The Log Cabin Myth: A Study of the Early Dwellings of the English Colonists in North America [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674433434, 9780674431522

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THE LOG CABIN MYTH

LONDON : H U M P H R E Y

MILFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LEYDEN STREET, PLYMOUTH, IN 1627 Drawing by Samuel Chamberlain

THE LOG CABIN MYTH Study of the £arly 'Dwellings of the English Qolonists in ü^orth ^America BY

H A R O L D R. S H U R T L E F F Edited, with an Introduction by

SAMUEL ELIOT MORISON

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 1939

COPYRIGHT, 1 9 3 9 BY THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U.S.A.

CONTENTS LIST OF I L L U S T R A T I O N S

.

ABBREVIATIONS

.

.

.

.

INTRODUCTION

.

.

.

.

I. W H Y T H E L O G CABIN? II. D E F I N I T I O N S A N D D I A L E C T I C Blockhouses and Garrison Houses, 9. Framed Houses, Types of Temporary Dwelling: Hut and Booth, 20; Cabin 23; Cottage, 28; Wigwam, 33. Parts of Framed Buildings (Clapboards, etc.), 35. Logs, 42. Carpenters and Tools, 44 Evidence and Inference, 51. III. S O C I A L I M P L I C A T I O N S

57

IV. N E W F O U N D L A N D T O M A S S A C H U S E T T S B A Y . Newfoundland, 64. Acadia, 66. Quebec, 71. Maine, 74 N e w Hampshire, 81. Massachusetts Bay, 83.

64

V. P L Y M O U T H T O PENNSYLVANIA Plymouth, 101. Rhode Island and Connecticut, 111. N e w Haven, 114. N e w Netherland, 120. Pennsylvania, 123.

ioi

VI. V I R G I N I A A N D H E R N E I G H B O R S Maryland, 127. Bermuda, 129. Virginia: Roanoke, 132; Early Jamestown, 134; Reconstruction under Dale and Gates, 1611-1614, 142; The Sandys Period, 1619-1624, 149; Later Data, 156. North Carolina, 161.

127

VII. O R I G I N A N D S P R E A D O F T H E L O G H O U S E . . N e w Sweden, 164. Peter Kalm, 173; The Pennsylvania Germans, 175. The Scotch-Irish, 176. The Indians, 180. Later Examples, 182.

163

VIII. T H E L O G C A B I N M Y T H : A C O M E D Y OF E R R O R S Origin, 186. The Log-Cabin Campaign, 188. Yankee N o tions, 191. Southern Sentiment, 197. More Yankee Errors, 206.

186

IX. C O N C L U S I O N INDEX

209 217

ILLUSTRATIONS L E Y D E N STREET, P L Y M O U T H , IN 1 6 2 7

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.

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Frontispiece

Drawing by Samuel Chamberlain based on the description of De Rasieres and following a conjectural plan by Sidney T . Strickland " F I R S T M E E T I N G H O U S E , " MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

Title-page From David D. Field's Centennial Address (1853), p. 38 A

T Y P I C A L A M E R I C A N LOG C A B I N OF THE CENTURY

NINETEENTH 4

From Captain Basil Hall's Forty Etchings from Sketches made with the Camera Lucida in North America in 1821 and 1828 (1829) MORTISED AND NOTCHED CORNERING

11

Drawn by H. R. ShurtlefF for Roger Burlingame's March of the Iron Men (1938), p. 44. Courtesy of Charles Scribner's Sons THE WILLIAM DAMME HAMPSHIRE

GARRISON HOUSE, DOVER,

NEW 14

Courtesy of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities DOVETAILED CORNERING IN M A I N E AND S W E D E N

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.

.

15

Corner of the Mclntyre Garrison House, York, Maine. From Old-Time New England, XVIII, 9 Corner of Swedish storehouse. From Folkliv, I (1937), PI. XI A H O U S E F R A M E AND ITS PARTS

18

The Clemence House, Manton, Rhode Island. Drawn by Helen Mason Grose for Antoinette Forrester Downing's Early Homes of Rhode Island (Richmond, 1937), p. 6 ENGLISH AND EUROPEAN " C A B I N S "

23

Charcoal burners' cabin, Yorkshire. Courtesy of Fiske Kimball Italian charcoal burners' cabin. From Folkliv, I (1937), 131 CRUCIC CONSTRUCTION IN ENGLISH BARNS

Redrawn from C. F. Innocent, Development of English Building Construction (1916), pp. 42, 47

31

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

INDIAN V I L L A G E IN E A R L Y VIRGINIA

34

From the first De Bry edition of Hariot's Brief e and True Report (i59°) RIVING SHINGLES W I T H A F R O W

40

Photograph by Harvey L. Gray, 1932. Courtesy of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Union H A N D - S A W I N G OF BOARDS

From Diderot, Encyclopédie (1769)

46

. . . Recueil

de Planches,

Vil

L ' H A B I T A T I O N DE L ' I L E S A I N T E CROIX

66

From Champlain's Les Voyages (1613), p. 38 L ' H A B I T A T I O N DU PORT R O Y A L

70

From Champlain's Les Voyages (1613), p. 99 L ' H A B I T A T I O N DE Q U E B E C

71

From Champlain's Les Voyages (1613), p. 187 LOG H O U S E AND LOG T E N T S

73

From Henry Ellis, A Voyage to Hudson's Bay (1748), p. 152 HOUSES IN S T . GEORGE'S FORT ON THE SAGADAHOC .

.

.

75

From John Hunt's sketch of 1607, as reproduced in H. O. Thayer, The Sagadahoc Colony (1892), p. 186 BUILDINGS OF THE "PIONEER V I L L A G E , " S A L E M , C O N STRUCTED IN 1 9 3 0 UNDER THE DIRECTION OF GEORGE F. Dow

86

Courtesy of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities H A L F - T I M B E R CONSTRUCTION IN THE COLONIES

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.

.

96

Reconstructed drawing of the Springfield parsonage of 1639 by Wallace E. Dibble, A.R.A. Courtesy of Mr. Harry A. Wright "Sawbuck House," Landisvalley, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. From a photograph by Mr. A. Lawrence Kocher RECONSTRUCTED APTUCXET

TRADING

HOUSE

OF

Courtesy of Mr. George F. F. Lombard

THE

PILGRIMS

AT 109

ix

ILLUSTRATIONS F R A M E AND RESTORATION OF THE ROGER M O W R Y PROVIDENCE, R . I., c. 1 6 5 3

HOUSE, 117

From drawings in Isham and Brown, Early Rhode Island Houses (1895), Pis. 6, 7 B E R M U D I A N HOUSES

131

From "Map of the Somer Isles" in Captain John Smith's Generall Historie (1624) B A R K - P E E L E R S ' C A B I N , YORKSHIRE

136

From Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, n.s., I (1901), 142 CROTCHET AND C R U C K CONSTRUCTION

139

Cross section of a Swedish barn with ridgepole supported on crotchets. From Folkliv, I (1937), 56. Courtesy of Dr. Sigurd Erixon Sketch of "Teapot Hall," Scrivelsby, Lincolnshire. Reproduced from S. O. Addy, The Evolution of the English House (1933), p. 42, by permission of George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London A

S A W M I L L FOR VIRGINIA

From Edward Williams, Virginia Richly (1650), p. 76

156

and Truly

CORNER JOINTING OF LOG HOUSES IN EUROPE .

Valued .

.

. 1 6 4

From Tolkliv, I (1937), 22 A

S W E D I S H - A M E R I C A N LOG H O U S E OF THE S E V E N T E E N T H C E N T U R Y : T H E JOHN MORTON BIRTHPLACE, PROSPECT PARK, P E N N S Y L V A N I A

172

Photograph by Green Studio, Chester, Pennsylvania. Courtesy of S. Kendrick Lichty A P E N N S Y L V A N I A - G E R M A N LOG C A B I N OF THE EIGHTEENTH C E N T U R Y AT POTTER'S B A N K , C E N T E R C O U N T Y , W I T H D E T A I L OF CHINKING

176

Courtesy of A. Lawrence Kocher T H E W I L L I A M D A M M E GARRISON H O U S E

.

.

.

. 1 7 8

Courtesy of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities S L A V E S ' LOG CABINS OF THE N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U R Y

Courtesy of A. Lawrence Kocher

.

.

184

X

ILLUSTRATIONS

" H O U S E OF AN E A R L Y S E T T L E R "

194

Engraving from a drawing by Washington Allston in J. G . Palfrey's History of New England, II (i860), 63 A

MYTHICAL LOG-CABIN JAMESTOWN

198

From the original drawing by H. A. Ogden. Courtesy of the Yale University Press T H E M Y T H I C A L P L Y M O U T H OF LOG CABINS

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.

From the painting by W . L. Williams, 1887. Copyright by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth

206

ABBREVIATIONS OED

A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, James A. H. Murray (and others) editors, Oxford, 1888-1933. Commonly known as the Oxford Dictionary.

DAE

A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles. Compiled at the University of Chicago, Sir William Craigie and James R. Hulbert, editors, Chicago, 1936- .

I N T R O D U C T I O N

was born at Concord, New Hampshire, on January 6, 1883. After graduating from Concord High School he entered Harvard College with the class of 1906. In college he rowed, played football, and engaged in all the activities of healthy young men at that era; also he read voluminously in the college library without any reference to his courses. After graduation he spent a year in the West, and then took up the study of architecture, first at Harvard and then in Paris. Returning to America about 1912, he became a designer in the New York office of Guy Lowell. Shurtleff was particularly good at "renderings," the drawings from plans of what a building will look like after construction.1 HAROLD ROBERT SHURTLEFF

As a member of Squadron A, New York Cavalry, he took part in the Mexican border demonstration against Villa, and attended two successive Officers' Training Camps at Plattsburg, as a result of which he was commissioned captain of infantry. This was a great disappointment, for as lieutenant he could have served overseas, which he ardently desired to do, but as captain he had to serve on the home front, instructing at various army camps. In 1919 he received honorable discharge with the rank of major. After the usual post-war search for a job, Shurtleff became a designer and draughtsman in the firm of Warren and Wetmore of New York, who were then engaged in recon1

Reduced half-tones of some of his renderings are in the editor's Founding of Harvard College and Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century.

xiv

INTRODUCTION

structing Louvain. His renderings of the new university buildings are still remembered for their fidelity and beauty. In 1921 Shurtleff married Alice Parker of New Jersey, a charming and high-spirited lady who acted as flint to his steel. Not long after, he gave up the overcrowded profession of architecture, and for several years worked for the travel firm of Raymond & Whitcomb, first as tour manager and then as a designer of advertising posters. The turning point in Shurtleff's life came when he was almost fifty. At the suggestion of a Virginian friend, he was engaged by "The Restoration," an organization set up by Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. for the vast project of rebuilding Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia. Originally he served as recorder for the architects, but his interest in the historical aspects of the problem was so keen that when a Research Department was organized to round up and study documentary sources Shurtleff was made the head of it. He moved to Williamsburg in 1930, and in addition to his other duties became the local representative of Perry, Shaw and Hepburn, the firm of architects charged with the restoration. One of Shurtleff's hobbies since his student days had been social history. He was ever studying the history of art, manners and customs and folkways, and speculating about their relations to political philosophy. His direction of the Research Department at Williamsburg, in which he constantly had to bring historical and artistic knowledge to bear on concrete problems, greatly stimulated and expanded his scholarly interests. Before long he reached the point where he felt that he knew nothing, owing to lack of academic training in history, and that he must study the tech-

INTRODUCTION

xv

nique of historical research from the ground up. As soon as the heaviest work was over, and all except details of the plans for the restored Williamsburg were settled, Shurtleff decided to subject himself to the discipline of a graduate school. At his request Mr. Rockefeller allowed him to work for the Restoration on a half-time basis, and in the fall of 1934 he entered the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University. Shurtleff's friends were astonished and not a little amused at this decision to "go back to school" at the age of fiftyone; and few thought it wise. I advised him against it myself, believing that he had sufficient intelligence to train himself, and doubting whether a man of his age could stand the terrific pace that graduate students set for themselves. Shurtleff, however, never thought that he made a mistake; his undisciplined mind learned even more from method and system in research than from accumulating facts and points. He had been called to help administer the greatest historical exhibit in the country, and he was determined to acquire the values and the knowledge to do it properly. Owing to the fact that the study of American history requires i\o obvious technique or skill, such as the knowledge of a foreign language, it is often undertaken by relatively uneducated people, sometimes with fairly respectable results; but more often not. The country is full of historical malpractitioners, and Shurtleff was determined to be a doctor in good professional standing. In the Graduate School, Shurtleff studied particularly under Professors Charles H. Mcllwain, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Frederick Merk, Crane Brinton, and myself. All his teachers were delighted to have a keen and intelligent

xvi

INTRODUCTION

man of the world as their pupil; and to the younger graduate students Shurtleff became a sort of father confessor, to whom they brought their troubles and with whom they discussed their problems. He followed the regular course of studies for the master's degree in American history, and would have received it in 1935 but for a ludicrous discovery by the College Office that he had failed to pass the entrance examination in elementary French in 1904. That hurdle was finally surmounted by a special examination, and Dominus Haroldus Robertus Shurtleff commenced Magister in Artibus in 1937. In the meantime his appetite for historical learning had grown with feeding, and he decided to proceed Doctor of Philosophy. His dissertation, which was partially completed at the time of his death, was to have been "The Relation of John Adams to the Ideas of his Time." During his entire residence at Harvard, Shurtleff made monthly visits to Williamsburg, and spent half his time in active work and correspondence for the Research Department there. Moreover, he was always ready to give up everything to help a friend, as for instance' his work on the restoration of the early colonial buildings of Harvard for my Tercentennial History. All this at times meant working twelve to fourteen hours a day; but Shurtleff never spared himself. He suffered a severe heart attack in the spring of 1936, but recovered sufficiently to go on with his historical work; in 1937-38 he and Mrs. Shurtleff moved to the country, where he spent most of his time on John Adams and on the early dwellings of the English colonists. In the fall of 1938 he took time out to write a lengthy reply to the strictures of Frank Lloyd Wright on the Williamsburg

INTRODUCTION

xvii

Restoration; this was printed anonymously in the Boston Transcript on December 3, 1938. On the fifth came another heart attack; and on December 6 he died. This bald record of Shurtleff's career gives an imperfect impression of his personality and character. He was a many-sided man, almost equally scholarly and convivial, "a combination of Rabelais and Don Quixote" (as one of his friends said), who could apply himself to study for days on end, and yet be the gayest of companions and indulge in the wildest escapades without fear of consequences. He was keenly susceptible to beauty, in all its manifestations. Men who have these qualities are commonly indifferent to public affairs, but Shurtleff was a responsible citizen, a man of deep and abiding loyalty to his country and his college. He readily became worked up over abuses in public life, the conduct of foreign affairs, or the policy of the University, and spent much time and energy doing what he could to change things for the better. He had a host of friends in many callings and professions, and in all parts of the country. Everyone who worked with Shurtleff or under his direction was impressed by his consideration, his appreciation of what others accomplished, and his complete indifference to personal publicity. He was particularly devoted to the Virginians with whom he came in contact through Williamsburg, and did much to bridge the gap of prejudice and misunderstanding that still exists between New England and Virginia. The Log Cabin Myth was a windmill at which our Don Quixote tilted to very good purpose, as this book will show. Shurtleff first became interested in the subject through the Williamsburg Restoration. He was frequently asked about

xviii

INTRODUCTION

the nature of the earliest dwellings at Jamestown, and the houses at Middle Plantation before it became Williamsburg. His studies of the sources, in the light of his architectural training, and of the works of Fiske Kimball and Henry C. Mercer, convinced him that there were no log cabins in Virginia until the end of the seventeenth century. Yet he found strongly intrenched in the public mind a myth that the log cabin was the earliest form of dwelling of the English settlers. Whenever there was question of restoring Jamestown, or Roanoke Island, or some other early colonial village, he was confronted by a strong public bias in favor of the log cabin. So he began this study in order to establish by documentary proof the actual nature of the first dwellings in the early English settlements, and incidentally to discover how and why the Log Cabin Myth arose. It was a fruitful outgrowth of his three interests, architecture, social history, and the history of ideas. At the time of his death Shurtleff had prepared a detailed outline for the entire book and had written the first draft of Chapters I and II. He left classified extracts from the sources and secondary authorities copied accurately and methodically, with his own comments on what inferences should be drawn from them, for Chapters IV through VIII, also a list of illustrations and of points for further investigation. I undertook to complete the book for publication, not merely as a tribute of affection to a dear friend but because I was convinced that Shurtleff's work was of great importance for American social history and should not be lost. He had worked on it for over two years, and had gone through literally hundreds of volumes page by page in search of evidence, for the indexes of the sources of co-

INTRODUCTION

xix

lonial history seldom pay any attention to housing. I had often discussed the subject with Shurtleff, agreed with his conclusions, and appreciated the value of his research. It is all very well to say, as some have, the Log Cabin Myth has been dispelled by Kimball and Mercer; the public is quite unaware of this. The Roanoke pageant of 1938 featured log cabins again, and the Hon. William E. Dodd, former president of the American Historical Association, declared his faith in them in a book published in 1937. Moreover, Shurtleff's work is not a mere "debunking" job. It is a positive contribution to our knowledge of early colonial housing. There is also a practical motive for publishing Shurtleff's work. Americans are becoming more and more conscious of their history, and eager to present it in the visual form of illustration, or the palpable form of reconstructed buildings or miniature models. T h e persons and institutions charged with these reconstructions are eager to be accurate, yet bewildered by want of facts and confusion of arguments. They are apt to follow the line of least resistance, the Log Cabin Myth, which pleases the public and only displeases the few who know the facts. This work by a trained architect and historical scholar, who at Williamsburg had a practice in architectural reconstruction equalled by nobody in America, should be an authoritative guide both as to what to do and what to leave undone in rebuilding the "homes of our forefathers." In a characteristically modest conclusion to his outline, Shurtleff wrote, "It only remains to be said that the only excuse for such a monograph as this is that someone shall draw attention to its errors and omissions, and write a better one." I think that the book is very much better than its

XX

INTRODUCTION

author believed, and that a long time will elapse before anyone writes a better. Accordingly, I have prepared it for the press by revising the chapters of which a rough draft was already written, and by writing the other chapters from Shurtleff's carefully arranged material, guided by his outline. Only Chapter III, which he apparently intended to write at the conclusion of his research, and for which no classified notes existed, had to be expanded from his outline. The chapter on evidence from the northern colonies has been somewhat expanded by the addition of evidence from Quebec, Acadia, and New Netherland, in order to cover gaps on the coastline from Newfoundland to North Carolina. Shurtleff would have wished to acknowledge help and encouragement from his professors at Harvard, and from Mr. Roger Burlingame, author of March of the Iron Men; from Mr. Sidney T . Strickland of the architectural firm of Strickland & Strickland; from Dr. Hunter D. Farish, who succeeded him as Director of the Research Department at Williamsburg, and Mrs. Helen Duprey Bullock and Mrs. Susan Nash, who were his colleagues in the Restoration; and from Messers Perry, Shaw, and Hepburn, architects of the restoration; from Mr. Norman M. Isham, Mr. A. Lawrence Kocher, and Dr. Fiske Kimball, Director of the Pennsylvania Museum, and Dr. Sigurd Erixon of Stockholm. Since his death, I have incurred similar obligations to Mr. Albert Matthews of Boston, who provided me with numerous examples to use in Chapter II, and to Mr. Singleton Moorehead, both of whom (together with Dr. Farish and Mrs. Bullock) read the copy, and made corrections and suggestions; to Professor Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker and his publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons; to Mrs. Frederick

INTRODUCTION

xxi

A. Richardson and the Port Royal Association; to Mr. Harry A. Wright of Springfield, Mr. Robert W . G . Vail, Librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, Miss Edna Huntington, Librarian of the Long Island Historical Society, Mr. H. Kendrick Lichty of Secane, Pennsylvania, and Mr. William S. Appleton of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities; to Professor Ralph H. Gabriel and the Yale University Press, Professor James R. Hulbert and the Dictionary of American English, Dr. Hugh O'Neill Hencken, of the Peabody Museum; to Professors J. A. C. F. Auer and Samuel H. Cross, who established the Dutch texts and checked the translation; and to Miss Florence Berlin, who did the translations from the Swedish, collated all quotations, checked all references, and filled up several holes in the research. In quoting from sources and contemporary authorities, I have followed the "expanded" rather than the "literal" method, pulling down superior letters to the line of the text, expanding such abbreviations as -wclo, ye, to and, which, the, but scrupulously respecting the original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. (All matter printed in the smaller type is quoted.) M y comparatively light share of this work is now done. Henceforth, where " I " is found in the text, it is Shurtleff who speaks, in his own words; "we" means Shurtleff and Morison—that is, Morison expressing Shurtleff's conclusions, as indicated in his rough notes, and to which he agrees. "The editor" is Morison alone. S . E . MORISON

Pleasance Ponkapoag, Massachusetts July, 1939

THE LOG CABIN MYTH

I W H Y T H E L O G CABIN? THE subject of this book is the type, rather than the design, of the dwellings erected by the English in the present United States during the seventeenth century. It began purely as an inquiry, and as such reached a positive conclusion, that the earliest English colonists, from Newfoundland to Virginia, first built temporary shelters of tents, Indian wigwams, and huts or cottages covered with bark, turf, or clay, and, as soon as circumstances allowed, replaced them by framed houses. In order, however, to establish the truth of this conclusion, it has been necessary to demolish a widely held popular belief, to the effect that the English settlers chose as their type of dwelling the log cabin that was later so conspicuous and typical a feature of the North American frontier. Architectural experts may consider this work supererogatory, because over ten years ago Mr. Fiske Kimball and the late Henry C. Mercer proved to the satisfaction of anyone conversant with architectural terms that the English colonies throughout the seventeenth century were complete strangers to the log cabin, a form of construction that was brought into America by the Swedes who settled on the Delaware in 1638, and which did not spread much beyond until the eighteenth century. 1 And in 1930 the late George 1 Fiske Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (New York, 1927), pp. 3-9; Henry C. Mercer, "The Origin of Log Houses in the United States," Old-Time New England,

4

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

Francis Dow designed for the Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary at Salem a "pioneer village" from which log cabins were conspicuously absent.2 Messrs. Kimball, Mercer, and Dow do indeed admit that structures of horizontally laid hewn timbers were built by the early English colonists for purposes of defense, in the form of forts, blockhouses, and garrison houses. Three instances have been found of "logg" houses built before 1700 in the South and in New England for prisons, and two "logg houses" have been found, one in Maine in 1662 and the other in Massachusetts in 1678; but these are evidently exceptional. The cabin, hut, or house of round or squared logs, the familiar log cabin of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, a common type of dwelling construction in Scandinavia, Russia, Switzerland, and parts of Germany for centuries past, was brought to the New World by the first Scandinavian immigrants in 1638 and, independently, by the Germans about 1710. Admirably adapted as this type was to American conditions, the log cabin did not commend itself to the English colonists; the Scotch-Irish who began coming over in large numbers after 1718 seem to have been the first English-speaking race to adopt it. From and through the Germans and Scotch-Irish it spread rapidly through the English colonies, and by the American Revolution had become the typical American frontier dwelling from Maine to Tennessee. X V I I I (1927), 3-20, 51-63 (reprinted from the Bucks County Historical Society Papers, V , with additions). 2 G . F. Dow, " T h e Colonial Village Built at Salem, Massachusetts, in the Spring of 1630," Old-Time New England, X X I I ( 1 9 3 1 ) , 3-14. Mr. Dow's Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Society for Preservation of N e w England Antiquities: Boston, 1935), chap, ii, includes the same material with a wider range of illustration.

WHY THE LOG CABIN?

5

Definite as were the conclusions of Messrs. Kimball, Mercer, and Dow, they have not made much headway outside architectural circles. Public belief in the log cabin as the typical dwelling of the average English colonists from the beginning remains unchanged; even famous scholars cling to it and reiterate it in their books.3 Magazine illustrators and popular artists still picture early Virginians and the Pilgrim Fathers in dwellings of round logs; and, invariably, the first impulse of any committee, patriotic society, or Federal workers' group entrusted with building a replica of an early colonial settlement is to put up a village of log cabins. Indeed, to deny that log cabins or log dwelling houses existed in the early English settlements, or to maintain the fact that framed houses were built by the English without passing through a log-cabin stage, is to take issue with an American belief that is both deep-seated and tenacious. The reasons for this emotional basis for the Log Cabin Myth are not far to seek. In the nineteenth century Americans began to marvel at their own progress, and to make a virtue of their early struggles with the wilderness. The log cabin as a symbol of democracy was dramatized in two famous presidential campaigns, those of 1840 and i860. In literature the popular "Log-Cabin to the White House" 3 See Chapter VIII, below. "Log-cabinitis" has even caught on among the English historians. V . T . Harlow's History of Barbados, 1625-1685 (Oxford, 1926), p. 2, in an imaginary description of the approach to Barbados in the twentieth century, speaks of "the white stately houses of the planters, built of coral, and the little villages of log cabins belonging to the negro labourers." This is an island where trees are scarce, and have been these two hundred years, and where the negroes live in cabins made of odd bits of board, wattle-and-daub palm thatch, flattened kerosene tins, or what-you-will.

6

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

series firmly fixed the log cabin as the proper scenario for the birth of a great American; 4 as early as 1840 Daniel Webster was apologizing for not having been born in one, and as late as 1935, we are told, a "considerable legend" had already grown up around the "log-cabin origins" of Roy Harris, the Oklahoman composer.5 Thus the log cabin came to be identified with "Old Hickory," "Tippecanoe," and Abraham Lincoln, with democracy and the frontier spirit, with the common man and his dream of the good life, and with those persons, types, and forces of which Americans are justly proud. The log cabin, along with the Indian, the long rifle, and the hunting shirt is associated with one of the greatest of all conquests, the winning of the West. It gives us that sense of the dramatic which we seek in our history. Add to this that the log cabin has been the typical dwelling in timbered frontiers, and in the backwoods of the older states, for at least two centuries, and we need not be surprised that careless historians projected it back into the earliest colonial settlements, or that many Americans today feel a sense of outrage when told that neither Captain John Smith nor Governor Bradford nor any of the founding fathers dwelt in a log cabin, or ever saw one. This book is built upon the foundations laid by Kimball and Mercer, using much added material gathered over a wider field. It will serve to implement their findings by a larger array of fact. My hope is to add enough documen4 William M. Thayer, author of From Log-Cabin to the White House, Life of James A. Garfield (1881), wrote other popular presidential biographies which were included in the Log-Cabin Series. 6 Aaron Copland, in American Mercury, X X X I V (no. 136, April 1935), 490.

WHY T H E LOG CABIN?

