The Classic Hewn-Log House: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building and Restoring
208
The Classic Hewn-Log House: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building and Restoring
208eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A classic of early American architecture, the hewn-log house has a unique rustic charm and character. In this engaging and informative guide, Charles McRaven provides illustrated step-by-step instructions that cover every aspect of building your own log house, from selecting the site and hewing the first log to laying the final chimney stone. Whether you’re building a new house or restoring an old one, McRaven offers proven techniques and time-tested advice that will help you successfully create a warm and inviting hewn-log home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612122144 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Storey Publishing, LLC |
| Publication date: | 08/31/2014 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 44 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The American House
THE SETTLER WHO SWUNG his long axe in the clearing to shape the logs for his pioneer home established a tradition curiously American: the log cabin. Even the term calls up mental pictures of open fireplaces, long rifles, and coonskin caps. It has launched presidential aspirations, and been the setting for a hundred years of hillbilly stories. But in this age of temporary housing, it retains its dignity.
Beginnings
The American log house is, by historic definition, a structure of hewn logs, corner-notched to form one or more pens, chinked with split boards or thin stones and mud or mortar, roofed on top with split shakes. It has one or more fireplaces, stone, brick, or mud-and-stick chimneys, and is intended as a permanent home.
The log cabin, by contrast, is often of round logs, and is of less-careful construction, being generally built as a temporary or occasional residence. Size has little to do with the basic difference between house and cabin, although this is the definition basis most people today would use — our "bigger is better" society speaking.
Cabin is from the Old French term caban. In Pioneer America, Eugene Wilson writes that the earlier "capanna," which may be the forerunner of these names, has Neolithic connections. American cabins have been mostly one-room structures, evolving from the "bay" or "rod" dimension — about 16 feet — of English rural housing.
The 16-foot measure, perhaps originally from the width required by four oxen, recurs again and again throughout the growth and spread of log housing. That's largely cultural; the isolated pioneer as often measured his house using his three-foot axe handle. But the fact remains that logs of greater length were heavy and awkward for the lone settler to handle. His need was for quick shelter, so a small structure of the materials available — logs — filled that need best.
This settler often dreamed of a substantial country house like those of the gentry that rose along the rivers of the East. This log building would be temporary, and when his fields ran wide and the roads reached out from the teeming towns, he would build again. And the log house would be put aside for use by visiting relatives, or as servants' quarters — eventually even to be stuffed with hay.
D. A. Hutslar offers a historic comparison of log house versus log cabin in the journal Ohio History. Cabins, he notes, were of unhewn logs, chinked with rails and moss, straw and mud. Roofs were covered with long staves with weight poles, which are poles laid on the split roof shakes to hold them in place. There were no windows or chimneys. Log houses, on the other hand, were hewn, with stone and plaster in the chinks. The roofs were shingled; there were glass windows and chimneys.
It's a bit difficult to imagine a cabin with no chimney, yet the early ones often had no more than a hole in the roof for the smoke from the dirt-floor fire pit to escape through. This was common in the peasant cottages of Britain. The gable-end fireplace so common in America developed in 15th-century England. Shortly thereafter, with the upper area now free of smoke, the use of loft space for living quarters became common. In central Europe, the chimney was usually in the center of the house.
The settlers from the tall ships anchored off Jamestown and Plymouth had been, for the most part, town dwellers. Although many were skilled carpenters with tools at hand, they had no knowledge of, or experience with, log construction. They set about reducing the formidable forest trees to whip-sawn boards and riven clapboards to nail onto hewn timbers, just as they would have done in Europe. Housed temporarily in huts of sailcloth, branches, and thatch, they endured rain, cold, and Indian depredation while laboriously fashioning the kind of houses with which they were familiar.
They could have had snug, safe quarters of logs almost from the first, had they so chosen. Most historians are of the opinion that these immigrants just didn't know how to build with logs until the Swedes, Finns, and Germans brought their skills with them later in the 17th century.
However, because logs were used early for stockade walls, forts, and even jails, it's more likely that the first settlers clung to their complicated house-construction practices as a link with a culture they feared would soon fade into the wilderness. History is full of accounts of civilized people thrust into the wilds, clutching remnants of their ordered, familiar pasts.
The very persistence of hewn logs instead of round logs in the houses of the pioneers is as much a cultural matter as a practical one, given the relative labor and skill involved in building this way. Barns, corncribs, even temporary dwellings and hunters' shacks could be of round logs, but not the house in which the pioneer wife was to keep and raise her children. This house must have some pretensions to gentility, if only flat walls.
Remember, the wife was probably the moving force behind those pioneers-turned-planters, who rose from owning nothing but wild land to the ranks of the new gentry. And until she had her painted rooms and her plastered walls, she'd have them hewn as smooth as possible, thank you.
