By the time settlers arrived in North America, log homes were widespread throughout Europe, Scandinavia and Russia. The Finns had a particular affinity for crafting log structures and are believed to have developed the basis for the log cabin as we know it today, a structure that uses interlocking notch joints to hold the overlapping logs in place.
The first log cabins in America were actually constructed by emigrants from Finland and Sweden in the mids in the Delaware and Brandywine River valleys of the East Coast. Although early English settlers in North America tended to build the types of wood-slat homes they were more familiar with, a National Park Service overview of log cabins in the United States indicates that log homes became increasingly popular as settlements expanded and began to move west.
Log cabins were ideal homes for early settlers and westward pioneers because they could be built quickly, with few tools and little in the way of human resources; one man could fell trees, trim the timber and build a log home within a couple weeks. Most American log cabins through the end of the 19 th century were one-room structures, often with a stone fireplace, although some featured lofts.
Log homes, of course, are not without their drawbacks. View Post. Call Us. Thus, they built the timber framed homes they were familiar with using either brick more common at Jamestown or clapboard Plymouth exteriors.
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While the log cabin did not take hold in the first colonies, it arrived only a few years later. The first log cabins in North America were built in what was then called New Sweden. This colony was founded in and ran along the Delaware River from its mouth to near present day Trenton. The Swedes that settled the area were mostly Finnish, since the two countries were united at the time.
Although the New Sweden colony was absorbed into New Amsterdam in , the quick-to-build log homes had caught on. The English colonies remained primarily timber framed, while other colonies adopted log homes. The house is one and half stories tall, one room deep, two rooms wide, and was constructed of thick, hand-hewn timbers interwoven in a cross-notched fashion.
These timbers are hewn on all sides, and are typically 12" tall and 6" to 8" wide. The surfaces of the timbers appear to have been smoothed without the use of a saw, possibly with the skilled use of a "drawing knife" or other finishing tool. The timbers are joined at the corners of the house with a joint often referred to as a "V notch. The spaces between the timbers are filled with chinking of small pieces of local stone, which was likely covered completely in the past with clay mud from the local subsoil.
The sill logs on the ground rest on short foundation walls of stacked local rocks. The house is 20 feet 1 inch long and 14 feet 2 inches wide, with an 18 inch square chimney placed off-center, 5 feet 8 inches in from the south facade, and 8 feet 1 inch in from the west facade.
It is oriented on a west-facing mountain slope, roughly along the cardinal directions, with its long side running east to west. No hearth or stove remains in the house at the base of this brick chimney. The quantity and type of clay needed to make these bricks is not consistent with the type of red-yellow clay available from the subsoils of the area around this house site U. The bricks were likely made somewhere else in the region, and obtained by the house owner for use in the construction.
An off-center front door on the south facade is matched roughly by an off-center rear doorway on the north side of the house. Just inside that north doorway is a collapsed boxed stair, leading to the half-story loft area above. A partition wall for this stair extends out to the chimney stack on the ground floor, separating a slightly larger room on the west side of the ground floor from a smaller room on the east side, containing the box stair. Existing floor boards were cut with a straight saw, and ride on top of hand-hewn "sleeper" timbers, which run north-south with their ends resting on the stone foundation walls.
Excavations have uncovered a notable quantity of hand-wrought nails, cut nails, glass wares, and ceramics from this site which date from the period of Phillips ; Nelson ; Mercer Early forms of wire nails recovered archaeologically at this site likely date from the 's and later periods Priess Other artifacts recovered to date include fairly basic mass-produced ceramics, glass wares, and iron hardware of the period. Land records show that the tract of land on which this house is located was used in the 's and 's by John Dimory also spelled Demory and Demery , who leased acres of land from the Fairfax family.
His son, Peter Demory, carried on with those leases and then purchased a acre parcel on which this house is located in Peter also owned a larger tract on the valley floor nearby, where he resided.
The Demory surname was associated with persons of Anglo-American heritage, and two of Peter's sons married women of German-American heritage. The maiden name of Peter's wife, Mary, remains unknown. Some limited oral history data exists on past uses of the house. Interviews with long-time residents now in their late 80's indicate that this house was occupied by John Wilkow born , died , his wife Susan Wilkow born , died , and their six children in the early 's.