7

tary proof to theirs to demolish the Log Cabin Myth and definitely solve the problem of the form of dwelling construction used by the earliest English settlers. T o many it will seem a matter of slight moment what sort of houses Americans lived in so long ago. But with the enlarged conception of history now in vogue, embracing all human relationships and activities, students of American history cannot remain indifferent to matters which were of so vital an importance to the pioneers as the form and construction of dwelling houses. Moreover, very different social implications are to be drawn from the Log Cabin Myth and the framed-house fact. If the English pioneers at once invented a type of housing hitherto unknown to them, it would mean that they came to terms with their new environment at once, and showed an extraordinary inventiveness. If, on the contrary, they first built temporary huts, cabins, or cottages of the types familiar to them at home, and promptly replaced these by framed houses, it might mean that they were not very ingenious. It might well mean that they were consciously keeping up standards, and refusing to make concessions to the wilderness. In any event, the introduction of a craft technique that has persisted to this day is a fact comparable with the expansion of the Church of England into Virginia or the founding of Harvard College in New England. If the eighteenth-century frontier borrowed log-cabin construction from the Swedish and German colonists, then this fact also, in its many ramifications, will interest the social historian. If the framed house was brought from England, where it was the typical form of construction for wooden dwellings, and set down intact in the English settle-

8

THE LOG CABIN MYTH

ments here, and if its principles of construction have persisted until now, and are the basis on which our wooden houses of today are built; then the usages of craft culture possess some of the persistence that is inherent in institutions, in legal concepts, and in language; and this ability of a craft culture to survive in a new environment should be taken into consideration in studying the transit of civilization. In the same way, if the log cabin was picked up quickly by some of the peoples moving toward the frontier, and adopted more slowly or not at all by other groups of frontier people, then there is the possibility of opening up a field for investigation into the psychological or other reasons for choice. But all these deductions I shall be content to leave to others.

II DEFINITIONS A N D DIALECTIC study is concerned wholly with dwelling houses in the English and some of the other North American colonies in the seventeenth century. Other structures built by the early colonists are considered only in so far as they have been confused by later writers with dwelling houses. The exception is important, for most of the contemporary documents upon which the log-cabineers rest their case have reference to buildings used primarily for defense or for prisons. The term log cabin has not been found in any manuscript or in print before 1770; 1 but the term log house has been found in five instances before 1700: ( 1 ) Maine, 1662; (2) Maryland, 1669; (3) Massachusetts, 1678; (4) North Carolina, 1680; (5) New Hampshire, 1699.2 These cases we shall later consider in detail; suffice it here to say that only two of the five—possibly only one—were dwelling houses, and that all were built over thirty years after the settlements in their respective localities were begun.

THIS

BLOCKHOUSES AND GARRISON HOUSES

A blockhouse is defined by the Chicago Dictionary of American English as "a building, usually constructed of logs with loopholes or embrasures, serving as a place of safety and defence against an attacking enemy." Block1

L . P. Summers, Annals of Southwest Virginia, 1769-1800 (Abingdon, Va., 1929), p. 77, quoting 1770 record of Botetourt County. 2 York Deeds (Portland, 1887), I, i, fol. 159; Archives of Maryland: Proc. and Acts of the General Assembly of Maryland (Baltimore, 1884),

10

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

houses were constructed in most if not all the North American colonies in the seventeenth century. These structures, usually built of logs hewn square, placed horizontally one on top of the other to form the wall, and dovetailed or halved at the corners, were a traditional type in English military engineering, and part of the general European technique of fortification.3 Blockhouses were not dwelling houses, nor what Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant when they spoke of log cabins, nor were they in fact log cabins. Their walls, instead of presenting the horizontally corrugated surface and the projecting ends at the corners by which the true log cabin is universally recognized, were squared off smooth by the broadaxe; and the corners were either formed by posts into which the wall timbers were mortised, or else the timbers were evenly and neatly joined by some form of dovetailing. But the blockhouse construction of squared logs was also imported by the Swedes and Germans, and in the eighteenth century was used in Pennsylvania and other colonies as an alternate form of dwelling-house construction to the cabin of round logs. Hence it comes within the scope of this study. The second definition of blockhouse in the Dictionary of American English is "a house built of squared logs." But the earliest instance of this usage is in a diary of a journey to Ohio in 1821: " A block house differs from a log one in II, 224; Harry A. Wright, The Genesis of Springfield (Springfield, Mass., 1936), p. 20; Colonial Records of North Carolina (Raleigh, 1886), I, 300; New Hampshire Provincial Papers (Manchester, 1869), III, 88. The editor has not included Cotton Mather's dream house, although he believes in it. 3 Notes and Queries, 12th ser., V I (1920), 48-49; Sigurd Erixon, "The North-European Technique of Corner Timbering," Folkliv, I (1937), 55.

1

1. Mortised Cornering of Hewn Logs, Blockhouse Type 2. Halved Cornering of Hewn Logs, Blockhouse Type 3. Notched Cornering of Round Logs, American Log-Cabin Type

12

T H E L O G CABIN M Y T H

this particular: in the former the logs are hewn square, so that they are smooth within and without, and the latter are hewn only within, having the bark on the outside." 4 Until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century the word blockhouse connoted defense, and not a particular type of construction. Most blockhouses of the seventeenth century, we may safely assume, were of horizontal squaredlog construction; but some, like the Pilgrim Fathers' fort at Plymouth, were built of heavy plank on an oak frame. Blockhouses are mentioned very early in the annals of Virginia. Ralph Hamor, in A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (London, 1 6 1 5 ) , thus describes Sir Thomas Dale's new frontier town of Henrico, which had been built about 1 6 1 1 : . . . there are also, as ornaments belonging to this Town, vpon the verge of this Riuer, fiue faire Block houses, or commaunders, wherein Hue the honester sort of people, as in Farmes in England, and there keepe continuall centinell for the townes security, and about two miles from the towne into the Main, a Pale of two miles in length, cut ouer from riuer to riuer, garded likewise with seuerall Commanders, with a great quantity of corne ground impaled . . . . 5 In the sentence immediately preceding this extract, Hamor states: There is in this town 3 streets of well framed howses, a hansom Church, and the foundation of a more stately one laid, of Brick . . . beside Store houses, watch houses, and such like . . . . 4 Zerah H a w l e y , A Journal of a Tour through Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, the north part of Pennsylvania and Ohio ( N e w H a v e n , 1822), p. 52. " R a l p h H a m o r , A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia

DEFINITIONS AND DIALECTIC

13

Three obvious conclusions may be drawn from this passage. First, the primary purpose of the five blockhouses was military; the synonym that Hamor uses, commander, is a term in fortification, meaning "a work raised so as to command the adjacent works and country round." 6 Second, Hamor assumed that his readers knew the difference between a "well framed howse" and a blockhouse built of squared logs, primarily for purposes of defense. And third, a majority of the inhabitants of Henrico lived in the "3 streets of well framed howses" rather than in the "fiue faire Block houses." Even such lived-in blockhouses must have been rare in the early settlements. Aside from the Henrico instance, the only other definite mention of them that has been found for this early period is at Jamestown, of which Ralph Hamor writes: The Towne it selfe by the care and prouidence of Sir Thomas Gates, who for the most part had his chiefest residence there, is reduced into a hansome forme, and hath in it two faire rowes of howses, all of framed Timber, two stories, and an vpper Garret, or Corne loft high, besides three large, and substantiall Storehowses, ioyned togeather in length some hundred and twenty foot, and in breadth forty, and this town hath been lately newly, and strongly impaled, and a faire platforme for Ornance in the west Bulworke raised: there are also without this towne in the Island, some very pleasant, and beutifull howses, two Blockhouses, to obserue and watch least the Indians at any time should swim ouer the back riuer, and come into the Island, and certain other farme howses. . . . From lames towne downewards, some forty and odde miles (London, 1615; reprinted Albany, i860), p. 30; also in Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes (Glasgow, 1906), XIX, 100. 8 OED, " Commander," 6.

14

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

at the mouth of the riuer, neer Point Comfort, vpon Kecoughtan, are two pleasant and commodious Forts, Henrie and Charles, goodly seats, and much corne ground about them, abounding with the commodities of fish, foivle, Deere, and fruits, whereby the men liue there, with halfe that maintenaunce out of the Store, which in other places is allowed: certainly this habitation would bee no whit inferiour to the best we haue there, saue, as yet, with the poore meanes we haue; we cannot secure it, if a forraigne enemy, as we haue iust caus to expect daily should attempt it.7 Hamor's text suggests that the two blockhouses on Jamestown Island, outside the town itself, were garrisoned by people who farmed the land around them as well as keeping "centinell." Blockhouses of squared logs are known to have been constructed at an early period in N e w England, 8 but mention of them is rare until King Philip's W a r of 1675-77. A n order was issued on October 16, 1675, by Governor Andros of N e w York that "all Townes and Villages" proceed "forthwith without Delay, to Fortify and make compleat, in some convenient Place, a block or palizadoed House, or Place for a Retreat to Women and Children, etc." 9 T h e practice then began, on this much-harried northern frontier, of building a certain number of dwelling houses on the blockhouse model in every exposed settlement. These were designated as garrison-houses or simply garrisons; the families who built and maintained them had certain privileges, in return for which they had to shelter the rest of the in7 Op. cit., p. 33. ' H e n r y C. Mercer, in Old-Time New England, X V I I I (1927), 3-20, ji-63. 6 John Easton, A Narrative of the Causes which led to Philips Indian War, of 1675 and i6-j6 (ed. F. B. Hough; Albany, 1858), p. 98.

fc

ra -

W o H W

c « u _a

5

ä

O

-

(ed. H. R. McIIwaine, Richmond, 1915), p. 28.

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T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

England (London, 1631), "how we beganne to preach the Gospell, . . . what Churches we had": When I went first to Virginia, I well remember wee did hang an awning (which is an old saile) to three or foure trees to shadow us from the Sunne, our walles were rales of wood, our seats unhewed trees till we cut plankes, our Pulpit a bar of wood nailed to two neighbouring trees. In foule weather we shifted into an old rotten tent: for we had few better, and this came by way of adventure for new. This was our Church, till wee built a homely thing like a barne, set upon Cratchets,17 covered with rafts, sedge, and earth; so was also the walls; the best of our houses of the like curiosity; but the most part farre much worse workmanship, that could neither well defend wind nor raine.18 This is the passage which Mr. George C. Gregory takes to be a description of log cabins,19 a type which he believes the versatile Captain picked up on his travels. Smith must indeed have seen European log cabins in the course of his adventures, for in his True Travels (1629) he writes of Transylvania: The Villages are onely here and there a few houses of straight Firre trees, laid heads and points above one another, made fast by notches at the ends more than a mans height, and with broad split boards, pinned together with woodden pinnes, as thatched for coverture. In ten Villages you shall scarce finde ten iron nailes, except it be in some extraordinary mans house.20 " S e e p. 138, below. u Chapter xiv, Works, p. 957. " " ' L o g Houses at Jamestown, 1607," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, X L I V (1936), 294. 20 Works, p. 868. Cf. p. 860 for his description of wattle-and-daub huts in Tartary. I am assuming that Smith had actually visited these regions, and not merely read about them just before publishing his True Travels.

VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBORS

137

A true log cabin, the last. But what have we in Virginia? "Holes within the grounde," "Cabbins worse than nought," obviously of the arbor type; a church rigged up by bending an awning to trees across which a few split rails are nailed or bound, so open that "an old rotten tent" is preferable in foul weather; a second church and better houses "set upon Cratchets," roofed and walled with rafts, sedge, and earth; the worst houses open to the weather. Only by ignoring "Cratchets" and assuming that when Smith writes rails and rafts he means logs can his reminiscent description of Jamestown churches and houses in 1607 be tortured into the semblance of log cabins. Cratchet is the word that reveals what the second church and the "best" houses were like. According to the Oxford Dictionary this is a seventeenth-century spelling of crotchet or crotch, in the sense of "a stake or pole having a forked tip, used as a support or prop." In English building construction a crotchet was an upright pole with a natural fork on the top, used to support the ridgepole of a house or barn. George Sandys, in his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, rendered furcas subiere columnae, "to columns crotches grew." 2 1 A part of this translation was made in Virginia between 1621 and 1628; and it seems not too fanciful to suppose that this phrase occurred to Sandys when examining one of the surviving structures among these primitive buildings of Jamestown. It seems highly probable then that Jamestown church and the houses built like it were rough frame structures, the ridgepole supported by a series of columns composed of posts in which the natural crotches n

Ovid's Metamorphosis, Englished, Mythologiz'd, And Represented in Figures (Oxford, 1632), Book VIII, line 201 from end.

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T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

were left at the tops.22 The roof, like English barns of the period, was covered with rafters close together upon which marsh grass and earth were laid; and the walls were simply continuations of the roof. One other reasonable explanation of Captain Smith's church "like a barne, set upon Cratchets" is possible. He may have been thinking of the so-called cruck construction 23 in which the ridgepole is supported by a pair of curved timbers called crucks, fastened together in such a manner as to form a fork for supporting the ridgepole.24 But his description absolutely excludes the log-cabin hypothesis. The "Cabbins worse than nought" that he mentions in 1607 were undoubtedly the flimsy sort of contemporary cabin, made of woven saplings, that was generally called an "English wigwam" in New England.25 Captain Newport, who had sailed for home just after the fort was finished, reappeared with the "first supply" ship in January 1608. "Within fiue or sixe dayes after the arriuall of the Ship," writes Smith, "by a mischaunce our Fort was burned, and the most of our apparell, lodging and priuate prouision. Many of our old men diseased, and of our new for want of lodging perished." 26 When Newport sailed again for England, in April, half those alive when he 22 Innocent, Development of English Building Construction, pp. 20-22, and fig. 4. D r y den translated the same phrase in 1700, "the crotches of their cot in columes rise" ( O E D ) . 28 Discussed above, pp. 30-32. 24 See above, p. 31. " T h i s is the interpretation of Henry C. Forman, Jamestown and St. Mary's, pp. 30-34, a book which Mr. Shurtleff did not see. T h e editor believes that Mr. Forman's interpretation is the more likely, as the cruck was much more common than the crotchet type in England b y 1600. 28 Works, p. 23.

C R O T C H E T A N D CRUCK C O N S T R U C T I O N Above: Below:

Cross section of a Swedish barn, showing ridgepole supported on crotchets. T h e walls are of the sectionplank type, as at St. George's Fort, Sagadahoc. A Cottage on Crucks: "Teapot Hall," Scrivelsby, Lines.

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T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

landed were dead.27 Under those depressing circumstances the new buildings can hardly have been better contrived than those destroyed by fire; and in the spring the depleted company turned "husbandmen, to fell Trees and set Corne." 28 But the ships carried home a cargo of clapboard and cedar wainscot for the Company, showing that woodworking operations were going on.29 In 1609 the Virginia Company was reorganized and a fleet of nine vessels sent out, of which seven reached Jamestown the same year, and the survivors of another, wrecked on Bermuda, arrived the following May in Bermuda-built pinnaces, under Sir Thomas Gates. Gates found the palisades of the fort torn down, and emptie houses (which Owners death had taken from them) rent up and burnt, rather then the dwellers would step into the Woods a staues cast off from them, to fetch other fire wood. . . .30 These houses must have been built of split timber or small sawn stuff, rather than logs, which it would have been more trouble to chop up and split for burning than to fetch firewood from the forest. Lord De la Warr arrived in June 1610, and new building operations started immediately. Captain Smith reports, in his Map of Virginia (1612), The houses which are built, are as warme and defensiue against wind and weather, as if they were tiled and slated, be27

Edward Channing, History of the United States, I, 170. Captain John Smith, Works, p. 35. 20 Id., pp. 40, 442. 30 William Strachey, " A true reportory of Sir Thomas Gates," reprinted in Purchas his Filgrimes (1906 ed.), X I X , 44-45. 28

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ing couered aboue with strong boards, and some matted round with Indian mats. . . . 3 1 T h e n e w buildings included, writes Strachey, . . . a pretty Chappell, though (at this time when wee came in) as ruined and unfrequented: but the Lord Governour, and Captaine Generall, hath given order for the repairing of it, and at this instant, many hands are about it. It is in length threescore foote, in breadth twenty foure, and shall have a Chancell in it of Cedar, and a Communion Table of the Blake Walnut, and all the Pewes of Cedar, with faire broad windowes, to shut and open, as the weather shall occasion, of the same wood, a Pulpet of the same, with a Font hewen hollow, like a Canoa, with two Bels at the West end. It is so cast, as it be very light within. . . , 32 A n d Strachey gives a somewhat detailed description of the new Jamestown of

1610-11:

And thus inclosed, as I said, round with a Pallizado of Planckes and strong Posts, foure foote deepe in the ground, of yong Oakes, Walnuts, etc. The Fort is called in honour of his Majesties name, James Towne; the principall Gate from the Towne, through the Pallizado, opens to the River, as at each Bulwarke there is a Gate likewise to goe forth, and at every Gate a Demi-Culverin, and so in the Market Place. The houses first raised, were all burnt by a casualty of fire, the beginning of the second yeare of their seate, and in the second Voyage of Captain Newport, which since have bin better rebuilded, though as yet in no great uniformity, either for the fashion, or beauty of the streete. A delicate wrought fine kinde of Mat the Indians make, with which (as they can be trucked 81 Works, pp. 502-03. This appears to have been copied b y Smith from A Trve Declaration of the estate of the Colonie in Virginia (London, 1610), reprinted in Peter Force, Tracts, III, no. 1, p. 20. 32 Purchas his Pilgrimes, X I X , 56.

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for, or snatched up) our people do dresse their chambers, and inward roomes, which make their houses so much the more handsome. The houses have wide and large Country Chimnies in the which is to be supposed (in such plenty of wood) what fires are maintained; and they have found the way to cover 3 3 their houses: now (as the Indians) with barkes of Trees, as durable, and as good proofe against stormes, and winter weather, as the best Tyle defending likewise the piercing Sunbeames of Summer, and keeping the inner lodgings coole enough, which before in sultry weather would be like Stoves, whilest they were, as at first, pargetted and plaistered with Bitumen or tough Clay: and thus armed for the injury of changing times, and seasons of the yeare, we hold our selves well apaid, though wanting Arras Hangings, Tapistry, and guilded Venetian Cordovan, or more spruse household garniture, and wanton City ornaments, remembring the old Epigraph: W e dwell not here to build us Bowers, And Hals for pleasure and good cheere: But Hals we build for us and ours, T o dwell in them whilst we live here.34 Strachey is obviously putting the best face on a rather poor housing situation. From his description, the colonists were still living in structures of the hut, cabin, or cottage class, with roofs of sawn boards or pressed bark, 35 and a liberal use of Indian woven mats in place of interior sheathing. Mats would have been unnecessary in log cabins. Probably the outer walls were of oak clapboard. Reconstruction

under Dale and Gates,

1611-1614

N e w life was infused into the colony with the arrival of Sir Thomas Dale in M a y

1611.

Before his expedition

34 Id., pp. 57-58. ™l.e., r o o f . 36 C f . G o o k i n ' s description above, p. 85, n. 43, of h o w the Indians made a kind of beaverboard out of bark.

VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBORS

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started, the Company advertised for workmen, and the list includes ten house carpenters, ten clapboard makers, and fifteen sawyers.36 W e do not know how many were secured, but enough came so that the new governor could embark on a vigorous housing policy. His first care, says Captain Smith, "was to imploy all hands about setting out of Corne." This business taken order for, and the care and trust of it committed to his vnder-Officers, to lames towne he hastened, where most of the companie were at their daily and vsuall works, bowling in the streets: these hee imployed about necessarie workes, as felling of Timber, repayring their houses ready to fall on their heads, and prouiding pales, posts and railes, to impale his purposed new towne. . . .37 Sir Thomas Dale reported to the Virginia Company on May 25, 1 6 1 1 : I drew all my new men ashore and taking some of the rest of both Companies quartered as aforesaid in Algernoune Fort,38 whilest I employed our Carpenters to build Cabins and Cottages for the present; we on all hands fell to digging and cleaning the ground and setting of corn. . . .39 Observe that the older hands, who would have known how to build log cabins if any had been earlier constructed, were not employed to build the new "Cabins and Cottages," but the new carpenters whom Dale had just brought over, and who were acquainted only with English "Cabins and Cottages." Dale's expedition to Kecoughtan to erect the fort is men86

Alex. Brown, Genesis of the United States, I, 469-70. Works, p. 507. 38 Fort Henry. These were men who had come over with Gates in 1610. 30 Brown, Genesis of the United States, I, 491.

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T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

tioned in A Briefe Declaration of the Plantation of Virginia (1623). Kecoughtan is described as haveinge for housing in the one, two [cabins] formerlie built by the Indians and covered with bark by them, in the other a tent with some few thacht cabbins which our people built at our comming thether. We founde divers other Indian Howses built by the natives which by reason we could make no use of we burnt. . . .40 Again, the flimsy type of English cabin. The same tract describes a sad state of affairs while Henrico was being built: Wante of houses at first landinge in the colde of winter, and pinchinge hunger continually bitinge, made those imposed labours most insufferable, . . . Many famished in holes and other poore cabbins in the grounde, not respected because sicknes had disabled them for labour, nor was their sufficient for them that were more able to worke, . . . 41 The highly creditable results of these forced labors at Henrico may here be reprinted from Ralph Hamor's Trve Discovrse of the Present Estate of Virginia (London, 1615), which affords more detail on building construction than any other original narrative of the early English colonies: There is in this town [Henrico] 3 streets of well framed howses, a hansom Church, and the foundation of a more stately one laid, of Brick, in length, an hundred foote, and fifty foot wide, beside Store houses, watch houses, and such like: there are also, as ornaments belonging to this Town, vpon the verge of this Riuer, fiue faire Block houses, or commaunders,42 40

Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1619-1658/$!) (Mcllwaine ed.), p. 30. "Id., p. 31. " S e e above, p. 13, for explanation of the blockhouses or commanders.

V I R G I N I A AND H E R N E I G H B O R S

145

wherein liue the honester sort of people, as in Farmes in England, and there keepe continuall centinell for the townes security, and about two miles from the towne into the Main, a Pale of two miles in length, cut ouer from riuer to riuer, garded likewise with seuerall Commanders, with a great quantity of corne ground impaled. . . . For the further enlargement yet of this Town, on the other side of the Riuer, by impaling likewise: for we make no other fence, is secured to our vse, especially for our hogges to feede in, about twelue English miles of ground, by name, Hope in Faith, Coxen-Dale, secured by fiue Forts, called Charity Fort, Mount malado, a retreat, or guest house for sick people, a high seat, and wholsome aire, Elzabeth Fort, and Fort patience: and heere hath Mr. Whitacres chosen his Parsonage, or Church land, som hundred Acres impaled, and a faire framed parsonage house built thereupon, called Rocke Hall. . . .43 About Christmas time, 1611, Sir Thomas Dale cleared the "Saluages" out of a place five miles from Henrico which he named Bermuda Hundred, "vpon which pale, and round about, vpon the verge of the Riuer in this Hundred, halfe a mile distant from each other, are very faire houses, already builded, besides diuers other particular mens houses, not so few as fifty."

44

Ralph Hamor writes the following description of Jamestown as rebuilt under Sir Thomas Gates: The Towne it selfe by the care and prouidence of Sir Thomas Gates, who for the most part had his chiefest residence there, is reduced into a hansome forme, and hath in it two faire rowes of howses, all of framed Timber, two stories, and an vpper Garret, or Corne loft high, besides three large, and substantiall Store-howses, ioyned togeather in length some hundred and 43

i860 reprint, pp. 30-31. "Hamor, op. cit., p. 3Z.

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T H E L O G CABIN M Y T H

twenty foot, and in breadth forty, and this town hath been lately newly, and strongly impaled, and a faire platforme for Ornance in the west Bulworke raised: there are also without this towne in the Island, some very pleasant, and beutifull howses, two Blockhouses . . . and certain other farme howses. . . .45 Another contemporary pamphlet, by Robert Johnson, The New

Life of Virgínea. ( 1 6 1 2 ) , gives this vivid descrip-

tion of building activity at Henrico under Gates and Dale:

Being thus inuited, here they pitch, the spade men fell to digging, the brickmen burnt their bricks, the company cut down wood, the Carpenters fell to squaring out, the Sawyers to sawing, the Souldier to fortifying, and euery man to somewhat. And to answer the first obiection for holesome lodging, here they haue built competent and decent houses, the first storie all of bricks, that euery man may haue his lodging and dwelling place apart by himselfe, with a sufficient quantitie of ground alotted thereto for his orchard and garden to plant at his pleasure, and for his own vse. Here they were building also an Hospitall with fourescore lodgings (and beds alreadie sent to furnish them) for the sicke and lame, with keepers to attend them for their comfort and recouerie. . . . 46 So here we have a complete set-up of houses framed after the English fashion—"well framd houses," a brick church, a "faire framed parsonage," "many faire houses," "two faire rowes of howses, all of framed Timber, two storied and an vpper garret." 47 Men were felling trees, 15 Id., p. 33. Gates was governor from August 1611 to March 1614, when he returned to England and Dale took over. "London, 1612 ed., sig. D2; reprinted in Peter Force, Tracts, I, no. 7. P- H"Henry C. Forman, in his Jamestown and St. Mary's (1938), has a sketch showing five possible outward forms that these houses may have taken. Compare also the sketch of St. George's Fort on the Sagadahoc.

V I R G I N I A A N D H E R NEIGHBORS

147

burning bricks, sawing plank, squaring timber, and riving clapboard. In the autumn of 1613 the colony had a windfall of readymade building material and hardware in the loot from Port Royal brought home by Samuel Argall. 48 "Virginia's tryalls" were not yet over, but the dawn of a better day had broken, and the rising production of tobacco, which was first exported about 1614, gave the colony a valuable staple. B y 1617 the exports amounted to only 20,000 pounds, but a decade later they had reached half a million pounds, and were still rapidly expanding.49 T h e English were even to furnish the ungrateful Opechancanough with a "faire house." A contemporary pamphlet, The barbarous Massacre committed by the Savages (London, 1622), declares: And whereas this King before dwelt onely in a Cottage, or rather a denne or Hog-stye, made with a few poles and stickes, and covered with Mats after their wilde manner: to civilize him, he first built him a faire House, according to the English fashion, in which (as before is said) he tooke such joy, especially in his Locke and Key, which hee so much admired as locking and unlocking his doore an hundred times a day, he thought no device in all the world was comparable to it.B0 Ralph Hamor predicted in 1615, The affaires in the Colony, being so well ordered, and the hardest taskes already ouerpast, that whosoeuer (now, or heerafter) shall happily arriue there, shall finde a hansome howse of some foure roomes or more, if he haue a family, to repose " See Chapter I V , above. 48 G . L . Beer, Origins of the British Colonial System, p. 87. Turchas his Pilgrimes (1906 ed.), X I X , 160.

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

148

himselfe in rent free, and twelue English Acres of ground, adioyning thereunto, very strongly impailed, which ground is onely allotted vnto him for Roots, Gardaine hearts, and Come.

. .

