.
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