Home Life in Colonial Days

								

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