,51

If emigrants were led by this rash promise to expect the gift of a "hansome howse" on arrival in Virginia, they were sorely disappointed. The inadequacy and shortage of housing continued to be a subject of bitter complaint. It is evident that, despite Dale's efforts, many of the Virginians were still housed in "cottages" and that the building of them went on. Captain John Smith writes of the winter of 1617-18 in his Generall Historie (1624), quoting the writings of Captain Samuel Argall and John Rolfe, we were constrained euery yeere to build and repaire our old Cottages, which were alwaies a decaying in all places of the Countrie: . . . and the Palizado's not sufficient to keepe out Hogs.52 Dale had found the people of Jamestown "repayring their houses ready to fall on their heads" in 1 6 1 1 ; and they are still "ready to fall" in 1618. This need for constant repair proves that the "cottages" were not log cabins, but frame structures, probably of the type that we should today call shacks. Mr. Orin Bullock, an expert on park maintenance, with particular experience in park structures, informs us that log structures either of round or squared green logs merely tighten when they check and shrink, but that flimsy plank huts of green lumber belong to the "alwaies a decaying" class.83 E1 Trve Discovrse (i860 reprint), p. 19. " Works, p. 536. 63 Letter of Mrs. Helen Bullock to Mr. Shurtleff, November 3, 1936.

VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBORS The Sandys Period,

149

1619-1624

The housing situation became even more acute during the administration of Sir Edwin Sandys, from 1619 to 1624, as Treasurer of the Virginia Company. Sir Edwin's policy was to send the largest possible number of people to the colony, and to diversify its economic life by promoting industries such as ironworks, potash and glass works, and other branches of agriculture than tobacco planting.54 T o these ends the Company used all the money it could lay hands on to assist emigration, including selected artisans and specialized agricultural workers, such as French vignerons who were expected to make Virginia the home of the olive and vine. It was impossible to prevent these people from planting tobacco after they arrived, since they found everyone else making money by it hand over fist; hence the housing situation fell into a sort of vicious circle. New immigrants required new houses; but the house carpenters were too busy growing tobacco to build houses for other people. And the governors no longer had the authority enjoyed by Dale, Gates, and De la Warr, to compel them. At a quarter court of the Virginia Company in London on November 21, 1621, it was recorded: . . . the last though not the least in estimación is for the sendinge of Shippwrightes and howse Carpenters to Virginia where plenty of materialls is to be had, So that the onely want was of Skillfull and sufficient workemen . . . with whome the Colony beinge once furnished they will in short time be enhabled with Pynnaces and Boates to make further discoueries "Wesley F. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company York, 1932), esp. chap. vi.

(New

T H E L O G CABIN M Y T H

150

vp into the Countrie and by meanes of howses ready framed to their handes and afforded at reasonable rates the Planters there and such as come newe over wilbe able to furnish themselues from time to time with substantiall howses well built and in a good manner to the comfort of the Inhabitants and future strength of the Plantación.55 About the year 1620 it occurred to the earnest gentlemen who ran the affairs of Virginia from London that a "guest-house" in each settlement would be the best method of caring for greenhorns. T h e difficulty was to get guesthouses built. Jabez Whittaker, the superintendent of Henrico, wrote to Sir Edwin Sandys in May 1621: I wrote unto you by Cap: Hamor of the receite of thos men which I receaved out of the London Merchant the Jonathan, and the Triall with a list of their names, and how ill provided I was to receave them. I have since taken better order both for thos that are yet remaining with me, and for thos which shall be hereafter sent finding the number of sixe in one hous 56 (as I had at first placed them) to be to many I have doubled the number of houses, and put but three to one hous, and for the new men which are to come I have alreddy built a guest hous of forty foote long, and twentie foote wide to receave them at there first landing, and have placed an ould woeman in it to wash their clothes and keep the hous cleane and have built a little roome for the surgeon that he may be ever neere and helpfull to them: and am now in building more houses upon the ground where I meane to seate them which are to come. . . .5T K

567.

Records

of the Virginia Company

of London

(Kingsbury ed.), I,

66 The fact that six men to a house proved too many for their health is significant of the small size of the available houses. 67 Records of the Virginia Company of London, III, 441.

V I R G I N I A A N D H E R NEIGHBORS

151

One guest-house did not satisfy the Treasurer and Company, who wrote to the Governor and Council in Virginia on July 25, 1621: we comend to your care especially the buildinge of Guesthouses, which we stricktly charge youe to be brought to perfección: we conceive that bussines would haue beene effected, if half so much care and time had been taken to do it, as hath beene spent in givinge reasons to the contrary. The plea of impossibility we admitt not; the Discontent we assure our selues is rather a bug-beare, then an essentiall cause of forbearance; the spoile of our goodes by often remoues is a weake allegation: but that it should be a more regulated kind of killinge of men (as some haue beene pleased to writte) wee deeme strange error of iudgment.58 And in their next letter of August 12 (the famous one about the shipment of "on Widdow and eleven Maides for Wiues"), the Treasurer and Company remark, There are gon and in goinge from hence many Shippes for Virginia and we canot but apprehend with great griefe the sufferings of these multitudes at theire first landinge for want of Guest houses wherein they might haue a while sheltred themselves from the iniuries of the air in the cold season; which omission and defect we hope and very earnestly desire you will supply by a curteous and Christian entertainment of them in your owne howses, till they may conveniently provide themselves; and that against the next yeare you will haue erected in the foure several! Boroughs as many Guest houses capable to receiue those great numbers.59 T h e Treasurer and Company's letter of December 5, 1621, has better news: that some friends of the colony had 68

Records of the Virginia Company, III, 488-89. "Id., Ill, 493.

T H E L O G CABIN M Y T H

152

. . . newly vnderwritt nere a thousand poundes for the sending of Shippwrightes and house-Carpenters; and so farr is the busines alreadie proceeded in, as we may asure you, and you the Collony, that by Godes blessing, they shall by the end of Aprill at the furthest haue this necessarie supplie amongst them: In the meane space we desire that fitt preparations may be made for the enterteining of them, that shall after make preparations for others. . . . 60 Apparently no more guest-houses had been erected b y March 3 1 , 1623, when William Capps, in a letter f u l l of wise advice as to h o w to avoid sickness at sea, promises And now if the Company will send me ouer x or xij Carpenters Sawyers and brickmakers with prouision for the first yeare (I will take paynes and care to prouide after for them) and build a substantiall guesthouse: the ferst at Elizabeth and the other at James: For if you did but see how miserable they dye for want of prouision and housing you could not but pittie their cases: There must be to this business two yoake of Oxen and a Horse This being effected by gods help their wilbe health, and after they may be sett to building of a skonce for defence. . . , 6 1 T h e Treasurer and Company in a letter of M a y 2, 1623, again exhort the Governor and Council to build more guesthouses, repeating that sickness and mortality "proceeded in great part through distempers and disorders in dyet and lodginge."

62

T o which the G o v e r n o r and Council replied

on January 30, 1 6 2 3 / 2 4 , in a tone indignant over their being blamed f o r the sickness: Howsoeuer ouer intended howse of entertaynment was not builte,for which woorkmen were entertayned,many subscribers K

Id., Ill, 531.

81

Id., IV, 78.

Id., IV, 162.

V I R G I N I A A N D H E R NEIGHBORS

153

beinge slayne in the Massacre, yett there hath beene great additione, of buildinges in divers places, wherein hath and may bee entertayned, great number of new Comers, and that with more convenience in ouer oppinions, then in publique Guest howses, where many beinge sick togeather, are likely to bringe a generall infectione, and finde noe willinge attendance, And heere wee cannott but againe putt you in minde, how the ships are pestered Contrary to your agreementes Victualed with mustie bred the reliques of former Vioages, and stinckinge beere, heertofore soe ernestly Complayned of, in great parte the cause of that mortalitie, which is imputed alone to the Countrey, the old planter Consideringe the accidentes, livinge as longe heere as in most partes of Englande, And it would bee wished, that new Comers who are not Consigned to such as are heere well settled, may bringe such provisione over with them, as mault Cyder butter Chease etc. as may give them Content, and not make to sudden a change in theire dyett, though the first charge be more, yet the proffitt in the ende wilbe the greater, . . .63 Proprietors of the Virginia hundreds or "particular plantations" probably were able to cope with the housing problem more easily, because of smaller batches to deal with, and less red tape. Sir William Throckmorton, chief proprietor of Berkeley Hundred, thus instructed the governor thereof on September 4, 1619: . . . wee doe ordayne . . . that you cause forthwith to be erected houses fit for the present shelter and succor of our people . . . built homelike and to be couered with hordes; of which we commend to your especiall care the framing of twoo, where of the one for the safe keeping of the tooles implementes of husbandry powder, shott, Armor, and victuall, which we wish may be strongly planted64 on the inside: And "Id., I V , 451-52. Evidently a misprint for planked.

84

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

154

the other for your assemblies at time of prayer and time of diet. . . .6S It would seem that Sir William had heard about the sedge- and earth-walled dwellings of Jamestown, and was determined to have none of that sort in Berkeley Hundred. Apparently his instructions were promptly carried out, for one of the "people" wrote to the proprietors before the end of 1619 that "ouer house is bilt with a stoore convenient." 66 From outside the hundreds we hear little but complaint. Captain Nuce wrote to Sir Edwin Sandys, May 27, 1621: How so many people sent hither of late yeers haue bene lost, I cannot Conceaue vnles it be through water and want, partly of good foode, but cheifly of good Lodginge: which haue bene the onely Causes of the death of so many as came with me, if the Conceipt of their 7. years servitude did not help them on: which Course, I am of opinion, yow should doe well to alter.67 And the Company wrote to the Governor and Council in Virginia on M a y 2, 1623: We . . . be much grieved at the Sicknes and mortality . . . since both now and formerly it hath . . . proceeded in great part through distempers and disorders in dyet and lodginge. . . .68 A f t e r the terrible Indian massacre of 1622 Captain Nathaniel Butler wrote an attack on the Sandys policy called " T h e Vnmasked face of our Colony in Virginia," in which he declared: Ther Howses are generally the worst that euer I sawe the meanest Cottages in England beinge euery way equall (if not 66

Records of the Virginia Company, III, 209. m Id., Ill, 114. Id., Ill, 456.

m

"Id., IV, 162.

VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBORS

155

superior) with the moste of the best, And besides soe improuidently and scattringly are they seated one from an other as partly by their distance but especially by the interposición of Creeks and Swamps as they call them they offer all aduantages to their sauadge enimys and are vtterly depriued of all suddaine recollection of themselues vppon any tearmes whatsoeuer.69 T o which "diuers Planters that haue long liued in Virginia as alsoe of sundry Marriners and other persons that haue bene often at V i r g i n i a " replied as follows: First that the houses there were most built for vse and not for ornament and are soe farr from beinge soe meane as they are reported that throughout his Majesty's Dominions here, all labouringe mens houses (which wee cheifly professe our selvs to be) are in no wise generally for goodnes to be compared vnto them And for the houses of men of better Ranke and quallety they are soe much better and convenyent that noe man of quallety without blushinge can make excepción against them; Againe for the Creeks and Swamps every man ther that cannott goe by Land hath either a Boate or a Conoa for the Conveyinge and speedy passage to his neighbours house. As for Cottages ther are none in Virginia that they knowe. 70 Although Captain Butler's strictures need not be taken too seriously, since he was animated b y a profound dislike of the Sandys régime, and although the Virginians' answer undoubtedly comes nearer to the truth, their denial of the existence of cottages in Virginia is suspect. T h e r e is no reason to believe that the pre-Dale cabins and cottages were immediately done a w a y with, and there is every reason to suppose that during the housing shortage of 1 6 1 9 - 2 2 many 60

Id., II, 383. H, 383.

mId.,

156

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

newcomers who could not obtain the services of a house carpenter built cottages of their own. Later Data Governor Harvey, as late as 1638, when Virginia's trials were long past and the colony was humming with prosperity, reported

to the Committee

on Plantations

in

London, Since which order [for allotting land to all persons who would promise to build a house thereon] there are twelve houses and stores built in the Towne, one of brick by the Secretarye, the fairest that ever was knowen in this countrye for substance and uniformitye, by whose example others have undertaken to build framed howses to beautifye the place, consonant to his majesties Instruction that wee should not suffer men to build slight cottages as heretofore. 71 It is significant that K i n g Charles I had issued an order to the effect that there should be no more "slight cottages" built "as heretofore." And, as sawmills were coming in, sawn timber was easier to obtain every year. 7 2 Returning to the indignant Virginians' reply to Butler in 1622, the distinction that they admit to have existed between "labouringe mens houses" and "the houses of men of better Ranke and quallety" is important. Such an admitted difference, together with Governor Harvey's remark, leads one to believe that there was a period of overlapping from 1 6 1 1 to about 1637, in which the temporary "cottages" were going out, and brick and framed houses were slowly coming to be the only sort of dwelling in Virginia. 71

Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, III, 29-30. " S e e illustration. T h e earliest mention I have seen of a sawmill in Virginia is in 1625 (Purchas his Pilgrimes [1906 ed.], X I X , 247).

A S A W M I L L FOR V I R G I N I A As depicted in Edward Williams, Virginia Richly and Truly Valued . . . Together with the tnaking of the Saw-mill, very useful in Virginia, for cutting of Timber . . . (London, 1650).

VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBORS

157

This period of shifting and overlapping allows no logical place for an intermediary phase of log cabins, since no such type was necessary for the transition. In view of the alacrity with which eighteenth-century immigrants took to the log cabin, it would seem that if the early Virginians had learned how to build them they would have continued to do so, except for houses of men of "Ranke and quallety." For the log cabin is easy to build, once you have the hang of it; requires no nails, needs little repairing, and is far tighter, warmer, and dryer than the Virginia "cottages" are reported to have been. Yet, apart from the blockhouses, no structures built of logs are even hinted at in the Virginian sources. That a "cottage" could have been a log house, or a "cabbin" have been built of horizontal logs, is unbelievable in view of what is said about them in the extracts we have quoted, and the meaning of such words in England at that time. Beyond the year 1638 it is not necessary to accumulate facts, for framed-house data become progressively more abundant. A typical set of specifications for a Virginia dwelling house in mid-seventeenth century is in a document dated July 22, 1661, at Westmoreland County Court house: It is Condiconed Agreed betweane James Neale, Esq., of the one party and francis West of the other party as followeth, the said francis West doth hereby promise and oblige himself to build for the said James Neale on his Plantacon on Wollaston Manor one house of forty foot long and twenty five foot wide framed work to be of nine foot between the ground sill and wall plate and all the groundsills to be of Locust wood the Lower part to be divided into five rooms with two Chimmes below and one small Chimnye above and build to it a porch of ten foot long and eight foot wide the Loft to be layd with sawed boards, and to build two Dormor Windows above and

158

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

other windows at the end of the Loft and to finish all Windows and Dores below stayers and all Compleatly finished and except the covering and weather boarding for and in Consideration whereof I the sayd James Neale oblige myself to find the said francis West Meat Drinke and Lodging during the time of the building . . . three thousand five hundred pound weight of Tobacco and Cask. . . .73 This was the well-known story-and-a-half (or storyand-a-loft) house of the period, covered with clapboards (still called weatherboards in Virginia as in England), and having a square closed-in front porch. John Hammond had already described the same sort of house as typical of Virginia in his Leah and Rachel (1656): Pleasant in their building, which although for most part they are but one story besides the loft, and built of wood, yet contrived so delightfull, that your ordinary houses in England are not so handsome, for usually the rooms are large, daubed and whitelimed, glazed and flowered, and if not glazed windows, shutters which are made very pritty and convenient.74 A description of 1649 mentions houses of "Wood high and fair," and brick houses as well,75 which became progressively more common as wealth and culture increased on the Tidewater. Yet log cabins were plentiful in late eighteenth-century Virginia, both as pioneer dwellings in the Valley, and for slave quarters on the Tidewater. When did they come in? 78 Westmoreland County Records, Deeds, Wills, etc., 1661-1662; this entry recorded February 4, 1661/62. Copy at the Research Department, Restoration, Williamsburg. ™ Narratives of Early Maryland (ed. C. C. Hall; N e w York, 1925), pp. 297-98. 70 A Perfect Description of Virginia, 1649, as reprinted in Force's Tracts, II, no. viii, p. 7.

VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBORS

159

That is for others to find; our research has been confined to the first half-century after the founding of Jamestown. But we hazard the opinion that log-wall construction of the rude, round-log type was brought to Virginia during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, at a time when the importation of slaves from Africa was rapidly increasing, creating the need of some cheaper form of housing. Our first actual evidence of log houses in Virginia, apart from the blockhouses of early Henrico, is, curiously enough, in a dream related by Cotton Mather. This may seem strange stuff for historians to deal with; but the log house is mentioned so incidentally and unconsciously as to be fairly convincing. Cotton Mather for his Magnalia Christi Americana: or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, finished in 1697,76 and printed in folio at London in 1702, compiled a special section called, "Thaumaturgus: vel . . . Liber Memorabilium . . . wherein Very many Illustrious Discoveries and Demonstrations of the Divine Providence in Remarkable Mercies and Judgments on Many Particular Persons among the People of New-England, are Observ'd, Collected and Related." Herein he prints the "Remarkable Sea Deliverances" of one of his "honest Neighbours, whose Name is Christopher Monk." Captain Monk, master of the good ship John's Adventure of Bermuda, was captured by Algerian pirates in August 1681 and enslaved. According to his own account which Mather printed: One Morning as I slept upon some old Sails between Decks, I dream'd, That I was upon an Hill, where was a little sort of a '"Publications

Colonial Soc. of Mass., X X I , 170, n. 1.

160

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

Log-house, like some Houses that I have seen in Virginia; That some who were with me had young Eagles in their Hands, bruising and squeezing 'em in their Hands till they made 'em cry; That there appear'd at length T w o great White Eagles upon the Top of another Hill coming towards us, at the Cry of the Young Ones, to release 'em: That for fear, lest the Old Eagles might kill us, I with several others, were put into the little House to secure us: And, that hereupon the Young Ones were set at liberty. . . ,77 A f e w days later the two white eagles appeared, in the shape of two white-sailed English frigates, which captured the pirate and released the captives. Captain Monk's unconscious comparison of his dream log house to "some houses" that he had "seen in Virginia," seems to us good evidence that he had seen log houses along the shores of Virginia on a voyage thither. W h e n or at what exact place he saw them is a matter of conjecture. His account is not dated, but is not likely to have been written before 1685, when Cotton Mather began collecting material f o r his Wonder-Book, and cannot have been written after 1697, when the book was completed. All w e know of Christopher apart from his sea deliverance is that he had five children bora in Boston (and doubtless baptized b y the Mathers) between 1696 and 1700. T h e plain meaning of the quoted extract suggests that he saw the Virginia log houses on some voyage subsequent to 1 6 8 1 ; but mariners are not particular about their grammar, and a simple change of tense would make the log houses precede the dream. In either event, Christopher Monk's dream is the only evidence w e have found of log houses in Virginia before the eighteenth century. " Magnalia (1702), Book VI, 8.

V I R G I N I A A N D HER N E I G H B O R S

161

NORTH CAROLINA

T h e northern section of North Carolina was settled spontaneously b y former indented servants and

others

crossing the southern border of Virginia and becoming squatters, around the year 1650. A party of N e w Englanders squatted near Cape Fear around 1660, in order to raise cattle; but w e have no data on the dwellings of these t w o earliest groups. Probably the first framed house in North Carolina was one that Governor Francis Yardley of V i r ginia had built as a compliment to the chief of the Indian tribe near Roanoke Island in 1654. H e reported that to gain the friendship of this potentate Immediately I dispatched away a boat with six hands, one being a carpenter, to build the King an English house, my promise at his coming first, being to comply in that matter.78 A n d in the same letter the Governor says that after a purchase had been made of their land, these Indians retired to a new habitation, where our people built the great Commander a fair house, the which I am to furnish with English utensils and chattels. N o r t h Carolina offers the second example of a log prison, and the fourth example of a " l o g g " building so called, that w e have found in the English colonies in the seventeenth century. A n affidavit of one Peter Brockwell, dated February 16, 1679/80 relates that a prisoner named Miller, apprehended in 1677, was b y " O l d M r Jennings" w h o had charge of the culprit "enclosed in a Logghouse about 10 or 11 foot square purposely built for him," and where he was 76

Colonial Records of North Carolina, I, 18.

162

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

closely kept.79 Although in a sense this was a log dwelling, the stated purpose of it was incarceration. Eleven years before a log prison had been built in Maryland. It is probable that in both instances, and in that of N e w Hampshire in 1699, the blockhouse type of hewn log construction was used, as providing a solid wall through which only a very enterprising prisoner could make his escape. 79

M., 1,300.

VII O R I G I N A N D S P R E A D OF T H E L O G H O U S E construction for rural dwellings was the universal mode in the greater part of Scandinavia, Finland, the Baltic Provinces, and Russia in the early seventeenth century. In Sweden particularly this craft had reached a high state of development, resulting in numerous variations in the hewing and jointing of logs. Dr. Sigurd Erixon of Stockholm in his recent study, "The North-European Technique of Corner Timbering," 1 describes some thirty different methods of notching the logs, the most primitive being a round notch on the underside, to enable it to fit over the log next undermost. Even as early as the fifteenth century many other and better forms of notching had been developed. The most efficient was an oblique notch with flat bottom and flaring sides on the top of a round log, to which the next upper one, hewn to fit a little loosely, snugged in close when the wood dried out. LOG-WALL

Besides round-log dwellings, prototypes of the American log cabin, the Swedes had several different styles of hewing logs for walls. One of particular interest to us, as the style of the Morton cabin (1654-98) still standing in Pennsylvania, is called by Dr. Erixon "plank-shaped timbering," 2 because the logs were hewn or split to the shape of thick, 1 Folkliv, I (1937), 13-63. Dr. Erixon's article is in English and beautifully illustrated with photographs, maps, and line drawings. "Folkliv, I (1937), 30; illustrations on p. 44; map of distribution on p. 51. It would be interesting to ascertain if the earliest Swedish colonists in America came from this plank-wall region in southern Sweden.

164

THE LOG CABIN MYTH

heavy planks. These were closely fitted on the edges and joined by vertical notches at the ends. The distribution of this type closely coincided with that of oak timber, which was too heavy to handle in whole logs, but split readily. Sweden also had buildings of the blockhouse type, the logs hewn square and their ends neatly dovetailed or mortised in a clean rectangular joint; but this was rarely done for dwelling houses. Almost every form of log-wall dwelling in Sweden, whether of round, squared, hexagonal, or plankshaped logs, was characterized by protruding ends, as in the typical American log cabin. N E W SWEDEN

New Sweden was founded on Delaware Bay by the Swedish West India Company in 1638. It was a fur-trading colony, consisting of a few fortified posts on the bay and river, populated by servants of the Company with only enough agricultural population to raise cattle and grow food for the rest. Although it covered parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey as well as Delaware, New Sweden never became an important or powerful colony. The population was not over two hundred in 1644, all Swedes except two Finns; in 1648 there were but ninety adult males, of whom probably twelve were Finns.3 The colony enjoyed 8 Arrandus Johnson, in The Swedes in America, 1638-1938 (ed. A . B. Benson and Naboth Hedin; N e w Haven, 1938), pp. 26-27. The standard and detailed work on N e w Sweden is Amandus Johnson, The Swedish Settlements on the Delaware, published by the University of Pennsylvania (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1911). Queen Christina's Instructions of 1642 to Governor Printz, his reports, and the surviving court records of N e w Sweden are printed with translations in The Instruction for Johan Printz (ed. Amandus Johnson; Philadelphia, 1930), but there is nothing in them relating to building.

C O R N E R - J O I N T I N G OF L O G HOUSES IN E U R O P E From Folkliv, I, 22 1. Groove-joint with oblique notch, from Dalccarlia, Sweden 2. Groove-joint with round notch, a prehistoric find in Austria 3. Groove-joint with oblique notch and double necking, from Dalecarlia

ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF THE LOG HOUSE

165

a certain prosperity from 1643 to 1653 under the vigorous administration of Governor Johan Bjornsson Printz, who successfully beat off intruders from New Haven and New Amsterdam, but in 1655 it was conquered by the redoubtable Peter Stuyvesant and annexed to New Netherland. Upon the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664, New Sweden fell within the Duke of York's grant, and was later divided among the English provinces of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. But the Swedish population remained in situ, and William Penn later paid tribute to their sturdy qualities, and their helpfulness to his own English colonists in 1682. None of the contemporary Swedish chroniclers or historians like Acrelius who wrote about New Sweden made any mention of the types of dwellings, so far as we can ascertain. This was natural enough, like the failure of English chroniclers and historians to describe in detail the early dwellings in the English colonies. What was imitated from the home country was not deemed worthy of remark. Even if all evidence were wanting, we should be safe in assuming that the Swedes and Finns built the log houses they were used to at home, since they had the necessary carpenters, tools, and materials. That they did so, is proved by surviving examples, by the testimony of travelers who passed through the Swedish settlements after they had fallen under English rule, and by a small amount of contemporary evidence. For instance, the Forklaring (Proclamation) of July 7, 1654 declares that in Tacony: . . . twelve men, four at the time, built [tim brade] a large house out of logs in 8 days. . . . We have assisted in the

166

T H E L O G CABIN M Y T H

work on all the houses which are on the estate as well with the building as with the masonry.4 On the basis of evidence such as this, and by analogy from Swedish buildings, Dr. Johnson has written an account of the buildings of the Swedes on the Delaware, of which all admit the essential accuracy. 5 W e add another bit of negative evidence. T h e reports of the governors of N e w Sweden and of other contemporaries are notably free from those complaints of sickness which in the early English colonies were often ascribed to "wett lodging" or "defective housing." Either the Swedes were tougher than the English, or they brought with them a housing craft technique that kept them dry and warm. Probably both! T h e earliest and most detailed description yet discovered of a Swedish log house in the Delaware region is in the journal of Jasper Danckaerts. This Dutchman of the Labadist sect traveled through the colonies from Maryland to Massachusetts in 1679-80, in company with his compatriot Peter Sluyter. 6 According to his latest editors, Danckaerts viewed his surroundings through the eyes of a fanatical self-satisfaction. For this reason his criticisms or strictures upon persons and conditions are to be received with much discount. But he was an intelligent man, and a keen-eyed and 4

Quoted in Amandus Johnson, Swedish Settlements, I, 348, n. 15. • H . , I, 345-65. " T h e original Dutch text, a photostat of the essential parts of which we have obtained through the kindness of the Long Island Historical Society, where it is owned, has never been printed. A translation b y Henry C. Murphy was printed as the Journal of a Voyage to New York in Memoirs of the Long Island Historical Society, I (1867). Another, the basis of ours, was published in the "Original Narratives" series as Journal of Jasper Danckaerts (ed. B. B. James and J . F. Jameson; N e w York, 1 9 1 3 ) . Professor Auer has established the Dutch text and checked the translation.

