Architecture, Colonial; Architecture, Domestic -- North Carolina; Historic buildings -- North Carolina
The roof is usually built with a curve, so as to project eight or ten
feet beyond the log wall; and a part of this space, exterior to the
logs, is inclosed with boards, making an additional small room,—the
remainder forms an open porch. The whole cabin is often elevated on
four corner posts, two or three feet from the ground, so that air may
circulate under it.... The porch has a railing in front.... The logs
are usually hewn but little, and, of course, as they are laid up,
there will be wide interstices between them. They are commonly not
‘chinked’ or filled up in any way; nor is the wall lined inside.
[Illustration: FIGURE 24. THE JOHN KNOX CABIN.]
That such cabins were indeed of a better class becomes painfully clear
when Olmsted adds a note about the cabins of poorer people. These cabins
were “mere pens of logs, roofed over, provided with a chimney, and
usually with a shed of boards, supported by rough posts before the
door.”
[Illustration: FIGURE 25. 17TH CENTURY FRAMED HOUSES.]
WOODEN FRAME HOUSES
Houses with wooden frames or skeletons were built in North Carolina long
before the log houses seen above. Framed houses represent a tradition of
building dating from medieval times which the colonists brought from
Europe.
The earliest framed houses in the South have disappeared almost without
a trace, but scholars are able to form general ideas about their nature.
For example, figure 25, showing several kinds of framed houses, is from
Henry Formans’ book, _Architecture in the Old South_. The drawing
depicts the kind of wall surfaces which might possibly have been seen in
Jamestown, Virginia, very early in the 17th century. All the houses are
of wooden frame construction, either exposed or covered. Houses with
framework exposed are called “half-timbered.” From left to right in the
drawing the houses are described as follows:—half-timber work with brick
filling; plaster; weatherboarding or clapboards; half-timber work with
plaster; and tile-hung. Several of the houses have a projecting second
story. All have steep roofs. Windows are of the hinged casement type,
with small pieces of diagonally set glass.
Houses of this general sort—especially those with exposed wooden frame
and projecting second story—are frequently shown in illustrations in
European history books. In England they are called Jacobean, because of
their association with the Jacobean period in 17th-century England which
followed the Tudor era.
[Illustration: FIGURE 26. THE BROTHERS HOUSE IN SALEM.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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