The six children slept in the loft, and the parents slept on the first floor. The room with the front door, back door and box stair was used as the kitchen and general activity room.
The house appears to have been in use from the time of its construction up through the 's. I am conducting archaeological investigations of this house site as part of a larger study of regional changes in socio-economic systems in this area of the upper Potomac River Valley and Loudoun Valley in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I have obtained data on the life ways of the occupants of this house site to examine changes in their consumption patterns over time. Moreover, I am exploring possible evidence of social and economic relationships between such a local house site and other households and merchants in the area, nearby plantations, and the nearby early industrial town of Harpers Ferry.
Evidence of the existence of past social relationships based on ethnic or religious identities provides valuable data on possible dynamics in such past regional relationships. In part, I will analyze the degree to which such ethnic, religious, or other social group identities may have either facilitated or inhibited changes in regional relationships, and the circumstances under which they did so.
I have started an analysis of possible ethnic and religious affiliation of one or more past occupants of this house site or persons with whom they had interactions with inferences derived from the attributes of a small clay figure uncovered at this site. This artifact dates in the period betwenn to , and appears to be an artifact of religiously significant behavior Fennell Such inferences must be based upon a rigorous examination of multiple sources of data in exploring possible past ethnic identities and their dynamics in different time periods.
In this paper I explore the degree to which the architecture of the house can be associated with persons of particular past ethnic identities, to see if one could infer the ethnic affiliation of the builder and designer of this house, or of persons with whom they may have interacted in regard to the construction of the house. One way to approach this question is to try to establish if the design and construction methods used were associated with a particular ethnic group in the past in this region.
This paper therefore surveys architectural history research on log house construction methods and plans in the Virginia Piedmont and surrounding regions to ascertain whether the construction of this Loudoun Valley house can be associated with a particular ethnic group. Historical data provides evidence of the types of ethnic groups that inhabited this region in the relevant period.
For example, a fairly large contingent of German settlers emigrated from the Pennsylvania area into the northern Virginia Piedmont in the mid-eighteenth century, as did many Scots-Irish settlers.
Free and enslaved African-Americans were also present, as were English settlers who moved into the region from the Tidewater Poland , 27, Small farms in this region in the eighteenth century likely focused on raising tobacco, and on raising and selling cereal crops, including wheat and corn, from the s onward Poland 27; see Wells ; Breen An initial question in this analysis is whether it is valuable to analyze past ethnic identities.
A number of archaeological studies have attempted to analyze the material expressions of ethnic identities by examining multiple lines of archaeological and documentary evidence. All emphasize the dynamic character of ethnic identities as reflected in material culture, and such identity frequently appears as an "instrumental phenomenon" in which "material culture [was] actively used in the justification and manipulation of inter-group relations" Jones ; see Hodder ; Shennan The analytic concept of ethnic groups focuses on the dynamics of social relationships which cross-cut other social dimensions: "Economic status, prestige, religion, and occupation can be equally persuasive.
Economic status, since it results from material wealth, has great potential for adding to the materials at a site and, a priori, should be considered the dominant social dimension evident in the archaeolog-ical record of domestic dwellings in a single society or economic system" McGuire However, ethnic identity may become more relevant even as to dwellings when we observe patterns of design and construction methods which correspond with particular ethnic groups.
Some forms of material culture expressions may provide direct and active symbolic expression of ethnic identification. Other forms of material culture may be patterned in a way specific to some ethnic groups, but as a result of "ethnically specific behaviors," rather than as a direct, instrumental expression of ethnic identification e.
Architectural styles and construction methods in dwellings are an overt form of information exchange, broadcasting statements of group affiliation: If, through the messages of his clothing, home, and other artifacts, as individual says: "I am an individual who belongs to social group X," he is also saying that he is in conformity with the other behavioral norms and with the ideology behind these norms.
As artifacts emit their messages continuously even in the absence of any other action on the part of their users , the compliance of individuals is continuously advertised and a continuous control on it can be maintained. Where a number of different socio-economic groups competes for niche-space, stylistic messages furnish predictors for the behavior that may reasonably be expected from individuals of the different groups. Style helps to mark, maintain, and further the differences between these groups at little cost.