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assiduous notetaker; and the variety and fecundity of his material is not a little due to the trivial and relatively unimportant details which are embodied in the narrative.7 A s a Dutchman, f r o m a country where all-wooden houses of any sort were rare and log houses unknown, the dwellings of the English and the Swedes were of sufficient novelty and interest to be mentioned, and to some extent described. W h e n he reached the site of Trenton, N e w Jersey, on N o v e m b e r 17, 1679, Danckaerts and his companion spent the night v e r y uncomfortably at the house of a miller named Stacey, a Quaker f r o m Yorkshire, which gave him the occasion to write the most detailed description w e have of the humbler sort of English framed house: . . . die huijsingen sijn soo ellendigh gemaekt dat indien men niet heel dicht bij twier is soodat men sigh schier brant, soo en kamen het niet warm hebben om dat de wint ower all doorwaijt. want meest all d' Engelsche, en vele andere hebben haer huijsen gemacht niet anders als van klap borden gelijck men die daer noemt en sijn aldus gemaeckt, eerst maken sij soo een houve geraemte gelyck men in westfalen, en t'altena doet maer soo sterck niet, dan klieven sij berden van klap hout en sijn gelijck de kuijpers pijp duijgen, anders dat se niet geboyen sijn, dese werden heel dun gemaekt met een snijmes soo dat de dickste sijd entrent een pinck dick blijft, de andere kauwert scherp of meskantigh gemaekt, sij sijn ontrente de rijf of ses woet Langh, dese werden buiten tegen her geraemte aen gespijkert met de sijden over malkanderen die gemenenelijck so dicht niet en sluiten of men kan hier en daer de vingers tusschen door steken, tsij dat se soo weijnigk woegen t'sij dat de berden soo krom getrocken werden. en wanneer het het kout en windrigh is, soo 7

James and Jameson ed., p. xviii.

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smeren de beste Lieden dit met wat kleij. soo ten besten wat toe, en soo wat sijn meest alle d Engelsche huijsen op t'Lant, ten sij dat sij er hebben die sij van andere natien gemaekt sijn, en sij bewonen. Nu dit huis was maer nieuw gemaeckt, en was vrij doorlucktigh en twas dien nacht vrij windrigh uijt den noordwesten met groote koude en heldere mane schijn, soodat ick desen nacht niet Licht vergeten sal. . . .8 . . . the dwellings are so wretchedly built, that if you are not so close to the fire as almost to burn yourself, you cannot keep warm, for the wind blows through them everywhere. Most all the English, and many others have their houses made not otherwise than of clapboards (as they call them there) in this manner: they first make a hewing frame, the same as they do in Westphalia and at Altena 9 but not so strong; they then rive the boards out of clap wood 1 0 so that they are like cooper's pipestaves, except they are not bent, these are made very thin with a large knife so that the thickest edge is about as thick as a little finger, and the other is made sharp, like the edge of a knife, they are about five or six feet long, and are nailed on the outside of the frame with the edges lapped over each other usually not so close as to prevent you from sticking a finger between them, in consequence either of their not being well joined or the boards being crooked. When it is cold and windy the best people daub them with clay. Such are almost all the English houses in the country, except those they have which were built by people of other nations. Now this house was newly built, and very draughty; and as the night was very windy from the northwest with intense cold in clear moonshine, I shall not readily forget it. . . - 1 1 8 Page 58 of MS. * The frame he mentions is what the English called a "frow horse" (see index). The Labadists had dwelt in Westphalia and at Altona in Holstein, where they had doubtless seen pipestaves riven in the same manner 10 as clapboards. The baulks of timber. 11 Translation based on Journal of Jasper Danckaerts (James and Jameson ed.), pp. 96-97.

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"Other nations" means the Dutch, who built brick or stone houses whenever possible, and the Swedes, who built log houses, as appears from Danckaerts' journal for the next day, November 18, 1679. He rowed down the Delaware River to "the Quakers' village, Borlington" (Burlington, N . J . ) , but, finding no room in the tavern, rowed upstream again to the house of one Jacob Hendrix from Holstein, "who received us very kindly, and entertained us according to his ability." Danckaerts then proceeds to describe the house: Dit huijs hoe wel niet veel grooter als daer wij voorleden nacht in geweest waren, was wat beter en dichter, sijnde gemaekt op de Sweedse manier, immers soo als sij daer gemenelijck bouwen, het welck sijn block huijsen, of huijsen van blocken, en is niet anders als heele boomen, die of int midden door gecloven of uijt den ruijgen soo wat vierkant gehackt sijn, dese boomen Leggen sij soo int vierkant op malkanderen soo hoogh als sij de huijsen hebben weller welke balken sij de eijnden deene de helft in d'anderes in laten, ontrent een voet van t'Eijnd af en. soo staet het gants gebouw souder een nagel of spijker, de solderinge en t'dack sijn niet veel fijnder werck, uijt genomen onder de Curieuste die hebben noch plancken tot de solderingh, en noch een glase venster. de deuren sij wijt genoegh maer heel Laegh, dat men seer bucken moet alleer men daer deur gaet, immers hoe tis dese huijsen sijn vrij dicht en warm, doch de schoor steen staet in een hoeck. [P. 60] hier kreegh mijn maet en ick eenige herte vellen om ons op te Legeren op de vloer, soo dat wij vrij beter teweeg kwanen, en conden wel wat rüsten, . . . The house although not much larger than where we spent the last night, was somewhat better and tighter, being made according to the Swedish mode, and as they usually build their houses here, which are blockhouses, or houses of hewn logs,

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being nothing else then entire trees, split through the middle or somewhat squared out of the rough, these trees are laid in the form of a square upon each other as high as they wish to have the house, the ends of these timbers are let into each other, about a foot from the ends of them. So stands the whole building without a nail or a spike, the ceiling and roof do not show much finer work, except among the most particular who also have all the ceiling planked and also a glass window. The doors are wide enough but very low, so that everyone must stoop to enter in, always these houses are very tight and warm, but the chimney stands in a corner. Here my comrade and myself had some deerskins spread upon the floor to lie on, and we were, therefore, quite well off, and could get some rest, . . . 1 2 W e have placed these two quotations together because they bring out the astonishing fact that the English and Swedes had been living side-by-side for a generation without learning each other's vernacular in dwelling construction. Undoubtedly, as Danckaerts says, the Swedish log house was greatly superior to the rougher sort of English framed and clapboarded dwelling that he so well describes. Y e t the English refused then, and for some years to come, to learn better ways of cheap building from their Swedish neighbors. Danckaerts' next reference to log houses is at Tinakonk (Tacony, Pennsylvania), on November 21, 1679: op desen hoek staen drij of vier huijsen op sijn Sweeds gemaekt, een Luiters kerkie mede van blocken gemaekt, en een restant van het groote block huijs dat haer in plaets van forteresse gedient heeft met noch eenighe ruijnen van noch eenighe gemeene block huisies. . . - 13 " P a g e s 59-60 of M S . Text established and translation checked by 13 Professor Samuel H . Cross. Page 62 of M S .

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On this point stand three or four houses built by the Swedes, a little Lutheran church made of hewn logs,14 and the remains of the large blockhouse which served them in place of a fortress, with also some ruins of some common blockhouses, . . . In December 1679 Danckaerts visited Newcastle, Delaware, the principal Swedish settlement, of which he merely remarks, "What remains of it consists of about fifty houses, almost all of wood. The fort is demolished, but there is a good blockhouse." 15 Yet the building of log houses was still going on there, as is shown by an entry in the records for 1680. Reynier van Eyst deposed that he and his brother five years before "did accordingly goe and fell trees and did cut them out for a Log house." 16 It will be noted that the log houses observed by Danckaerts were all of hewn logs, some squared, others "split through the middle," i.e., plank-shaped. W e have found no direct evidence of round-log dwellings, like the American log cabin, having been built by the Delaware Swedes in the seventeenth century. But it is a safe assumption that this type was built, since it was common in contemporary Sweden. 17 Danckaerts does note the protruding ends and notching, which are distinctive characteristics of Swedish " " B u i l t by Governor Printz in 1646" (note in James and Jameson ed., p. 1 0 1 ) . " M , P- 143la

Records of the Court of New Castle on Delaware, 1676-1681 (Lancaster, Pa., 1904), p. 388. " D r . Amandus Johnson writes to me from the American Swedish Historical Museum of Philadelphia, September 1, 1938, "It is absolutely certain that the Swedes used round-log construction in their most primitive dwellings, as well as in their barns and storehouses." A n eighteenthcentury example is illustrated in his Swedish Settlements, II, 540, and also in Old-Time New England, X V I I I , 57.

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and American log cabins, as contrasted with the smooth dovetailed joints of blockhouse construction. Henry C. Mercer, when writing his article, "The Origin of Log Houses in the United States," was "unable to find any log structures of certain seventeenth century date or Swedish construction in the Delaware region." 18 Some of those that he did find, none older than the eighteenth and some undoubtedly of the nineteenth century, were of the round-log type with protruding ends chinked with clay between the logs. The gables were all boarded above the "plate log." Door and window openings, sawed out after the walls were built, were framed with sections of plank or board pegged into the log-ends. With rare exceptions, the logs were not squared as in the New England blockhouses, though nearly always somewhat faced inside and out. Log ends were often hewn or sawed flush to the walls, even when locked by notching rather than dovetailing.19 A recent investigation by Mr. S. Kendrick Lichty has revealed a surviving example of seventeenth-century Swedish construction, the birthplace of John Morton, Signer of the Declaration of Independence, at Prospect Park, Delaware County, Pennsylvania. It consists of two one-room log houses — the first built by the Signer's grandfather, Morton Mortonson, in 1654; the second built ten feet away in 1698; and the two connected by a stone section in 1806.20 The construction of the two seventeenth-century parts is of the type called "plank-shaped timbering" which Dr. Erixon found characteristic of the oak regions of Sweden; 18

10 Old-Time New England, XVIII (1927), 54. Id., pp. 54-60. This method of adding to a log cabin was common in all parts of the eastern United States in the nineteenth century. 20

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and Delaware County when first settled abounded in oak. The plank-shaped timbers of the 1654 section of the Morton house are of oak; those of the 1698 addition are of pine and chestnut. These hewn planks, about four inches thick, were lighter to handle than bulky squared logs and could be fitted to one another with greater ease and nicety. T h e fittings in the Morton house are so perfect that no chinking of the joints was necessary, and there is no evidence of interior daubing or plastering. About the time of the American Revolution the outer walls were covered with vertical siding and clapboards. PETER K A L M

Peter Kalm, Professor of Natural History in the University of Abo, visited America in 1749-50, and published an account of his travels in three volumes at Stockholm a f e w years later; 2 1 these were translated into English in 1770, 22 and his notes for a fourth volume were translated together with the Travels in 1937. 23 A Swedish-speaking Finlander, Peter Kalm showed particular interest in the survivals of Swedish culture in America. His description of the Swedish houses in the Delaware region tallies closely with that of Danckaerts: De hus, some de Svenske bygt sig, da de forst kommo hit, hade varit mycket usle: en liten stuga med lag dorr, at man mast luta 21 E n Resa til Norra America (3 vols., Stockholm, 1753-61); our text based on Pehr Kalms Resa Till Norra Amerika (4 vols., Helsingfors, 1904-29). 22 Travels into North America (J. R. Forster, trans.; 3 vols., Warrington and London, 1770-71). 23 Peter Kalm's Travels in North America (ed. A . B. Benson; 2 vols., N e w York, 1937).

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sig, da man skulle ga där in. Som de ej hade glas med sig, sä betjänte de sig af smä gluggar med skätt-bräde före, at skjuta up och igen. De hade här ingen mässa, at myssja väggarna med, ätminstone ingen särdeles god mässa, därföre betjänte de sig i stället af 1er, som de smetade i springorna bade pä yttra och inra sidan of huset. Spisarne murades da i en vrä, antingen af grasten och sädana de funno pä backar, eller ock pä de Ställen, som inga stenar funnos, gjorde de dem af bara 1er, det de smetade helt tjockt i vrän af huset: bakugnen murades ock da inne i stugan. The houses that the Swedes built, when they first came here, had been very poor: a little cabin with a low door so one must stoop when going therein. Since they did not have glass with them, they made use of small holes with sliding board in front to push up and down. They had no moss here, to chink the walls with, at least no specially good moss, therefore they made use of clay instead, which they daubed in the cracks both on the outer and inner side of the house. The fireplaces were built then in one corner, either of gray stone or such as they found on hills, or else in the places where no stones were found, they made them only of clay, which they daubed very thickly in the corner of the house: the oven was also built inside in the cabin.24 The English were still building "cottages" on the frontier, as Kalm describes when he visited Crown Point, N e w York: Hus hade de förafskedade Soldater nu strax efter kriget upbygt sig pä de dem tilslagna ägor, hvilka voro belägne häromkring Fästningen; men de fläste af dem voro ej annat, än kojor och ingen ting bättre, än pä de uslaste Ställen hos oss. . . . Husen, som de sig bygt, voro af bräder, lodrätt stäende när hvarandra: mellantaket, och äfven yttra taket voro ock af 2 4 Text from Pehr Kalms Resa (Helsingfors ed.), III, 56; translation by Florence Berlin.

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brader: uti springorna inne i huset var smetadt med ler, at gora rummet varmt.25 Directly after the war 2 8 the discharged soldiers, on the land allotted to them, had built themselves houses, which were located right around the fort; but most of them were no more than huts and not much better, than in the most wretched places with us. . . . The houses, which they built themselves, were of boards, standing vertically close to each other: the ceiling and even the outer roof were of boards too: the chinks inside the house were daubed with clay, to make the room warm. THE PENNSYLVANIA GERMANS

Germans began coming to Pennsylvania in large numbers in 1710. Many of them, notably those from Switzerland, the Black Forest, Upper Bavaria, and Saxony, had lived in log houses at home, and knew no other form of dwelling for people of modest means. Mr. G . Edwin Brumbaugh, who has made a careful study of existing log houses and log cabins in the counties settled b y Germans, differs from Dr. Mercer in asserting that most surviving log houses in Pennsylvania should be ascribed to German, not to Swedish influence. 27 T h e greater part are of the blockhouse type, dovetailed at the corners; but some are of the round-log type, crudely notched so that large interstices are left to be chinked with split oak and daubed with clay. Professor Wertenbaker also believes that existing examples show German rather than Swedish influence. H e finds four different types of Pennsylvania log houses which may 25

Pehr Kalms Resa (Helsingfors ed.), Ill, 191. King George's War, which ended in 1748. 27 "Colonial Architecture of the Pennsylvania Germans," German Society, Proceedings, X L I (1930), Part II (1931). 28

Pennsylvania

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be traced to definite regions of Germany or Switzerland. 28 Although Peter Kalm gives the Germans no credit, they were probably the first to spread log houses beyond tidewater, into the interior counties of Pennsylvania; and it was certainly they w h o carried the type into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Kalm does, however, make a significant reference to log houses being built b y an English-speaking race: De Swenskas hus woro fordom alia af trad, med ler smetat emellan stockarna, nog like dem irlandarna nu har bygga. de hade inga glas uti fonsterna, utan opna sma gluggar med en lucka eller skattbrade fore, at de liknade aldeles wara Finska ports fonster.29 The Swedes' houses were formerly all of wood, with clay daubed between the logs, no doubt like those the Irish now build here. They had no glass in the windows, but small open holes with a shutter or sliding board in front, so they were quite like our Finnish cabin window. THE SCOTCH-IRISH

B y the Irish of Pennsylvania (where he wrote this note), Kalm undoubtedly meant the Irish Protestants of Ulster, commonly called the Scotch-Irish, w h o began coming to the English colonies in large numbers after 1718. 30 A n earlier bit of evidence than Kalm's indicates that log houses were being built on the N e w Hampshire frontier b y the Scotch-Irish as early as 1719. John Morison, born in 28 Wertenbaker, The Founding of American Civilization. The Middle Colonies, pp. 298-307, 311-12. ™Pehr Kalms Resa (Helsingfors ed.), [IV], 223. 30 C. K . Bolton, Scotch Irish Pioneers in Ulster and America (Boston, 1910), p. 28.

A P E N N S Y L V A N I A - G E R M A N L O G CABIN O F T H E EIGHTEENTH CENTURY At Potter's Bank, Center County. Front view and detail of chinking with split oak and clay. The daubing has fallen out.

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Aberdeen, but who had passed most of his life in Londonderry, Ireland, emigrated with his Scotch wife to New England in 1718. They arrived late in the fall at Casco Bay, Maine, passed the winter there, made their way to Nutfield (later Londonderry and now Derry), New Hampshire, in the early spring, and began their settlement on April 1 1 , 1719. According to a story handed down in the family, and first printed in 1845, John told his wife that they must be content with a log house; upon which she came to him and in a manner unusually affectionate, said, "Aweel, aweel, dear Joan, an it maun be a log house, do make it a log heegher nor the lave" (higher than the rest).31 Where did the Morisons learn log-house craft? N o Swedes or Germans are known to have settled in Casco Bay that early, and the Scotch-Irish who settled New Hampshire came over directly from Ireland, and not by way of Pennsylvania. The key to this puzzle lies in that footnote of Williamson's that we have quoted, to the effect that all the houses built at Berwick, Maine, between 1690 and 1745 "were of hewed logs, sufficient to oppose the force of small arms." 32 If that was true of Berwick, it was doubtless true of Casco Bay and other parts of Maine. The Morisons had time to learn the craft before they moved inland. They had every reason to expect attentions from the Indians when they pitched their new Londonderry in the New Hampshire wilderness. Certainly the log house was the usual type of dwelling at Londonderry for several al John H. Morison, Life of the Hon. Jeremiah Smith (Boston, 1845), p. 11, n. The story was told to the author by Jeremiah Smith, who heard it from John Morison himself. 82 See above, p. 81.

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years.33 And it appears at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, within a month of the date that the Morisons arrived. The New Hampshire Assembly on May 2, 1719, Voted, That Maj. Jno. Gillman's Loghouse by the bridge, be a publick licensed house for Entertainment, . . .34 It is probable that these Maine and N e w Hampshire log houses were of the blockhouse type, originally used for garrison houses but adopted for ordinary dwellings because of the constant danger. The "William Damme Garrison" of Dover, N e w Hampshire, photographs of which we reproduce, is representative both of the type and of its appearance. But there needs to be a much more intensive study of the records after 1675 than we have been able to undertake, before one can be certain of the exact type of these New England log houses or their distribution; and we are still ignorant of the time when or place where the log cabin proper, of rounded logs and crossed corners, first appeared in New England. There was a "logg house" at Cape Porpoise as early as 1662, and another at Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1678; houses of "hewed logs" were common on the Maine coast from 1690; and in the correspondence about the Winthrop estate near N e w London, Con83 Edward L . Parker, History of Londonderry (Boston, I 8 J I ) , p. 88, notes that " b y means of the saw-mills, which were soon in operation, the people were much aided in procuring materials for building. T h e log huts in which they had at first resided, soon gave place to substantial framed-houses, many of them two stories high." T h e Early Records of Londonderry (Manchester, N . H., 1908), I, 18, mention a sawmill as early as 1719; but in 1724 the town voted "that their shall be aschol house built in this town, the demension of said house is to be sixtine foot Long and twelve foot Brenth Said house is to be a logg house seven foot side wall" (id., I, ji). 31 New Hampshire Provincial Papers, III, 760. T h e Gilman "logg house" license was renewed the next year (id., p. 787).

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necticut, in 1713, there is mention of a "logg house" for which £50 was allowed in depreciated currency.36 But there is nothing to indicate whether these were of the blockhouse or the round-log type, and the evidence so far gathered is too spotty to permit even a conjectural pattern of influence and distribution. Even supposing that log houses were as thick as stumps on the Maine-New Hampshire frontier in 1719, one would like to know why the Scotch-Irish took up the type so promptly, instead of resisting it for half a century as the English had done. The Scotch-Irish came from a land where framed houses were a luxury. Most of the farmhouses and cottages of Ulster were frameless structures of stone or mud walls, covered with a thatched roof laid upon slender rafters.36 Flimsy "cabins" of the earlier English "arbor" type, built on a frame of poles thrust into the ground at both ends, were constructed for temporary summer use in the Ulster hills.37 These were unsuitable in a northern colony infested wtih Indians. It may be surmised that the Scotch-Irish, clever and adaptable people, decided that the frontier blockhouse type with hewn-log walls was the best sort of dwelling for them, as indeed it was. Once they had mastered the technique, it could be easily constructed out of available materials, and it was more defensible than the English framed dwellings. Dr. D. A. Chart, Deputy Keeper of the Records of the Government of Northern Ireland, writes as follows to Dr. 33

Mass. Hist. Soc. Colls., 6th ser., V , 272, 202 n. A k e Campbell, "Notes on the Irish House," Folkliv, I (1937), 207-34. Mr. Campbell has another article on the subject in Bealoideas, the Irish folklore journal, V (1935), 57-74. " L e t t e r of Professor E . Estyn Evans of the Queen's University, Belfast, to Dr. Hencken, February 9, 1939. 86

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Hugh O'Neill Hencken, Curator of European Archaeology in the Peabody Museum: It is true enough that in rural Ulster around 1700 the cabins of the poor were constructed of mudwalling or, much more rarely, of stone plastered with clay. I do not know that wood was then extraordinarily scarce, though the great ancient forests had probably perished. Clay as a building material was adopted more because of its cheapness, universality, and easiness of handling than for any other reason. It would not be altogether safe to say that the Irish had no tradition of building in wood, of however rudimentary a nature the wooden construction may have been. T h e y used to put up wooden booths of some kind for summer pasturing on the hills. A century earlier similar structures had been put up by nomadic herdsmen. But wooden shelters of this kind were, I should fancy, not much more substantial than a garden arbour and needed as little skilled labour. The American log house I take it was even in its simplest form something of a skilled job. It may be that if the Ulster native had found in his own country a building material so ready to his hand as the trunks of the "forest primeval" he would have built in that, but in early eighteenthcentury Ulster he could not have built with logs of any size without having to pay somebody for them or getting them from the landlord's demesne. The Ulster immigrants to America of the early eighteenth century were not the very poorest of the poor. T h e y were often artisans and it may well be that, finding themselves in a country where logs were as easily to be had as clay had been at home and, being persons of some intelligence and adaptability, they soon acquired the log-building technique. THE INDIANS

In the story of the early spread of the log house, we cannot altogether neglect the hypothesis of Indian influence. Although every known form of Indian dwelling on

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the Atlantic seaboard at the time the English came was of sapling-and-bough construction, walled and roofed with bark, mats, or skins — the "wigwams" of the New England chronicles — Indian forts were stockaded with upright logs,38 and there is reason to believe that some tribes, once they had acquired steel axes, began to build log houses.39 A log-house prison on the North Carolina frontier in 1680 we have already noted; and thirty years later we find a log house on the Virginia-North Carolina border. The commissioners who were running the boundary line in 1710 left a journal, in which they say, "we lodged in a wretched Kennell of a Loghouse where we could hardly have our length and breadth. . . . " 4 0 Whether this was an English or an Indian dwelling they do not state. Colonel John Barnwell reports Indian log houses on that frontier, built primarily for purposes of defense, when describing the capture of a Tuscarora fort in February 1 7 1 1 : The Indians41 when they saw the Brittains enter, they judging the business was over, Crowded in on all hands to plunder which proved the destruction of several, and when we forced the log houses while we were putting the men to the sword, 38 F . W . Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (2 vols., Washington, 1907-10), articles on "Habitation," "Fortification and Defense," "Tuscarora," etc. 59 Frederick J . Turner, in his classic essay on the Significance of the Frontier (The Frontier in American History, N e w York, 1921, p. 4), says, " T h e wilderness masters the colonist. . . . It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him." Professor Merk and the editor think that Turner meant this only in a poetical sense, and did not expect it to be taken literally, as Fiske Kimball does in his Domestic Architecture, pp. 7-8. 10 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, V (1897), 7. 41 Allies of the English.

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our Indians got all the slaves and plunder, only one girl we gott.42 Yet William Byrd in 1728 found Indians on the VirginiaNorth Carolina border living in the traditional lodges of their ancestors, "Bark Cabanes . . . no other but Close Arbours made of Saplings, arched at the top, and cover'd so well with Bark as to be proof against all Weather." 43 Somewhat later in the century the Indian village of Logstown on the upper Ohio, about eighteen miles below Pittsburgh, was so called because of its log houses. At a place called Conner's on the Ohio in 1773, both Shawnee and Delaware dwelt "in pretty good log houses well shingled with nails." 44 LATER E X A M P L E S

Once the Germans had made a fresh introduction of the log house and the Scotch-Irish had taken it up, the rapid spread of this type was assured. Delaware Bay, where the original Swedish settlers lived, and through which most of the Germans and Scotch-Irish entered, was a funnel to the American frontier from 1710 to the Revolution, and Philadelphia was the principal port of entry for emigrant ships from Ireland and Germany. The "Pennsylvania Dutch" settled the first belt of interior counties in Pennsylvania, and the Scotch-Irish mainly took up land west of the Germans. Both races sent their vanguards across the Poto12

Id., p. 395 (Barnwell's journal of the Tuscarora War). The Writings of Colonel William Byrd (ed. J. S. Bassett; N e w York, 1901), p. 95. "David Jones, A Journal of Two Visits Made to Some Nations of Indians on the West Side of the River Ohio, in the Years 177.2 and 1713 (Sabin reprint; N e w York, 1865), p. 88. 43

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mac at Harpers Ferry and up the Great Valley of Virginia, debouching into the Piedmont of Virginia and North Carolina through the gaps of the Blue Ridge. And although emigrants to N e w England generally landed at Boston or more northerly ports, a nucleus of squared-log houses, as we have seen, had been established in southern Maine as early as 1690. Thence the type could easily have spread throughout the N e w England frontier, and have been taken up by the English. The log cabin that Daniel Webster apologized for not being born in must have been erected by his father in Salisbury, N e w Hampshire, shortly after 1760. A n important task which we have not had the time to perform — to document the spread of the log house, and the evolution of the log cabin — awaits an investigator. W e can only offer a few examples, discovered more or less by chance. William Byrd of Westover wrote in his journal for March 1728 at Edenton, North Carolina, a region settled largely by English from Virginia: Most of the Houses in this Part of the Country are Loghouses, covered with Pine or Cypress Shingles, 3 feet long, and one broad. They are hung upon Laths with Peggs, and their doors too turn upon Wooden Hinges, and have wooden Locks to Secure them, so that the Building is finisht without Nails or other Iron-Work.45 Colonel Byrd follows with a description of the fences built by the Edenton settlers: " "History of the Dividing Line," in Writings of Colonel William Byrd (Bassett ed., 1901), pp. 78-79; see also p. 29, where Colonel Byrd describes the method of building wharves of pine logs in Norfolk, Virginia: "These [logs] are bound fast together by Cross-Pieces notcht into them, according to the Architecture of the Log-Houses in North Carolina."