But of course the availability of so much timber, and soon the influx of log-wise Scandinavian and Middle European craftsmen, saw the log house emerge as the frontier structure. It could be built with only an axe if need be, and built well with an axe, auger, broad axe, drawknife, hammer, and nails. No whip-sawn boards, complicated mortising, or carefully finished woodwork went into the average frontier log house, although some finely crafted specimens were built.
Early Log House Construction
The settlers of New Sweden, on the Delaware River, are credited with the beginning of log house construction in America. Fort Christina, at what is now Wilmington, was built in 1638. In his book The Log Cabin in America, C. A. Weslager writes that half of the first settlers in New Sweden were Finns, whose building techniques were closer to the later styles here than those of the Swedes. Log houses were built inside a log stockade wall for protection, and soon others spread out into the countryside.
It takes some imagination today to envision this land blessed with straight trees that fit so well into the building traditions of these new Americans. Picture these settlers venturing farther and farther from the fort's walls to raise their log houses and establish their farms: up the Delaware, out into the waiting wilderness, the Indians, the wild game, the good land.
Some of these earlier dwellings were of round logs, some of hewn. Corner fireplaces were a Scandinavian feature different from either the German or Scots-Irish log houses soon to appear.
The influx of Germans into Pennsylvania and the advent of large numbers of Scots-Irish into the region by 1700 combined with the spread of the Scandinavian influence to create the log house as it has become known. Fred Kniffen, in his article "Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion," makes the significant statement that "Building with logs was a mode of construction, not an architectural type. Log, frame, stone or brick may all be the material for a type."
But it wasn't that simple: Corner-notched log pens just about mean square or rectangular houses or sections of houses, so the choice of types is somewhat limited. I do know some zealots who've built odd, multisided log houses in an attempt to be "different," but some other material would have been better. I think the materials — logs — influence type considerably. More about this later.
In Folklore Today, Warren Roberts discusses similarities in and differences between Scandinavian log houses and those in America, and concludes that there is little resemblance overall. Montell and Morse, in their book Kentucky Folk Architecture, write that the Pennsylvania Germans introduced the classic American log house. Henry Glassie, in "The Appalachian Log Cabin," states that "the log cabin stands as a symbol of this meshing of German and Scotch-Irish cultures."
We can safely say that the cultural building patterns of the Scandinavians, Germans, Scots-Irish, English, and even the Dutch underwent some necessary modifications to fit the conditions and materials available. The New Sweden houses were not of the careful oval-log, tightly fitted, chinkless style Roberts found where these people came from.
The Scots-Irish must have been overjoyed at tall, straight trees to build with, instead of the mud and stones and thatch of Ulster. And the Germans set to work building those wonderful barns of log and stone, along with their substantial American log houses with the Old Country touches in decorative beading, mitering, and even painting. In this land of trees, our ancestors naturally used them freely.
The spread of log housing followed the flow of settlers to new territory. Germans, traveling to the Shenandoah Valley in 1732, passed through Maryland, and of course many settled along the way. The Scots-Irish moved into western Virginia, too, and to the Carolinas. Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and north Georgia were penetrated as the 1700s wore on. Even during the Revolution, thousands of land-hungry pioneers moved west, into the rich lands of the Tennessee River basin, fighting their own battles with Indians, the ever-encroaching forest, and the elements.
By 1800 the tide had reached into Alabama, where Eugene Wilson, in his book Alabama Folk Houses, divides the folk house types into first, second, and third generations. He identifies first-generation houses with fine craftsmanship, built with skill, and made to endure. These were built until around 1840, when sawmills, commercial hardware, windows, and doors appear in the second generation. Less attention to craftsmanship is evident here. In the dogtrot house, Wilson notes a shift from the front door in each pen to entryways off the open passage during the period from 1840 to 1890. Third-generation houses, to 1940 or so, embody most of the modern rural building techniques.
Log House Styles
Mention of the dogtrot house brings us to the question of log house types or styles. Beginning with the basic one-room structure of one story, with gable-end chimney and door on the side parallel to the ridge, the types evolved in several directions.
A loft was the feature most often added, requiring perhaps three more courses of logs above the ceiling joists and a combination ceiling and upstairs floor. Given a relatively steep roof pitch, the living area was essentially doubled with the loft addition. These one-and-a-half-story, single-pen houses were built from the 1600s onward until perhaps the 1940s, when traditional log construction can be said to have ended.
That's a date out of the air, but it's close. Certainly during the Depression many hungry folks back from the city hacked out log houses for themselves on the folks' back forties. There, as before, that loft was the place the kids were stowed. Being a child of that period, I probably escaped sleeping in the loft of the cabin my father built only because the loft was never finished. We always had a lot of other projects to pursue.