Wobst Put another way, the design and construction choices exhibited in houses "embody their creators and become for the period of their existence active images of their creators' wishes" Glassie ; see also Barrick Fredrik Barth's anthropological analysis of ethnic groups emphasized that they should not be viewed as static, and one should analyze the degree of variation in the solidity, permeability or disappearance of ethnic boundaries in different settings and over time.
Thus, when one finds evidence of different groups interacting, analysis should focus on the degree to which "the persistence of ethnic groups in contact implies not only criteria and signals for identification, but also a structuring of interaction which allows persistence of cultural differences" Barth Edward Spicer undertook this type of analysis, and outlined the observable characteristics of a variety of ethnic groups as "persistent cultural systems.
Barth's studies of ethnic identities revealed other remarkable dynamics of group boundedness. Rather than identify themselves by a large aggregation of beliefs and practices, group members "select only certain cultural traits, and make these the unambiguous criteria for ascription to the ethnic group" Barth b: When individuals cease living a lifestyle that permits them to satisfy those key attributes and "where there is an alternative identity within reach" the result "is a flow of personnel from one identity to another" b Thus, the features of the ethnic identity, its beliefs and practices may not change in some time periods, "because many [persons] change their ethnic label" b Where tensions exist within a group and no alternative identities are accessible, or where diverging from the key criteria is not very costly, then the "basic contents or characteristics of the identity start being modified" b Ethnic identities may often dissipate when individual members of an ethnic group assimilate themselves into new identities based on socio-economic classes within a larger social and political framework in their region:.
An extensive array of architectural history studies address the question of the sources of design and construction methods used in many forms of log house construction in the American colonial period.
Fred Kniffen and Henry Glassie summarized the sources of log building techniques for houses which would be imported into the Virginia Piedmont in the early 's as follows: Beginning in the late seventeenth century, and reaching a peak in the early eighteenth, great numbers of Scotch-Irish and Germans arrived in Pennsylvania and settled just west of the English.
The Pennsylvania Germans used horizontal log construction of the type which they had known in Europe, and which may still be found there, primarily in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. The previously stone- or mud-using Scotch-Irish quickly adopted Pennsylvania German log construction, primarily because of its practicality in timber-rich America.
Pennsylvania German log work, and subsequent American log work, were characterized by logs notched near the end, a method that eliminated overhang and produced a box corner. Spaces between the logs were filled - "chinked" - with clay, stones, poles, or shingles. The logs were usually squared, split and faced, or planked. Logs were hewn for a variety of reasons. A large log could be handled more easily when reduced in size; and a large round log took up interior space and produced an irregular wall that was hard to utilize.
Primarily, however, hewn logs were thought to produce a tighter building, more finished in appearance. Clinton Weslager emphasized the difficulties of attempting to identify a particular group as rigidly employing unique and consistent criteria in their design and construction techniques: The problem lies not only in identifying the forms of log housing in the native European hearths, but the German sects, like the Swedes and Finns, improvised when they erected their American log houses.
Although their log housing was similar to certain Old World forms with which they had a familiarity, it was by no means identical. It is simply unrealistic to assume that all peoples of German origin who came to Pennsylvania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries built the same kind of log house which can be neatly and indisputably cataloged as the "German type.
Weslager ; see also Glassie He suggests this resulted because intra-group homogeneity gave way to frequent inter-group borrowing as different settler groups interacted in the colonies Weslager Similar borrowing could have occurred among free African Americans and the German and Scots-Irish settlers as well, and African Americans were known to build forms of log houses by the late eighteenth century Weslager Kniffen and Glassie contended that earlier studies see Mercer ; Weslager erred in concluding that log house construction techniques were introduced into Pennsylvania by Swedes in the seventeenth century.
He employs four concepts from the discipline of "cultural geography" in this study: first effective settlement, cultural pre-adaptation, cultural simplification, and cultural syncretism Using these concepts and mustering evidence of developments in log building designs and construction techniques in the American colonies, Jordan concluded that the Swedes and Finns indeed had the greatest impact on this type of building in America
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