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T h e y also set up their Pales without any Nailes at all, and indeed more Securely than those that are nail'd. There are 3 Rails mortised into the Posts, the lowest of which serves as a Sill with a Groove in the Middle, big enough to receive the End of the Pales: the middle Part of the Pale rests against the Inside of the Next Rail, and the T o p of it is brought forward to the outside of the uppermost. Such Wreathing of the Pales in and out makes them stand firm, and much harder to unfix than when nail'd in the Ordinary way. 49 Samuel Kercheval, of German stock, settled in the Shenandoah V a l l e y with his father as a small b o y in 1773. A b o u t 1776, at the age of six or seven, he was sent to Maryland to school, in charge of an uncle. In his History

of the

Valley,

first published in 1833, Kercheval reminisces about this journey: A t Bedford everything was changed. The tavern at which my uncle put up was a stone house, and to make the change more complete, it was plastered in the inside, both to the walls and ceiling. On going into the dining room I was struck with astonishment at the appearance of the house. I had no idea that there was any house in the world which was not built of logs; but here I looked round the house and could see no logs, and above I could see no joists; whether such things could be made by the hands of man, or had grown so of itself, I could not conjecture. 47 In 1784 many of the assessors of frontier towns in Maine and Massachusetts reported "log huts" or other buildings that must have been log houses or log cabins, it is impossible to say which. 4 8 B y that time these types were almost uniP- 79"Samuel Kercheval, A History of the Valley of Virginia (3d ed., Woodstock, Va., 1902), p. 254. " T h e Assessors of Massabesec (Waterford), Maine, write on their

S L A V E S ' L O G CABINS O F T H E N I N E T E E N T H

CENTURY

Examples from Maryland and Virginia, both built of round logs, somewhat faced inside and out, crudely notched with large chinks between. Above: Virginia, Richmond-Williamsburg Road, with catted clay chimney. Below: Maryland example, with brick and stone chimney.

ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF THE LOG HOUSE 185 versally employed by American backwoodsmen, of whatever race. Everyone admits that the log house and log cabin, whatever their origin, had become the typical American frontier dwelling by the time of the Revolution. It is high time that constructions of such deep influence on American life and folklore should be carefully studied. Investigators, using the well-developed technique of Dr. Sigurd Erixon, should make measured drawings of surviving log houses and cabins in every part of the older states and the forested West and South, sketch and photograph their notchings, and attempt to date them from documentary evidence.49 It is possible that we may discover new developments in the art of loghouse construction during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries analogous to the complicated but clearly differentiated notchings that Dr. Erixon found in Scandinavia. Thus different streams of craft influence may be established and traced to their sources. returns of 1784 that there are eighty-four houses in town, of which six are shingled; "the Remainder chiefly consist of Poles and Logs Cover'd with slabs Bark etc." Windham, Maine, reports sixty "houses" and fourteen "log houses." Limerick Plantation has six "huts" and two "houses." Massachusetts Archives, CXXXII, 163. Ashfield, Mass., returns "90 Dwelling Houses and 66 poor logg Huts." Rowe, Mass., reports nine dwelling houses; "the Remainder are Log huts, which in the year 1780 were valued at 20s. each. Since which they are so crumbled Down, that they have been not rated since." " T h e r e are over 270,000 log dwellings in the United States today, being 3.7 per cent of the total number of rural dwellings, and more than those of brick, stone, and stucco combined. In Halifax County, Virginia, 42 per cent of the dwellings are log houses; in Albany County, Wyoming, 48.8 per cent. ( T h e Farm-Housing Survey, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture Misc. Pub. No. 323, March, 1939, Table 2.)

VIII T H E L O G CABIN M Y T H : A COMEDY OF E R R O R S T w o conclusions seem clear and unescapable from the data presented in the previous chapters, i. Log dwellings were never built by the English or Dutch in their earliest colonial settlements. English and Dutch alike proceeded directly from various temporary types inspired by English or Indian models to framed houses. 2. Log-dwelling technique was brought to the Delaware by the Swedes in 1638 but did not spread beyond that place until the last quarter of the seventeenth century at the very earliest. A second source of logwall dwellings may have been the blockhouses and garrison houses of the Maine frontier, but we do not claim this to be more than a hypothesis. How then did the Log Cabin Myth arise? W h y did American historians in the last century first suggest and then insist that the pioneers of Virginia, Maryland, and New England built a type of dwelling completely unknown to them at home, and no evidence of which can be found in the sources? ORIGIN

The first reason for this mistake was plain ignorance of English domestic architecture of the period just preceding colonization. Until Innocent's book appeared in 1916, one could have acquired correct notions of the subject only through research in English local records, antiquarian soci-

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187

ety proceedings, and scattered monographs. Lacking knowledge of the English background of our early settlers, the historians did what should be done only with great caution: they projected late eighteenth-century light into early seventeenth-century darkness. Knowing that the log cabin was the typical frontier dwelling at the era of the revolution, they imagined that it always had been so. Moreover, not realizing the persistence of English carpentry technique, and the ease with which our first settlers hewed timber, sawed plank, and rived clapboard, historians imagined that it would have been easier to trim trees, notch the logs, and roll them into place than to build a framed house. T h e mistake was made, as we shall see, under circumstances which led the American public to accept it as truth; and, once the L o g Cabin Myth was fixed in the historians' minds, it was easy for them to interpret the existing data as proving the theory. One historian who made the mistake, but later acknowledged his error, has taken the trouble to search his own mental processes, and admits having been a victim of the Myth. He had heard since childhood that the early settlers lived in log cabins, and was impressed by the imaginary pictures of an all-log Plymouth in The Pageant of America. He did not particularly consider the question of housing, or believe it to be important; so when he saw "cabin" or "cottage" in the sources he assumed that a log cabin was meant. None of the colonial or early federal historians made the mistake of attributing log houses to the seventeenth-century English. Morton of Plymouth (1669), Hubbard of Massachusetts (1679), Beverly (1705) and Stith (1747) of Vir-

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T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

ginia, Prince of N e w England (1736), Samuel Smith of New Jersey (1765), Trumbull of Connecticut (c. 1776), Lambert of New Haven (1838), Belknap of New Hampshire (1784), and Sullivan (1795) of Maine 1 say nothing about log houses or cabins in the seventeenth century, although Belknap mentioned them on the New England frontier in his own day, and several describe early housing in considerable detail. The first suggestion of the Log Cabin Myth that I have been able to discover is in a history of Dedham, Massachusetts, that came out in 1827. Describing the appearance of the village in 1664, and commenting (very incorrectly) on the scarcity of carpenters or trained artisans in early New England, this writer declares: These houses therefore must have been principally constructed by farmers, not by mechanics, and have been very rude and inconvenient. They were probably log-houses.2 T H E LOG-CABIN C A M P A I G N

The next log-cabin statement, although it goes no further than Dedham's cautious "probably," was much more important, for it occurred in a book of wide circulation and at the precise moment to be believed. This statement was a little footnote in the Rev. Alexander Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers (1841). T o the passage in Mourns Relation where Bradford and Winslow describe the rain1

T h e dates given are of the first edition, or of the completion of the manuscript, if publication was long delayed. 2 Erastus Worthington, History of Dedham, p. 13. Mr. Shurtleff intended to search the historical novels of mid-nineteenth century for references to log cabins, but did not get around to it; and the editor has had neither the time nor the patience.

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189

storm of February 4, 1621, which "caused much daubing of our houses to fall downe," Young appends the footnote, "Their houses were probably log-huts, thatched, and the interstices filled with clay." 3 That seems to have done the trick. Mr. Young's preface is dated June 1, 1841, and he must have been preparing his copy for the press during the logcabin campaign of 1840. Not even the dreamiest recluse could have escaped log cabins that fall, and Mr. Young dwelt in no ivory tower; he was an active Boston minister, and a Whig. An unlucky sneer in a Democratic newspaper, to the effect that the White House was too good for William Henry Harrison, who would be content with a log cabin and plenty of hard cider, gave opportunity for effective contrast and to turn democratic propaganda against the Democrats. It became the log cabin and hard cider campaign. There were log-cabin badges and log-cabin songs, a Log Cabin newspaper and log-cabin clubs, big log cabins where the thirsty were regaled with hard cider that jealous Democrats alleged to be spiked with whiskey; little log cabins carried on floats in political processions, with latchstring out, cider barrel by the door, coon-skin nailed up beside, and real smoke coming out of the chimney.4 Mr. Young would have been less than human if he had resisted the temptation to connect Pilgrim Fathers with "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." In that romantic era Americans reared in log cabins liked to think of Pilgrim Fathers 3 Page 179, n. See above, pp. 103-04, for a discussion of the meaning of daubing. 4 S. E. Morison, Oxford History of the United States (Oxford, 1927), II, 32.

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T H E L O G CABIN M Y T H

and Mothers living in log cabins. Conversely, if the Pilgrims lived in log cabins, William Henry Harrison was the legitimate heir to their sturdy virtues. The emotional value of the log cabin may be gathered from a campaign speech of Daniel Webster, made at Saratoga on August 19, 1840: Gentlemen, it did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin; but my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin, raised amid the snow-drifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early that, when the smoke first rose from its rude chimney, and curled over the frozen hills, there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it, to teach them the hardships endured by the generations which have gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections, and the touching narratives and incidents, which mingle with all I know of this primitive family abode. I weep to think that none of those who inhabited it are now among the living; and if ever I am ashamed of it, or if I ever fail in affectionate veneration for him who reared it, and defended it against savage violence and destruction, cherished all the domestic virtues beneath its roof, and through the fire and blood of a seven years' revolutionary war, shrunk from no danger, no toil, no sacrifice, to serve his country, and to raise his children to a condition better than his own, may my name and the name of my posterity be blotted for ever from the memory of mankind! 5 Most appropriately it was former President John Tyler — the " T y l e r T o o " of 1840 — who introduced the Log Cabin Myth to Virginia. In his address at the two hundred 5

Daniel Webster, Works

(1851 ed.), II, 30.

A COMEDY OF ERRORS

191

and fiftieth anniversary celebration of Jamestown in 1857, President Tyler said: The log Cabin is built, its covering of reeds, and the fortification made of logs and brush to guard against surprise from a savage foe, is hastily constructed. . . . c At the conclusion of this speech, Governor Henry A . Wise, "who was on the stand, in response to numerous and enthusiastic calls from the audience, thus addressed it": Here the Old World first met the New. Here the White man first met the Red for settlement and colonization. Here the White man first wielded the axe to cut the first tree, for the first log cabin\ Here the first log cabin, was built for the first village. . . .7 Y A N K E E NOTIONS

The ball is now kicked to the Puritans, who keep it briskly in play until well after the Civil War, when the Cavaliers recover it on a fumble and carry it down the field for a touchdown. Henry Bronson wrote, in his History of Water bury, Connecticut (1858): In the course of the summer of 1678, a few houses were erected on the newly selected site for the village. They were 6 Southern Literary Messenger, X X I V , no. 6 (June 1857), p. 437. W e are indebted to Mrs. Bullock f o r this reference. It may not be the first mention of Jamestown log cabins in print, but there is no reference to them in any earlier history of Virginia, including such recent ones as the history b y " A Citizen of Virginia" appended to Joseph Martin's Gazetteer of Virginia (Charlottesville, 1835), H e n r y H o w e , Historical Collections of Virginia (Charleston, S. C., 1846), and the Virginia volume in Lippincott's Cabinet Histories (Philadelphia, 1852). 1 Southern Literary Messenger, X X I V , 462. Quoted in L y o n G . T y l e r , Cradle of the Republic (Richmond, 1900), pp. 21-22.

T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

192

constructed of logs, after the fashion of the new settlements of the present day.8 But when we turn to the records, the Waterbury pioneers' "Articles of Association" (Mr. Bronson's sole source), we find only this: We determin that every parson that tacks up alotments att mattatucke within four yer after the datt hereof shall build agood substan shall Dwelling house [at least eighteen feet in length and sixteen feet wide and] nine foot between joynts with a good chimly in the forsaid place.9 The phrase "nine foot between joynts" (between sill and plate) 10 proves that a frame construction was anticipated; the phrase is senseless for a log-wall building. Nor is it likely that a log cabin would have been considered a "substan shall Dwelling house" in 1678. The earliest instance of a log-cabin illustration for a pioneer settlement that we have found appears in the Rev. David D. Field's Centennial Address on Middletown, Connecticut (1853). 1 1 Dr. Field correctly paraphrased the town vote of February 2, 1652/53, on building a meetinghouse, the original of which, mentioning sill and plate, clearly indicates a framed structure.12 But when he put 8

Page 17. Id., pp. 8-9. T h e clause in brackets was inserted from another copy of the Articles b y Bronson. 10 See Index for meaning of "joint." u Centennial Address, with Historical Sketches of . . . Middletown and its Parishes (Middletown, 1853), p. 38. 12 "It was agreed at a meeting at John Hall's house, to build a meeting house and to make it twenty foot square: and ten foot between sill and plat: the height of it" (MS., " T o w n Votes and Proprietors' Records," Middletown, I, 10; copied for us by Professor S. H . Brockunier of Wesleyan). 9

A COMEDY OF ERRORS

193

this in the hands of an artist it came out as a nineteenthcentury log cabin, surrounded b y what appears to be a circle of hitching-posts or a Druidical circle done in logs. 1 3 J o h n G . Palfrey provided another imaginary log cabin and advanced the myth another stage in his monumental History

of New

England.

P a l f r e y , too, was writing during

a log-cabin campaign. In a footnote he remarked somewhat cautiously: A t the very earliest period, it was necessary for the great body of the emigrants to be content with any sort of shelter from the weather. After a while, when saw-mills furnished timber and boards, and shipments of salable articles brought plenty of iron from abroad, the villages began to consist of frame-houses. In the interval between these two periods, the settlers, it is probable, made themselves comfortable in log-houses, of a construction similar to those which are still seen in new settlements, wherever made in the United States. Josselyn says (Account of T w o Voyages, &c., 20) that there were "not above twenty or thirty houses" at Boston, at the time of his visit in 1638. He was not an accurate witness, but he could not possibly have intended to say that Boston had only thirty dwellings at that time. B y "houses" he must have meant such as had timber frames, or walls of stone or brick. Johnson (Wonder-Working Providence, 174), 1 4 in or about 1650, speaks of the Lord's having "been pleased to turn all the wigwams, huts, and hovels the English dwelt in, at their first coming, into orderly, fair, and well-built houses." In 1621, a storm at Plymouth "caused much daubing of the houses to fall down" (Mourt's Journal, 30), b y which I suppose is to be understood the earth used to 13 See the vignette on our title page. Also reproduced in A . W . Hazen, History of the First Congregational Church of Middletovm (1920). " T h e 1867 edition; this is the passage that we have quoted in Chapter V from the 1910 edition, p. 2 1 1 .

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T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

close the chinks between the logs, which, laid one upon another, made the walls. . . . 15 This long footnote was accompanied by an engraving, "from a drawing in Indian ink by Washington Allston," showing "House of an Early Settler" — a log cabin of the nineteenth-century type. John G. Palfrey was long regarded as the law and the gospel in New England history; and Allston's drawing, reproduced in schoolbooks and elsewhere, helped to fix the Log Cabin Myth in the popular mind. A few log-cabin illustrations have undoubtedly done more to spread the myth than all the writings of historians put together. The popular Williams pictures of an all-logcabin Plymouth that came out around 1887 have been framed in schoolhouses throughout the country, reproduced in textbooks, and mailed home by tourists in the form of picture postcards. The beautifully illustrated Pageant of America, edited by Yale professors and published by the Yale University Press in 1925, not only put the stamp of authenticity on these drawings, but produced an entirely new log-cabin picture of Jamestown by Mr. H. A. Ogden. The harm wrought by this sort of carelessness is incalculable, for the Pageant has a wide circulation, and is the natural source of information for school children, pageant organizers, and illustrators.16 It is pleasant to note that correct information has already begun to seep down; M History of New England (Boston, i860), II, 62-63. By i 8 7 2 Mr. Palfrey was becoming a bit dubious — compare his Compendious History of New England (Boston, 1872), I, 296. 10 The editors of the Yale University Press, apparently convinced of their errors by Mr. Shurtleff's evidence, have invited the editor to correct their faulty text and to replace log-cabin illustrations by others in the next printing of the Pageant.

A COMEDY OF ERRORS

195

America Builds Homes by Alice Dalgliesh and Lois Maloy (Scribners, 1938) has drawings of an early N e w England village and a Swedish log cabin that are both beautiful and correct. 17 But why were historians so persistently wrong? Because, for one thing, a common matter such as housing was not regarded as important until the recent rise of social history. Nobody thought it worth while to study the English housing background in order to interpret the colonial sources. When historians found "cabin" or "hut" in the sources they naturally thought of log cabins, not knowing that "cabin" meant something else to the English. Most general historians relied on local antiquarians for such information, and by the close of the Civil W a r the predilection of N e w England antiquarians for log cabins had become so strong that whatever source material they found was turned into log cabins. President Porter of Yale, in an address on the N e w England meetinghouse read before the N e w England Society of Brooklyn, said, The original structures were doubtless built of logs and thatched, with here and there a possible exception. None of those of the first age are now standing. We know the dimensions of one built in Dedham in 1638, viz., that it was 36 feet long, 20 feet wide and 12 feet "in the stud." 18 Dr. Porter was so imbued with the Myth that he did not see that the phrase "in the stud" precludes a log-wall structure. 17 On the other hand, Roger Duvoisin, And There Was America (New York, 1939) shows a sort of futurist log-cabin Plymouth. 18 Noah Porter, The New England Meeting House (from the New Englander for May 1883), p. 6.

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T H E LOG CABIN M Y T H

Log houses have no studs. And the Dedham Town Records for January i, 1637/38, which he misquoted, are even more specific: . . . to contriue the Fabricke of a Meetinghouse to be in length 36 Foote and 20: foote in bredth, and betweene the vpper and nether sell [sill] in the studds 12: foote. . . . 1 0

An even more striking instance of misinterpreting the records is found in Edward E. Atwater's History of the Colony of Neiv Haven (New Haven, 1881): The temporary shelters, which the first planters of N e w England provided for their families till they could erect permanent dwellings, were of different kinds. Some planters carried tents with them to the place chosen for a new house, some built wigwams like those of the natives. Either species would suffice in summer; but for winter they usually built huts, as they called them, similar to the modern log-cabins in the forests of the West, though in some instances if not in most, they were roofed, after the English fashion, with thatch.20

And he supports this by the familiar misconception of "daubing" as equivalent to the chinking between logs. The New Haven records contain a bill of sale of a house and lot and "two loads of clay brought home." Mr. Atwater comments: "The clay was doubtless to be 'daubed' between the logs." 2 1 He ignores the abundant evidence in the New Haven records of framed house construction, and Lambert's description of the early New Haven houses, "The space between the clapboards and the interior side walls were usually filled with clay." 22 Yet the mythical New Haven log cabins, built out of two loads of clay and Atwater's 18 20

Dedham Records, III, 38. Page 71.

21 22

Id., pp. 79-80. See above, p. 115.

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imagination, continue to affect descriptions of early housing in that colony. William B. Weeden repeated the mistakes of the local historians about log cabins, and added more of his own. Speaking of Boston in 1655, he writes, " T h e 'hovels and huts,' i.e. log cabins of the settlers, had been transformed into 'orderly and well-built' houses according to our Puritan Johnson." 23 A s we have already seen, Johnson's "hovels and huts" were not log cabins. Quoting Atwater's " t w o loads of clay," Weeden remarks that "the log huts, if driven from Boston, were certainly in the country and in the hamlets." 24 Worthington and Bronson are quoted on log cabins in Dedham and Waterbury: Dedham had 95 of the original log-houses standing near together in 1664. Their whole value was £691. Four only came to £20; the most ranged from £3 to £io.25 Weeden forgot that on an earlier page 28 from Lechford the specifications for a house in 1640 that cost £21. A n d for the Maine we find many framed houses valued for as little as £3.

he had quoted Boston framed same period in at £8, and some

SOUTHERN S E N T I M E N T

So far, we have been dealing largely with N e w England errors about N e w England colonies. N o Southern historian that w e can discover had suggested the existence of log cabins south of the Mason and Dixon Line, but Governor 23 Economic and Social 1890), I, 212-13. 25 1,

History

of New

England,

283; this is quoted from Worthington's Dedham

""I, 213. Cf. above, pp. 91-92.

1620-2789 24 1,

(Boston, 214.

(1827), p. 13.

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T H E LOG CABIN

MYTH

Wise and President Tyler, at the Jamestown celebration of 1857, had sounded forth a trumpet, and the echoes of their blast mingled with Yankee overtones after the din of civil war subsided. Despite the warnings of the President's son, Dr. Lyon G. Tyler, against the myths and errors of Yankee historians, the Log Cabin Myth in its latest Palfrey position — sandwiched between the crude "cottage" and the sophisticated framed house — was presently adopted by Virginian historians of Virginia, where it acquired such substantial and moral support that later New England historians are powerless to destroy it. Even so careful and unprejudiced a writer as Philip Alexander Bruce reads the existence of the log-cabin form of construction for dwellings into the first years of the Jamestown scene. In his Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1896) he says that it is . . . quite probable that for a number of years after the foundation of Jamestown, neither plank nor nails entered into the construction of a majority of the houses in which the colonists lived. Undressed logs were doubtless the material principally in use. 27

In view of the prevalent conception at the period in which he wrote, it is not strange that Bruce should interpolate such a comment. And it is significant of the power of this conception that his remark about "undressed logs" at Jamestown is not only frankly expressed as his own supposition (for he adduces no evidence for it) but is preceded and followed by evidence which shows that the early Virginia dwellings were either "cabins" or "cottages." - n , 147.

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199

By the turn of the century, after many illustrations and countless picture postcards representing Puritan or Cavalier at home — always in a log cabin — had been distributed, a sort of psychological predisposition grew up to make a log of every timber. For instance, Samuel H. Yonge, in 1904, declared that Sir Thomas Gates added "a number . . . of log houses arranged in two rows, some of which were two stories and a garret high." 28 But what source does he cite? Ralph Hamor's "two faire rowes of howses, all of framed Timber"! 29 Later Virginians discovered local foundations of their own on which to rear the Log Cabin Myth, corresponding to the "daubing" statement in Mourfs Relation for N e w England. These "Virginia house" quotations from Hening's Statutes served the double purpose of taking the curse of Yankee origin off the old log cabin, and naturalizing it in the Old Dominion. The first statute in question was an Act of the Virginia Assembly in 1647 for the building of more effective prisons in each county: WHEREAS divers escapes have been made by prisoners, and more likely to be, for want of sufficient prisons in the severall countyes, to which the poverty of the countrey and want of necessaries here will not admitt a possibillitie to erect 28

Samuel H . Yonge, The Site of old "James Toivne," 1601-1698 (Richmond, 1904), pp. 24-25; (Richmond, 1907), p. 38. Also on p. 25 (p. 39 of 1907 ed.) he says, " O n account of unseasoned or sappy timber being used for the log houses, but five or six remained serviceable in 1617"; but his source is Captain John Smith's statement that Captain Samuel Argall found "but fiue or six houses" when he arrived in 1617 (Works, Arber ed., p. 535). The need of seasoned logs to build log cabins is Dr. Yonge's special contribution. " See above, p. 145.

T H E L O G CABIN M Y T H

200

other then such houses as wee frequently inhabitt, by which meanes much damage hath arisen to the severall sherriffs, comissioners and counties specially for want of interpretation what shall be accompted a sufficient prison and what provision shall be made against prisoners thence escaping; Be it therefore enacted, That such houses provided for that purpose shall be accompted sufficient prisons as are built according to the forme of Virginia houses, from which noe escape can be made without breaking or forcing some part of the prison house. . . . 30 In March 1657/58 the Assembly passed an act entitled "Pennalty for not Building Prisons," in which it instructed the sheriffs to find "remedie against the severall counties which shall be delinquent in the building of prisonns"; 3 1 which would seem to indicate that the previous law had been disregarded. In March 1661/62, however, the Assembly reviewed the earlier legislation on the building of suitable prisons, and enacted the following: W H E R E A S the first act of the assembly held att James Citty the third of November, 1647, and continued by the assembly held there the 13th of March, 1657, for prevention of escapes for prisoners, hath enacted that sufficient prisons should be built in each county, and that a house built after the forme of a Virginia house (our ability not extending to build stronger) should be accompted a sufficient prison . . . which acts have for want of a penalty never been put in execution . . . For remedy whereof Be it hereby enacted that according to the said acts a good strong prison built after the forme of Virginia houses be built within eight months after the date of this act, by the court at the charge of the county, upon 30

Statutes at Large . . . of Virginia (ed. W . W . Hening; N e w York,

1823), I, 340. 51 Id., I, 460.

A COMEDY OF

ERRORS

201

penalty of being fined five thousand pounds of tobacco, and be answerable for escapes as aforesaid. . . . S 2

This act was repealed in April 1684. A common-sense inference from these statutes would be that the Burgesses were declaring that an ordinary and customary framed house of the country, "a house built after the forme of a Virginia house," would meet the law, and "be accompted a sufficient prison," since a "stronger" type of building — such as a stone structure or a "logg house" of the sort built for a prison in Maryland in 1669 — would cost too dear. A "Virginia house" between 1647 and 1664 we should suppose to mean the sort of house commonly built in Virginia; and that sort, from 1621 on, was the English framed house, as described in John Hammond's Leah and Rachel in 1656: Pleasant in their building, which although for most part they are but one story besides the loft, and built of wood, yet contrived so delightfull, that your ordinary houses in England are not so handsome, for usually the rooms are large, daubed and whitelimed, glazed and flowered, and if not glazed windows, shutters which are made very pritty and convenient. 33

Such a house strongly framed and well plastered could not be escaped from "without breaking or forcing." Such houses sufficed for our country jails until within the memory 32 Id., II, 76-77. Replaced by the following in April 1684 (III, 1 5 ) : "And be it further enacted, That a good strong and substantiall prison, after the forme of Virginia houseing be built, and continued in each county sometime before the first of January next, b y the justices of the peace in their sessions, and at the charge of each county, under penalty of being fined five thousand pounds of tobacco, and of being answerable for any escapes which shall be made for want of such sufficient prison." 33 Narratives of Early Maryland (ed. C. C. Hall), pp. 297-98.