Single- and Double-Pen
A full two-story, single-pen log house required only a few more logs, and these became common as permanent farmhouses, principally in the East and west into Ohio and Indiana. Like the loft house, the two-story required a peg ladder or narrow stair for reaching the upper floor.
Double-pen houses were logical expansions, given the weight of the logs. By building two separate pens, the settler could enlarge his house with easily managed short logs. He either built directly against his existing house at the gable end or set up the second pen some distance away and connected the two with one roof — the dogtrot.
A double-pen log house joined at the gable opposite the chimney is called just that, a double-pen house, although it can have other names. The double-pen house usually has two front doors, and a second chimney may be added at the gable end of the new pen. An example I am quite familiar with is the Beaver Jim Villines house at Ponca, Arkansas, preserved by the National Park Service as part of the Buffalo National River. The original pen logs are of hewn oak; the added pen is of cedar. Other houses are scattered throughout the South and East, some with both pens built at one time, some with the second pen added.
Saddlebag
When the added pen was joined at the chimney end, the house was called a saddlebag, putting the chimney in the center of the house. Sometimes the second pen was set up the chimney-depth apart from the original. In this case, there was usually a boxed-in passageway between the two pens. The chimney was often rebuilt or added to, to allow a fireplace to open into each pen. Double-pen houses of all kinds were often built all at once. The double fireplace is a good reason why, because it's harder to add a second chimney later in the center of the house. Sometimes the two pens shared the fourth interior log partition wall, which served to brace the full-length logs at midpoint.
Dogtrot
This practice of building all at one time was also, as often as not, the case with the dogtrot house, which has the two separate pens joined by a common roof. This type has become the classic log house, which allows a maximum of space for the logs used. It has become my favorite house.
Montell and Morse tend to believe both halves of the dogtrots they studied in Kentucky were built at one time. However, I know of as many dogtrot log houses with pens built at different times as I know of those built all together. Quite often a second pen would have different notching, indicating either another date or even transfer of the pen from another site. It should be pointed out that the more hard-nosed scholars insist that a true dogtrot have pens of identical dimensions and that the breezeway be floored. Because it is a colorful pioneer house type, modern rebuilders have certainly taken far-fetched liberties with non-dogtrot cabins to achieve the general effect. Many dogtrots have been closed in for more living space, and many have been boarded up entirely in complete camouflage
Wilson points out that the early Norse often utilized separate buildings for separate functions, and that these were often joined with a covered passage. Certainly the open-passage house was known prior to its appearance in this country as a log house.
The earliest example in the Ozarks region is the Jacob Wolf house in Norfolk, Arkansas, built in the 1820s. The dogtrot log house is generally considered a later development in this country, seen mostly in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The few examples of dogtrots in the older colonies on the East Coast are generally post–Civil War.
However, Terry Jordan, in American Log Building, notes that the Morton house, a now enclosed dogtrot log structure in Prospect Park, Pennsylvania, dates from 1690. Calling it an example of "Fenno-Scandia" building, he shows the unusual placement of the chimneys, on the inner-facing walls, off-center of the ridge. I have seen and read of examples in the Tennessee basin in the late 1700s. But whatever its origins, and whether built together or separately, the double-pen dogtrot house has become the stereotype of the substantial pioneer farmer's dwelling.
I consulted with the architect Tommy Jameson in 2000 on the restoration of the Jacob Wolf house. A mystery regarding dendrochronology dating came up — why were the logs cut over a six-year period? Close study showed the same craftsman hewed all the logs of this large house (left-handed hewing, which is my own natural approach although I'm right-handed). Whether it was Jacob Wolf himself, a slave, or Indian help, the same distinctive strokes were clear. We concluded that, with his blacksmithing skills, Indian agency work, homesteading, clearing, farming, hunting, it had just taken that long. Even such an ambitious dwelling apparently wasn't Jacob's highest priority.
Evolution of Styles
J. Frazer Smith, in his book White Pillars, sees the type as an evolutionary link between single-room log cabin and central-hall plantation house. With the passageway enclosed, and perhaps two rooms on each side of the hall thus created, you do have the basic planter's house of Tennessee. But the English Georgian houses of Sir Christopher Wren and their counterparts in Virginia had already set the pattern for the central–hall "big house" of the upland South.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Classic Hewn-Log House"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Charles McRaven.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction: Hewn Logs and Houses
1 The American House
2 Pioneer Building
3 Restoration
4 Land and Site
5 Design
6 Acquiring Materials
7 Foundations and Basements
8 Hewing, Notching, Log Raising
9 Roofing
A Gallery of Hewn-Log Houses
10 Windows and Doors
11 Chinking
12 Floors and Stairs
13 Stone Fireplaces
14 Porches and Additions
15 Lofts, Utilities, Finishing Interiors
Epilogue
Bibliography
Additional Reading
Glossary
Index