Old New England houses

The chinks between the logs, due to the uneven surfacing, were filled with clay or mud. The roofs were thatch. The floor was the little section of the earth’s surface enclosed within the walls or, at best, the flat side of split logs, rudely dressed, known as puncheons. Most of the furniture was only what the occupant could fashion with axe and saw. The fireplace, as a writer has cleverly described it, “sent half the smoke into the apartment and half the heat up the chimney.” For a short time one room, in many cases, served for all purposes. These simple structures afforded the necessary shelter, but the New England colonists were not of a class content to live in so rude a manner. Lumber, both hand-sawed and mill-sawed, was produced soon after their arrival. The earliest mill of which I find record was erected in the vicinity of Portsmouth in 1631 by a man named Gibbons. But the output of the little mills of the early days was limited in quantity, and a number of generations passed before the log hut disappeared. As the pioneers pushed their way, year after year, into the interior, northward and westward, they built in western Massachusetts, in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, log cabins such as were built in an earlier day in the coast settlements and along the valleys of the larger rivers. For them, as for the first settlers, shelter was a requirement second only to food, and the readiest means of meeting the necessity was the cutting, hewing, and piling of logs from the surrounding forest. Even after the operation of sawmills, much of the heavier framing timber was hewn from logs. This is often revealed when the old houses are torn down or altere