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of man. Yet Mrs. Mary Newton Stanard, assuming the direct contrary from the plain meaning of these statutes,34 declared in 1917, "so much the rule did it [the log cabin] become that it was known as the 'Virginia house.' " Mrs. Stanard's curiously inverted conclusion has now become the variety Virginiana of the Log Cabin Myth. Mr. C. E. Kemper, in an otherwise accurate article on the Valley of Virginia that appeared in 1922, calls the logcabin type "the 'Virginia manner of building,' " 3 5 and Professor William E. Dodd as recently as 1937 quoted Mrs. Stanard's husband to the effect that "the log house became so characteristic as to be called 'the Virginia house.' " 3 6 This interpolation of "log cabin" into the phrase "Virginia house" as used in Hening's Statutes gave the Log Cabin Myth, hitherto a somewhat sickly plant in Virginia, so vigorous a stimulant that it quickly blossomed into full Mrs. Stanard does not refer to the statutes in question, but as Hening is almost the best-known source of Virginia colonial history, and as Dr. E. G . Swem, in his monumental Virginia Historical Index (2 vols., Roanoke, 1934-36), mentions no other use of the term in the corpus of Virginia source material, we may assume that the Statutes of 1647, 1662, 1684, and 1712/13 (see below) were her sources. W e have also searched the Journals of the House of Burgesses and Legislative Journals of the Council (edited by H . R . Mcllwaine). T h e last reference in Hening (IV, 39) to "the Virginia house" is in an Act of the Assembly in 1712/13 concerning "a sufficient sealing, planting, cultivating, and improving of lands already granted, or hereafter to be taken up and patented": — ". . . every such pattentee shall be obliged, within three years . . . to erect and build on some part of the said tract, one good dwelling house, after the manner of Virginia building, to contain at least twenty foot in length, and sixteen foot in breadth. . . ." 35 C. E. Kemper, " T h e Settlement of the Valley," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, X X X (1922), 180; cf. X X I X , 416, n. ™The Old South: Struggles for Democracy (New York, 1937), p.

37. n.

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flower. Witness this extract from Mrs. Mary Newton Stanard's Colonial Virginia — Its People and Customs: Poorly provided in many ways as were the first English Americans they found ready for their axes and saws great plenty of goodly timber upon which they at once fell to work, and Virginia pine and cedar trees speedily became roof-trees. The construction of these is left to the imagination, but they were, of course, the crudest and most primitive of shanties. Hastily put together of green plank, they were soon warped and rickety and it is not surprising that when Sir Thomas Dale came out to be governor, in 1611, he should have found them about to fall down on the heads of their owners. Ere long the flimsy plank hut gave way to the sturdier if equally primitive log-cabin, which deserves to be called the earliest form of colonial architecture, for so much the rule did it become that it was known as the "Virginia house" — as the cloth the busy housewife wove for bed linen and clothing was "Virginia cloth." . . . She was glad of her dwelling of logs with the bark on, chinked with mud or with clay to keep the weather out, and roofed with poles or with clapboard. . . . As time went on, the one-room log-cabin developed into the double cabin with two rooms below and loft above and a shed-room kitchen adding to its commodiousness, and sometimes a shingled roof and weather-boarded sides, or even a rude porch, gave it further comfort and sightliness. Later, when these primitive abodes were supplanted by frame and brick houses with steep roofs and big chimneys like those the colonists remembered in old England the "Virginia house" became and remained the home of the very poor man and the frontiersman.37 Mrs. Stanard's theory has been a godsend to the logcabineers, for it relieves them of their embarrassment over 37

Philadelphia, 1917, pp. 55-56.

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the lack of log-house evidence, and the overwhelming body of framed-house documents. The old Log Cabin floats through the air, as it were, coming down to earth in the statutes as a "Virginia house" whenever the Burgesses have a spasm of prison building. It is true that log prisons were built in Maryland and North Carolina, as well as in N e w Hampshire, but it would be a bold assumption that Leah necessarily followed Rachel. Usually, she did just the contrary. Professor Dodd includes in his highly readable history of The Old South: Struggles for Democracy a charming description of "father, son and servant" building a log cabin in democratic fashion during the seventeenth century, supporting it by the "Virginia house" theory, and a quotation from the late Fairfax Harrison (a noted authority on horses), "I have no reasonable doubt that log houses were built in Virginia before 1650." 3 8 The latest exposition of the Myth as respects Virginia by Mr. George C. Gregory 3 9 resulted (the editor is informed) in the Works Progress Administration constructing in 1938 a pageant background of nineteenth-century log cabins, together with a round-log church fearful and wonderful to behold, of a type never constructed anywhere at any time, to represent the Raleigh colony of 1585 at Roanoke Island. Mr. Gregory, who has made a very pretty model of an all-log-cabin Jamestown, writes: Until a few years ago no one questioned the fact that our first Jamestown houses were built of logs. We had an un38

The Old South, p. 37, n. " L o g Houses at Jamestown, 1607," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, X L I V (1936), 287-95. 39

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broken tradition to this effect, and it has never been denied by any Virginia historian; but to the contrary, Col. Samuel H. Yonge, Dr. Lyon G. Tyler, and Dr. William G. Stanard understood what the words used meant and stated that the first Jamestown houses were built of logs.40 On the contrary, it was not until the 1857 celebration that anyone suggested a log Jamestown. Where was the "unbroken tradition" during those two hundred and fifty years? Can anyone seriously believe that an oral tradition of so strange and outlandish a type of housing seeped down through two centuries and a half, without anybody — contemporary, antiquarian, or historian — noting it down? And, as we have seen, Colonel Yonge and Mr. Stanard did not understand "what the words meant." 41 The words on which Mr. Gregory relies are the "rales of wood" with which Captain John Smith says the earliest Jamestown church — the one roofed with an awning — was walled. Now, a rail is very different from a log,42 and Captain Smith's description fits either of two forms of English cottage and cabin construction, as we have already seen. Nor are we much impressed by the possibility that Captain Smith had seen log cabins in Transylvania, or by 40

Id., p. 288. " D r . T y l e r seems to have been converted b y Colonel Yonge. In the first edition of his Cradle of the Republic (Richmond, 1900), Dr. T y l e r quoted the eloquent words of Governor Wise in 1857, but it was the "first" that interested him, not the log cabins. His own description of the early buildings is sound, and his frontispiece, representing Jamestown in 1622, shows only framed buildings. In his second edition (Richmond, 1906, p. v ) , Dr. T y l e r refers to the "excellent monograph . . . of Samuel H . Yonge," and (p. 43) introduces log cabins before the framed buildings. 42 See above, pp. 41-42.

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the fact that Russia had been visited by several Elizabethan Englishmen. Other log-house sections of Europe were even better known; but if the English had several types of wood and wattle dwellings to which they were accustomed, and which could easily be erected in Virginia with the materials and tools at hand, why should they have borrowed from continental Europe? N o evidence of such borrowing exists, except this forced construction of Captain Smith's poor "rales of wood"! M O R E Y A N K E E ERRORS

It must not be supposed that New England historians have purged themselves of error in recent years. Mr. J. Truslow Adams published a work in 1921 that was supposed to set all the crooked paths of New England history straight; but the old Log Cabin is still there.43 The most eminent living New England historian, Professor Charles M. Andrews, stated in the first edition of his monumental Colonial Period of American History that the first houses at St. Mary's, Maryland, were "log cabins"; yet the footnote refers to Cornwallis's "cottages." 44 He quotes Colonel Banks misinformed against Colonel Banks better informed, as to Godfrey's "rough log cabin" in Maine.45 Mr. J. Frederick Kelly, in his otherwise excellent Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut,46 declares, " A t first, and before the advent of the framed house, log cabins were " " A log hut about twenty feet square," the Plymouth storehouse (Founding of New England, p. 99). 14 II (1936), 288 and n. 1; cf. above, p. 127. 43 1 (1934), 424-25. But Professor Andrews has informed the editor that log cabins and log houses will disappear from his next edition. " N e w Haven, 1927, p. 6.

"PLYMOUTH IN 1622" The mythical log-cabin Plymouth and log fort, based on defective translations of De Rasieres. Most influential in spreading the Myth.

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evidently not uncommon." He quotes as authority the baseless assertion of Atwater,47 and two "traditions" relating to the last decade of the century, one as to the existence of a log cabin in Guilford in 1690, and the other vouched for by "descendants of the original settler" who was alleged to have built a log cabin in Colchester, settled in 1701. Neither instance is impossible, but any tradition of a "cabin" was almost certain to have "log" attached to it after 1840, and cannot be regarded as good evidence.48 It is particularly unfortunate that a trained architect should be misled, since it is on such authorities that historians have to rely for their information. The general historian cannot be blamed for his own want of specialized knowledge to understand references to building construction in seventeenth-century records. Fortunately there are a number of painstaking antiquarian investigations into early colonial housing, like those of Henry C. Mercer, Percival H. Lombard, and Henry Chandlee Forman,49 upon which he may rely with confidence. And the findings of Dr. Fiske Kimball have been confirmed by all evidence uncovered since his book, the first effective challenge to 47

See above, p. 196. " I n reply to the editor's request to Mr. Kelly f o r further evidence that led to his belief in early log cabins, he courteously communicated the following: Statement to him by John Norton of Guilford, over eighty years old, that his ancestor's first house at Moose Hill, built 1690, was a log house; statements by secondary writers such as William de L . Love, David D. Field, Noah Porter, and Henry T . Blake, which we have dealt with elsewhere. 49 Jamestown and St. Mary's, Buried Cities of Romance (Baltimore, 1938). Mr. Forman, who was chief architect of the Jamestown Archaeological Project for the United States Department of the Interior, has produced a most readable and scholarly account of the earliest dwellings in Maryland and Virginia, illustrated by his own drawings.

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the Log Cabin Myth, appeared. Professor Thomas J. Wertenbaker, the first general historian to make his own investigation of early colonial housing, has concluded that there were no log houses in Virginia or N e w England until the eighteenth century.50 Dr. Carl Bridenbaugh, in his painstaking Cities in the Wilderness (1938), has reached the same conclusion. So firmly established, however, is the Log Cabin Myth, and so widely has it been disseminated by illustrations, picture postcards, pageants, and reconstructions, that the dispelling of it will take many years. 60 Letter to the editor. Virginia housing will be discussed in the next volume of Professor Wertenbaker's Founding of American Civilization.

IX CONCLUSION this study of types of dwellings in the seventeenthcentury colonies from Newfoundland to North Carolina there emerge certain conclusions, some definite and others tentative. FROM

First, the definite conclusions, which we believe we have proved. The unique trace of a log dwelling in the English, French, or Dutch colonies before the last quarter of the seventeenth century is a single "logg house" mentioned in a Maine document of 1662; and that may have been a defensive work. Each group of European colonists in the seventeenth century erected the sort of dwellings they were accustomed to at home. The only colonists who brought with them a log-house technique were the Swedes, who began to settle on the shores of Delaware Bay in 1638. T h e y built log-wall dwellings from the beginning. It is highly probable that these log houses included prototypes of the later log cabin, built of round logs with notched corners and the ends protruding, because that was one of the several types of log-wall dwellings common in Sweden. But all examples of Swedish-American houses that have survived are built of squared or plank-shaped timbers. This squared-timber construction was used by the English for defensive works at home and in their colonies. Virginians were building these blockhouses as early as 1611, and in Maine they are found about the middle of the century. Blockhouses, also called garrison houses, were built

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primarily for defense, and used only incidentally as dwellings. Three instances of log-house prisons, one in Maryland, one in North Carolina, and the third in New Hampshire, are found in the records between 1669 and 1699. These were undoubtedly of the blockhouse, solidwall construction, since the cabin type of rounded logs with moss-filled chinks would not have confined prisoners very long. In every English colony except Newfoundland and the Sagadahoc settlement in Maine, the settlers first built temporary structures which were variously called huts, tents, cabins, booths, cottages, or wigwams. All except the wigwams were traditional types from the mother country. Some were conical structures of poles, covered with earth; others were made of saplings stuck in the ground and bent over in the shape of an inverted U, strengthened with woven branches, and covered with layers of pressed bark or Indian mats. These were called booths or wigwams in the North and cabins in the South. Others, called huts, cottages, or (rarely) cabins, were rough framed structures with thatched roofs, walled with clapboard and daubed with clay. Others approximated the "crotchet" or "cruck" construction of contemporary English cottages. These temporary dwellings were replaced, at intervals varying from a few months to a few years, by framed houses of types familiar in England. All the earliest English colonies from Newfoundland to Virginia inclusive counted among their members a considerable number of carpenters, sawyers, and other woodworkers, who brought out all necessary tools to prepare oak and other timber for export and for local building.

CONCLUSION

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Sawn plank and riven clapboards were among the first colonial exports to England. Given the skill, the tools, and the right materials, it was easier for the settlers to erect dwellings of traditional English types than to learn a new technique of fitting and jointing pine or spruce logs, for which, moreover, they had no teachers. Except for a few wrinkles (such as woven mats and pressed bark) acquired from the Indians for roofing or sheathing their temporary dwellings, the English conservatively followed inherited crafts. Within ten years of their foundation the English settlements consisted almost entirely of framed wooden houses covered with clapboard, roofed with thatch or cedar shingle, and using various forms of filling such as wattleand-daub, nogging, or plain clay daubing, between the outer wall and the interior sheathing, which was sometimes omitted. Exceptionally, a few brick and stone houses had been built by the wealthier people, and a few temporary cottages and flimsy cabins were still occupied by the poor. Most emphatically we wish to assert that it is unhistorical and inaccurate to use log construction for dwelling houses when illustrating or reproducing any European settlement in North America in the seventeenth century, except that of the Delaware Swedes, or the Maine villages after 1690. Delaware Bay was the principal center from which logwall dwelling construction spread. There the Swedish loghouse craft was reinforced in the eighteenth century by immigrants from the forested regions of Germany and Switzerland where log houses were common. The ScotchIrish who came hard on the heels of the Germans adopted the log house and helped to spread it along the frontier. Possibly they favored the proper log cabin of round logs

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with notched joints over the squared-log with mortised or dovetailed joints, but this is not certainly known; and the first appearance of "log cabin" in their writings is in 1770. Even before the Germans came, it is possible that the English of Virginia had learned the log-house technique from the Swedes, and were using it for slaves' quarters; but the only evidence of this is an incidental remark of Cotton Mather's seafaring neighbor when relating his dream as an Algerian captive. On Delaware Bay we have positive evidence that English settlers were still building framed houses exclusively in 1680. Probably there was a line of influence independent of the Delaware source leading to the log cabin. During King Philip's War (1675-77) "garrison houses" — fortified dwellings of the blockhouse type — were built in all exposed settlements of the N e w York and N e w England frontier. Many of these have survived in northern N e w England; all have solid walls of hewn timber halved or dovetailed at the corners. An historian of Maine, writing in 1832, states that this was the common type of dwelling on the southwestern Maine frontier from 1690 to 1745, an era when the settlers were in constant danger of French and Indian raids. A round-log type obviously would have afforded little protection against gunfire. Probably the log cabin of the N e w England backwoods developed from these hewn-timber houses. But this question of the spread and evolution of the American log cabin has been very little studied, and our hypothesis is little more than a guess. Another puzzling question remains unsolved. W h y did the English and Dutch settlers take so long to adopt the log house? In partial answer I suggest that in a transference

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of craft culture the land emigration of colonists from tidewater into the interior effects more changes than the original Atlantic crossing. In a migration by sea there are no new experiences that affect one's way of living on land. An unbroken cargo of craft culture is landed on the shores of the N e w World. But in a land migration, often effected by stages and passing through successive zones of earlier settlement, there were many occasions to break old patterns of behavior and to form new habits. Moreover, even the crowded holds of seventeenth-century vessels had room for the tools of the more essential crafts. Trained workers such as sawyers and house carpenters, reared in an ancient tradition, accompanied the earliest groups of English, French, and Dutch settlers. But the American pioneer who turned his face to the setting sun was seldom a trained carpenter. He traveled by necessity with a very meager equipment, and found no room in his saddlebags — provided he was so fortunate as to own a pack animal —for heavy tools or hardware. T o build a framed house in the wilderness was beyond his means, or skill. The log house of Swedish and German origin was exactly what our early western pioneers wanted. Once the art of fitting and notching was mastered, a log house could be constructed in a jiffy by a group of neighbors out of pine or spruce logs that would otherwise be wasted, with the use of no other tool than an axe, and without nails. This combination of cheapness and convenience with a great folk-movement into the forested slopes of the Appalachians probably explains why the Swedish log house, after existing on the Delaware tidewater for over half a century without imitators, suddenly began to move westward with the

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German and Scotch-Irish pioneers, until it became the typical dwelling of the old American frontier. Such, as we see it, was the Log Cabin Fact. Between 1840 and 1917 there was built up by writers (and even more by illustrators) the Log Cabin Myth. According to this theory, the first English settlers of Virginia and New England invented and built cabins of round logs as their earliest type of dwelling, and the log cabin has an unbroken history of three centuries as the typical home of American democracy. W e have traced the rise and growth of this myth. It arose during the "log-cabin campaign" of 1840 through an emotional association of the log cabin with the American spirit, against a background of indifference to the recorded facts of early colonial housing and complete ignorance of seventeenth-century English housing. Once launched, the Log Cabin Myth found easy going. The public was predisposed to accept it, no historian had sufficient knowledge to challenge it, and the dominant school of sociology taught that arts and crafts evolved through a spontaneous reaction of the individual to his environment rather than by derivation from an older culture. Illustrators engraved the Jamestownlog-cabin and Pilgrim-log-cabin pictures on the public mind, so that even honest investigators turned every "cottage" or "cabin" into a log cabin, and every "timber," "plank," or "rail" into a log. In 1917 the Myth reached its fullest literary flower in Mrs. Mary Newton Stanard's Colonial Virginia. The first effective challenge to the Log Cabin Myth came ten years later, in Dr. Fiske Kimball's Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies. It was he who showed that New Sweden, alone of the American colonies, built log-

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215

wall dwellings in the seventeenth century, and that the log cabin did not become typical in the English colonies until well on in the eighteenth century. The data since unearthed by Henry C. Mercer, Percival Lombard, Henry C. Forman, Harry Andrews Wright, Albert Matthews, Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, and the present writer, have confirmed Mr. Kimball's conclusion; yet the myth continues to flourish through popular illustrations, false reconstructions, amateur pageants, anniversary celebrations and careless statements by ill-informed historians. W e dare not boast that we have finally put it to sleep, since the American will to believe in it is still strong; and visual representations, however ill-founded, have a hundredfold power over the written word. W e can only offer our data to a "candid world," and hope that all who seek to learn the truth about early colonial housing will consult our pages before giving further currency to the Log Cabin Myth.

INDEX

INDEX Aberdeen, Scotland, 177 Abo, University of, 173 Abraham, Mr., 123 Acadia, dwellings in, 66-71 Acrelius, Israel, 165 Adams, J. T., Founding of New England, 206 Adams, S. W . , Memorial History of Hartford County, Conn., 112«3 Adobe, io3n Africa, 1 j 9 Agamenticus, Me., 76 Albany County, W y o . , i8yn Algernoune Fort, see Fort Henry Algonkian Indians, i7n, 33 Allen, William, 83 Alline, John, 98 Allston, Washington, 194, illus. Almby Parish, Närke, Sweden, illus., 15 Altona, Holstein, 168 Andrews, C. M., Colonial Period of American History, 206. See also Trowbridge, Bertha M. Andrews, E. H., The Whitefield House, J9 Andriaesen, Maryn, 123 Andros, Gov. Edmund, 14 Annapolis Basin, 68 Appalachian Mountains, 213 Aptucxet trading post, 68, 109; illus., 109 Arbor, 34-5, 85n, 129, 137, 182; Indian, 25; Ulster, 179-80 Architect, 3, 82, 207 Architecture, 186 Argall, Capt. Samuel, 69-70, 147-8, 199"

Ark (ship), 127 Arts, preservation of, 57 Ash, 27, 30 Ashfield, Mass., log cabins in, i85n Atlantic Ocean, 213 Atwater, E. E., History of the Colony of New Haven, 196, 207 Auer, J. A . C. F., 107, i66n Augur, 45-7, 49. See also Tools Augusta, Me., 109 Austria, prehistoric log cabin, illus., 164 Avalon, Province of, Newfoundland, 66 Awning, 136 Axe, 47, 181, 203, 213; broad, 45-6, 49, 93, 121; felling, 45, 93; hewing, 46; pitching, 49 Balch, John, 84 Baltic Provinces, 163 Baltimore, Sir George Calvert, Lord of, 66, 127 Baltimore County, Md., 128 Banks, C. E., 206, History of York, Me., 77; Edward Godfrey, 77 Bar Harbor, Me., 21 Barbados, log cabin myth in, 5n Barbarous Massacre, The, 147 Bark, 25, 27-8, 85n, i n , n3-14, 120-1, 142, 144, i85n, 203, 211; pressed, 34; use in buildings, i7n, 25 (illus., 136) Barn, 76, 125-6, 136; English, i7n; framed, 30 Barnwell, Col. J., 181; Journal of the Tuscarora War, 181-2 Barrel stave, 36 Barricade, log, 43

220

INDEX

Bartlett, Stuart, i jn Batson, Stephen, 80 Batten, n ò Battlements, 105 Bavaria, 175 Baxter, J . P., Christopher Levett, 2on, 86n; Documentary History of Maine, 78-9; Sir Fernando Gorges, 76 Bay of Conception, 64-5 Bay of Fundy, 68 Beam, 17, 41, 60, 102, 108, 118, 121; definition of, 35; horizontal, 30; oak, 107; summer, 109; wind, I2J

Bedford, Va., 184 Beer, G . L., Origins of the British Colonial System, 147 Beetle head, 49 Belcher, Edward, 92 Belknap, Jeremy, 188; History of New Hampshire, 82 Bell, church, 141 Bell turret, 99 Berkeley Hundred, Va., 153 Berlin, Florence, 54, 174H Bermuda, 55, 140; dwellings in, 129-32 Bermuda Hundred, Va., 145 Berwick, Me., 81, 177 Beverley, Robert, 187; History . . . of Virginia, 24, 33 Beverly, Mass., 83 Bible, the, 35 Bit, 46-7, 49. See also Tools Bitumen, 142 Black Forest, Germany, 175 Blacksmith, 49 Blake, H . T . , 207n; Chronicles of New Haven Green, 120 Blaxton, William, 88 Blockhouse, 9-16, 56, 80, 100, IOJ, 108, n o , 128, 133, 144-6, IJ7, 162,

178-9, 186, 209; as dwelling, 10; called garrison house, 14; construction of, 10, 172; cornering of, illus., 1 1 ; definitions of, 9 - u , 13; frontier, 179; German, 10; Maine, 81; military, 12-16; N e w England, 14; Pennsylvania, 10, 175; Plymouth, 12; Swedish, 10, 169-71; timber, 4; Virginia, 13, 159 Bloody Brook Tavern, Mass., illus., 40 Blue Ridge Mountains, 183 Board, 28, 35-41, 43, 78, 92-3, 97100, 106, 119-21, 129, 136, 153, 193; definition of, 35; English, 36; export of, 47; export prohibited, 38; floor, 116; horizontal, 29; illus., 46; outside, 97, 172; price of, 48; sale of, 35; roof, 106, 141; sawn, 81, 157; sheathing, 87; vertical, 175; wall, 29 Boat, 49, 65, 149 Boat-making, 64 Bolton, C. K., Scotch Irish Pioneers, 176 Booth, 20-1, 24, 28, 35, 88, 210; canvas, 23, 91; definition of, 23; for beasts, 23; Ulster, 180 Boston, Mass., 36, 88-9, 160, 183, 189; description of, 91, 193, 197; harbor, 33, 95; mud-walled cottages in, 32; regulations of, 43; shortage of wood in, 90; T o w n Records, 37n, 95 Boston Record Commissioners, Second Report, 43, 92; Fourth Report, 37n, 41 Botetourt County, Va., 25-6 Boughs, 21, 24, 29, 34, 86, 90 "Bound" House, N . H., 81-2, 112 Bourne, Mass., 109 Bowling, 143

INDEX Brace, 17, 108, 125. See also Tools Brackenbury, Richard, 83-4 Bradford, Gov. William, 6, 107-9; 188-9; History of Plymouth Plantation, 40, 43, 86, 101, no; Journal, 102; on buildings, 101-2; on fortifications, 104 Braintree, Mass., Town Records, 98n Branches, see Boughs Brick, 19, 29, 87, 128, 144, 147, 193; church, 12; houses, 59, 146, 156, 158, 169; kilns, 112; nogging, i9n; walls, 95 Bricklayers, 46; regulation of, 47, 118 Brickmakers, 152 Brickmaking, 51, 146-7 Brickyard, 87 Bridenbaugh, Carl, Cities in the Wilderness, 208 Bridge, 43, 94, 96 Briefe Declaration of the Plantation of Virginia, A, 144 Briggs, M. S., Homes of the Pilgrim Fathers, i-jn, 29, 40, 101 Bristol, England, 6j British Museum, 132 Broadaxe, see Axe Brockunier, S. H., ¡92n Brockwell, Peter, 161 Bronson, Henry, 197; History of Waterbury, Conn., 191-2 Broughton, Thomas, 43 Brown, A. F., see Isham, N. M. Brown, Alexander, Genesis of the United States, 36, 74, 143 Browne, W . H., Archives of Maryland, 128 Bruce, P. A., Economic History of Virginia, 198 Brumbaugh, G. E., 175 Building agreements, 157-8

221

Buildings, removal of, 68 Bullock, Helen, 148 Bullock, Orin, on log structures, 148 Bulwarks, 146 Burial Hill, Mass., 105 Burlington, N. J., 169 Burr, G. J., 97 Burrage, H. S., Early English and French Voyages, i-jn Burt, H. M., First Century of the History of Springfield, 43, 96, 98n Butler, Nathaniel, 129-30, 155-6; Historye of the Bermudaes, 129; The Unmasked Face of the Colony of Virginia, 154-5 Byrd, William, History of the Dividing Line, 25, 182-4; on North Carolina houses, 183; on Indian cabins, 182 Cahane, French, 24 Cabin, 20-8, 96, 129, 135, 137, 142, 195, 198, 207, 210-n; bark, 25, 182; bark-peelers', illus., 136; "close-boarded," 79; definition of, 23-7; English and European, illus., ly, field-stone, 25; foresters', 24; Indian, 144; mud, 25; sleeping, 23-4, 79; types of, 23-6; Ulster, 179-80; willow, 24. See also log cabin Cabin bed, 23-4 Cable, John, 98 Calking, 27 Calvert Papers, 127 Cambridge, Mass., 38, 90, 95; Records of the Town of Cambridge, 38 Cambridge University, 59 Campaigns, political, 189-91 Campbell, Ake, 179

222

INDEX

Canada, 70, 190 Cannon, 69, 107 Canonicus, 104 Canvas, 23, 91 Capanna, 24; illus., 23 Cape Ann, Mass., 38, 83, ioon; houses at, 84 Cape Cod, Mass., 43 Cape Cod Canal, 109 Cape Fear, N. C., 161 Cape merchant, 135 Cape Porpoise, Me., 80, 178 Capps, William, 152 Caribbee Islands, 36n Carolina, Indian wigwams in, 33 Carpenters, 44-51, 70, 74, 112, 125, 130, 146, 165, 187-8, 210; Dutch, 122; house, 78, 116, 143, 149, 152, 156, 213; indentured, 50; regulation of, 47, 99, 106, 118; Swedish, 123; tools, 87. See also Tools Carpenters' work, plundering of, 7i Carpentry, 67, 100 Cartier, Jacques, 72n Casco Bay, Mass., 177 Castle, see Fort Castle Island, Me., 95 Cavaliers, 191, 199 Cave, 124 Cedar, 37, 9111, 130, 141, 203; scarcity of, 38; shingles of, 60, 9m, 115; wainscot of, exported, 140 Ceiling, 28, 113, 170, 175, 184 Cellar, 69, 71, 77, 92, 97, 112-13, 120, 122, 127, 130 Chalk, 30 Chamber, 66, 79, 97, 122, 142 Chamberlain, Samuel, frontis., Leyden Street, Plymouth, in 1627 Chamfers, 97 Champdore, M., 67 Champlain, Samuel de, 67-8;

