Home Life in Colonial Days | Page 2

ancient form of shelter: they became cave-dwellers;
caves were dug in the side of a hill, and lived in till the settlers could
have time to chop down and cut up trees for log houses. Cornelis Van
Tienhoven, Secretary of the Province of New Netherland, gives a
description of these cave-dwellings, and says that "the wealthy and
principal men in New England lived in this fashion for two reasons:
first, not to waste time building; second, not to discourage poorer
laboring people." It is to be doubted whether wealthy men ever lived in
them in New England, but Johnson, in his Wonder-working Providence,
written in 1645, tells of the occasional use of these "smoaky homes."
They were speedily abandoned, and no records remain of permanent
cave-homes in New England. In Pennsylvania caves were used by
newcomers as homes for a long time, certainly half a century. They
generally were formed by digging into the ground about four feet in
depth on the banks or low cliffs near the river front. The walls were
then built up of sods or earth laid on poles or brush; thus half only of
the chamber was really under ground. If dug into a side hill, the earth
formed at least two walls. The roofs were layers of tree limbs covered
over with sod, or bark, or rushes and bark. The chimneys were laid of
cobblestone or sticks of wood mortared with clay and grass. The
settlers were thankful even for these poor shelters, and declared that
they found them comfortable. By 1685 many families were still living
in caves in Pennsylvania, for the Governor's Council then ordered the
caves to be destroyed and filled in. Sometimes the settler used the cave
for a cellar for the wooden house which he built over it.
These cave-dwellings were perhaps the poorest houses ever known by
any Americans, yet pioneers, or poor, or degraded folk have used them
for homes in America until far more recent days. In one of these
miserable habitations of earth and sod in the town of Rutland,
Massachusetts, were passed some of the early years of the girlhood of
Madame Jumel, whose beautiful house on Washington Heights, New
York, still stands to show the contrasts that can come in a single life.
The homes of the Indians were copied by the English, being ready
adaptations of natural and plentiful resources. Wigwams in the South
were of plaited rush or grass mats; of deerskins pinned on a frame; of

tree boughs rudely piled into a cover, and in the far South, of layers of
palmetto leaves. In the mild climate of the Middle and Southern states a
"half-faced camp," of the Indian form, with one open side, which
served for windows and door, and where the fire was built, made a
good temporary home. In such for a time, in his youth, lived Abraham
Lincoln. Bark wigwams were the most easily made of all; they could be
quickly pinned together on a light frame. In 1626 there were thirty
home-buildings of Europeans on the island of Manhattan, now New
York, and all but one of them were of bark.
Though the settler had no sawmills, brick kilns, or stone-cutters, he had
one noble friend,--a firm rock to stand upon,--his broad-axe. With his
axe, and his own strong and willing arms, he could take a long step in
advance in architecture; he could build a log cabin. These good,
comfortable, and substantial houses have ever been built by American
pioneers, not only in colonial days, but in our Western and Southern
states to the present time. A typical one like many now standing and
occupied in the mountains of North Carolina is here shown. Round logs
were halved together at the corners, and roofed with logs, or with bark
and thatch on poles; this made a comfortable shelter, especially when
the cracks between the logs were "chinked" with wedges of wood, and
"daubed" with clay. Many cabins had at first no chinking or daubing;
one settler while sleeping was scratched on the head by the sharp teeth
of a hungry wolf, who thrust his nose into the space between the logs of
the cabin. Doors were hung on wooden hinges or straps of hide.
A favorite form of a log house for a settler to build in his first "cut
down" in the virgin forest, was to dig a square trench about two feet
deep, of dimensions as large as he wished the ground floor of his house,
then to set upright all around this trench (leaving a space for a fireplace,
window, and door), a closely placed row of logs all the same length,
usually fourteen feet long for a single story; if there was a loft, eighteen
feet long. The earth was filled