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Home Life in Colonial Days

CHAPTER I

HOMES OF THE COLONISTS

When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in
finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost
unbearable. The colonists found a land magnificent with forest trees of
every size and variety, but they had no sawmills, and few saws to cut
boards; there was plenty of clay and ample limestone on every side, yet
they could have no brick and no mortar; grand boulders of granite and
rock were everywhere, yet there was not a single facility for cutting,
drawing, or using stone. These homeless men, so sorely in need of
immediate shelter, were baffled by pioneer conditions, and had to turn
to many poor expedients, and be satisfied with rude covering. In
Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and, possibly, other states, some
reverted to an 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 th