L'Habitation de l'Ile Sainte Croix, illus., 66; L'Habitation du Port Royal, illus., 70; L'Habitation de Quebec, illus., 71; Works, 69, 71-2 Channing, Edward, History of the United States, 140 Chapel, 29, 72, 141 Charcoal burners' huts, 21; illus., n Charity Fort, Va., 145 Charles I, i j 6 Charles River, Mass., 89 Charlestown, Mass., 87-9; Records, 88n Chart, D. A., on Ulster dwellings, 179-80 Cherokee Indians, 181 Chesapeake Bay, 134 Chester, Anthony, Voyage . . . to Virginia, i33n Chester County, Pa., 124 Chestnut, 173 Chimney, 25, 28, 66, 77, 79, 97, ii2, 127, 157, 170, 192; brick and stone, illus., 184; "catted," 87 {illus., 184); clay, 37; country, 142; daubed, 98, 104; framed, 92; stone, 116; wooden, 37, 90, 121 Chink, chinking, 55, 103-4, 172—5, 194, 196, 203; illus., iy6, 184 Chips, 55, 103 Chisel, 45-7, 93, 135. See also Tools Christian IV, i i j Christina of Sweden, i64n Church, 29, 9m, i o j , 107, 114, 136, 144; framed, 129-30; Henrico, Va., 12; Indian, 93; Jamestown, 205-6; log, 72n, 171; Maine, 74; on crotchets, 137-8. See also Meetinghouse Church of England, 7, 59

INDEX Cider, 189 Civil War, 191 Clap, Ebenezer, 3711 Clap, Roger, 3311, 87-9, 95 Clapboard, 17, 33, 36-40, 56, 90, 92, 101-2, 107-8, 119, 147, 168, 173, 187, 196, 210; definition of, 36; export of, 36-7, 104, 121, 140, 211; floors of, 125; laws restricting cutting of, 38-9; making of, 40; oak, 109, 115, 142; roofing of, 25; sawn, 40; woods used in, 37. See also Weatherboard Clapboard buildings, England, 40; Virginia, 37 Clapboard-makers, 143 Clapboard-rivers, charges of, 40 Clapboard tree, 38 Clay, 19, 21, 29, 30, 72, 87, 92, 103-4, 11 j , 142, 168, 172, 174-6, 180, 189, 196, 203, 210-11; use in building, illus., 96 Clay daubing, 98 Cleaving, 40 Clemence, T . , house of, illus., 18 Closet, sleeping, 23 Colburn, William, 89 Colchester, Conn., 207 Colliers, 65 Colonial Garrisons of New Hampshire, The, i j n Column, 137 Commander, see Blockhouse Commons, town, 38 Conant, Roger, 83-4, 88 Concord, Mass., 112, 124; dwellings in, 96 Connecticut, dugouts in, 97; dwellings in, i n , 114-20; log houses in, 179. See also N e w Haven Connecticut River, 97, 109, 112 Conner's, 182 Contracts, building, 122

223

Cooper, Thomas, 98 Coopers, 36; regulation of, 118 Copland, Aaron, 6n Coral rock, 132 Corn, 61, 65, 143 Corn loft, 13 Cornelissen, Jan, 122 Corner post, 10 Cornering, 10-12, 55, 163-4, 171—2; dovetailed, illus., 15; halved, illus., u , 14; mortised, illus., 11; notched, illus., 11, 164 Cornwallis, Gov. Edward, 22n Cornwallis, Thomas, 127, 206 Cottage, 20-1, 28-33, 96, 110, 127, 148, 154-5, !57> i87> '98, 210-n, 214; bark-covered, 3; definition of, 28; English, 174-5; framed, 30, 87 {illus., 86); Indian, 147; mudwalled, 32, 91; on cracks, 30; Plymouth, 102; poor, 29; regulation against, 29, 156; repairs to, 148; stone-walled, 32; Ulster, 179-80 Coulter, 45 Country house, 73 Courthouse, log, 25 Courtyard, 107 Coverdale, Miles, 23 Coxendale, Va., 145 Craft culture, 8, 213-14 Craft influences, 185 Crafts, preservation of, 57 Craftsmen, 70 Cranston, R. I., 111 Cratchet, see Crotchet Craven, W . F., Dissolution of the Virginia Company, 149 Crooks, see Crucks Cross, S. H., i7on Cross casings, 123 Crosscut sawing, 118 Crosspieces, 30

224

INDEX

Crotchets, 21, 210; church on, 136; construction, illus., 139; definition of, 137-8; ridgepoles on, 30 Crowbar, 46 Crown Point, N . Y., 174-5 Cruck construction, 138, 210; described, 30-1; illus., 31, 139 Crucks, cottages on, 30; transition to, 32 Culture patterns, 57 Customs, preservation of, 57 Dale, Sir Thomas, 12, 51, 142-6; 148-9, 155, 203 Dalgliesh, Alice, and Lois Maloy, America Builds Homes, 195 Damme, William, garrison house, 178; illus., 14, 178 Danckaerts, Jasper, 40, i2on, 173; describes log houses, 53, 63, 16671; Journal, 9 m, 166-71; on flimsy English houses, 95 Daubing, 27, 87, 90, 92, 98-9, 103-4, 115, 158, 168, 173-6, 189, 193, 196, 201, 210-11; cement, 30; definition of, 103, i04n; illus., 176; method of, 29-30; mud, 33 Davenport, John, 114 Davies, Capt., 74 Davys, John, 91-2 Dearinge, George, 78 De Bry, Theodore, engravings of, i33n; illus., 34; Grands . . . Voyages, i32n Dedham, Mass., i9n, 38, 90, 197; log cabin myth in, 188; meetinghouses in, 195-6; Records, 39, i03n, 104, 196 De Hooges, Anthony, 123 Delaware (De la W a r r ) , Thomas West, Lord, 140, 149 Delaware, 72, 81, 95, 115, i23n, 124,

165, 213; log houses in, 53, 63, 186; settlement of Swedes in, 3, 164, 211 Delaware Bay, 164, 211 Delaware County, Pa., 172-3 Delaware Indians, 182 Delaware River, 169; Dutch on, 121 Democracy, log cabin as symbol of, 5-6 Democrats, 189 Denmark, 115 De Rasieres, Isaack, description of Plymouth, 106-9; HI11*-, 2 °6 Derry, N . H., 177 Dibble, W . E., Springfield parsonage of 1639, illus., 96 Dictionary of American English, 9-10, 12, 25, 37, 42, 54, 98n, io3n, io4n Digby, Mr., 74 Dillon, Thomas, 26 Discovery (ship), 134 Ditches, 71 Dochet Island, Me., 66 Documentary History of Rhode Island, 112 Dodd, W . E., The Old South, 202-4 Door, 87, 97-8, 147, 158, 170, 172 Door frame, hewn, 87 Dorchester Adventurers, 83-4 Dormitory, 24 Dove (ship), 127 Dover, N . H., garrison house, illus., 14 Dovetailing, 172, 175, 212; illus., 15; of timbers, 10 Dow, G . F., 5; colonial village, Salem, Mass., 4, 85; Every Day Life in the Mass. Bay Colony, 4n, 85; on English wigwams, 86-7; studies of housing, 8j

INDEX Downing, A. F., Early Homes of Rhode Island, iyn, 37n, i n Downing, Lucy, 77 Dudley, Mr., house of, 35 Dudley, Thomas, 89 Dugout, 96-7, 112-14, 120-1, 124, '35- 137. '44. "54 Dummer, Mr., of Newbury, 82 Dutch, 166, 212; colonies of, 44, 56; dwellings of, 169; unfamiliar with log houses, 53 Duvoisin, Roger, And There Was America, i95n Dwellings, 68; blockhouse, 10; clapboarded, 101; colonial, 209; first English, 3, 9; Massachusetts Bay Colony, 83-100; North Carolina, 161-2; temporary, 20, 23. See also Arbor, Blockhouse, Booth, Cabin, Dugout, Garrison house, Guest house, Huts, Log dwelling, Log house, Tent, W i g wam Early English and French Voyages, 74 Earth, used in houses, 136 East Anglia, 101 East India Company, 115 East River, N . Y., 121 Easthampton, L . I., 43, i04n; Records, 43 Eastland Company, 1 1 5 Easton, John, A Narrative of . . . Philip's Indian War, i4n Easton, Nicholas, 82, 112 Eaton, Theophilus, 114-16 Edenton, N . C., log houses at, 183-4 Eliot, Rev. John, 93-4 Elizabeth City, Va., 152 Elizabeth Fort, Va., 145 Ellis, Henry, A Voyage to Hudson's-Bay, 73, illus.

225

End girt, 17 Endecott, G o v . John, 83-4, 86, 88 Endicott, C. M., 85 Engineers, 47 English, first dwellings of, 3; houses, 16, 19-20, 168 English wigwam, 20, 22, 35, 86n, 87-91, 96-7, 102, 133, 138, 144, 193, 196, 210; burning of, 86; illus., 86 Erixson, Sigurd, ion, 24n, 61-2, 76, 163, 172-3, 185 Erondelle, Nova Francia, 67 Essex County, England, 30, 40 Essex County, Mass., 83 Essex Institute, Historical Collections, 84 Essex Registry of Deeds, 83-4 Evans, E . E., letter of, i79n "Fair" house, 16, 19-20, 22, 66, 147, 193; illus., 86; Newfoundland, 65-6 Fairbanks House, i9n Farmers, 80 Farmhouse, 122, 146; Ulster, 179 Feather-edging, 120, 125, 168 Felling axe, see Axe Fence, 184; log, 43 Fence rail, 41-2, 184 Fencing, 118; regulations governing, 118-19 Fenner, Arthur, 1 1 1 Ferryland, Newfoundland, 66 Field, Rev. D. D., Centennial Address, 192, 207n File, 46 Finland, 163 Finns, 164, 173, 176; in Pennsylvania, 123 Fir, 44, M I , 136 Fireplace, 73, 87, 116, 174

226

INDEX

Firewood, 43, 73, 92, 133, 142; houses used for, 140 Fishermen, 80 Fishing station, 83 Flags, 34 Flanders, L. W., i5n Flanders, Holland, 121 Flankers (flankarts), 15, 104 Flodder, J. J., 122 Floor, 28, 91; board, 116; cellar, 92; clapboard, 125 Floor board, 125 Floor joist, 98 Florida, 42 Folkways, effect of environment on, 57 Forklaring (proclamation), 165-6 Forks, 30; transition to, 32 Forman, H. C., 215; Jamestown and St. Mary's, 128, 138, i46n, 207 Forster, J. R., i73n Fort, 34, 68, 74, 94-5, 105, 134, 138, 140, 143; cabins in, 23; English, 175; Indian, 181; log, 54, 95, 107 (illus., 206); Plymouth, 76; Ste.Croix, 67; Swedish, 171; timber, 4; Virginia, 14 Fort Charles, Va., 14 Fort Good Hope, 113 Fort Henry, Va., 14, 143 Fort Hill, Boston, 95 Fort Patience, Va., 145 Fortifications, 12-13, 51, 64-5, 69, 104, 129, 133, 144-6 Fortune (ship), 104 Foundations, stone, 30, 94, 109, non Founding of Massachusetts, The, 47n, 86 Framed buildings, 60, 68, 70, 130, 192; barns, 30; churches, 129-30; forts, 12, 95, 107-8; materials, 12,

69, 97, 109; meetinghouses, I92n, 195; parts, 35-42; Quebec, 72. See also Framed houses Framed houses, 3, 12-13, 16-20, 2933. 47. 5°. 52> 55-6. 6z> 8 8 -9'. 95""6> 101, 106, 107, 109, 121, 145, 153, 156-8, 167-8, 179, 187, 201, 213; Acadia, 68-71; agreements for building, 91-2, 97; Bay of Conception, 65; Bermuda, 129-30; Connecticut, 114-20; definition of, 17; English, 168 (described), 210; evaluation of, 197; frontier, 213; Henrico, Va., 13, 51, 144; illus., 18, 96, 117; Indian, 92-3; Jamestown, Va., 13; Maine, 76-9; Maryland, 127; Massachusetts Bay, 83, 87, 91-3, 97-8; materials for, 49; Newfoundland, 64-6; New Hampshire, i78n; Penn's directions for, 124-6; Pennsylvania, 20; removing of, 68, 83; Rhode Island, 1 1 1 - 1 2 ; specifications for, 97 Framed timber, 13, 199 France, 53, 67 Freemen, 122 French, 212; colonies, 44, 56; raids of, 81 Frontier, 179; log cabin typical of, 4, 6, 185, 187, 211-12; Maine, 186, 212; Massachusetts, 15; New England, 183-4, 2 1 2 > New York, 212; North American, 3, 182 Frow, 40, 45, 47, 49; illus., 40 Frow club, 40 Frow horse, 40, i68n Fruit tree, 22 Gable, 172 Garden, 22, 51, 65, 76, 105, 107, 146, 148 Garfield, James A., 6n

INDEX Garret, 13, 145, 199 Garrison, 14 Garrison house, 4, 14-16, 56, 96, 100, 178, 186, 209, 212; frontier, 14; illus., 14, 15, 178; Massachusetts Bay, 15; military purpose of, 13-16 Gates, Sir Thomas, 13, 140, 146, 149, 199 Gates, town, 141; wooden, 107 Gedney, Bartholomew, 84 Germans, 126, 184, 213-14; log cabin spread by, 4, 176, 182, 211; Pennsylvania, 175-6 Germany, 36, 182, 211 Gerrish, William, 81 Gillman, Maj. John, 178 Gimlet, 4J-7. See also Tools Girder, 17, 60 Girts, 17, 98n, 108 Glass, 36, 174, 176; diamond, 116; leaded, 49 Glass works, 149 Glazing, 201 Glorious Progress of the Gospel, The, 93 Gloucester, Mass., 83, ioon Godfrey, Edward, 78, 206; house of, 76-7 Godfrey's Cove, Me., 77 Godfrey's Pond, Me., 77 Goodspeed (ship), 134 Goodwin's blockhouse, 81 Gookin, Daniel, 8j-6n, 94; on Indian bark work, i42n Gorgeana, Me., see Agamenticus, Me. Gorges, Sir Fernando, Briefe Narration, 76 Gorges, Capt. William, 76 Governor's house, Plymouth, 107 Graham, J. A., A Descriptive Sketch of . . . Vermont, 22n

227

Graves, Thomas, 47, 88 Great Britain, 53 "Great House," 79, 88, 91 Gregory, G. C., 115, 136, 204-6 Grindstone, 45, 94 Gristmill, 127 Groove, 30, 184 Groove joints, illus., 164 Grose, H. M., 1711; drawings bjr, 11 in; illus., 18 Guest house, 145, ijo-3 Guilford, Conn., log cabins in, 207 Guy, John, Master John Guy his Letter, 64-5 Habitation, see Port Royal, Quebec, Ste.-Croix Hakluyt, Richard, Principal Navigations, i33n Half-timber construction, 102; illus., 96 Halifax County, Va., i85n Hall, 68 Hall, Basil, illus., 4 Hall, C. C., Narratives of Early Maryland, 158, 201 Hall, John, house of, I92n Halved cornering, 10, i n ; illus., 11, 14 Halving, see Cornering, Halved cornering Hamilton's garrison, 81 Hammer, 45-7. See also Tools Hammond, John, Leah and Rachel, 158, 201 Hamor, Ralph, 51, 150, 199; describes Jamestown, 145-6; A True Discourse, 12-14, !44_5< 147-8 Hampton, N. H., 81-2, 112 Handsaw, 45-7. See also Tools Harbor, 105 Hariot, Thomas, describes Indian

228

INDEX

lodges, 34; A Briefe and True Report, 16, 53, 132; illus., 34 Harlow, V . T., History of Barbados, j n Harmans, Augustine, 128 Harris, K . C., 7011 Harris, R o y , 6 Harris, T . M., Journal of a Tour, 27 Harris, William, 24 Harrison, Fairfax, 204 Harrison, William Henry, 6, 189-90 Hartford, Conn., 1 1 2 - 1 3 , I 2 4 Harvard College, 7, 58; clapboard trees, 38; sleeping cabins in, 23 Harvey, Gov., 156 Hatchet, 46-7. See also Tools Hawley, Zerah, A Journal of a Tour, 12 Hazard, Ebenezer, Historical Collections, 94 Hazel saplings, 30 Hazen, A . W . , History of the First Congregational Church of Middletown, i93n Hemp thread, 34 Hencken, H . O., 180 Hendrix, Jacob, 169 Hening, W . W., Statutes at Large . . . of Virginia, 199-200, 202 Henrico, Va., 159; description of, 12, 51, 144-6; fortifications at, 1 2 - 1 3 ; g u est houses in, 150-1 Hepburn, A . H., illus., 31 Hewing, 118; frames, 168 Higginson, Rev. F., New-England's Plantation, 47, 85, 87 Hinge, 98; wooden, 87, 183 History of Plymouth Plantation, see Bradford, G o v . William Hoadley, C. J., Records of the Colony . . . of New Haven, 118— 19

Hodge, F. W . , Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, 181 Hoe, 4J, 49 Holland, 53 Holstein, i68n, 169 Hook, 98 Hope-in-Faith, Va., 145 Horse, 204 Hospital, 51, 146. See also Guest house House frame, illus., 18; removal of, 88-9, 110. See also Framed buildings, Framed houses Houses, 28, 76; agreements for building, 157-8; "bound," 81-2; brick, 59, 146, 156, 169, in Virginia, 158; burning of, 89-90, 141; clapboard, 37; dwelling, 9; English, 16, 19-20, 168; fair, 16, 19-20, 22, 66, 147, 193 (illus., 86); farm, 122, 146, 179; framed, see Framed houses; framed timber, 145; garrison, 4, 13-16, 56, 96, 100, 178, 186, 209, 212 (illus., 14, 15, 178); governor's, 107; "great," 79, 88, 91; half-timbered, 98; Hamor's account of, 147-8; Henrico, 150; jailers', 26; Jamestown, 50; Maine, 74; minister's, 97; palisaded, definition of, 88n; Plymouth, 107; regulations for building, 127; removal of, 84; repairing of, 143; Richmond Island, 79; seventeenth-century definition of, 5 1 2; stone, 59, 169, 184; store, 12-13; story-and-a-half, 158; thatched, 88; Virginia, 51, 154-5, 158, 199-204; watch, 12, 99. See also Blockhouse, Booth, Cabin, Cottage, Hut, L o g cabin Housewright, 50 Housing, advice on, 134-5; illness

INDEX caused by poor, 89, 135, 138, 153-4, 166; shortage of, 135, 148, 150-3. 155 Hovel, 22, 197 Howe, Henry, Historical Collections of Virginia, 1 9 m Howland, John, 109 Hubbard, Mr., 187 Hudson, A . S., History of Concord, 97n Hudson Bay, illus., 73 Hudson River Valley, 121 Hull, W . I., Narratives of New Netherland, loyn Hundreds, Virginia, 145, 153 Hunt, John, 74; illus., 75 Hut, 20-3, 28, 96, 142, 193, 195-7, 210; bark-covered, 3; charcoal burners' 21; clay-covered, 3; definition of, 21; English, 175; Indian, 34; log, 21-2, 27, 42, 52, 184, 189; military, 26; plank, 203; turfcovered, 3 Hutchinson, Gov. Thomas, History of the Colony . . . of Massachusetts-Bay, 15 Indians, 6, 13, 15, 43, 55, 87, 128, i3 2 i '4 2 » '54i !79. >9'. 2 1 1 - i z ; Algonkian, i7n, 33; arbors of, 25; buildings of, 180; cabins of, 144; Cherokee, 181; churches of, 93; Delaware, 182; English house for, 161; "faire house" for, 147; framed houses of, 92-3; influence on log cabin, 180-2; Iroquois, i7n, 181; Massachusetts, 85-6; plains, i7n, 33; raids of, 81; villages, 16, 182; walls built by, 42. See also Tepee, Wigwam Innocent, C. F., on cruck construction, 30; Development of English Building Construction,

i7n, 21, Instruction Voyage Instruction

229 29, 30-2, 44, i38n, 186 . . . for the Intended to Virginia, 134 for Johan Printz, The,

Ireland, 25, 182; mud construction in, 32 Irish, 176. See also Scotch-Irish Iron, 135, 193 Iron ware, 46, 49, 65, 99. See also Tools Ironworks, 65, 149 Iroquois Indians, i7n, 181 Isham, N . M., 1 1 3 ; on log cabins, 1 1 1 ; and A . F. Brown: Early Connecticut Houses, 111, 113, Early Rhode Island Houses, 111; illus., 117 Jackson, Andrew, 4, 6 Jailer's house, 26 James I, 115 James River, Va., 12, 141 Jamestown (James City), Va., i32n, 152, 159; celebration at, 191, 198; crotchet construction at, 32; De Bry drawing of, 13311; descriptions of, 13, 16, 141-3, 145-6; dwellings at, 16, 50, 13456; Gregory on log houses at, 204-6; log cabin myth in, 191, 194, 214; log cabins in, 191 (illus., 198); Port Royal building materials at, 71 Jamestown Archaeological Project, 207n Jennings, Mr., 161 Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 72 Jesuits, 73 Johannes, Dom., 123 John Tory's Lost Description of Plymouth Colony, 105

230

INDEX

John's Adventure (ship), 159 Johnson, Amandus, on round-log construction, 17m; The Swedes in America, 16411; Swedish Settlements on the Delaware, 164, 166 Johnson, Edward, 97; on wigwams, 86n; Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in NewEngland, 22, 86n, 96, 193, 197 Johnson, Robert, The New Life of Virginea, 51, 146 Joiners, 70, 91; regulation of, 47, 106, 118 Joiners' work, plundering of, 71 Joining, methods of, 17 Joint, 17, 192, 211; definition, 98. See also Cornering Joist, 17, 92, 125, 184; floor, 98 Jonathan (ship), 150 Jones, David, A Journal of Two Visits . . . on the West Side of the River Ohio, 182 Jones, Rev. Hugh, Present State of Virginia, 42n Josselyn, John, 19; Account of Two Voyages to New-England, 2on, 36n, 45, 92, 193 Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, see Danckaerts, Jasper Kalm, Peter, io4n; on log houses in Delaware, 173-4; on English "cottages," 174-5; Travels in North America, 173-6 Kecoughtan, Va., described, 144 Kecoughtan River, Va., 14 Kelly, J. F., 120; Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut, in, 206-7 Kemper, C. E., 202 Kendall, Gov. (Bermuda), 130 Kennebec River, Me., 74, 109 Kennebec trading post, 109

Kentucky, log huts in, 22 Kercheval, Samuel, A History of the Valley of Virginia, 184 Keyes, J. S., Story of an Old House, 97 Key's garrison, 81 Kimball, Fiske, 4-6; Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies, 3, i7n, 21, 60, 104, i8in, 214-ij; on Plymouth houses, 102, 107-8 King George's War, 175 King Philip's War, 14, 21, 33, 96, 100 King William's War, 81 Kingston, Mass., 109 Kitchen, 116 Knight, Walter, 83-4 Knopp, William, 48 Labadist sect, 166, i68n Laborers, 46, 50 Lambert, E. R., History of the Colony of New Haven, 115-16, 120, 188, 196 Lancaster, Pa., house, illus., 96 Lapboarding, 99 Larch trees, 19 Latch, wooden, 116 Laths, lathing, 30, 49, 98, i04n, 183 Lechford, Thomas, 91; Note-book, 39n) 92. 197 Legislative Journal of the Council of Virginia, 202n Lescarbot, Marc, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, 67, 69-71 Levett, Christopher, 19; A Voyage into New England, 2on, 86n Libby, C. T., 78 Lichty, S. K., 172 Lime, 32, 130 Lime facing, illus., 96 Limerick Plantation, Me., 185a

INDEX Lincoln, Abraham, 4, 6 Lincoln, Countess of, 89 Lincolnshire, England, 41 Lippincott's Cabinet Histories, 19m Lit-clos, 23 Living-room, 72 Lock, 98, 147 Locksmith, 70 Locust, 157 Lodge, Indian, described, 33-5 Loft, 13, 125, 145, 201 Log, 41, 108, i85n, 193, 198, 211, 213-14; barricades of, 43; definition of, 42-4; for burning, see Firewood; halved, 1 1 1 ; hewn, 14, 81, roon, 171, 177-8; mortised cornering of, illus., 1 1 ; in cellars, 112; lack of, 119-20; lining of, 114; methods of hewing, 42; methods of notching, 163; methods of sawing, 46; new, 148; plate, 172; regulations concerning, 43; roofs of, no; round, see Round-log construction; squared, see Squared logs; unhewn, 27; upright, 113—14, 181 Log bridge, 43, 96 Log cabin, 21; artists' pictures of, illus., 194, 198, 206; chinking of, 103; commonness of, 158; cornering of, illus., 11, 14; Dutch lack of, 186; early mention of, 9, 27; ease of construction, 55; emotional attitude toward, 5-6; etymological search, 54; European, illus., 164; fallacy of, 21; first mention of, 9, 27; frontier, 4; in Tennessee, 26; Indian influence on, 180-2; jailer's, 26; Jamestown, 191; military, 26; negro, 5n; New Hampshire, 190; of green wood, 148; Plymouth, 107; popular belief in, 3, 5-6; report on, 18411;

231

sketch of, illus., 4; slaves', 158 (illus., 184); spread of, 157, 176, 180-2; Swedes introduce, 3; Swedish, 115, 121, 195; typical of frontier, 3-4; underground, 11213; Virginia, 25-6, 203. See also Log house "Log Cabin Campaign," 189-91, 193, 214 Log cabin myth, see Myth, log cabin Log castle, 95 Log church, 72n, 171. See also Church Log courthouse, 25 Log dwelling, English, absence of, 186; four prior to 1690, 54; present-day, i8jn Log fence, 43 Log fort, J4, 9j, 107; illus., 206 Log house, 42-3, 51; chinking of, i04n; Connecticut, 179; definition of, 22; description of, 27-8; early mention of, 9; evaluation of, 197; German, 175-6; Indian, 181-2; later spread of, 182-5; Maine, 9, 79-80, 209; Maryland, 9, 54, ioon; method of building, 55; moving of, 124; New Hampshire, 9; North Carolina, 9, 183-4; Nova Scotia, 22n; Pennsylvania, types of, 175—6; public, 178; Quebec, 72; Scotch-Irish, 176-9; search for records of, 54; spread by Germans, 182, 211-12; Springfield, 100; survey of, i8jn; Swedish, see Swedes; SwedishAmerican, illus., 172; Transylvania, 44; used as prisons, 4; Virginia, 54, 159-60, 184 Log hut, 27, 42, 52, 184, 189; definition, 21-2; Kentucky, 22 Log prison, 4, 42, 51, 54, 210; Mary-

232

INDEX

land, 54, 128, 204, 210; New Hampshire, 54, 82, 128, 162, 204, 210; North Carolina, 54, 128, 161, 181, 204, 210 Log schoolhouse, iy8n Log tavern, 178 Log tent, 73, illus. Log wharf, i8}n Log-wall construction, 55-6, 159, 186, 209; in Europe, 163 Logging chain, 43 Logstown, Ohio, 182 Lombard, G. F. F., io7n Lombard, P. H., 109-10, 207, 215; The Aptucxet Trading Post, i9n, 109 London Merchant (ship), 150 Londonderry, Ireland, 177 Londonderry, N. H., 177 Love, W . de L., 207ns Colonial History of Hartford, 112 Lower Granville, Nova Scotia, 69 McGavock, James, 26 Mcllwaine, H. R., 202n Magazine, 67 Maine, 4, 19, 24, 36, 188, 197; dwellings in, 74-81; first settlement of, 74; framed houses in, 79; frontier of, 179, 186, 212; log houses in, 9» 79- I 7®) 183-4. 2°95 myth in, 206; Province and Court Records, 78, 86n; scarcity of logs in, 55; villages, 211 Maize, cultivation of, 61 Maloy, Lois, see Dalgliesh, Alice Manamet, Mass., n o Marbeck, Book of Notes, 24a Mariners, 70 Marketplace, 141 Martin, Capt., 1 3 j Martin, Joseph, Gazetteer of Virginia, 19m

Maryland, 166, 184, 186; Catholics in, 58; dwellings in, 127-8; log houses in, 9; log prisons in, 54, 162, 204, 210; socialized character of, 50; Archives of Maryland: Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly, 9n; Narratives of Early Maryland, 158 Masonry, 166 Masons, 70 Massachusetts, 4, 37, 166; General Court of, 82; log cabin myth in, 85; log houses in, 9, 184 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 48, 68, 92, 101, 112; beginning of, 83; booths in, 23; dwellings in, 83100; regulations of, 40; Records of the Court of Assistants, 40; Records of the Government and Colony, 48 Massachusetts Bay Company, 47-8, 83, 84, 87 Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary, 4 Massachusetts Historical Society, Americana Series, 124; Collections, 94, 179; Proceedings, 87 Mat, 8jn, 86, 95, 211; Indian, I7n, 141-2, 147, 210; woven, 34 Mather, Cotton, 160; Magnalia Christi Americana, 159; on dream of log houses, ion, 54, 158-9, 212 Mather, Increase, 43 Matthews, Albert, 27, 42; search for log records, 54, 215 Maverick, Samuel, Briefe Description of New England, 81, 114 Mayflower (ship), 101, n o Mayflower Compact, 59 Meetinghouse, 88, 94, 98-9, io4n, 105, 195. See also Church Megapolensis, Rev. John, 122 Mercer, H. C., 3n, 4-6, i4n, i5n, 40, 61, 72n, loon, 172, 207, 215

INDEX Michaelius, Jonas, 121 Middletown, Conn., myth in, 192-3 Military construction, 10 Milkroom, 116 Miller, Mr., 161 Millers, 167 Mills, 46, 127 Monk, Capt. Christopher, dream of, 159-60 Montagu House, illus., 73 Monts, Sieur de, 66, 69; dwelling of, 67 Moore, Gov., 129 Moose Hill, Conn., 207n Morgan, David, 100 Morison, J. H., Life of the Hon. Jeremiah Smith, 176-8 Morison, S. E., The Founding of Harvard College, 2311; Oxford History of the United States, 189 Mortar, 102 Mortising, 108, 118, 184, 212; of blockhouses, 10; of hewn logs, blockhouse type, illus., 11 Morton, John, log house of, 163, 172-3; illus., 172 Morton, Thomas, 187 Mortonson, Morton, 172 Moss, 27, 55, 73, 103, 174 Mount Malado, Va., 145 Mourt's Relation, 102-3, : 88-9, 193, 199 Mowry, Roger, house of, 111; illus., "7 Moxon, Joseph, Mechanic Exercises, i-jn Mud, 21, 25, 29, 32, 203; construction, 33; daubing, 27; walls, 32-3, 91» 95. 179-80 Murphy, H . C., i66n Murray, Sir James, 54 Myth, log cabin, y- 183 Pehr Kalms Resa till Nona Amerika, 173-6 Penn, William, 123, 165; describes Indian wigwams, i7n; Information . . . to Such Persons as are Inclined to America, 2on, 124-6; Select Works, i7n Pennsylvania, i23n, 165; Archives, 114; blockhouse dwellings in, 10; cabins in, 163; Dutch in, 182; dwellings in, 123-6; framed houses, 20; Germans in, 175-6; Provincial Council, Minutes, 124; Quakers in, 58; Swedes in, 164-5; Swiss in, 175 Pennsylvania Germans, 175-6; log cabin, illus., 176 Perfect Description of Virginia, 158

235

Philadelphia, Pa., 123, 182; log house at, 124 Piedmont, Virginia, 183 Piercer, 45. See also Tools Pilaster, 76 Pilgrims, 43, 68, 101, 104, 109-10, 189-90, 214 Pin, wooden, 17, 116, 136 Pine, 37, 48, 68, 95, 97, i n , 173, 203, 211, 213 Pine Hill, Me., 81 Pinnace, 65, 74, 140, 149 Pioneers, 158 Pipe-staves, 36, 168 Pirates, 160 Pit man, 118 Pit saw, 46 Pit-sawing, method of, 46 Pitch, 36 Plains Indians, i7n, 33 Plank, 35, 65, 71, 93, 103, 106-8, 118-9, I29> 136, 141. 170. 172. 187, 198, 214; definition of, 41; export of, 211; export prohibited, 38, 48; floors of, 113; green, 203; hewn, 173; horizontal, 76; methods of sawing, 46; regulation of sale of, 35; sawn, 147; used in blockhouses, 12; vertical, 109 Plank-shaped timbering, 172-3 Plantagenet, Beauchamp, Description of the Province of New Albion, 37 Plantations, Committee on, 156 Planters, tools for, 47 Plaster, plastering, 27, 29-30, 103-4, 115, 142, 158, 173, 180, 184, 201 Plasterers, regulation of, 118 Plate, 17, 32, 60, 97, 98n, 118, 125, 192 Plate logs, 172 Platform, ordnance, 146 Pluver, 34

236

INDEX

Plymouth Colony, 103, 193, 19511, 2o6n; blockhouses at, 12; description of, 105-7; dwellings in, 10110; fort, 76, frontis.-, log cabin myth in, 187 (illus., 206); Records, 36, 38, 41, 43, 106; regulations of, 35; restriction on export of building materials, 38; sickness at, 89 Point Bollogue, Me., 76 Point Comfort, Va., 14 Pole, I7N, 21, 27, 34, 41, 85, HI, 147, 179, i85n, 210; roof of, 203 Pontgravé, M., 71 Popham, Me., 74 Porch, 97, 157, 203 Port Royal, 68, 74, 83; Association of, 69; building material from, 147; Champlain's account of, 69; frame construction of, 70, illus.; log cabin myth in, 70 Porter, Noah, The New England Meeting House, 195 Portsmouth, N. H., 178 Pory, John, 108; describes Plymouth, IOJ Post, 17, 19, 32, 60, 65-6, 76, 97, 108-10, 118-19, I25> 137> I 4 1 ' x43> 184; corner, 10, 98n Post and petrel, construction, 29n Potash, 36, 149 Potomac River, 183 Potter's Bank, Pa., illus., 176 Praying Indian towns, 94 Prince, Thomas, 188 Printz, Gov. J. B., i64n, 165, 17m Prison, building of, 200; Maryland, 54, 128, 204, 210; New Hampshire, 54, 82, 128, 162, 204, 210; North Carolina, 54, 128, 161, 181, 204, 210; Virginia, 199-201. See also Log prison Prospect Park, Pa., 172

Providence, R. I., 24; houses at, III; Early Records of, 24 Provincetown, Mass., 101 Pulpit, 136 Purchas, Samuel, Purchas his Pilgrims s, 44-5, 65-6, i56n Puritans, 21, 32, 58, 114, 199 Pynchon, Mr., 99 Pynchon, John, accounts of, 100 Pynchon, William, 97 Quakers, 58, 167 Quakers' Village, 169 Quampeagan, Me., 81 Quarter Courts, Va., 149 Quebec, Champlain's description of, 72; dwellings in, 71-3; framed buildings in, 72; habitation at, 70; Indian wigwams in, 33; log houses in, 72; illus., 71 Raft, 113, 136-7; definition of, 41 Rafter, 17, 30, 32, 41, 6i, 115, 125, 179. See also Raft Rail, 27, 66, 118-19, !36-7> H3> i8 4i 205-6, 214; definition of, 41; horizontal, 30, 42 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 132, 204 Reeds, 28, 67, 191 Relation of a Voyage to Sagadahoc, ijn Rensselaerwyck, New Netherland, 122 Revolutionary War, 88 Rhode Island, 37, 82; dwellings in, m-14 Rib, 115 Richardson, Mrs. F. A., 69 Richmond Island, Me., 24, 36, 78; house in, 79 Ridge-piece, see Ridgepole Ridgepole, 21, 32, 138, 203; on crotchets, 30

INDEX Ridge-tree, see Ridgepole Riving, 40, 1 0 2 - 3 , I25> '47i 187; illus., 40 Rix, William, 9 1 - 2 Roanoke Island, Va. ( N . C.), 16, i7n, 1 6 1 ; dwellings in, 1 3 2 - 4 ; myth at, 204; report on, 133 Rocke Hall, Va., 145 Rockport, Mass., ioon R o c k y Nook, 109 Rolfe, John, 148 Roman Catholics, 58 Roof, 34, 41, 86, 106, 125, 137, 170, 203; board, n o , 1 4 1 - 2 , 175; clapboard, 25, 36, 92, 1 1 9 ; flat, ioj, 1 0 7 - 8 ; Indian, 2 1 1 ; log, 111-2; log cabin, 27; rafter-covered, 136-8; sharp slope of, 30; shingled, 1 1 5 ; spar, 1 1 3 ; thatched, 87, 179, 210; prohibited, 90; tile, 19 Roof pitch, 60, 62 Room, 116, 125, 157, 184 Round-log construction, 10, 171-2, 175, 178-9, 210, 212 Rowe, Mass., log cabins in, i8sn Rowley, Mass., Early Records, 41 Roxbury, Mass., 97 Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions, 25n Rubble, 29 Rushes, 21, 34 Russia, 49, 163, 206; log houses in, 4 Sabino Island, Me., 74 Sagadahoc, Me., 74, 135, i46n, 210 Sailcloth, 86 Sails, 159 St. Croix River, 66 St. George's, Bermuda, 130-1, illus. St. George's Fort, Me., i46n; illus., 75

237

St. Mary's, Md., myth at, 206; planning of, 127 Sainte-Croix, 74, 83, 133; illus., 66 Salem, Mass., 4, 39n, 47-8, 77, 83, 102; ferry, 84; houses at, 84; reproduction of 1628 village, 85, 87 (illus., 86) Salisbury, N . H., 183 Salmon Fall Brook, Me., 81 Salters, 106 Saltonstall, Sir Richard, 48 Sandys, Sir Edwin, 149-jo, 1 5 4 - 5 Sandys, George, translation of Ovid, 137 Saplings, 24-5, 27, 30, 34 Sarah Constant (ship), 134 Saratoga, N . Y., 190 Saw, 203; crosscut, 93; hand, 4 5 - 7 ; pit, 46; two-handed, 49; whip, 45> 93 "Sawbuck House," Pa., illus., 96 Sawing, 98, 102-3, I I O i " 8 , 130, 147; illus., 46; of logs, methods, 46 Sawmill, 28, 43, 76, 1 2 1 , 156, 17811, 193; building agreement, 78; New England, 47n; Virginia, 47ns illus., 156 Saw-pit, 65, 99, 118 Sawyers, 46, 51, 65, 70, 112, 143, 146, 1J2, 210, 2 1 3 ; Indian, 93; regulation of, 47-8, 99, 106 Saxony, 175 Scandinavia, 163, 185; log house in, 4. See also Denmark, Sweden, Swedes Schoolbooks, myth in, 194 Schoolhouse, 94; log, i78n Scotch-Irish, 176-80, 182, 2 1 1 , 214; log cabin adopted by, 4; spread log cabin, 26 Scurvy, 88-9

238

INDEX

Section plank wall, see Panel building Sedge, 32, 86, 136-7, 154 Servants, indentured, 161 Seymour, G . D., New Haven Tercentenary: Memorials of Theophilus Eaton, n 6 n Shakespeare, King Lear, 103ns Merchant of Venice, 29; Twelfth Night, 24 Shapleigh, Nicholas, 78 Shawnee Indians, 182 Sheathing, 70; interior, 37n, 103, 2 1 1 ; of matched boards, 87 Shed, 25, 28, 86, u o n Shenandoah Valley, Va., 184; log houses in, 176 Shetland Islands, 41 Shingles, 27, 67, 98, 119, 130, 182-3, i85n, z n ; cedar, 60, 9m, 1 1 5 ; riving of, illus., 40; tools for splitting, 4on Ship, 49, 73 Ship-building, 35, 75 Ship carpenters, regulation of, 118 Shipwright, 74, 149, 152 Shurtleff, N . B., 48; Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, 91 Shutters, 158 Sickness, 102 Siding, vertical, 173 Sill, 17, 19, 32, 60, 98n, 116, 118, 157, 184, 192 Skins, 34 Slab, i85n Slany, Mr., 64 Slate, 140 Slaves, housing for, 158-9; illus., 184 Sleepers, 11 j Sleeping cabin, 23-4 Slit work, 98-9, 118

Sluyter, Peter, 166 Smeta, 104 Smith, Henry, 98 Smith, Capt. John, 6, 138, i99n, 205-6; Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of NewEngland, 135-6; describes Transylvania houses, 44; Qenerall Historie, 50; management of, 50; on framed houses, 19; on Jamestown dwellings, 32, 41, 148; Map of Virginia, 131, 140; St. George's, Bermuda, illus., 131; True Travels, 136; Works, 2on, 36, 44, 134-6, 140-1, 143, i99n Smith, Samuel, 188; History of New Jersey, io8n Smith's Forge, Bay of Conception, 65 Smith's Hundred, Va., 46-7 Soap ashes, 36 Sod, 113 Soldiers, 31 Somers Islands, see Bermuda South, log houses in, 4 Southampton, Earl of, 105 Southern Literary Messenger, Spade, 93, 146 Spanish Archives, 75 Spar, 41, 113 Spencer, John, 82 Spike, 45, 49, 66, 109, 170 Splitting, n o

191

Springfield, Mass., 43, 96, 112, 178; log houses at, 54, 100; meetinghouse, 98; parsonage, illus., 96; T o w n Records, 99 Spruce, 80, 211, 213 Squared logs, 10, 171, 173, 183, 2 1 1 12 Squared timbers, 96 Squaring, 48, 93, u 8 , 121, 130, 146-7, 170, 172

INDEX Stables, 76, 122 Stacey, Mr., 167 Staircase, 66 Stairs, 66, 97, 116 Stanard, M. N., Colonial Virginia, 203, 214; on Virginia log cabins, 202-4 Stanard, W . G., 202, 205 Staves, roof, 27 Sticks, 147 Stiles, Ezra, 120; Itineraries and Correspondence, 11 5 Stith, William, 187 Stockade, 88n, 107, 181 Stokes, I. N . P., Iconography of Manhattan Island, 121 Stone, 27, 43, 66, 92, 94, 99, 128, 174, 193; chimneys of, 116; construction, 32; foundations, 30, 109, non; houses of, 59, 169, 184; walls, 179-80 Stone carvers, 70 Storehouse, 12, 66, 68-9, 74, 76, 7980, 101-2, 134, 144—5; framed, 102; Jamestown, Va., 13; N e w foundland, 64; Plymouth, 2o6n; Swedish, illns., i j Stores, 154 Strachey, William, Historie of Travaile into Virginia Brittania, 74; A True Repertory of Sir Thomas Gates, 16, 140-2 Straw, 27, 29-30, 87 Street, 92, 114, 127 Strickland, S. T., on construction in Plymouth, 109 Stucco, 32 Stud, studding, 17, 19, 29, 32, 60, 70, 98, 195-6 Stud-and-mud, see Wattle-anddaub Sturgeon Creek, Me., 78 Stuyvesant, Peter, 165

239

Suffolk Deeds, 43 Sullivan, James, 188 Summer beam, 92, 108-9 Summers, L. P., Annals of Southwest Virginia, 9n, 26 Surgeon, 150 Swamps, 37n Sweden, 49; high development of log construction in, 163; oak regions of, 172; persistence of log cabin in, 62 Swedes, 53, 72, 213; building technique of, 5j-6 (illus., 139); carpenters, 123; colonies, i63n, 164; Delaware, 211; Pennsylvania, 123; log-cabin technique of, 209; log cabins introduced by, 3; log cabins of, I04n, 186, 195; log houses of, 166-71, 173-4 (illus., 172) Swedish West India Company, 164 Swem, E. G., Virginia Historical Index, 202n Swiss, in Pennsylvania, 175 Switzerland, 175, 211; log houses in, 4 Tacony, Pa., 165, 170 Tailors, 70 Tar, 36 Tartary, houses in, i36n Tavern, 88, 169, 184; log, 178 "Teapot Hall," Scrivelsby, Lines., illus., 139 Tenements, 66 Tennessee, frontier of, 4; log cabins in, 26 Tent, 3, 23, 88-9, 129, 135-7, '44. 196, 210; log, 73, illus. Tepee, Indian, i7n, 21, 33 Thatch, 5n, 50, 60, 84, 87-8, 90, 98, 102, 1 1 1 - 1 2 , 136, 144, 179, 189, 195-6, 210-11; prohibition of, 106

240

INDEX

Thatchers, regulation of, 47 Thayer, W . M., From Log-Cabin to the White House, 6n Throckmorton, Sir William, 153—4 Thwaites, R. G., Early Western Travels, 27 Tidewater, Virginia, 158 Tile, 19, 140, 142 Timber, 43-4, 92-3, 96, 102, 106, 112, 130, 170, 193, 203, 214; cloven, io8n; export of, 12, 210-11; crooked, 30; dovetailing of, 10; felling of, 118, 143; framed, 13, 199; hewn, 92, 99, 187; horizontal, lining of, 113, 120; regulation of sale of, 35; sawmill for, illus., 156; sawn, 41, 67, 114, 119, 127; scarcity of, 19; split, 114; square, 15, 35, 93, 96, 147, 209; waste, 125; wrought, 48 Timber frame, 17 Timber post, 32 Timber trees, regulations concerning. 38 Timbering, corner, ion; plankshaped, 172-3; types of, 163-4 Timbers, see Timber Tinahonk, Pa., 170 Tobacco, 147, 149 Tompson, Benjamin, New Englands-Tears, 33 Tools, 40, 44-51, 118, 153, 165, 21011, 213; carpenters', 87; for use of Indians, 93; ordered for Maine, 78; recommended for New England, 45, 47; recommended for planters, 49; recommended for Virginia, 44-5; scarcity of, 48; workmen's, 49 Trading post, 68, 88, 97, 109 Transylvania, 205; houses in, 136; log houses in, 44 Trees, 44; curved, 30; fruit, 22;

larch, 19; palisades of, 94; pine, 68; scarcity of, 90 Trenton, N. J., 167 Trelawney, Edward, 36 Trelawney, Robert, 36, 78-9; house of, described, 79 Trelawney Papers, 24, 78-9 Trévoux, Dictionnaire universel François et latin, 73n Trowbridge, Bertha M., and C. M. Andrews, Old Houses of Connecticut, 114 Trumbull, J. H., Memorial History of Hartford, Conn., ii2n, 188 Trunnel, wooden, 17 Tucker, Capt., 130 Turf, 21, 32, 112 Turner, F. J., The Frontier in American History, 181 Turret, bell, 99 Tuscarora Indians, 181-2 Tyler, John, 189-91, 198 Tyler, L. G., 205; Cradle of the Republic, 191, 205n; on Yankee historians, 198; Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, zjn Tyndale, William, Doctrinal Treatises, 23 Ulster, Ireland, 26, 176; dwellings in, 179-80 Underpinning, 98-9 Unframed dwellings, 33 Uprights, 30 Valley Forge, Pa., 26 Valley of Virginia, 183, 202 Van Curler, Mr., 122 Vander Aa, Pieter, i33n Van Eyst, Reynier, 171 Van Rensselaer, Kiliaen, 122 Van Tienhoven, Cornelis, Informa-

INDEX tion Relative to New Netherland, 113-4, 12011 V a n Wassenaer, Nicolaes, 121 Vermont, log cabins in, 22 Vignerons, French, 149 Villages, Indian, 16, 182; N e w England, 195 Vincent, Philip, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England, 34 Virginia, 7, i9n, 47n, 56, iojn, io5n, 132-61, 182, 186, 210; blockhouses in, 12; clapboard houses in, 37; crotchet construction in, 21; description of 1611, 51; early towns in, 12-13; English culture of, 59; first dwellings in, 3; houses described, 201; Indian dwellings in, 28; log cabins in, 25-6, 159-60; mud-walled cottages in, 32; myth in, 198-206; sickness in, 89; socialized character of, 50; Tidewater, 158; tools recommended for, 45; Valley of, 183, 202; Acts of A s sembly, 199-204; Statutes-atLarge, 199-200, 202; Journals of the House of Burgesses, 144-5, 202n; Legislative Journals, 202n Virginia cloth, 203 Virginia Company of London, 36, 45. 134-5. ! 4°. I 43. H 9 - 5 1 ; R e c ' ords, 46, 150-5 "Virginia house," 199-204 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 26, 28, 115, 156, 181 Virginia Richly Valued, 42 Vise, hand, 45 Wages, regulation of, 118 Wainscot, 37n, 71, 113; export of, 140 W a l l , 97, 184; brick, 95, 193; cottage, 104; earth, 154; formed b y

241

roof, 30; mud, 32, 91, 95, 179-80; rail, 136, 205-6; stone, 25, 32, 179, 193; wattle-and-daub, 103 W a l l plate, 157 W a l l timbers, mortised, 10 Walling, methods of, 17-19, 29-33. See also Walls Walnut, 36, 141 Walter, Henry, 23n W a r , 14, 88, 175, 191, 212 Warren, Mercy, 26 Warren-Adams Letters, 26 Washington, George, 26 Washington, Martha, 26 W a t c h house, 12, 99, 144 Waterbury, Conn., 197; myth in, 191-2 Waterford, Me., log houses in, i84n Watertown, Mass., 37-8; Records, 38, 98n Watson, J. F., Annals of Philadelphia, 124 Wattle-and-daub, 5n, 29-30, 87, 90, 103-4, *3Ön, 211 Wattling, 33, 86, 103, 206, 211 Weatherboard, weatherboarding, 37, 40, 87, 158, 203. See also Clapboard Weatherboarded buildings, in England, 40 Webster, Daniel, 6, 183; Works, 190 Webster, Noah, American Dictionary, 22, 42 W e d g e , iron, 46, 49 Weeden, W . B., Economic and Social History of New England, 197 Wells, Me., 86n Wentworth's blockhouse, 81 Wertenbaker, T . J., 215; on early Dutch housing, 120-1; on Pennsylvania log houses, 175-6; The

242

INDEX

Founding of American Civilization, 120-1, 123, 176, 208 West, Francis, 157-8 West, winning of, 6 West India Company, 121 Westmoreland County, Va., Records, 157-8 Westover, Va., 25 Westphalia, 168 Wethersfield, Conn., 112 Wharf, see Log wharf Whigs, 189 Whipsaw, 45, 49, 78 Whitacres, Rev. Mr., 145 Whitbourne, Richard, The Names of Divers Persons . . . in the New-foundland, 65-6 White, John, 17ns drawings of, 132; Oppidum Secota, illus., 34 Whitefield, Henry, The Light Appearing, 93 Whitefield House, Conn., 59 Whiting, I04n Whittaker, Jabez, 150 Wigwam (wigwang), 33-5, 86n, 93, 96; derivation of, 33, 35; Boston, 91; burning of, 86; Charlestown, 87-8; fireplaces in, 87; Indian, 3, i7n, 23, 25, 27-8, 33-5, 53, 59, 85-6, 94-5, 181; described, 85-6; warmer than English houses, 94-5; New Englanders', 34. See also English wigwam William and Mary College, Quarterly Historical Magazine, 22, 27n Williams, Edward, Virginia Richly and Truly Valued, illus., 156 Williams, Roger, Key into the Language of America, 35-6 Williams, W . L., 108; illus., 206 Williamsburg, Va., I9n Williamson, W . D., History of the State of Maine, 54, 77, 81, 177

Wimble, 94 Wind beam, 125 Windham, Me., log houses in, i85n Windmill, 121 Window, 28, 77, 98-9, 116, 157-8, 170, 172, 176 Window frame, lead, 116 Windsor, Conn., 109, 112 Windsor trading post, 68, 109; described, n o Winne, Capt. Edward, 66 Winnicumet, N. H., 82 Winslow, Edward, 93n, 188-9; Journal, 102; Good Newes, 105 Winter, John, 78-9; house of, 24; report of, 79 Winthrop, Gov. John, 88; cottages of, 29; Journal, 35, 37, 86; Winthrop Papers, 23-4, 26n, 86n, 90 Winthrop, John (1605/06-1676), 77

Winthrop estate, 178; fleet, 48 Winthrop Papers, see Winthrop, Gov. John Wise, Gov. H. A., 191, 198, 205n Wollaston Manor, Va., 157 Wood, William, New England's Prospect, 23, 36, 48-9, 9on; describes Boston, 91 Woodberye, John, 84 Woods, John, Two Years' Residence, 2J11 Woodwork, 69 Woodworkers, 210 Worcester, Mass., Records of the Proprietors, 2211 Work house, 64 Works Progress Administration, 204 Worthington, Erastus, History of Dedham, 90, 188, 197

INDEX Wright, H. A., 215; The Genesis of Springfield, ion, 9711; on log houses, J4, 100 Wright, Joseph, English Dialect Dictionary, 41 Wright, Samuel, 99 Yale University, 195 Yale University Press, 194 Yardley, Gov. Francis, 161 Yoe, Allen, 78

243

Yonge, Col. S. H., 205; The Site of Old "James Towne," 199 York, Duke of, 165 York, Me., 76-7; garrison house, illus., i j ; York Deeds, 9n, 76, 78 Yorkshire, England, 41, 167; charcoal burners' cabin, illus., 23 Young, Alexander, 103; Chronicles of . . . Massachusetts Bay, 33n, 87, 89, 95; Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, 188-9